Thank you for visiting my website. My name is Kenneth Sebastián León, and I am an Associate Professor of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University - New Brunswick.

My primary training in criminology and sociology of law provides me with the tools to show how criminology and criminal justice (CJ) systems (e.g., police, courts, corrections) reflect broader political economic forces and asymmetries of power that permeate modern society. I also leverage critical criminology to understand and communicate about practical policy concerns. In addition to my current portfolio on Latino Criminologies, my work spans the gamut of police, courts, and corrections, and I’ve taken on politically sensitive topics like MS-13, the federal death penalty, and COVID-19 mitigation practices in large metro jails and detention facilities.

I also study and teach on the embedded nature of race and ethnicity in criminology and criminal justice (CCJ) knowledge claims. Representative publications in this area include “Latino Criminology: Unfucking Colonial Frameworks in ‘Latinos and Crime’ Scholarship” and “Critical Criminology and Race: Examining the Whiteness of U.S. Criminological Thought.” Appearing in the flagship journal of my subfield, the former paper provides a representative overview of how I view the conceptual and empirical bridges between Latino studies and CCJ. Taken together, my interdisciplinary works are about understanding race, class, and crimes of the powerful both in and beyond the formal disciplinary and material boundaries of criminal justice.

I am currently writing a book on the political economy of mobility regimes, and the state-corporate incentives in capturing, commodifying, and ultimately killing human beings, social relationships, and civic institutions. Provisionally titled Capture, Commodify, Kill – Political Economies of State-Corporate Violence, I am currently working on a subsection of this text, where I analyze data on licit and illicit monetary flows that fuel the growth of surveillance, incarceration, and formal control in both CJ and non-CJ settings.    

I use capital as a platform for understanding practices, objects, instruments, systems, ideologies, and political relationships - particularly as they relate to race, power, and personhood. My first book, Corrupt Capital – Alcohol, Nightlife, and Crimes of the Powerful (Routledge, 2021), provides an auto-ethnographic account of how political economic forces shape the socio-legal landscape of bars and nightclubs, and contribute to the normalization of white-collar crime and corruption in the nightlife economy.  A book review of the text is available here, and published in The Journal of White-Collar and Corporate Crime.

I have applied for over $6 million in extramural funds to study some of the most pressing contemporary domestic and transnational challenges of our time, and have secured competitive institutional support as PI for a $4.9 million foundation grant to study race and ecologies of injustice. I have a demonstrable record of inter- and multidisciplinary partnerships and scholarly outputs. Previous collaborations include studies of the Colombian National Police, the Honduran National Police, and the transnational capacity of MS-13 in the United States and El Salvador. I have also provided my expertise as a consultant for the transnational “COVID-19 and (Im)Mobility in the Americas" network, which serves as a pedagogical resource for communicating about COVID-19 and processes of racialized social control, migration, public safety, and human rights. I have served as a co-PI on a project funded by the Rutgers Center for COVID-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness, I have worked to efficiently generate timely publications on the impact of COVID-19 on migrant detention and deportation within the state of New Jersey. Lastly, I am a member of the Latina/o/x Criminology network (latcrim.org) and the Racial Democracy Crime and Justice Network (RDCJN), both of which provide mentorship and community support for scholars at all career stages.

My work appears in Criminology & Public Policy; Critical Criminology; Crime, Law and Social Change; Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology; International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy; Journal on Migration and Human Security; Journal of Psychoactive Drugs; the Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice and Criminology; the Journal on White Collar and Corporate Crime; Race and Justice; among other refereed and public outlets.

I was born in Bogotá and grew up between Miami-Dade and Broward County, Florida. I am a first-generation college student and a proud alumnus of Fort Lauderdale High School and Florida State University. You can reach me at Kenneth.Sebastian.Leon [at] Rutgers [dot] edu. Thank you for visiting my site.