{"id":81187,"date":"2014-09-17T10:46:58","date_gmt":"2014-09-17T14:46:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=81187"},"modified":"2017-11-03T14:27:24","modified_gmt":"2017-11-03T18:27:24","slug":"bates-welcomes-new-faculty-michael-rocque-sociology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2014\/09\/17\/bates-welcomes-new-faculty-michael-rocque-sociology\/","title":{"rendered":"Bates welcomes new faculty: Michael Rocque, sociology"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_81190\" style=\"width: 630px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2014\/09\/140814_Michael_Rocque_0042-W.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-81190\" class=\"size-large wp-image-81190\" src=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2014\/09\/140814_Michael_Rocque_0042-W-620x413.jpg\" alt=\"Michael Rocque, assistant professor of sociology. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)\" width=\"620\" height=\"413\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2014\/09\/140814_Michael_Rocque_0042-W-620x413.jpg 620w, https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2014\/09\/140814_Michael_Rocque_0042-W-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2014\/09\/140814_Michael_Rocque_0042-W.jpg 1620w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 620px) 100vw, 620px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-81190\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Michael Rocque, assistant professor of sociology. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s hard to think of anything more interesting than why people commit crimes,&#8221; says Michael Rocque, a criminologist who joined Bates this summer as an assistant professor of sociology.<\/p>\n<p>Rocque brings a distinctive perspective to Bates sociology: He previously served as director of research for the Maine Department of Corrections. An important part of his DOC work was evaluating the department&#8217;s tools and programs\u00a0\u2014 for instance, Maine&#8217;s new, nationally unique approach to the incarceration of first offenders aged 18 to 25.<\/p>\n<p>The program is designed around the fact that our brains typically aren&#8217;t fully mature until our mid-20s, says Rocque, who still serves as an unpaid adviser to the DOC. In the new program, these young offenders are &#8220;actually housed in a juvenile facility and given access to a lot of programming not present in the adult system. The program is getting a lot of attention.&#8221; (<a href=\"http:\/\/bangordailynews.com\/2014\/04\/15\/opinion\/were-you-mature-at-18-jails-get-it-wrong-by-treating-young-adults-as-real-adults\/?ref=relatedBox\">Read Rocque&#8217;s column about the program in the <em>Bangor Daily News<\/em>.<\/a>)<\/p>\n<hr style=\"width: 100%;\" width=\"100%\" \/>\n<p><em>Read more profiles of tenure-track faculty new at Bates in 2014:<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2014\/10\/24\/bates-welcomes-new-faculty-brett-huggett-biology\/\">Brett Huggett, assistant professor of biology<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2014\/10\/14\/bates-welcomes-new-faculty-katharine-ott-mathematics\">Katharine Ott, assistant professor of mathematics<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2014\/09\/24\/bates-welcomes-new-faculty-genevieve-robert-geology\/\">Genevi\u00e8ve Robert, assistant professor of geology<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2014\/10\/02\/bates-welcomes-returning-faculty-nathan-tefft-economics\/\">Nathan Tefft, assistant professor of economics<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr style=\"width: 100%;\" width=\"100%\" \/>\n<p>Intellectual interest drives Rocque&#8217;s criminology career, but so does a sense of mission. &#8220;Something that appealed to me about working at Bates was that the department was looking for someone interested in race, crime and justice,&#8221; says Rocque.<\/p>\n<p>How those themes intersect is a compelling focus for him, especially the inequalities in law enforcement and the criminal justice system. &#8220;I&#8217;m driven by a desire to assist in the quest for social justice,&#8221; he says. For instance, Rocque is part of a research team that just finished an analysis of racial bias in the application of the death penalty.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We live in the United States\u00a0\u2014 it&#8217;s supposed to be a democracy, equal rights for all,&#8221; he says. &#8220;You hope that it&#8217;s not just, &#8216;Oh, that&#8217;s interesting, blacks who kill whites are much more likely to be given the death penalty,&#8217; and the research just gets put away.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;You hope that your research is used to make the world a better place.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Along those same lines, Rocque wants to help build bridges between scholars and the people on the front lines of the criminal justice system.<\/p>\n<p>Criminologists believe they could make a difference \u2014 but, as Rocque says, &#8220;not a lot of practitioners have the time to look through the journals, nor are they necessarily well-versed in the language and analyses used.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;There needs to be an intermediary,&#8221; and that&#8217;s a role he strives to fill. In his time on staff at DOC, for instance, Rocque produced a departmental newsletter that included digests of new research pertinent to the work of the department.<\/p>\n<p>A Maine native, Rocque studied at the University of Maine and the University of Maryland, and earned a doctorate at Northeastern University. In his dissertation, he took several theoretical explanations of &#8220;desistance&#8221;\u00a0\u2014 the tendency of criminals to commit fewer crimes and eventually stop as they age\u00a0\u2014 and argued that each, in its own way, represents the process of maturation.<\/p>\n<p>For instance, so-called social-control theorists point to common life transitions as the moderating factor, he explains. &#8220;Men will be hell-raisers, and then getting jobs or getting married will turn them around.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Another theory, which subsequent research showed to be the most compelling, explains desistance as a product of internal factors, rather than external.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Over time, people start to think of themselves in a different way,&#8221; Rocque explains. An offender&#8217;s self-image might transition from being a badass &#8220;to someone who wants to contribute to society or to a family man. That identity shift changes their behavior.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Rocque&#8217;s own identity as a person dealing with crime from the right side of the law emerged early, in the form of a fascination with the novels starring teen detective &#8220;Brains&#8221; Benton. Later, he says, &#8220;I did look into becoming a detective. But when I was an undergrad, I learned of the criminology concentration in the sociology department.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;And I fell in love with how this type of field works.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New at Bates, criminologist Michael Rocque brings a distinctive perspective to the sociology faculty. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":81190,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[10496,10767],"class_list":["post-81187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-life","category-maine-world","tag-criminology","tag-sociology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81187"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81850,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81187\/revisions\/81850"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}