Profile for Jennifer Trost

Brief biography

Since I grew up in the segregated South, I have been interested in how different groups of people experience the American legal system and how those differences contribute to crime policy. My book Gateway to Justice: The Juvenile Court and Progressive Child Welfare in a Southern City explored the origins and workings of the juvenile legal system in Memphis, Tennessee. My current research is about the history of identity theft and impersonation in America, beginning with the Impostor Rule and ending with the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act of 1998. I trace the evolution of different ways of identifying people such as formal names, credit ratings, the passport, fingerprinting, driver licenses, and financial authorization codes and how identification is used for surveillance by both the state and private groups. As a policy historian, I try to do as much as possible to correct misinformation about crime and the people labelled as criminals, and to explain why we have the criminal legal system we do.

I grew up in Lubbock, Texas.