Dr. Kaitlyn M. Sims

Headshot of Jeremy Levine.

Can justice exist after trauma? A new study co-authored by @jeremylevine.bsky.social reveals that bureaucratic hurdles and racial disparities limit access to victim compensation for adult survivors of sexual assault.

Read the full study: https://myumi.ch/Mkjm8

Honestly I think the move is a convertible coffee table to real table

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

Claudine Gay was punished and lost her job for incomplete citations in her PhD dissertation.

In a statement to The Crimson, Summers wrote that the decision to leave was “difficult” and that he remained “grateful to the thousands of students and colleagues I have been privileged to teach and work with since coming to Harvard as a graduate student 50 years ago.” “Free of formal responsibility, as President Emeritus and a retired professor, I look forward in time to engaging in research, analysis, and commentary on a range of global economic issues,” he added.

When academia's stars mistreat people, they're "punished" with relief from teaching, mentoring, and service responsibilities. This frees them to spend more time on the more valued work of research. And dumps less valued responsibilities onto colleagues, making it harder for them to become stars.

"The men implicated in the Epstein files reinforces that I spend half my life explaining to men that their simplified, optimistic view of other men doesn’t line up with the experience of women and girls trying to dodge sexual harassment, assault and abuse attempts." - Leslie Morgan Steiner

Shame on anyone who told women they were silly to worry that, post-Dobbs, birth control would be next.

A lot of people, including me, were wondering how an IRB could ever approve this study.

The answer is that no IRB did. The person who “signed off” on approval from the only ethics board that reviewed it had resigned three years earlier. His signature was used without his knowledge.

This should make your blood boil.

But coming from a small country town, it is not at all surprising.

Colorado has emergency domestic violence shelters in only half its counties, leaving survivors without safe housing options A lack of shelters and affordable housing means survivors of domestic violence have few places to go.

Safe housing is foundational to security and opportunity. In Colorado, emergency domestic violence shelters exist in only half of the counties. IHS scholar @kaitsims.bsky.social examined the impact of housing shortages and policy constraints.

Read More: theconversation.com/colorado-has...

Justice after trauma? Race, red tape keep sexual assault victims from compensation Bureaucratic hurdles and racial disparities restrict access to victim compensation for adult survivors of sexual assault, deepen justice system inequities and compound trauma.

Justice after trauma? Race, red tape keep sexual assault victims from compensation

Despite high interest in mass incarceration, little research examines how it scales across 3,000 U.S. city and county jails. New from Korbel Prof @kaitsims.bsky.social in journals.sagepub.com shows how jails differ from prisons and why we should study the first step in the carceral cycle: jailing.

Excited about this new pub! The first of many out of the Jail Justice Initiative :)

#crimsky #polisky

Kaitlyn M. Sims - Jail Justice Initiative We are a collective of scholars studying the role of jails in the broader context of the US criminal-legal system. While there has been substantial qualitative and quantitative research on the causes ...

For more info on the JJI: sites.google.com/view/kaitsim...

@josefkorbelschool.bsky.social @georgemasonu.bsky.social

This is the first publication (of we hope many!) to come out of the JJI, and I am so so so grateful for the community we've built for ourselves. There's much more to come from us -- and if you're interested in getting involved, DM us/email/come chat at Law and Society in May!

Some backstory: ~4 years ago, Ella Friday (St. John's) and I brainstormed up a collective of jr. scholars to take an interdisciplinary look into jails as institutions of punishment. @erineife.bsky.social (Mason) joined us shortly thereafter for what we called the Jail Justice Initiative (JJI).

We show how mass incarceration has looked drastically different in jails versus prisons. Rather than an explosion in new facilities, jails have reshaped and restructured themselves to meet new demands for bed space. We argue this is a function of the pre-existing presence of jails everywhere.

To do this, we developed a theory of what we call 'jailization' -- how the criminal-legal system has been reshaped to put jails at the front as its lobby, funneling folks to different institutions and jurisdictions. Jails' liminality and flexibility let them reshape to fit the states' needs.

🚨New publication alert!🚨

Jails are a prominent piece of the US carceral state, yet we often lump them in with prisons and (falsely) assume that they follow similar trends for mass incarceration.

In this piece, we unpack what we lose when we conflate jails and prisons and trace jails' unique role.

Gender studies courses are shutting down across the US. The Epstein files reveal why | Joan Wallach Scott Texas A&M University is the latest school to end women’s and gender studies programs and teaching race. We know why

Eliminating gender studies courses helps to ensure that universities and other institutions will continue to protect men who benefit from the abuse of women and girls, either directly or through their connections to those who exploit girls and women for profit.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Feb. 12, 2026: No indictment for Dem video, Missy Woods arraigned, strengthening Colorado's response to domestic violence | Colorado Public Radio Former crime lab scientist Missy Woods pleaded not guilty to more than a hundred felonies Wednesday.

Only 33 of Colorado's 64 counties have emergency shelters for people living in abusive situations. In an interview with Colorado Today on @cprnews.bsky.social, Korbel Prof @kaitsims.bsky.social discusses how this affects DV survivors and the complexities beyond funding. Listen here:

Feb. 12, 2026: No indictment for Dem video, Missy Woods arraigned, strengthening Colorado's response to domestic violence | Colorado Public Radio Former crime lab scientist Missy Woods pleaded not guilty to more than a hundred felonies Wednesday.

bb's first appearance on a podcast talking about DV shelters and housing affordability for survivors of violence!

www.cpr.org/podcast-epis...

photo of Pam Bondi testifying in the foreground as a group of 7 women and 1 men raise their hands

Likely-historic photo by NBC News of all the Epstein victims asked to raise their hands if they've not yet been asked to meet with the DOJ as Bondi testifies in foreground

The autistic community is a large, growing, and heterogeneous population, and there is a need for improved methods to describe their diverse needs. Measures of adaptive functioning collected through public health surveillance may provide valuable information on functioning and support needs at a population level. We aimed to use adaptive behavior and cognitive scores abstracted from health and educational records to describe trends over time in the population prevalence of autism by adaptive level and co-occurrence of intellectual disability (ID). Using data from the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, years 2000 to 2016, we estimated the prevalence of autism per 1000 8-year-old children by four levels of adaptive challenges (moderate to profound, mild, borderline, or none) and by co-occurrence of ID. The prevalence of autism with mild, borderline, or no significant adaptive challenges increased between 2000 and 2016, from 5.1 per 1000 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 4.6–5.5) to 17.6 (95% CI: 17.1–18.1) while the prevalence of autism with moderate to profound challenges decreased slightly, from 1.5 (95% CI: 1.2–1.7) to 1.2 (95% CI: 1.1–1.4). The prevalence increase was greater for autism without co-occurring ID than for autism with co-occurring ID. The increase in autism prevalence between 2000 and 2016 was confined to autism with milder phenotypes. This trend could indicate improved identification of milder forms of autism over time. It is possible that increased access to therapies that improve intellectual and adaptive functioning of children diagnosed with autism also contributed to the trends.

Increasing autism rates over the last 25 years may just be kids with mild forms getting diagnosed. Rates of moderate to severe impairment due to autism have actually fallen slightly.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

I could see that working!

My gut instinct: keep the court cases named as is, put a nice chunky footnote at the top where you name this ethical concern, but if a case names a child (whose name I would hope is already redacted) redact that. You could also create a numbered roster of cases w/the key in an appendix/table?