Profile for Alyssa LaBerge

Brief biography

Alyssa LaBerge is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice. Her research focuses on families in the justice system, child maltreatment, juvenile justice, and intersections of the juvenile legal and child welfare systems. She emphasizes the roles of adolescent development, childhood trauma, and community partnerships in advancing understanding of three lines of inquiry: 1) the relationship between childhood trauma and juvenile delinquency; 2) the treatment of maltreated and child welfare-involved youth in the juvenile legal system; and 3) the validity of juvenile risks and needs assessments among youth with histories childhood trauma. 

Dr. LaBerge teaches through interdisciplinary social justice lenses and critical pedagogies, centering legal systems, crime, and victimization within historical, political, social, and cultural contexts. By urging her students to challenge preexisting assumptions and develop independent judgments grounded in evidentiary science, she emboldens them to critique structures of power and the state’s capacity to institute social control, question the efficacy of legal practices and policies, and identify the impact of individual characteristics on processes of criminalization.