Kristin Turney

Kristin Turney is a Dean's Professor in the Department of Sociology (with a courtesy appointment in Criminology, Law and Society) at the University of California, Irvine. She serves as a faculty affiliate for the Center for Population, Inequality, and Policy (CPIP), the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy, and the Initiative to End Family Violence. Additionally, she maintains a research affiliation with the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin.

Her educational background includes:

• B.S. in Journalism and Sociology from Northwestern University
• M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania
• Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan

Turney's research investigates how stressors—particularly those from the criminal legal system—create, maintain, and exacerbate social inequalities in health and wellbeing. Her work examines differential exposure to stressors based on social position, mechanisms through which stressors influence health outcomes, and how social structures condition responses to stressors. Using mixed methods including in-depth interviews, quantitative causal inference, and demographic analyses, she explores the consequences of police contact, jail incarceration, and prison incarceration on individuals, families, and children. Her research reveals how these stressors compound existing inequalities through pathways like family instability, mental health deterioration, and disrupted healthcare access.

Analysis of her recent publications shows consistent focus on criminal legal system stressors, with emerging attention to pandemic-related mortality in carceral settings and the intergenerational transmission of inequality through parental mental health and relationship dynamics. Her work increasingly employs longitudinal designs and mixed-method approaches to capture complex causal pathways.

Her scientific recognition includes:

• Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars postdoctoral fellowship
• Visiting Scholar appointment at the Russell Sage Foundation (2019-2020)

Turney leads multiple major funded projects including PrisonPandemic (a digital archive preserving stories of incarcerated individuals and their families), the Jail and Family Life Study (a longitudinal qualitative study of 123 fathers experiencing jail incarceration), and research on pandemic-related mortality disparities. Her work has secured substantial funding from Arnold Ventures, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and several major foundations. She is currently developing the PrisonPandemic archive to enhance transparency about carceral conditions while simultaneously investigating how criminal legal contact reverberates through family systems.

Her laboratory work centers on the PrisonPandemic initiative, which involves collaborative teams documenting experiences across jails, state and federal prisons, and immigration detention facilities. This digital archive project employs interdisciplinary teams combining sociological expertise with digital humanities methods to preserve and analyze narratives from incarcerated individuals, their families, and prison employees.