Benjamin Hamilton
Email: bchb83@umsystem.edu
Ben joined UMSL's Criminology and Criminal Justice PhD program in 2015 after entering the MA program a year prior. He earned his BA in Criminal Justice at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, and his research interests include offender decision making, measurement of theoretical constructs, evaluation of criminal justice interventions, and quantitative methods.
Dissertation Title: “Net Benefits and Offender Decision Making: Investigating some Overlooked Predictions of a Rational Choice Theory of Crime.”
Dissertation Committee: Kyle Thomas (Chair), Lee Ann Slocum, Janet Lauritsen, and Thomas Loughran.
Areas of Interest: Offender decision making, measurement, evaluation research, partial identification, and quantitative methods.
See Benjamin's CV
Pious Maedzenge
Email: pdmg4b@umsystem.edu
Pious D. Maedzenge is a PhD candidate in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, with an expected completion date of Summer 2027. His research examines gender and punishment, courts, customary/informal justice, and socio-legal processes, with particular attention to justice institutions in the Global South and global peripheries. His dissertation, "Participation, Authority, and Dispute Transformation: Gendered Interaction in Zimbabwe’s Traditional Courts," examines how gendered authority is (re)produced through micro-interactional courtroom practices.
Pious uses qualitative methods to study how participation, authority, and dispute transformation shape the administration of justice. The project examines women’s silencing, masculinity regulation, and narrative control as interconnected processes through which broader structural inequalities become consequential in everyday court interaction. His work has been presented at the Law and Society Association, the American Society of Criminology, and international conferences on punishment and socio-legal studies. He also co-presented “Women’s Perceptions of Access to Justice in Prison and Jail” at a parallel event held in conjunction with the 70th Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in New York City.
His scholarly work includes a first-authored peer-reviewed article on incarcerated women’s parenting experiences, a forthcoming co-authored book chapter on prison and the pains of imprisonment, and a co-authored manuscript under review, “Women’s Perceptions of Access to Justice from Prison and Jail.” He is also preparing sole-authored, dissertation-derived manuscripts for journal submission, including a paper on women’s silencing in Zimbabwe’s traditional courts.
He has served as instructor of record for Introduction to Criminology and Criminal Justice across two in-person sections during the 2025–2026 academic year and is scheduled to teach Race, Crime, and Justice online in Fall 2026. He also served as a graduate teaching assistant at Illinois State University for courses including Women in Criminal Justice and World Criminal Justice Systems.
Dissertation Title: "Participation, Authority, and Dispute Transformation: Gendered Interaction in Zimbabwe’s Traditional Courts"
Areas of Interest: Gender and punishment; courts; criminological theory; race, crime, and justice; juvenile justice; qualitative methods; and socio-legal studies.
See Pious' CV
Konstadina Spanoudakis
Konstadina is a PhD candidate in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at UMSL, with an anticipated graduation date of May 2027. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Criminology, Law and Justice from the University of Iowa and a Master of Arts in Criminology and Criminal Justice from the University of Missouri – St. Louis. Her research centers on corrections policy, correctional officer deviance and decision making, and qualitative methods. Her dissertation, “Bending the Rules: The Harms of Correctional Staff Misconduct,” explores the perceptions of corrections staff around staff misconduct, particularly unreported force and contraband conveyance. Her published work includes studies on correctional staff morale and strain, community-centered approaches to measuring safety, and the discretion exercised by 911 call takers.
Dissertation Title: “Bending the Rules: The Harms of Correctional Staff Misconduct”
Areas of Interest: Corrections policy, correctional officer deviance and decision making, and qualitative methods.
See Konstadina's CV
