Public Scholarship · Structural Analysis · Louisiana

Pattern Hunters, LLC

Clarity. Advocacy. Power.

Making structural patterns in Louisiana's justice systems visible — through criminology, community accountability, and the analytical rigor that turns data into demand.

About the Work

The Pattern Is the Story

Pattern Hunters, LLC is a public scholarship and structural analysis platform operating at the intersection of criminology, community accountability, and institutional analysis in Louisiana.

Founded by Andrea Hagan — criminologist, educator, and public scholar — Pattern Hunters publishes original analysis in the Louisiana Illuminator, The Lens, The Conversation, and the Baton Rouge Advocate. The work applies rigorous social science to the stories Louisiana keeps trying not to tell.

Clarity

Making structural patterns visible. Naming the system, the actor, and the specific decision point — not just the outcome.

Advocacy

Public scholarship that moves between the academy, the newsroom, and the community. Theory in service of people, not prestige.

Power

Building the body of work that compounds — until the pattern is undeniable and the accountability has an address.

Pattern Hunters

Notes from the Field

★ Featured Longform Analysis  |  October 2026

The Hate Outlived the Robes

A student in an N.C. A&T sweatshirt said she got an alert that the KKK was on campus and her college went into lockdown. Greensboro officials said no Klan ever came. Two days later, a “RepubliKKKan Party” sign went up while Minnesota’s first Black gubernatorial nominee was speaking. The Klan’s own leader admits the organization is “not strong at all,” with an online audience in the dozens. The organization is starving. The name eats every day. From Reconstruction’s night riders to an FBI warning about white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement to Louisiana v. Callais, this analysis follows how the hate outlived the robes.

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Foundation Analysis

The Children We Don’t Report: St. Tammany, Christa Pike, and What We Owe Abused Kids

On September 2, two former E.E. Lyon Elementary administrators in Covington pleaded guilty to failing to report child abuse. Incidents involving 8- and 9-year-olds never reached the school resource officer, police, or the Department of Children and Family Services. In Tennessee, the state attempted to execute Christa Pike, the only woman on its death row, on September 30; the attempt was halted after two rounds of lethal injection drugs. Her clemency petition details abuse that began when she was 2. Widom’s research shows most abused children never offend, but the risk is real, and it stacks. This analysis follows the road from an unanswered childhood to death row, lays out the arguments without refereeing them, and asks what we owe abused children before harm compounds.

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Foundation Analysis

Form Last Revised 2017: What Louisiana Signed Away in the Dark, and Who Was Standing There When It Happened

A boilerplate commercial template, seven years old at signing, handed to the chief executive of a state, and he signed it as written. Section 13 put the agreement under the law of New York. Nearly three hundred agreements in twenty-eight months. Fifty-four elected officials. One document is an incident. Nearly three hundred is an institution.

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Foundation Analysis

Even in 2026: What Ryan Clark’s Firing Reveals About the Price Black Excellence Still Pays

ESPN cut Ryan Clark’s microphone during a commercial break and he did not come back for the final segment. He says he was fired, not laid off. The angry Black man trope applied by colleagues who had known him twelve years, the Talented Tenth that Du Bois himself took apart in 1948, and a mother’s arithmetic taught in Marrero and in Gonzales. Nineteen sections.

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Foundation Analysis

Divide the House: The American Distraction at 250

Nolan Wells went to Horn Island on July 4, 2026. His friends came back. He did not. Emmett Till. Money, Mississippi. 1955. Seventy-one years apart — same state, same water, same silence. This is the full longform reckoning: 350 years of receipts, the seed planted in Jamestown in 1676, the Voting Rights Act gutted in the same spring sociology was banned in Florida, the missing Black girls nobody is looking for, and the theory I have been building since 2004. The American Distraction is not a metaphor. It is an active, ongoing political operation.

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Published Work

Out in the World

Louisiana Illuminator

Louisiana doesn’t see safety improve when 17-year-olds are jailed far from home

Since Louisiana reversed its Raise the Age law in 2024, parishes without separate youth housing have been shipping 17-year-olds, still presumed innocent, to jails nearly 200 miles from home. St. Landry Parish pays $325 a day for each one. State inspectors found the Jackson Parish jail short of required school-day minutes. A study published by the U.S. Department of Justice linked adult transfer to a median 33.7% increase in violent rearrest. Multisystemic therapy costs about what St. Landry spends on 29 days of jail and returns $3.01 for every dollar. Louisiana is buying distance from the very conditions that help a teenager come home and stay home.

Pennsylvania Capital-Star

What girls hear when a Pennsylvania lawmaker calls women ‘more costly to hire’

At a Sept. 29 committee meeting on House Bill 2135, a Pennsylvania lawmaker said he would pass over an equally qualified woman in her mid-40s to avoid possible menopause accommodations. “I would.” The federal Pregnant Workers Fairness Act has been in effect since 2023, and a Philadelphia ordinance takes effect in January. A Mayo Clinic study put lost work time from untreated symptoms at $1.8 billion. This commentary asks what that logic teaches girls about ambition, and why economic independence matters far beyond a paycheck.

Louisiana Illuminator

Louisiana can tell you exactly how long it jailed people it had no right to hold

An Orleans Parish judge ordered Lisa Andres released May 30, 2025. The state secured the paperwork 100 days later, according to a federal lawsuit. She spent 151 days in jail on a charge that carries a 90-day sentence and lost her apartment. More than 1,200 people were held past their release dates from August 2024 through 2025. The lawsuit asks for a 48-hour release deadline. A calculation that takes one day cost Lisa Andres 101.

Louisiana Illuminator

Louisiana’s new anti-homelessness law punishes people already living a sentence

Act 788 took effect June 9. It creates the crime of unauthorized camping — a tent, a blanket, a night outdoors in a place the state did not designate — punishable by $500, six months, or both. The homelessness courts require a defendant to waive the right to trial, and when someone cannot pay for their own treatment, the court can order unpaid labor instead. A University of Kentucky study found older homeless men already describing themselves as imprisoned by the conditions around them, long before any of them saw a cell. Pennsylvania and Illinois moved to bar enforcement where there is no shelter. Finland cut long-term homelessness by 72% over a decade by housing people first. Louisiana reached for the jail.

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Pattern Hunters, LLC is independent. No institution funds this work, no outlet assigns it, and no one signs off on what gets investigated. That independence is the whole point — and it is also the cost.

People have started coming to us with stories — stories they carried to news outlets that, for whatever reason, looked past them. Stories still sitting there, untold. When that happens, we pick up the baton: we give those stories the full weight of our analysis, we make the pattern visible, and we put the work before the community's eyes even as we pitch it to the outlets that should have run it the first time.

Everything we publish is free, and it stays that way. Whatever you choose to give — whatever amount, whenever you can — keeps this work alive and keeps it free for everyone.

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andrea@patternhunters.com