Interview with Nicholas Goldrosen

Can you briefly summarise your time at the Institute of Criminology?

I came to the Institute of Criminology in 2020 to do the MPhil and had a really excellent time. I enjoyed the teaching and was interested in pursuing a lot of my research further, so I ended up staying for the PhD, starting in 2021 and finishing it last year in 2024.

What convinced you to study Criminology?

My undergraduate background was in quantitative social science, particularly in political science and mathematics. I was interested in applying those quantitative tools to questions of social organisation, public policy, and particularly criminology. What appealed to me about that subject area is how it taps into deeper questions of how we organise ourselves as society, what behaviours we proscribe, how we respond to those, and what we think are the appropriate systems for preventing and responding to crime.

I think I was drawn by that substantive focus, but also its interdisciplinary nature: the ability to draw on things from sociology, politics, economics, philosophy and a whole host of other fields. The way the data brings together those fields really spoke to me.

Why did you decide to come to Cambridge?

I originally came to Cambridge because of some funding from my undergraduate institution. Williams College [in Massachusetts, US] has a programme, endowed by Herchel Smith, where they fund several students to study at Cambridge after their graduation. I was excited by that opportunity to study abroad, experience new educational systems and culture, and obviously by the historic nature of Cambridge and their reputation of the university and Institute of Criminology.

I initially came with that scholarship for a year, and then I was really motivated to stay for the PhD.  During the MPhil, I took courses on organised crime with Paolo Campana and policing with Justice Tankebe, both of whom ended up then being my PhD supervisors. I was really interested in bringing those together to understand the social organisation and culture of policing, and how those ties can explain police culture, police misconduct and how policing deals with reform and changing circumstances.

So, initially it was having the opportunity to go to Cambridge for a year. Then I was really struck by what I'd done during that year at the Institute and wanted to stick around a bit longer.

How did you benefit from the Gates Cambridge Scholarship?

The Gates Cambridge Scholarship provides a lot of tangible resources: funding the degree programme, a maintenance stipend, professional development expenses, and the ability to attend conferences and grow your field.

But beyond that, the benefit and impact that it had for me, is just the community of other scholars across such a wide variety of fields and backgrounds. It was the ability to have that really incredible community of people who are working in areas both similar and really dissimilar from your own. I think of that as a resource for one's academic work, and certainly for the experience of being a PhD student and an academic. But also more broadly, just to have friends in that community is a really, really wonderful complement to working within a department.  Working with folks who are interested in both very similar and very different questions broadens the experience, and especially the deeply motivated and impressive people that they had there. That was always very humbling and very inspiring.

Can you briefly describe your thesis?

I was interested in the concepts of structure and agency within law enforcement, and how those interact with misconduct and organisational culture.

Within the broader setting of sociology, we have social structures as well as individual agency. But how much do each of those determine actions, outcomes, culture? Within law enforcement, that gets raised in the form of the bad apple paradigm. Is it individuals, networks and connections of individuals, or rotten culture that causes police misconduct?

I was interested in trying to use social network analysis in that paradigm, to study social phenomena with law enforcement misconduct. My thesis incorporated four projects. I looked at administrative data in two of them, with various police officers and corrections officers were named in complaints together. Did we see networked patterns of people accused of misconduct? And might that give some insight into what’s contributing to those patterns, socially and culturally?

For the latter 2 projects, one involved original survey data with UK police officers. I was interested in their views of the police organisation, and if their peers’ views about misconduct affect their own. Police officers really want the same things from their supervisors that the public wants from police: to be treated respectfully, to have a voice, to not be subject to arbitrary or discriminatory motives. So, I was interested in the police officers’ perceptions of their own organisation as well how their peers affect their own views.

Then for the final project, I gathered ethnographic data about police misconduct hearings in London. I was interested in how the police service uses these formal procedures to send a message about police misconduct. A message not only to the public saying, ‘we are a lawful organisation that responds to misconduct,’ but also to their own officers. Do they want to project a message, for example, of being a fair, procedurally just employer towards their own officers? What impacts does that have on organisational culture?

All these projects fell under the umbrella of understanding how individual choices, connections, friendships, ties and organisational culture all go together, to create either more positive or more negative policing and law enforcement.

What have you gone onto since graduating?

I'm currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Pennsylvania State University, where I work with the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing. This is a government agency quite similar to the Sentencing Council England and Wales, that makes sentencing policy and does research. I also work with the Criminal Justice Research Centre, which is one of the research centres at the university.

It's a really interesting position, where I can work on research as an academic but also have this great policy connection to people that are making policy around sentencing, probation and parole, and to work on research that impacts policy, with policy makers.

Can you give some examples of how you have used learning from the course in your career?

I mean, it's a very direct influence, in that the PhD is the same basic academic research skills that you're developing: formulating research questions, reviewing and tying it to the existing literature, speaking out various data sources, gathering and collecting data, analysing it, writing results from publication dissemination of research. So, it’s very similar in that way.

Obviously, it's a substantively different field, working a bit later in the criminal justice system than policing, which was my focus during the PhD. But I would say that obviously the training during the PhD forms the basis then for an academic career, in terms of research skills.

I would say the other influence is that Cambridge's department is particularly well connected, in bringing researchers and policymakers together. For example, the opportunity to work with various police forces on research while at Cambridge, and that experience of working with policy makers and trying to do policy relevant research is something that persists. There’s a slightly different substantive focus now for my research. But it's still a key portion of that.

What was the most important thing criminology taught you?

I think the PhD training experience is different than a taught master's degree or an undergraduate course, in that the substantive knowledge of the field is really important. But realistically, I think the important skill set that it gives you is applicable across a variety of domains, and it's more the professional training in the field, conducting academic research. That's the part that the PhD gives you experience.

And I would say, so less so than sort of any one substantive lesson or something, it's rather that experience of being trained as an academic, that the Cambridge PhD did a really excellent job at.

What would you say to somebody who was going to study Criminology?

I would say to really draw on the interdisciplinary nature of the field. I think that Cambridge lends itself to that, as a place where you can take advantage of the educational opportunities there as well as the field itself.

To give some examples from my time, I was able to do work that drew on philosophical concepts in policing and how we respond to police misconduct alongside much more empirical quantitative work. Or to audit a course in the economics faculty about econometrics, to strengthen my skills in quantitative analysis and causal inference.

So, I'd say that criminology presents a really interesting opportunity because you're studying the same sort of substantive field from a variety of viewpoints and disciplines. Cambridge is also a place with a sense of academic community, that can also foster academic interdisciplinarity.

I would say that the opportunity to not let go to waste is to take advantage of the fact that criminology sits at the intersection of so many different disciplines. Draw on as many of those as you can, to really round out your experience.