Petersilia began working for the
RAND Corporation in 1974, and remained there until 1994. She joined the faculty of the University of California, Irvine in 1992 as a professor of criminology, law and society, and in 2005, she became the founding director of the Center on Evidence-Based Corrections there. She joined the faculty of Stanford Law School in 2009. She was a founding
co-editor of the journal the
Annual Review of Criminology. ==Research==