Anat Kimchi was a passionate social scientist working on inequalities in the US criminal justice system. On June 19, 2021, she was murdered in Chicago in a random sidewalk stabbing attack. As a doctoral student of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, Anat identified and focused her work on a major and largely overlooked contribution to the mass incarceration of non-violent offenders: individuals who enter prison after having their community supervision sentence revoked, sometimes by failing to fulfill impossible conditions. Her dissertation "Set Up to Fail? A Longitudinal Examination of Disparities in Community Supervision Sentences and Outcomes" awarded Anat her Ph.D. posthumously a few weeks after her murder.

Anat began working with Choice Research Associates in 2019 on their longitudinal study of desistance in a Maryland community corrections population, “Stay Close and Looking Back”. Prior to working with Choice directly, Anat worked as a Research Assistant with the Principal Investigator, Shawn Flower, on the 2016 DC Department of Corrections Population Study through their affiliation with the Justice Research Statistics Association in Washington, DC.

Simultaneously, while at the University of Maryland, Anat was involved in various projects including assessments of disparity in probation sentences and an evaluation of the developmental impacts of custodial placement for female juvenile offenders. Anat was primarily interested in community corrections, courts and sentencing, and quantitative methods. She earned her Master’s Degree in Criminology & Criminal Justice from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2017 and graduated from UMD with a B.S. in Psychology and a B.A. in Criminology and Criminal Justice.

An endowment -- the Dr. Anat Kimchi Memorial Graduate Award in Criminal Justice -- has been established in her memory.

https://giving.umd.edu/giving/Fund.php?name=dr-anat-kimchi-memorial-graduate-award-in-criminal-justice