Reagan has been working on criminal and juvenile justice reform at Vera since August 2007, when she joined the Institute as a senior research associate in the Center on Sentencing and Corrections. She is currently an associate research director in the Center on Youth Justice. Since joining Vera, Reagan’s work has focused primarily on informing and evaluating state-level community corrections reforms. Most notably, she managed a two-year quantitative and qualitative research project for the New York State Division of Parole, the results of which were used to develop an empirically-based system of graduated options for responding to violations and other behaviors of people on parole. Reagan also has a great deal of experience evaluating the implementation of criminal and juvenile justice initiatives. In 2009, she conducted a process evaluation of a pilot specialized substance abuse supervision program in the state of Nebraska, and she is currently overseeing a process and impact evaluation of juvenile facility reforms in the District of Columbia’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services.

Prior to joining Vera, Reagan was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also received her PhD in criminology. While at Penn, she worked on a number of projects, including the development of an evidence-based system of probation in Philadelphia and a randomized controlled trial testing the effect of restorative justice conferences in England. Her dissertation was a network analysis of 16,000 adjudicated juveniles in Philadelphia, and she worked for five years on a project, sponsored by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, to explain past trends and predict future trends in juvenile violence. Reagan received her BA in sociology from Franklin and Marshall College.