“Adding a Spatial Component to Contextual Sentencing Research” by Emerson Waite earned the Criminology Master’s Thesis Award for 2021-2022. This novel research examines how criminal sentencing, specifically the use of incarceration within a county. is influenced by community factors and social processes in neighboring counties. This study expands upon prior sentencing that looked only at social context of the focal county without regard to broader social context. The most interesting finding was that the political context of nearby counties did impact sentencing within a focal county in such a way that increases in conservatism in surrounding counties decreased the use of incarceration in the focal county. These findings were notable because without accounting for the political context of neighboring counties the political context of the focal county had no effect.