Dr. Sandra L. Trappen, Penn State University. Email: slt62@psu.edu
Biography
Thank you for visiting this page. Dr. Sandra L. Trappen is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Penn State University.
Policing
Her research program centers on corrections, policing, and law enforcement, with a specialized focus on trauma-informed approaches within the criminal justice system.
Dr. Trappen is a sociologist whose scholarship develops what she terms postindustrial ontologies of harm, a framework for understanding how injury, abandonment, and governance co‑produce the conditions of contemporary social life. Within this framework, harm emerges as an ontological condition in regions like the Mon Valley in Western Pennsylvania, where communities navigate the overlapping crises of gun violence, drug addiction, and the struggle for revivability—the everyday labor of holding families, futures, and communities together in the wake of industrial collapse.
Sociology of Harm
These local crises illuminate the broader dynamics her work theorizes: across all her projects, Dr. Trappen clarifies how harm circulates as a material, affective, and political force, shaping the capacities through which bodies sense, align, and inhabit the contemporary world. She follows the movement of harm into the infrastructures of policing, probation, and health infrastructure, revealing how institutional systems absorb and recirculate injury—and in doing so, they shape the very conditions of survival and repair.
Her research moves beyond conventional criminological frames, shifting from questions of crime and control to a broader inquiry into how power takes shape in landscapes marked by deindustrialization, militarism, structural inequality, and the long afterlives of industrial collapse. Rather than treating harm as an outcome to be measured or managed, her work examines the cultural and atmospheric logics through which security and risk come to organize feeling, embodiment, and belonging.
Author’s note: photo image here is a double exposure: a portrait intersecting with the steel mill smokestacks that once typified the Mon Valley outside of Pittsburgh, where I grew up. It stages the perceptual argument at the heart of my work — that harm becomes visible only through certain apertures, and that those apertures are shaped by history, collapse, and power. The industrial ruins are not backdrop. They are part of the figure, signaling that the analyses offered in my research emerges from within the very infrastructures it seeks to understand.
Fun Facts about Me:
Born and raised in Western Pennsylvania, the daughter and granddaughter of steelworkers
Former active duty U.S. Army Captain, signals intelligence officer
Lived & taught college in New York City for 14 years
Lived & worked in Vicenza, Italy for 4 years (unrepentant Europhile)
Extreme traveler (scuba diver & aspiring kite surfer)
Research & Teaching Interests
- Community Corrections & Probation
- Police Health
- Trauma-informed Criminal Justice
- Sociology of Violence
- Postindustrial Collapse
Expertise
- Trauma & Health studies
- Program Evaluation
- Quantitative & Qualitative research methods: interviews, surveys, focus groups, and observational methodologies
Research
Dr. Trappen’s general research program examines how trauma, affect, and institutional power shape contemporary forms of harm across community corrections, postindustrial regions, and the broader infrastructures of American governance. Across this work, she develops a sustained inquiry into harm and its postindustrial afterlife, alongside a broader examination of violence and the institutional arrangements through which it is governed.
Probation Officers, ACEs, and the Paradox of Double Exposure
This project examines a long‑overlooked dimension of community corrections: the trauma histories of the officers themselves. While trauma‑informed initiatives in probation have largely focused on justice‑involved people, her work shows that probation and pretrial services officers also carry significant burdens of early and occupational trauma. She explores how cumulative stress exposure influences health risks, occupational well-being, and behavioral outcomes. This scholarship aims to advance evidence-based strategies that promote resilience and ethical practice among justice system professionals.
Drawing on a mixed‑methods study of 423 U.S. Probation and Pretrial Services Officers and in‑depth interviews with 30 participants, she documents elevated rates of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) across the workforce, with women and officers of color disproportionately affected. These early exposures intersect with the daily pressures of the job—vicarious trauma, caseload demands, role conflict, and burnout—producing what she terms a paradox of double exposure: officers are both survivors of trauma and professionals tasked with managing the trauma of others.
Officers described a wide range of coping strategies, from compartmentalization and emotional suppression to peer support and adaptive reframing, while also naming the structural barriers that make resilience difficult to sustain. This research provides baseline data now being used in program evaluations and policy discussions aimed at improving officer wellness, morale, retention, and organizational culture.
By situating probation officers within broader conversations on trauma, resilience, and workplace wellbeing, this work underscores the need for confidentiality protections, leadership engagement, and organizational reforms that genuinely support staff. Recognizing officers as both caregivers and individuals shaped by their own histories of harm is essential for workforce sustainability and for building justice systems that care for the people who sustain them.
Blue Structures in Policing: Why Black and Blue Back the Blue
This project examines how the internal hierarchies of policing shape everyday behavior, loyalty, and decision‑making within the profession. Dr. Trappen studies how officers navigate rank, assignments, specialized units, and informal status systems — and how these pressures influence the choices they make on the street. Rather than treating misconduct as the actions of “bad apples,” this research shows how competition, stress, and the pursuit of belonging create powerful subcultures inside police departments. By tracing how men seek stability and authority within a rigidly vertical institution, the project reveals why certain forms of silence, risk‑taking, and rule‑bending become normalized. Blue Structures offers a structural view of police culture, showing how internal dynamics shape public outcomes and why the “blue” identity holds such strong emotional force for those inside the profession.
Red Tides & Red Hats
This project examines wounded masculinity and the intergenerational dynamics of blocked opportunity for men—atmospheric conditions that stabilize contemporary authoritarian formations. It traces how grievance, exhaustion, and vulnerability become organized into political coherence. Dr. Trappen uses the term chromatic authoritarianism to describe the atmospheric conditions that shape how bodies sense coherence, threat, and relief. The color red, she argues, saturates the field as a material force, organizing sensation long before anything becomes available as meaning. This is not symbolic politics; it is affective governance.
Camouflage Economy
Traces how military logics permeate civilian life, reorganizing electoral campaigns, digital platforms, and everyday interactions. It names the afterlife of counterinsurgency strategy as a mobile, atmospheric formation that migrates across domains, embeds itself in civilian infrastructures, and reorganizes governance. What first appears in the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS) as epistemic camouflage—the fusion of research, intelligence gathering, and coercion—now extends into electoral politics, digital platforms, and the shadow‑finance networks exemplified by Jeffrey Epstein.
The project follows this formation through specific condensations and infrastructures, showing how knowledge production, desire, vulnerability, and exposure are reorganized as counterinsurgency logics settle into everyday life. By understanding violence as infrastructural rather than episodic, this research reveals how harm moves across online and offline environments, structuring how people interpret conflict, vulnerability, and belonging. Camouflage Economy demonstrates how governance increasingly works through risk, anticipation, and selective visibility, embedding coercion within practices that present themselves as care, protection, or connection.
Book Project
The Wound in the Valley: Collapse, Survival, and the Afterlife of Harm
Her forthcoming book, The Wound in the Valley, examines what takes shape after industrial collapse in Western Pennsylvania. Rooted in the Monongahela River Valley east of Pittsburgh, the book begins not with the moment the mills closed, but with the long afterlife that followed—a slow, settling harm that seeped into bodies, institutions, and landscapes for decades. In the Mon Valley, she argues, the atmosphere itself teaches people how to live: what to expect, what to brace for, and what comes to feel ordinary. The vigilance learned in traumatized households doesn’t stay inside those walls; it expands outward and becomes a regional way of navigating the world. This is how harm circulates, how vulnerability spreads, and how people learn to move through a place where collapse is not a single event but an ongoing condition.
Drawing on years of research in the region, she traces how harm circulates through a landscape where industrial ruin has become a climate, shaping the rhythms of daily life and the possibilities of survival. In this world, the wound is not a metaphor. It is an interface between people and the systems that govern them: probation offices, hospital emergency rooms, detox centers, plasma clinics, and the bureaucracies that decide whose injuries matter. Through interviews, observation, and local narratives, she illustrates how structural abandonment is experienced as pain, nostalgia, grievance, and survival. Men and women are recycled through the Valley, altered by addiction, military service, incarceration, and economic abandonment—revenants of a collapsed industrial order and a gendered survival economy.
Through this work, she offers a new way to understand how power operates through the air—through feelings, sensations, and the lingering effects of industrial decline. Vivid scenes and an analytic method attuned to what lingers drive the narrative of The Wound in the Valley, revealing how institutions manage harm, govern through injury, and how people endure in the afterlife of collapse.
Penn State Study Abroad
Lived experiences abroad support Dr. Trappen’s ongoing passionate engagement with Penn State’s Study Abroad programs. Her custom-designed programs provide full-immersion “high-impact” cultural experiences to students, which further enable them to strengthen cross-cultural competencies while developing global awareness. All things considered, she has taken more than 100 students to Italy, France, and Portugal. This year (2026), students are embarking on a new adventure, where they will visit the famous World War II D-day landing sites in Northern France.
Naples, Italy, 2023
Lisbon, Portugal, 2025
Military Field Research
In addition to my academic work on police stress and trauma, Dr. Trappen previously worked as an advisor to the U.S. Army, where she performed program evaluation for social science research conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan. She has held various government security clearances and is currently clearance eligible. Her graduate dissertation research, “Empty Metal Jacket: The Biopolitical Economy of War & Medicine” investigated how war shaped the social organization of medicine. Comparative historical case studies document how combat injury and casualty accounting was (is) bound up with the racial and status hierarchies embedded in U.S. militarism and military service. Findings call attention to the social history of white groups hurting themselves and others in order to maintain gender, racial dominance, and social class dominance.
Media/Press
Dr. Trappen is based in the Pittsburgh area for 9 months out of the year and is available for interviews on topics that fall within her research expertise: police stress and trauma, gun violence, the afterlife of industrial harm, and criminal justice policy issues.
It would be appropriate for officials to contact me if they are seeking local/regional expertise on police stress, gun violence, drug problems, and other community-based social problems. To arrange an interview, contact Penn State Academic Affairs, Ms. Connie Surman, (412) 675-9052; or contact me at my university email: slt62@psu.edu
How to Use this Site:
This site is meant to serve as an online interactive space and resource hub for my students and anyone else who would like to learn with us, even if you are not at Penn State University or able to take courses in person. Non-students should bear in mind that these pages were developed to foster student interaction, both within and across the different courses that I teach. Your comments are welcome, but please be aware that you do so as our guest.
On the left margin of the website page, you will find links to the different courses I teach. Each course contains a series of media modules that explore different topics. The comment links in the modules provide students and others with opportunities to participate in discussion and exchange.
Comments Policy
All who wish to contribute constructive comments are welcome. Comments must be relevant to the topic at hand, must not contain advertisements, degrade others, or violate laws or considerations of privacy. I strive to make this a safe space for all. I value a diversity of opinions but I insist they are presented in ways that are respectful of others.
All forms of trolling and aggressive posting are prohibited. Professional standards of decorum apply for all commenting activity. While I do not “censor” comments, abusive and unprofessional comments will not be retained for publication. Any obscene, violent, profane, taunting or antagonistic content will be removed. In this effort, I rely on my community members to support this endeavor through personal accountability and mutual respect.
Comments will only be posted when they are accompanied by a valid and functioning email address. These addresses are only visible to me (not to readers).
I encourage the use of real names but do not prohibit the use of pseudonyms, provided you do not impersonate a real person.
Here are some general rules of the road:
Rule 1: Does your comment pass the “Mother” test – that is, would you let your mother read it?
Rule 2: Don’t be a rage factory. IOW don’t insult people.
Rule 3: All ideas are welcome if they can survive. Clap-backs are encouraged.
Rule 4: This is my house; it’s not a free speech zone. Hate speech is not welcome here.
Thank you!
Professor Trappen
slt62@psu.edu
Grading papers in the faculty lounge @ Hunter College, City University of New York.
Staff @ Academia Italiana, Salerno, Italy (Penn State Study Abroad)