Teaching
interests: Ethnography, Criminology, Social Inequality, Urban Drug Markets, and Theory.
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Brief
biography: Dr. Contreras is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. He came of age in the South Bronx during the 1980s, when widespread arson, declining job opportunities, and cuts in social services coincided with the rise of crack-cocaine and devastated the community. As an undergraduate, he attended Tompkins Cortland Community College (SUNY) and then City College (CUNY). Later, he attained his Ph.D. in Sociology from The Graduate Center (CUNY).
His recently released book, The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, and the American Dream (University of California Press, 2013), is based on field research he did on Dominican drug robbers in his old South Bronx neighborhood. Known on the streets as “Stickup Kids,” these men brutally robbed drug dealers storing large amounts of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and cash. He found that these former crack dealers created a violent drug robbery niche because of the crack market’s decline during the 1990s. He also examines their meanings of changing drug markets, a drug robbery’s organization and violence, their legal employment pursuits, and their relationships with family and children. In the end, his research renders these men as aging criminals, who became more violent and self-destructive as their legal and illegal work opportunities declined.
Currently, he is doing field research on the “Black and Brown” tension that exists between Latina/os and African Americans in Los Angeles. He also teaches undergraduate and graduate courses such as Criminology, Juvenile Delinquency, Drugs in the City, and Theories of Social Behavior.
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