Visiting Fellow: Enhancing Corrections Spaces & Cultures

The fellowship emphasizes working to support correctional agencies in developing and transforming jail/prison environments, physical spaces, and staff culture to assist residents in all institutional units with preparing for and successfully navigating reentry with particular attention to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Applicant will also provide support to BJA’s corrections and reentry training and technical assistance (TTA) programs.

To accomplish the fellowship work, applicant will first engage in qualitative data collection with staff and residents at a representative sample of U.S. prisons/jails to conduct interviews/observations regarding several focal areas including: 1) environments/spaces (organizational structures, policies/practices/rules, and temporal locales); 2) cultures/social climates (interpersonal relationships, perceptions of morale, legitimacy, humane treatment); 3) COVID procedures, protocols, experiences; 4) training/TTA needs, and 5) preferred training modalities. Deliverables from this step include a rich database and report with recommendations for transforming environments, spaces, and cultures, training materials, and presentations to academic and practitioner audiences.

Next, applicant will conduct a thorough review of existing BJA corrections resources using a well-documented framework and will create a gap map that compares the qualitative data on environment/climate/culture, COVID, needs, and modalities to compare against existing BJA trainings to see where new trainings need developing and where improvements/edits to existing trainings are necessary.