Elizabeth Griffiths

Elizabeth Griffiths is a Professor and Faculty Chair at the School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University-Newark. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Toronto and researches place-based influences on crime distribution, spatial methodologies, and criminal justice outcomes.

Her work examines spatiotemporal crime patterns, spatial measurement refinement, and the impact of neighborhood characteristics on violence. She leads an NSF-funded project analyzing how race and geography influence the policing, prosecution, and punishment of felony drug offenses. Her research integrates quantitative spatial analysis with qualitative assessments of system-level decision-making.

Key research areas include neighborhood effects, drug enforcement policies, prosecutorial decision-making, and spatial analysis of gun violence using GIS technologies.