isaac dalke

Thanks for visting! I am a political sociologist studying the intersection of crime, bureaucracy, and social policy using computational and qualitative methods. I am a post-doctoral fellow working with the Complexity and Society Lab at the Northeastern University Network Science Institute and the Institute for Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at Harvard University. I am also a fellow at the Harvard Department of Sociology. I received my PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2025.

My dissertation and current book project investigates efforts to cultivate community-based violence prevention projects in California since 1990. Through fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, 72 interviews, and extensive archival research, I show how a rigid system of competitive nonprofit contracting emerged and consolidated to make it increasingly easy for cities to experiment with new approaches to public safety, but difficult for their proponents to institutionalize them. In doing so, I draw out the interrelations of state and street violence, the role of nonprofits in the modern American state, and the predicaments of criminal justice reform for both advocates on the ground and theorists of the penal state.

I also have written on bureaucratic decision-making, moral meaning-making, and policy reform using parole boards as the primary case. Some of this work looks at how the reasons for granting or denying parole change over time. This includes a paper on how old rehabilitative ideas become new again and one (with Brendon McConnell) on how parole commissioners respond to externally-imposed changes. Another set of papers (with Joss Greene) inquires into how criminal justice administrators adjudicate culpability and regulate freedom. This work highlights the categorical fluidity of individuals up for parole, the racialized gender tropes that commissioners mobilize to justify their decisions, and the symbolic value of incarcerated labor.

Elsewhere, I am currently at work on a paper that probes justifications for police violence (with Sandra Smith and Jaqueline Lepe), and one that investigates the spatial dynamics of low-level criminalization across urban and suburban settings.

Across all my work, I am interested in the dynamics of policy change and the implications for reducing social inequality and creating a fairer criminal legal system. If you are interested in my CV, you can find it here. If you’d like to get in touch, please send me an email: idalke -at- fas.harvard.edu.