Our Leadership
JIRN Executive Committee
JIRN is led by its Executive Committee and Executive Director. The Executive Committee is the elected governing body of the Justice Information Resource Network and is comprised of a president, vice president, secretary/treasurer, and three delegates.
2023-2025 JRSA Executive Committee
President
George Shaler
Research Associate
Maine Statistical Analysis Center
Cutler Institute for Health and Social Policy
Muskie School of Public Service
University of Southern Maine
gshaler@maine.edu
George Shaler is the Senior Research Associate at the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine in Portland. He provides program evaluation and consultation services to state and local government agencies and community-based organizations. He offers technical assistance in evaluation capacity building (using a logic model approach) to many Maine non-profits. Mr. Shaler has extensive experience applying statistical methods and techniques and has been on the SAC staff since 2003. He has examined county jail trends, disproportionate minority contact, prison/jail health care issues, and juvenile and adult recidivism analysis and conducted a community policing program evaluation. Mr. Shaler has co-authored and/or edited numerous SAC reports, including the recent Disproportionate Contact: Youth of Color in Maine’s Juvenile Justice System, a winner of the 2015 Douglas Yearwood National Publication Award in the Statistical Analysis/Management category.
Vice President
Stephen M. Haas, Ph.D.
Director, Research and Evaluation for the Justice Research and Victim Services Practice
ICF
Stephen Haas is a director of research and evaluation for the justice research and victim services practice at ICF. He has over 30 years of experience in project management, quantitative and qualitative data analysis, applied research and program evaluation, and training and technical assistance. Dr. Haas has served as the principal investigator and project director for more than 50 national, state, and local research and evaluation projects. He writes about performance measurement, crime and victimization surveys, implementation science, risk assessment validation, program quality assurance approaches, best practices in adult and juvenile corrections, recidivism prediction, and other topics. Stephen has also led many training and technical assistance (TTA) projects for multiple levels of government, nonprofit organizations, and for-profit agencies in multiple justice areas and contexts. He routinely consults and provides TTA in core correctional practices, juvenile and adult risk and needs assessment, case planning, motivational interviewing, and cognitive-behavioral interventions with justice-involved populations. Dr. Haas has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and political science from The Ohio State University and a master’s and a doctorate in criminal justice from the University of Cincinnati.
Secretary/Treasurer
Michelle Beck
Director
Criminal Justice Analysis Center (CJAC)
North Carolina Governor’s Crime Commission
michelle.beck@ncdps.gov
As Director of North Carolina’s Statistical Analysis Center, Michelle Beck manages all data-driven research and analysis projects on criminal justice. This includes publications and the development of the Justice Data Portal that launched in March 2022, to provide publicly available data at the state and county level. Ms. Beck has 28 years of experience working in research and program evaluation utilizing various quantitative and qualitative data collection and data analysis methodologies with knowledge of evidence-based practices. She has served on key criminal justice advisory taskforces and worked in multiple state agencies – Program Evaluation Division, NC General Assembly; State Center for Health Statistics; Department of Correction; Labor and Economic Analysis Division, NC Commerce; and Administrative Analysis, Department of Public Safety. Ms. Beck received her undergraduate degree and Master of Science in Sociology from N.C. State University.
Delegate
Christopher Henning, Ph.D.
Senior Research Analyst
Bureau of Justice Information and Analysis
Wisconsin Department of Justice
henningcj@doj.state.wi.us
Christopher has been a senior research analyst with the Wisconsin SAC at the Wisconsin Department of Justice since June of 2016. During that time he has been the principal investigator on a number of criminal justice research and data collection projects. He has extensive experience working with a variety of complex administrative data sets including, the Wisconsin Centralized Criminal History Repository (CCH), Wisconsin Circuit Court data, and data from the Wisconsin Incident Based Report System (WIBRS). This work also includes building a data warehouse, working with statistical models, and building interactive dashboards with BI tools. Christopher holds a PhD and an MSc from the University of Edinburgh and a BA from Lawrence University.
Delegate
Jack McDevitt, Ph.D.
Director of the Institute on Race and Justice and Associate Dean for Research in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities,
Northeastern University
j.mcdevitt@northeastern.edu
Jack McDevitt is the director of Northeastern’s Institute on Race and Justice. He is also the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. McDevitt is the co-author of three books: Hate Crimes: The Rising Tide of Bigotry and Bloodshed, Hate Crime Revisited: American War on Those Who Are Different (both with Jack Levin), and Victimology (with Judy Sgarzy). He has spoken on hate crime, racial profiling, human trafficking, and security both nationally and internationally. He has testified as an expert witness before the Judiciary Committees of the U.S. Senate and The U.S. House of Representatives and as an invited expert at the White House. In January 2013, McDevitt was appointed by Massachusetts House Speaker Robert DeLeo to lead a special commission on gun violence.
Delegate
Kara Miller
Statistical Research Coordinator
Oklahoma Statistical Analysis Center
Kara.Miller@osbi.ok.gov
Kara Miller has been the Director of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation’s (OSBI) Statistical Analysis Center (SAC) since January 2022. Before being appointed SAC Director, Kara served as a Statistical Research Specialist in the SAC for just over three years. During her time in the SAC, she has worked to develop methods to query Oklahoma’s State Incident-Based Reporting System (SIBRS), participated and/or led grant-related research, and developed an online, public-facing website to display SIBRS data. Kara holds a Bachelor of Arts in Social Science and Organizational Studies, focusing on Sociology and Psychology. In addition to her bachelor’s degree, she has a Master of Arts in Crime and Intelligence Analysis from the University of Central Oklahoma.
Delegate
Lisa Shoaf, PhD
Director
Ohio Statistical Analysis Center
Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services
lshoaf@dps.state.oh.us
Lisa Shoaf received her Ph.D. in psychology from The Ohio State University in 2002. She began working at the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services (OCJS), a division of the Ohio Department of Public Safety, as a research analyst in 2002, and became Statistical Analysis Center director in 2004. Over the years, she has been involved in research, evaluation, and policy related to criminal justice issues such as the intersection of criminal justice and behavioral health, illegal and pharmaceutical drug crimes and drug task forces, community-police relations, violence reduction initiatives, and deaths in custody reporting. She also helps to secure grant funds for the state’s criminal justice initiatives. Lisa represents OCJS on numerous committees and task forces, including the Attorney General’s Task Force on Criminal Justice and Mental Illness, the Stepping Up Ohio Initiative and the Ohio Criminal Sentencing Commission’s data subcommittee. She served on the Council on Criminal Justice’s Crime Trends Working Group in 2024.
Lisa is an active member of the Justice Information Resource Network (formerly Justice Statistics and Research Association) and prior to 2025 served on its executive committee for several years, including two years as president.