Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Criminal Justice

Advisor

Amy Adamczyk

Committee Members

Brian Lawton

Joshua Freilich

Brooke Foucault Welles

Subject Categories

Criminology

Keywords

crime and punishment, twitter, social media

Abstract

Criminal legal reformers and abolitionists have differing visions for change within the criminal legal system, where reformers seek to modify and abolitionists aim to dismantle it altogether (Davis 2005; Foucault 1977; Kaba 2020). Advocates used print media to disseminate information related to their proposed changes to broader audiences. While print media remains a valuable tool to reach wide audiences, the advent of social media introduced new mechanisms to interact with broad audiences at very low cost while leaving traces of digital data which could be analyzed to better understand the social factors which impact whether information is spread. Throughout this dissertation, I argue that Bourdieu’s approach to social capital is equipped to provide an explanation regarding the social factors which contribute to an account’s success in receiving engagement from their audiences. I test this perspective by collecting Twitter data through a multi-step sampling process via the 2.0 application programming interface (API) from October 1st, 2021, until December 31st, 2021 which allowed for the collection of accounts which tweeted a keyword as well as those who participated in the same conversation. I observed that likes and retweets were concentrated on a small group of accounts and that their social capital, measured in their number of followers as well as their Katz-Bonacich Centrality within the reply network was positively associated with an increase in likes and retweets. While prior research has examined the distribution of engagement of accounts sampled from the keyword search, I found weaknesses to this approach when introducing other accounts who participated in the broader conversation. Namely, while the elite group remained elite if operationalized as accounts in the 99th percentile, they would have been missed if relying on visual inspection of a distribution of likes or retweets. Further implications related to social media research, as well as criminal legal reform and abolition are discussed throughout.

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