UMass Boston

Probation, community corrections, criminal court, drug court policy and implementation, and criminal justice system

MA, Applied Sociology, UMass Boston

View Professor McNicholas's Curriculum Vitae

William McNicholas has 31 years of experience in the field of criminal justice. Employed by the Massachusetts Probation Service from 1993 to 2020, he was a Probation Officer at the Roxbury District Court and dedicated most of his service as Assistant Chief Probation Officer at the Charlestown Municipal Court. He started his career in 1989 with the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department as a Caseworker and Institutional Instructor at the Suffolk County Jail where he taught English as a Second Language. William speaks Spanish fluently and worked with the Latinx court-involved community throughout his career.

McNicholas, a current Sociology PhD student at UMass Boston, is developing research on drug courts from which he will conduct an ethnographic study on drug court participants as it relates to procedural justice, drug court policy and implementation. He received his BA in Spanish Literature and Grammar from UMass Boston in 1989 and MA in Applied Sociology from UMass Boston in 2000.

McNicholas began teaching at UMass Boston in 2019 and is a lecturer at Northeastern University for the College of Professional Studies and the College of Social Sciences and Humanities.