Abigail Hayes is a Doctoral Candidate in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska Omaha. Her research focuses on institutional corrections, gangs, and rehabilitative programming. Abby holds an MPS in Criminology and Criminal Justice from Fort Hays State University.

Abby’s current work spans areas of prison violence, restrictive housing, and the classification of criminal groups.

At the center of her graduate work is her dissertation, which investigates how security threat group (STG) affiliation and housing composition drive patterns of assaultive behavior within the Iowa Department of Corrections. Using administrative data across nine state facilities, the project moves beyond individual-level risk to ask how the concentration and mix of STG-affiliated individuals within housing units shape exposure to violence—and whether the IDOC Prison Alert Dashboard, a predictive risk tool built from the same data, accurately captures those ecological conditions or simply flags high-risk individuals. The study is grounded in an institutional ecological framework, treating violence as an outcome of who people are, where they are placed, and who surrounds them.

Alongside her dissertation, Abby is pursuing three additional lines of research:

1. A mixed-methods study of restrictive housing conditions in the Oregon Department of Corrections, analyzing in-depth interviews with 112 incarcerated men to understand how individuals experience disciplinary segregation including their relationships with correctional officers, any perceived benefits of the placement, and ideas for reform;
2. An interrupted time series analysis assessing whether a recent Nebraska policy change has meaningfully reduced restrictive housing use for misconduct; and
3. A scoping review tracing the origins and evolution of gangs alongside other criminal groups (e.g., delinquent peer networks, drug cartels, and extremist organizations) to interrogate whether gangs are better understood as an extension of peer dynamics or as a form of organized crime.