Meda Chesney-Lind is a US feminist, criminologist, and an advocate for girls and women who come in contact with the criminal justice system in Hawaii.
Chesney-Lind works to find alternatives to women's incarceration and is an advocate for humanitarian solutions within the Hawaiian criminal justice system. She focuses on teaching courses on girls' delinquency and women's crime, issues of girls' programming and women's imprisonment, youth gangs, the sociology of gender, and the victimization of women and girls. Over much of the past two decades, her focus has been on improvement of the Hawaiian correctional system through producing articles for newspapers, books, and journals, as well as working with community-based agencies and giving talks to local organizations and legislators. She has also been credited with helping to direct national attention to services for delinquent girls.[1]
Meda Chesney was born in Woodward, Oklahoma, in 1947 and was the oldest of four children. She grew up in Maryland and moved to Portland, Oregon at the age of 16. She graduated valedictorian from high school in 1965.[2] She then attended Whitman College where she met Ian Lind. They married in 1969 and moved to his home in Hawaii.
Chesney-Lind received her B.A. in 1969 from Whitman College and both her M.A. (1971) and Ph.D. (1977) from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
She is an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, professor emerita of the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and a senior research fellow at Portland State University.
Chesney-Lind has received various grants to fund research projects and initiatives, ranging from $6,000 - $422,121. She was the principal investigator for Hawaii's Youth Gang Response Evaluation (YGRE). Chesney-Lind received over $700,000 in increments between 1992 and 2005 for the project, which centered on interviews and analysis with current youth gang members, research on delinquency, and gang members of youth at risk in Hawaii. She also received a contract for a three-year pilot project (2003-2004), for which she was granted almost $40,000 to provide evaluation services to the Family Drug Court (first circuit) in the state of Hawaii. Chesney-Lind has also been granted $15,000 to provide evaluation services to the Family Court's pilot project of developing a "girls' court." This court intends to address female delinquents with a history of offending on the island of Oahu.
Chesney-Lind has received a number of awards including;
