Barbara Owen
Professor
Office: Science II, Area C, Room 151
Phone: (559) 278-5715
Email Barbara Owen
Biographical Sketch
Barbara Owen is a nationally known expert in the areas of girls, women and crime, and substance abuse and prison culture; with extensive experience in conducting large-scale surveys, ethnographies and program evaluation.
A Professor of Criminology at California State University, Fresno, she received her Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley in 1984. She received an NIJ Graduate Research Fellowship in 1982 and was a NIAAA Post-Doctoral Fellow with the Alcohol Research Group, School of Public Health, UC Berkeley in 1986. In 2002, she received the Provost's Award for Excellence in Research from her University and in 2003 was named University Scholar and a Fellow of the Western Society of Criminology.
Prior to returning to academia, Dr. Owen was a Senior Researcher with the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). In this capacity, she was conducted research in the field in the Washington DC Central Office. While with the BOP, Dr. Owen was involved with studies of Prison Social Climate, prison drug treatment, the Cuban detainee riots of 1987, and numerous evaluation studies. She has served as a grant reviewer and advisor to several federal agencies. Since 1990, Dr. Owen has served as a consultant with the Drug Abuse Research Center, UCLA, focusing on drug treatment in the criminal justice system and developing services for women offenders.
In the past 10 years, Dr. Owen has concentrated her work in the areas of women, prisons and crime, gender-specific programming, drug treatment systems, program evaluation and applied research methods. In 97-98, she was Co-Principal Investigator (with Dr. Barbara Bloom) of a California State Office of Criminal Justice Planning project entitled Modeling Gender-Specific Services in Juvenile Justice: Policy and Program Recommendations. Other California studies include Profiling the Needs of California's Female Prisoners: A Needs Assessment, and a National Institute of Justice supported project, Profiling the Needs of California's Young Female Offenders: A Pilot Study (co-authored with Dr. Barbara Bloom). She also served as a legislative appointee on Senate Concurrent Resolution 33 Commission on Female Inmate and Parolee Issues.
She has provided training for the National Institute of Corrections in such areas as operational practices for women offenders, staff sexual misconduct, women and community corrections and improving health care for women offenders. Barbara Owen is the author of over 12 articles and two books, including In the Mix: Struggle and Survival in a Women’s Prison (SUNY Press, 1998). At present, she is involved in a variety of research projects; including a new ethnographic project, examining an in-prison drug treatment program for women and developing an international Collective for the Study of Women’s Prisons.
Most recently, along with Barbara Bloom, she is Co-Principal Investigator of a major report for the National Institute of Corrections (NIC), Gender-Responsive Strategies: Research, Practice, and Guiding Principles for Women Offenders, available on the NIC website.
Courses Taught
- Crim 130-Corrections in America
- Crim 170-Research Methods CJ
- Crim 292-Readings in Criminology
- Crim 200-Research Methods