Ángela Zorro Medina

Ángela Zorro Medina is a sociolegal scholar who focuses on how the criminal justice system produces and reproduces racial and social inequality in Latin America and the United States. For the Latin American case, her work studies the consequences of the Latin American criminal procedure revolution on crime rates, incarceration rates, and the administration of justice in the region. As an expert on adversarial procedural reform in Latin America, she has advised the Colombian Ministry of Justice, Deutsche Gesellschaft Fur Internationale Zusammmenarbeit (GIZ), the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), and the Inter-American Bank of Development and Colombian Congress Representatives in assessing and designing economic development, criminal justice, and penitentiary public policies. 

Her work in the U.S. examines how institutional arraignments can exacerbate racial and social inequality through contact with the criminal justice system. As part of her U.S. research agenda, Zorro Medina is affiliated with the University of Chicago Justice Project, a group of scholars that seek to bring together academia and U.S. public policy by blending social sciences with multi-city projects on neighborhood violence, redistricting, and policing. Àngela is firmly committed to transparent and replicable social sciences as part of the Justice Project, making all codebooks, data, and data agreements public. 

Her work has been recognized as an outstanding academic accomplishment, and the University of Chicago named her a Neubauer Family Distinguished Doctoral Fellow since her work demonstrates her promise as a scholar and teacher capable of making important contributions to their respective fields. Her work has been published in Demography and Social Forces and funded by the Horowitz Foundation and the Institute of Humane Studies, among others.

Selected publications

Stephanie Ternullo, Ángela Zorro-Medina, Robert Vargas,"How Political Dynasties Concentrate Advantage within Cities: Evidence from Crime and City Services in Chicago," Social Forces, Volume 102, Issue 4, June 2024, pp. 1310-1331,  https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soae029.

Hepburn, P., Kohler-Hausmann, I. and Zorro Medina, A., 2019. "Cumulative Risks of Multiple Criminal Justice Outcomes in New York City," Demography, 1-11.