Upon earning her PhD, Jones accepted an assistant professor position in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara for the 2004–05 academic year.[3] In this role, she earned a William T. Grant Award for Early Career Scholars to fund her research project titled Pathways to Freedom: How Young People Create a Life After Incarceration.[4] A few years later, Jones published her first book titled Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner City Violence, which won the New Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology.[5] The book was an ethnographic study of violence within the inner-city of Philadelphia amongst adolescent girls. She focused on how the girls oscillate between protecting themselves against daily threats of physical violence and conforming to White middle-class gender norms.[6][7]
The following year, Jones published her second book, which was edited by criminologist Meda Chesney-Lind, titled Fighting for Girls: New Perspectives on Gender and Violence. Similar to her first book, Jones focused on adolescent girls and the moral panic caused by media representations surrounding them as becoming increasingly violent.[8] Her research claimed that a spike in arrest numbers for adolescent girls was the cause of this panic, not an actual increase in violence. She placed the blame of the increase on zero-tolerance policies in schools and mandatory arrest policies.[9] As a result of her research, Jones was appointed Chair of the American Sociological Association's Race, Gender and Class Section from 2012 until 2013.[10] During this time, she also co-led a research project with Geoff Raymond called Identifying Good Strangers: A Micro-Interactional Approach, funded by a $592,699 three-year grant.[11]
Jones left the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2013 to join the department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.[10] Following the Killing of Philando Castile, Jones collaborated with Raymond on a three-year project to help police develop better communication methods.[12] She also established the Justice Interaction Lab during the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement with funding from the William T. Grant Foundation.[13] Her third book, The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption, reflected on her recent research and focused on the victimization of young Black men by urban gun violence.[14] It went on to receive on the Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title for 2018[15] and the Michael J. Hindelang Award from the American Society of Criminology.[16] In 2020, Jones received the W.E.B. DuBois Award from the Western Society of Criminology for her work in raising awareness for racial and ethical issues in criminology and criminal justice.[17]
