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Randol Contreras, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Phone: 410 704 2929 Dr. Contreras is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice. He was born in the South Bronx and lived there for over thirty years. He also attended City College (CUNY) as an undergraduate and later attended The Graduate Center (CUNY), where he attained his Ph.D. in Sociology. At the The Graduate Center, he participated in several leading studies of immigration and ethnicity in New York City. In particular, he was a researcher in the Immigrant Second Generation/Metropolitan New York Project led by Dr. Philip Kasinitz and Dr. John Mollenkopf of The Graduate Center, and Dr. Mary Waters of Harvard University. Here, he conducted life history interviews of second generation Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, focusing on their assimilation to neighborhoods, labor, schooling, and political participation.
For his own research, Dr. Contreras conducted participant-observation, or fieldwork, with Dominican drug robbers in a South Bronx neighborhood. Known on the streets as “Stickup Kids,” these men organize to rob drug dealers storing large amounts of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and cash. The dealing victims are tortured into compliance, brutally forced into surrendering the hidden goods. His research reveals how these former crack dealers became violent drug robbers because of the shrinking 1990s crack market. In doing so, it examines how these men understand changing drug markets, a drug robbery’s violence and organization, their legal employment pursuits, and their relationships with family and children. In the end, Dr. Contreras’ research renders these men as aging criminals, who suffer as they run out of both legal and illegal work opportunities.
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