Welcoming Dr. Meghan O'Neil

September 17, 2024

Content Warning: This interview discusses topics such as domestic violence, substance abuse, and suicide.

 

Dr. Meghan O’Neil is an Assistant Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. 

 

What originally interested you in Criminal Justice?

I’m from a working-class family. No one went to college before my generation. My mother graduated top of her high school class right down the street from Yale University a year before they allowed women to attend Yale. Her father, advised her to “get married” when she expressed interest in enrolling in college. She married at 19 years old and became pregnant soon thereafter. Her husband threw her down the stairs while she was pregnant with my sister, and he was increasingly violent, intoxicated, and absent. She would divorce and later marry my father. My father has a GED and enlisted during Vietnam. Both my grandfathers served in combat during WWII. When I was in elementary school my brother served during the Gulf War. One sibling became pregnant at 15 and another was locked up on felony charges.

I think these experiences are fairly common for working-class/working-poor American families, but often we do not talk about it. As a scholar of criminal justice, I know that nowadays, its estimated that one in two Americans have an immediate family member who has been incarcerated. Violence, trauma, poverty, and justice system interactions (criminal, e.g., misdemeanor & felony, and civil, e.g., child support, eviction, divorce, etc.) were commonplace in our community. I recall sitting at the dining room table with my maternal grandfather and his rendition of his wartime service repeating like a record—the deaths, the bombs, the weaponry—violence is a part of the family history. The men in my family were combat trained. This intergenerational history permeates not just those who served, but impacts the household, the family, and the community. PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) was not founded and placed in the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until its third edition (DSM-III) in 1980, decades after my grandfathers’ wartime service and long after we lost one of my grandfathers to suicide.

As more young men became incarcerated in our jails and prisons at younger ages and increasingly serious charges (1980s and 90s,) this removed their right to serve in the US military. For my community, this was devastating. I grew up in an era where most men no longer had a clear path to remain in the working class, nor middle class aspirations; instead, they went under supervision by the government. A complex revolving prison door experience became much more commonplace than a college acceptance letter for most boys in the community. Visiting my sibling in prison when I was in elementary school and observing that most of the prisoners were not white was eye opening and thought provoking. Boys and girls I went to public school with started to die from drug and alcohol related deaths in their teens. Even for those who initially got out of the community with a scholarship or the military, they faced barriers to long term upward mobility and success. Take for instance, my childhood best friend and next-door neighbor who was the niece of our city police commissioner—she became hooked on heroin, lost her college athletic scholarship (she was always a better athlete than me), and ultimately became deeply involved with the justice system and in and out of homelessness. Her brother who had gone into the military, moved to a nicer neighborhood, started a family, and became a police officer, passed away in his thirties. While he is a highly respected hero, according to those close to the family, his struggles with addiction haunted him.

These are some of my motivations for dedicating my career to exploring criminal and civil justice, trauma, substance use disorder, violence, and American inequality.

 

What is your favorite part of teaching?

I love to see the hope on students’ faces when they are excited about what they are studying and the spark when they realize they could apply what they learn and do it as a career that they enjoy.

 

What has been your favorite part of joining the School so far?

I enjoyed going to the Lansing Lugnuts Baseball faculty outing. There was a bad storm in Michigan that week and we had lost power for a few days. I was really happy to get out of the house! The SCJ faculty were very welcoming to my daughter Daphne who is 17 months old and myself. Although it wasn’t planned to bring family, since she did not require a seat, they let me sneak her in.

 

What is a fun fact about yourself that you’d like to share?

I’ve been riding a motorcycle since I was a kid. First on the back of my dad’s motorcycle. Then at 18, I completed a class in community college to learn to operate a motorcycle and got licensed. I had my own bike for a few years and sold it when I moved to NYC for school (parking garages were too expensive). I am now interested in dirt biking because I hear that is pretty great in Michigan.