Isaac Dalke

Isaac is a joint postdoctoral fellow at the Northeastern University Network Science Institute and the Harvard Institute for Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety. His research investigates the development of community-based violence prevention efforts in California to shed light on dynamics of reform, resistance, and co-optation in the penal state. Using a mix of interviews, ethnographic observation, and historical methods, he shows how alternatives to policing have emerged and been incorporated into different levels of the state through nonprofit contracting. The upshot has been to make it increasingly easy for historically marginalized residents of high-violence and highly-policed neighborhoods to experiment with alternatives, but difficult to institutionalize them. The findings speak to and reformulate our understanding of the punitive turn in social policy,  as well as the democratic potential and limits of nonprofits as vehicles of social change. In other work, he combines interpretive techniques and Natural Language Processing methods to examine bureaucratic reason-giving in the penal state and the symbolic role of nonprofits within U.S. policymaking.