PROJECT DIRECTOR
Kelly Lytle Hernandez is a Professor of History and African American Studies at UCLA. She is also the Interim Director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is the author of the award-winning books, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), and City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
PROJECT CO-DIRECTOR
Danielle Dupuy is a doctoral candidate in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and the Assistant Director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. Prior to coming to Los Angeles, Danielle worked for 7 years in Chicago, initially as a social epidemiologist at the Sinai Urban Health Institute and later as the Associate Director of the Metropolitan Breast Cancer Task Force. During that time, she worked on issues related to racial disparities and social equity in the fields of maternal and child health, breast cancer, urban agriculture, violence, and policing. In 2013, Danielle enrolled in the Community Health Sciences program with a minor in Law to focus on incarceration and its effect on the wellbeing of black communities in the U.S. Since coming to UCLA, Danielle cofounded the Justice Work Group at UCLA and is a member of the University of California Criminal Justice & Health Consortium. She helped usher in the first UCLA college courses for high school graduates incarcerated at Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall and led the inaugural Beyond the Bars LA conference held in October 2017 at UCLA.
DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC POLICY
Isaac Bryan serves as the Public Policy Advisor of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. Working for Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, Bryan also co-authored the first City of Los Angeles comprehensive report on the reentry needs of community members. He is best known for his 2018 TEDxUCLA talk which focused largely on the injustices found in the criminal justice system.
DIRECTOR OF ORAL HISTORY AND ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH
Terry Allen is a doctoral student at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. He currently works as a summer associate-adjunct staff member at RAND Corporation and as a data fellow for Denver Public Schools. He also holds research positions at UCLA Law and the Vice-Provost Initiative for Pre-College Scholars Program. Terry received his master’s degree in education policy from Columbia University and his bachelor’s degree in Rhetoric from U.C. Berkeley. His research focuses on the social and psychological costs of policing, incarceration and criminalization. Prior to his doctoral studies, Terry served President Barack Obama as an advance associate for the White House.
OVERVIEW OF RESEARCH TEAM
The Million Dollar Hoods research team is an interdisciplinary group of scholars led by Kelly Lytle Hernandez, professor of History and African-American Studies and the Interim Director for the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. She secures the data, assembles the research team, and coordinates the project’s overall development. In August 2017, Danielle Dupuy joined the team as a lead researcher and project manager. Albert Kochaphum and Mariah Tso are lead GIS technologists at the UCLA Institute for Digital Research and Education. They scrape, clean, code, and map the first data-sets. They also built the website. For more detailed information on the data and the team’s GIS process, visit the Million Dollar Hoods Wiki. Eric Lee leads the data division, under the guidance of Danielle. Ricardo Patlan (a UCLA Political Science major) improves the team’s mapping accuracy by cleaning up the data inputted in the home address field. Terry Allen is a PhD candidate in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and he leads the team’s oral history and ethnographic research division, which includes the following, amazing undergraduate students: Jovan Martinez (recent graduate), Marcelo Clarke (African American Studies/Sociology), Chibunkem Ezenekwe (History/Sociology/Global Studies), Luz Flores (African American Studies), Harold Grigsby (African American Studies), Andrew Guerrero (International Development Studies), Taylore Thomas (African American Studies), Arianna Kirksey, DaMonte Jones, Ian Taylor(Sociology), Francisco Aviles Pino (Chicana Studies/ Sociology), Sade Ajayi (Public Policy and African American Studies), and Cierra Black. Terry Allen also leads graphic design for our research reports. Isaac Bryan conducts original data analysis and leads the team’s outreach with advocates and public policy leaders.
Every phase of the Million Dollar Hoods research process also includes input from advocacy groups and community-based organizations working to decarcerate Los Angeles. From the beginning, representatives from Critical Resistance-Los Angeles, Californians United for a Responsible Budget, Dignity and Power Now, and Youth Justice Coalition, have attended research meetings and offered feedback on mapping strategies, data trends, website design, and project naming. Since the project’s launch, we have also collaborated with the following organizations: ACLU of California, ACLU of Southern California, JusticeLA, Community Coalition, Los Angeles Community Action Network, Human Rights Watch, the Los Angeles Black Worker Center, and A New Way of Life.
Shout out to Robert Habans, a 2015/16 fellow at the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, who was one of the original members of the MDH team. Robby devised the team’s original LASD daily bed rate formula.