Faculty > Andrew L. Spivak

Andrew L. Spivak is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was the 2010 recipient of the William Morris Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 2011 recipient of the Outstanding Mentor Award. A graduate of The University of Oklahoma (Ph.D., 2007) and the University of Central Oklahoma (BA, MA), he completed bachelors’ in economics and history and master’s in experimental psychology before turning to sociology. Prior to academia, Dr. Spivak worked for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections for nearly a decade, beginning as a correctional officer and later serving as a prison case manager and finally as a research analyst. He has taught for his alma mater (OU) as well as Oklahoma State University - Oklahoma City and Ohio University (the other OU), and at UNLV he currently teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in criminology, penology, social research methods, and demography, and is preparing to teach and statistics in Spring 2012. He also developed and now supervises a sociology internship program in cooperation with the Nevada Department of Corrections in which undergraduate students work with case management staff at High Desert State Prison. He has presented papers at conferences of the American Sociological Association, the American Society of Criminology, the American Public Health Association, the Western and Southwest Social Science Associations, the Justice Research and Statistics Association, and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, given invited presentations to the Oklahoma Department of Health and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, and has testified in state district courts as an expert witness in 2002 for the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System and in 2011 for the Los Angeles County Office of the Alternate Public Defender. In 2009, he received the Faculty International Development Award from the University Study Abroad Consortium and spent a summer term at Southwest University for Nationalities (SWUN) in Chengdu, China. In 2005, he was primary author of a two-year American Heart Association grant report on tobacco regulation, and in 2010 obtained a one-year grant from the Oklahoma Tobacco Research Center to complete a follow-up study as co-principal investigator. He is also co-principal for a current Department of Justice Smart Policing Initiative (SPI) grant awarded to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department in partnership with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His book Sexual Violence: Beyond the Feminist-Evolutionary Debate (LFB Scholarly Publishing) was released in July 2011, and his peer-reviewed articles are published or forthcoming in Crime and Delinquency, Deviant Behavior, Justice Research and Policy, Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, Problems of Post-Communism, Politics and Policy, Public Integrity, the Journal of Drug Education, and Urban Geography. Dr. Spivak has been cited by journalists in the Las Vegas Review Journal, Las Vegas CityLife, the Las Vegas Sun, and Vegas Seven magazine, and appeared in television interviews on KSNV Channel 3 Las Vegas in 2010 and Fox 5 Las Vegas in 2011. His current research relates to topics including prison recidivism and prison misconduct, violent offending and victimology, juvenile justice processing, deterrence theory, tobacco and alcohol regulation, and residential segregation. Outside academia, he performed through two seasons as a violinist in community orchestras – the Oklahoma Baptist University Shawnee Community Orchestra and the Henderson Symphony – and was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army Reserve after nine years of service.

Recent Publications

 Givel, Michael and Andrew L. Spivak. (In Press) “American Pragmatism and Bureaucratic Advocacy: A State-Level Case of Public Agency Rulemaking and Tobacco Control Policy.” Forthcoming in Public Integrity.

Spivak, Andrew L., Miyuki Fukushima, Margaret S. Kelley, and Tiffany Sanford-Jenson*. 2011. “Religiosity, Delinquency, and the Deterrent Effects of Informal Sanctions.” Deviant Behavior 32 (8): 677-711.

Spivak, Andrew L., Loretta E. Bass, and Craig St. John. 2011. “Reconsidering Race, Class, and Residential Segregation in American Cities.” Urban Geography 32 (4): 531-567.

Spivak, Andrew L. 2011. Sexual Violence: Beyond the Feminist-Evolutionary Debate. El Paso: LFB Scholarly Publishing

Recent Courses Taught
 Soc 101– Principles of Sociology
Soc 403 – Techniques of Social Research
Soc 415 – World Population Problems
Soc 431 – Crime and Criminal Behavior
Soc 434 – Penology and Social Control

Contact Dr. Spivak:
Office location: CBC-B 241
Email: andrew.spivak@unlv.edu


Recent Book
 Sexual Violence: Beyond the Feminist - Evolutionary Debate

Current Research Projects

Prison Misconduct and Recidivism
Using more than a decade of prison misconduct data from the Oklahoma correctional population, I attempt to predict the extent to which rule-violation among inmates predicts post-release performance, as well as why sentence-length and length-of-stay predict prison misconduct even after controlling for age. The latter question has bearing on post-classical vs. life-course criminological explanations for the age-crime curve.

Feminist vs. Evolutionary Theories of Sexual Violence
Following my dissertation work, I attempt to explain the victim-age distribution for adolescent and adult female sexual assault victims. Particularly, I use the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) to try to explain why the age distribution of rape victims diverges from the age distribution of non-sexual violent crimes. Feminist and Evolutionary theorists have engaged in a bitter debate over the issue of offenders' motives, and I attempt to bridge this theoretical gap with a criminological perspective.

Religiosity, Social Deterrence, and Projected Delinquency
Expanding on the work of one of my mentors in Criminology (Harold Grasmick), I and colleagues at the University of Illinois-Urbana, Cleveland State University, and the University of Oklahoma are using measures of religiosity and religious fundamentalism to predict the likelihood of college students' projected violation of a campus alcohol ban. We consider social deterrence measures, such as the anticipation of shame and embarrassment, as intervening variables that mediate the relationship between religion and social conformity.