Created by Dr. Michelle Fine, the Vera Institute of Justice and CUNY Graduate Center invites applications for Summer Fellows who will be based in Vera’s New York City office. These $4,000 fellowships will be offered to Graduate Center Ph.D. students from any program with primary research interests in criminal or immigration justice and the work of the Vera Institute. * The primary responsibilities of the award winners will be to collaborate with researchers in one of Vera’s research initiatives relating to a specific project, including but not limited to data collection, analysis, fieldwork, report writing, stakeholder engagement, and dissemination.

While Vera’s initiative work spans the criminal justice and immigration systems, Vera is offering CUNY fellows projects in select areas. Please see the list of potential projects below and indicate in your application which project or projects are most relevant to your experience and interest. 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.

Fellowship recipients will be required to be in residence for 120 hours over the summer of 2022 at the Vera Institute of Justice. As of November 2021, Vera began hybrid work (2-3 days in office). Unless there are COVID-19 development that would prohibit that and/or fellows have special requests, this position will be in-person out of our Brooklyn office. Fellows will be given more instructions as the summer gets closer. In addition, recipients will be required to attend a welcome reception at the beginning of the fellowship, to do a brief presentation on their work at the end of the summer and write a blog post about their experiences before the start of the Fall 2022 semester.

To apply, please submit 1) a letter of interest describing your research interests and related experience with specific reference to one of the projects described below, 2) a C.V., 3) a current Graduate Center transcript (you may submit the unofficial student copy that can be printed from banner), and 4) a letter of support from your primary advisor.

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 Deadline: February 22, 2022

 

Projects

1) 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.

2) Jail Decarceration

Vera’s Jail Decarceration Initiative is seeking a Summer 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 Summer Fellow would primarily be working on the Washtenaw Equity Partnership project. 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.

In June 2021, we began work on the Washtenaw Equity Partnership project, an 18-month long partnership with community stakeholders and government agency partners in Washtenaw County, Michigan with the goals of: (1) developing a transparent, coordinated, evidence-based community plan to identify and eliminate racial disparities across all components of Washtenaw County’s juvenile and adult criminal legal systems, and (2) developing a framework for implementation, ongoing oversight, and evaluation of the community plan.

The Summer Research Fellow would work directly with the Research Associate leading the data and research work for the Washtenaw Equity Partnership. Project tasks will include: (1) analyzing criminal legal administrative data to measure racial disparities and identify drivers of disparities and overall criminal legal involvement, (2) working with community and government partners to execute community-driven research priorities, which may include conducting surveys and interviews with community residents and/or people with lived experience with the criminal legal system, and (3) translating research findings to a broad audience of community residents, leaders of government agencies, and policymakers. Prior experience with data analysis in R is preferred.

3) Center on Immigration and Justice – National Qualified Representatives Program (NQRP)

This project seeks to evaluate the work of the National Qualified Representatives Program (NQRP). This program provides legal representation to people found by an Immigration Judge or Board of Immigration Appeals to be incompetent to represent themselves in immigration proceedings because of their mental disorder. The project’s goals are in the process of being defined with a community advisory board. However, it will likely focus on the experiences and challenges of clients with the program, centering their voices in terms of both analyses experiences and problems, and proposals for solution. A possible focus will be regarding the extent, personal impact, and the challenges of the provision of zealous and person-centered representation the program seeks to offer.

The Fellow will contribute to the writing of the report, especially through organizing the literature and co-writing sections that relate the findings to the literature—fieldwork and data analysis will be conducted during the Spring semester, before the Fellow joins the project. The ideal Fellow is interested in one or more of the following topics: immigration, legal representation, and mental illness.

4) Reshaping Prosecution

The Reshaping Prosecution program at Vera is partnering with reform-minded prosecutors across the country to help them rethink their role in delivering justice and pursuing public safety, and to put their campaign promises into action as concrete, data-informed policies and practices. The goal of these partnerships is to develop strategies for prosecutors to reduce the criminal legal footprint and its negative consequences by decentering prosecution and punishment as solutions to social problems; to promote racial equity in their work; and to increase the public’s confidence in their office

In addition to working directly with prosecutors’ offices, we also partner with community-based organizations through research projects and advocacy campaigns in order to elevate the voices of those who are directly impacted by the criminal legal system and their visions for safe and thriving communities. Our approach to research is participatory and relies on both quantitative and qualitative data analysis.

The fellow will work closely with our team of researchers in developing and implementing a participatory action research (PAR) framework to data gathering, analysis, and interpretation in both qualitative and quantitative research, with the goal of arriving at an anti-racist research practice. They will learn about collaborative techniques, like community engagement, data walks, story mapping etc.

We are looking for a student of any discipline with experience in either qualitative or quantitative research (or both) and a demonstrated interest in a mixed methods approach. The fellow will be dedicated to working closely with system-impacted community members, embrace challenges to established frameworks of knowledge, and be eager to support us in advancing an action-driven research agenda.

5) 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

6) Ending Detention, Quantitative Research Fellow
 
In the face of immigration enforcement, millions of non-citizens are at risk of extended detention and permanent separation from their families and communities. Vera seeks a quantitative research fellow to join a project team that aims to produce evidence in support of ending detention, to create data-driven tools for advocates, and to shape an understanding of mass detention as an extension of mass incarceration.

The quantitative research fellow will work collaboratively with Vera researchers on the project team to conduct exploratory analyses primarily using Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention data released through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Candidates should be comfortable working with large, messy administrative datasets for quantitative analysis, including: writing code to clean data, assessing data quality in the absence of an available codebook, conducting exploratory analyses, producing descriptive statistics, and building and refining statistical models. The fellow is likely to be involved in creating a special report or data visualization to share findings with the public.

CIJ welcomes applications from students from all academic backgrounds (e.g., social science, computer science, statistics, mathematics). Applicants with experiences with the immigration system are especially encouraged to apply.