Jonathan Caudill

In-person and virtual office hours available by appointment. Please email me to schedule a meeting.

Dr. Jon Caudill joined UCCS in 2016 as a tenured associate professor and graduate program coordinator for criminal justice. He has served in various leadership roles on campus and currently holds an appointment as a tenured professor in the Criminal Justice Department. Dr. Caudill holds undergraduate and master's degrees in criminal justice from Sam Houston State University and a Ph.D. in Criminology from the University of Texas at Dallas.

Dr. Caudill is from Breathitt County, Kentucky, where he spent his formative years exploring the hills, creeks, and coal mines of eastern Kentucky. After moving to Houston, Texas, Dr. Caudill completed high school at Cypress Creek High School and swiftly entered the United States Marine Corps. After his military service, Dr. Caudill continued on a path of service through continuing his education and working in various roles, including shift work in custodial corrections for juvenile offenders, managerial work in the service industry, and as a Texas Juvenile Probation Officer. Dr. Caudill's entry into the higher education profession began as a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he served as a research fellow and interim-director for research in the Caruth Police Institute's leadership development efforts at the Dallas Police Department.

Dr. Caudill's academic career has focused on bridging the gap between communities through application of a public criminologist mindset and a teacher-scholar model of education. Dr. Caudill has worked in multiple university systems in several different states and with community leaders across a wide swath of interests. Dr. Caudill's scholarship focuses broadly on the application of formal social control with a synergy of understanding the nexus between people and systems. This exploration has included police-suspect interactions, patrol strategies, prosecutorial actions, institutional misconduct, post-incarceration recidivism, recidivism measurement, sentencing reforms, county jail inmate culture, jail inmate deaths, social media censorship, and organizational development. Dr. Caudill has published 40 peer-reviewed studies; is a co-author of Lost Causes: Blended Sentencing, Second Chances, and the Texas Youth Commission (University of Texas Press) and is first author of Deadly Consequences: The Unintended Impact of Sentencing Reforms on California County Jails (Springer Publishing). His research has appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including the American Journal of Criminal Justice, Crime and Delinquency, the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, and the Journal of Criminal Justice, and Youth Violence & Juvenile Justice. Dr. Caudill also served as editor (2019-2025) for the top-ranked peer-reviewed journal in juvenile justice, Youth Violence & Juvenile Justice, and serves as associate editor for the Journal of Criminal Justice.

Dr. Caudill has a passion for education and is solutions focused. His work with agencies and organizations as they navigated the institutional disruptions of criminal justice reforms helped to shape Dr. Caudill’s approach to organizational leadership.

Dr. Caudill enjoys spending time with his family of four and many animals, and he encourages a work environment that is supportive of families and children.

• Formal social control
• Recidivism
• Correctional policy
• Institutional misconduct
• Legal processing
• Gangs
• Organizational change
• Policing culture and strategies

J Caudill CV