Vera Institute of Justice and CUNY Pre-Doctoral Fellowship in Applied Justice Research

In 2016, the Vera Institute of Justice and The Graduate Center launched the Applied Justice Research (AJR) pre-doctoral fellowship. This fellowship is an opportunity to spend a full academic year at the Vera Institute, working with Vera research staff on ongoing projects related to the institute's core areas of focus. There are a number of opportunities to join ongoing projects, listed below. Fellows will work with a Vera research team for one academic year, participate in applied research, and potentially test new ideas and research approaches to Vera's existing work.

Research at Vera

The use of data to inform policy and drive change is at the core of Vera's approach to reform. Researchers based in each of Vera's initiatives use a range of methods and approaches to address some of the most pressing justice issues of our time. Currently, Vera researchers are working on issues ranging from the conditions of confinement of young people in prison, to the systemic racial bias that undercuts U.S. policing and prosecution, to the impact of providing legal representation to people who are facing deportation. While the topics addressed by Vera researchers are wide-ranging, the common thread that runs through all of this work is a drive to use data to understand and address real-world problems that perpetuate disparity and limit the ability of vulnerable groups to access justice.

Application Requirements

Students should submit:

• A 2 page proposal narrative that addresses, under specific headings, the "project of interest" and short descriptions describing "goals for the fellowship", "relevant experience" (including specific methodological expertise) and "potential research questions" that the student is interested in addressing.
• Letter of support from faculty advisor

• Including recognition that the faculty advisor should meet once a semester with the fellow and their Vera supervisor
• Please ensure that your advisor confirms that you currently hold a Graduate Center Fellowship (GCF). Your application will be deemed ineligible if you do not hold this.
• Up-to-date resume or CV
• Signed letter of academic standing (from applicant's Executive Officer)

Students interested in more than one project should submit one application per project. If you are interested in more than one project, you should list those projects in order of preference in your application. You can apply for no more than 3 projects. Selected applicants will be asked to interview with Vera staff, depending on their project of interest, and additional materials may be requested.

Fellowship Details and Deadlines

The Fellow will be expected to spend three days per week working on Vera projects during the 2022-2023 academic year. Over this period, they will be embedded within a research team and will contribute to Vera work products. AJR Fellows will be encouraged to identify opportunities to publish and otherwise disseminate products from Vera projects and to explore opportunities to expand Vera's work in new directions. Fellows must currently hold a Graduate Center Fellowship (GCF) in order to apply for the AJR fellowship. If selected for the AJR fellowship, the student will replace one year of the GCF with one year of the AJR. The total compensation for the AJR award will be $33,861 and will include tuition remission, continued NYSHIP coverage, and all service responsibilities associated with the GCF will be waived for the full term of the AJR. Vacation and time off will be discussed with each applicant but will not follow the academic calendar.

Applications are due on February 16, 2022.

• Ending Girls' Incarceration

Vera is leading a national initiative to end of girls' incarceration in the US. We partner with government and community leaders across the country to disrupt the unique pathways leading girls and gender expansive youth into the juvenile justice system and into confinement. The number of youth in the girls' side of the juvenile justice system is small, most girls are unjustly locked up to protect their safety or to address unmet needs, and jurisdictions across the country are finally ready to commit to gender-responsive systems change.

The current project is a research report demographic and geographic analyses of juvenile probation data among other information on the scope of girls' incarceration in California written in collaboration with our partners at San Francisco's Young Women's Freedom Center.

Student responsibilities and activities include but are not limited to: merge and recode statewide juvenile system (probation and jails) data; descriptive analysis; organize and format output and document analysis process. It would be most helpful if candidates had the following skills and requirements: intermediate quantitative skills, including sorting, querying, recoding numeric data and producing descriptive analysis, managing output and graphs; GIS would be helpful.

• Restoring Promise

Restoring Promise's transformation process ensures:

• Human dignity is first and foremost- from how people are treated, to the design of spaces, to the daily schedule
• Daily life is productive- young adults attending school, work, or activities that are designed by themselves, their peers, mentors, and corrections officers/counselors
• Staff are agents of change- they go through intensive training on restorative justice, development, and family engagement
• Mentors give support- people serving life sentences are trained to provide coaching and support to staff and young adults on the unit
• Family are partners- families get an orientation to the unit, they are called on to help when young adults are struggling, and they are kept updated on young adults' progress in their activities and education

Our applied research is guided by Participatory Action Research (PAR). That means all of our work is done in collaboration with those most impacted- the folks who live and work in prisons. We have three main buckets of research:

• a prison culture survey- to understand how the people that live and work on Restoring Promise units experience prison culture and any changes resulting from our partnership with them
• a randomized control trial- to understand the impact, if any, of changing prison culture
• a transition study- to understand the experience of moving on from a Restoring Promise unit, whether that be to another unit, prison, or to the community.

The fellow who joins the Restoring Promise team may analyze data from our prison partners, administer surveys to young adults, mentors, and corrections staff, analyze survey results, train new researchers who lived on Restoring Promise housing units, conduct interviews, analyze quantitative or qualitative data, and/or assist with the randomized control trial. The fellow will learn about collaborative research techniques and how to effectively partner with the communities most impacted by our research.

• Jail Decarceration

Vera's Jail Decarceration Initiative is seeking an Applied Justice Research Fellow to work on its new projects focused on: (1) reducing the scope of jails and local criminal legal systems in the US, with a focus on smaller and rural counties and (2) addressing and eliminating racial inequities in criminal legal system exposure.

The Jail Decarceration Initiative is composed of programmatic and research staff working with government and community partners at the local county level to reduce jail populations, improve racial equity, and shift resources to non-punitive alternatives to jail incarceration. As part of this work, the Jail Decarceration Initiative is partnering with rural counties - where jail incarceration rates remain high nationally - that wish to reduce the jail population and instead invest in community support services. This work will include a focus on partnering with Indigenous communities in the US to address the overcriminalization of Indigenous people. The Jail Decarceration Initiative is also working with Washtenaw County, MI to develop a transparent, coordinated evidence-based community plan to identify and eliminate racial disparities across all components of the criminal legal systems. The Applied Justice Research Fellow would provide research support on both of these areas of work.

Specifically, the Research Fellow will work with the team's Research Associates on the following tasks: (1) developing mixed-methods research plans and data use partnerships appropriate for the questions and context in each locality, (2) analyzing criminal legal administrative data, from jails and from community supervision and other local criminal legal system agencies, to identify drivers of criminal legal system involvement and experiences and to measure racial disparities, (3) conducting qualitative research with local actors and people impacted by the local criminal legal system, and (4) translating research findings for a broad audience of community residents, leaders of government agencies, and other decision-makers. Prior experience with quantitative and qualitative data analysis required; prior experience with R and/or Atlas.ti preferred.

• Nurturing Justice

Nurturing Justice is a budding initiative with the twin aims of supporting the creation of safe, nurturing communities and transforming the national conversation on violence. This initiative takes structural violence as a major obstacle to the flourishing of communities of color and seeks to support and partner with activists, organizers, and local organizations to develop comprehensive democratic plans for promoting safety, healing, and transformative community-led investment. The heart of Nurturing Justice is building strong equitable partnerships with advocates and organizations, both local and national, to support proactive accountability on behalf of the project and ensure the initiative aligns with racial equity and respects existing and historical efforts, coalitions, and progress, especially ones rooted in local community.

The main project of Nurturing Justice, Sowing Safety, aims to support deep local work to contextualize understand the history of violence in a community and its structural drivers, partner with communities of color to assess the current anti-violence assets and investments, and foster the conditions for community-led safety agendas centered on care work, investment, and healing. Safety must be rooted locally, tended to by everyone, and cultivated from a thriving community. Sowing Safety aims to create the conditions for communities to collectively imagine what structural safety and flourishing looks like for them.

Since this project is still in its infancy, the fellow who joins the Nurturing Justice Team will have an opportunity to support a variety of tasks related to the development and refinement of major components of the project. The fellow will support in the creation of metrics to measure the impact of structural violence, support in relationship building with activists and organizers, and support in the development of participatory research. Given the intersectional nature of structural violence, students from all backgrounds, including criminal justice, sociology, art, urban design, political advocacy, public health, and social welfare as well as students with lived experience - are encouraged to apply.

Grounding Project Values

• Nonviolence and harm-reduction
• Intersectional anti-oppression
• Holistic participatory research
• Equitable partnership
• Public education
• Cultural healing & flourishing
• Liberation and joy

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