Personal Information

Loretta J. Stalans is Professor of Criminal Justice, a full member of the graduate faculty, and an affiliated Professor of Women?s Studies at Loyola University Chicago.  She received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Illinois Chicago in 1990, and has taught at Loyola since 1994.  Before coming to Loyola, she was an assistant professor of Criminal Justice and Center Fellow at the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Georgia State University (1991 to 1994) and a Collaborating Scholar of the American Bar Foundation (1990-1999).

Dr. Stalans is a peer reviewer for academic journals, book publishing companies and national grant funding agencies.  She serves on three editorial boards:  Canadian Journal of Criminology, Criminal Justice Review, and Law & Human Behavior.  She also serves as a reviewer for fifteen other academic journals in the field of criminal justice or psychology.  She serves as a panelist and reviewer of grants submitted to the sexual violence program of the National Institute of Justice.  She also serves as a grant reviewer for the National Science Foundation Law and Social Science Program.

She has written two books, including Penal Populism and Public Opinion:  International Perspective Across Five Countries (2004) published by Oxford University Press and co-authored with Roberts, Hough, and Indemaur.  She has published extensively in the areas of public opinion about justice, police discretionary decision-making, predicting violent or sexual recidivism, taxpayer compliance, and lay stereotypes or expectations about crime and legal procedures.  She has published over 40 articles in top refereed academic journals, many book chapters, and several technical and grant reports.

She has given invited talks at University of Cambridge Law School, Public Attitudes to Sentencing Conference in London England, and the NIJ Crime and Justice Research and Evaluation Conference.  She has presented numerous research papers at professional conferences over the last fifteen years.  She has received funding for her research in the areas of understanding tax audits, evaluation of domestic violence screening tool, police decision-making about domestic violence, predicting violent recidivism, and evaluations of specialized sex offender probation programs.

She has served as chair of master?s theses and major papers in criminal justice and women?s studies, and has served as an external dissertation committee member for universities in Australia and California.  Her teaching interests include domestic violence, sexual violence, criminal justice research methods, program evaluation, statistics, criminal laws and courts, restorative and retributive justice, and communication and conflict resolution.