Faculty

          Faculty members of the Department of Criminal Justice care deeply about our students, and the awards we have received attest to this caring attitude. Faculty members have received five of the rare Patricia Christmore and Donald C. Roush Awards for teaching excellence, which are a product of students selecting their best teachers. Dr. Tom Winfree received the Darnell award for outstanding faculty member and Dr. Larry Mays received the university's most prestigious award, the Regents Professorship. The Department has the highest level of university awards of any department at New Mexico State University .

          Faculty members are also actively involved in helping others. One has pioneered a federally funded program for at-risk adolescent youth in the community. Another is director of the federally funded College Assistance Migrant Program for children of migrant workers. Faculty members serve on a number of boards and committees within the community and provide professional service and consulting to a number of criminal justice agencies, including New Mexico Association of Chiefs of Police, La Casa Community Board, Visitor Hospitality House, New Mexico Department of Public Safety, and the New Mexico Juvenile Justice Division.

Dr. Cynthia L. Bejarano is an assistant professor of Criminal Justice at New Mexico State University. Her publications and research interests focus on border violence; race, class, and gender issues; and Latino youths' border identities in the Southwest. Bejarano is the author of Qué Onda? Urban Youth Cultures and Border Identity , with the University of Arizona Press. Bejarano is also the principal administrator for the College Assistance Migrant Program at NMSU, which assists migrant and seasonal farmworker children to attend the University from the Southern New Mexico and West Texas region.

Hank DiMatteo received his MPA from the University of Texas at El Paso and his MBA at NMSU. He is completing his Ph.D. in Educational Management and Development at NMSU. For the past 32 years, Hank has been a police officer with the El Paso Texas Police Department. He is presently a Lieutenant and is responsible for the night operations in Central El Paso . He is also a graduate of the FBI National Academy . His research interests are in police administration, school violence, ethics, and force issues.

Dr. James Maupin is the Department Head for the Department of Criminal Justice. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Arizona State University in 1990 and his Master of Public Administration from Southwest Missouri State University in 1985. He has taught at New Mexico State University since 1995. Dr. Maupin's area of specialty is policy analysis and program evaluation. He has worked closely with state and local juvenile justice professionals in addressing issues of importance related to preadjudicatory detention and parole decision making. He has also conducted research on the ethical orientation of criminal justice professionals. His primary teaching areas are research methods, statistics, policy analysis and program evaluation.

Dr. Joan E. Crowley received her doctorate in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1979. Prior to joining the faculty of NMSU in the Fall of 1989, Dr. Crowley held a senior research position with the Center for Human Resource Research at the Ohio State University and with the Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Alabama. She taught as Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychology at both the Ohio State University and at the University of Alabama. In 1991, she was elected to the three-year presidential cycle of the Southwest Association of Criminal Justice Educators. Her current interests are in the areas of communities and criminal justice, family violence and child abuse, juvenile delinquency, substance abuse, historical criminology, and research methods.

Dr. Larry Mays was a Knoxville, Tennessee police officer for five years prior to completing his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Tennessee in 1979. He has previously taught at Appalachian State and East Tennessee State Universities. Dr. Mays has served as a consultant to the Department of Corrections, State Police, Youth Authority, and Association of Counties in New Mexico and to the El Paso, Texas Police Department. From 1981 to 1990, Dr. Mays was head of the New Mexico State University Department of Criminal Justice. His primary areas of research interest are jails, court organization and administration, and juvenile justice.

Dr. Lisa Bond Maupin received her Ph.D. in Justice Studies from Arizona State University in 1992. She also earned an M.S.W. from ASU in 1987. Dr. Bond-Maupin taught at Southwest Missouri State University and New Mexico Highlands University prior to coming to NMSU in 1995. She most often teaches Juvenile Justice and Introduction to Criminal Justice. Her research interests include the experiences of young people with the police, courts, jails, and prisons, the connections between structural and interpersonal violence, and a youth development approach to prevention. Besides her teaching and research, Dr. Bond-Maupin is the Chair of the New Mexico Juvenile Justice Commission and is a co-PI on a state contract to provide technical assistance, research, and resources to communities throughout the state interested in reducing disproportionate contact with the juvenile justice system for youth of color. She is a very enthusiastic Aggie volleyball fan, loves CJ students even when they sound like Nancy Grace, and is the mom of Sarah, a freshman at NMSU.

Dr. Robert Duran is an assistant professor of Criminal Justice at New Mexico State University. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Colorado-Boulder in 2006 with an emphasis in criminology and race. His work experience includes juvenile probation, youth corrections, and child protective services. Dr. Durán's unique background of lived experiences has driven his study of racial and ethnic inequalities within the application of the law. From gang evolution and border surveillance to disproportionate minority contact and law enforcement shootings, his research seeks to provide greater insight into post-civil rights forms of racism and community resistance. As a former gang member, Dr. Durán has been studying gangs for the last 14 years in several states: Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah.

Dr. Thomas Winfree joined the criminal justice faculty in 1987. He served as the first director of graduate studies for the MCJ program from 1987 to 1992. Between 1990 and 1999, Tom served as head of the Criminal Justice Department. In 2005, he again took over as director of graduate studies. His research interests include testing and expanding criminological theories, issues related to the administration of justice to juvenile offenders, correctional practices in the United States and the world, and comparative criminal justice systems broadly. He typically teaches courses related to his research interests, including research methods, nature of crime, corrections, juvenile justice, and comparative criminal justice systems. Tom is the author of over 70 refereed journal articles and nine books, including Essentials of Corrections , Understanding Crime, and Juvenile Justice. He is a past winner (2003) of NMSU's Dennis Darnall Award for excellence in teaching, research and service.

Dr. Carlos Posadas is an assistant professor in the Department of CriminalJustice. His research interests include immigration, U.S.-Mexico border issues, race, gender and crime, and research methods. His teaching interests include research methods, statistics, and immigration and justice.He is a native of the area having grown up in El Paso, TX and completing his undergraduate work in criminal justice at New Mexico State University before moving on to the School of Justice and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University to pursue his graduate studies.

Dr. Dana Greene completed her doctorate at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her dissertation -- Repeat Performances: Why Good Reforms Go Bad & Testing the Next Wave, Restorative Justice -- explores and accounts for how collective action aimed at reducing the punishment system ultimately serves to expand and widen the penal landscape. Dana came to the study of punishment from a history of street activism and is deeply committed to applying her work beyond the academy. She was a graduate teaching fellow at John Jay College of Criminal Justice for three years. The position involved on campus teaching as well as teaching corrections officers at Riker's Island - the largest penal colony in the free world. She was a writing-across-the-curriculum fellow and spent two years at Bronx Community College developing their writing center and helping professors incorporate WAC pedagogy in their classrooms and assignments. Before Dana moved to the desert she was conducting day-long workshops for Police Officers and Corrections Officers on bigotry, racial & ethnic hatred, and personal responsibility at The New York Tolerance Center - the educational arm of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. She is currently working on a textbook covering the history of American criminal justice systems & practices as well as a Social and Behavior Sciences reference Glossary. Her interests include social change movements, restorative justice, penal history, penal abolition, and social control. She is always up for collaboration and conversation so feel free to come by her office.

Dr. David Keys is assistant professor of Criminal Justice at New Mexico State University. He received his AB in History from the University of Missouri-Columbia and MA and Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. His research interests include capital punishment, narcotics and addiction, research methods, and urban studies. Dr. Keys has consulted with municipal, county, and state governments for 17 years on corrections and sentencing issues. His dissertation was a biographical treatment of the career of drug researcher Alfred Lindesmith, that was subsequently published by SUNY Press as Confronting the Drug Control Establishment (2000) with John Galliher. Dr. Keys lives in Las Cruces with his life partner Janis A. Burkhardt and their daughter Sophie B. Burkhardt.