Vera Institute of Justice

Patrick Sharkey is professor and chair of the Department of Sociology at New York University, and is affiliated with NYU’s Robert F. Wagner School for Public Service. He holds a PhD in sociology and social policy from Harvard University and was postdoctoral scholar at the Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars Program, Columbia University. He is the author of Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, The Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence, which focuses on how the decline of violent crime has affected urban life and urban inequality in America. His first book, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality, analyzed neighborhood inequality over generations of American families in arguing that the transmission of neighborhood advantage and disadvantage has played a major role in explaining the persistence of racial inequality in America. Stuck in Place received the Mirra Komarovsky Award for the best book of the year from the Eastern Sociological Society, the Otis Dudley Duncan Award from the Population Section of the American Sociological Association, and The American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award) in Sociology and Social Work.

Sharkey has published dozens of articles in academic journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Criminology, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Journal of Urban Economics, American Journal of Public Health, Demography, and many others, and his writing has appeared in The Guardian, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, and The Huffington Post.