Research Project

The semester prior to beginning my senior capstone internship with Barrios Unidos, I took a Criminological Research Methods course in which I learned the fundamental principles of social science research and related research design. This was a writing intensive course that subsequently required me to write a research paper. My professor encouraged the class to write our paper on the topic that we could duplicate for when we completed our internship. My professor gave everyone in the class bogus data to analyze, and when it came time for our internship, we would analyze original data that we had collected. However, many of my classmates had not finalized their internships, so they had to guess about a topic they might be interested. Because I knew that I would be interning for the Prison Project, I came up with my original research project beforehand, gathered existing literature on the subject, and executed my test as if I was completing this project in real life.

Due to Internal Review Board and University regulations, it is a more arduous process if one wants to survey/test human subjects. As such, we were strongly encouraged to use data that had already been collected and just analyze the numbers to write our papers. However, because I was not planning on having this paper published and because this was an undergraduate course, I discussed with my Professor the option of surveying human subjects using a questionnaire, which is normally not done for this course.

The Barrios Unidos Prison Project has an Interactive Prison Cell, which is used to show people what life might be like inside prison. This a life-size replica of a Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit (SHU), and my previous post links to a YouTube Video. And this is a link to several other newspaper articles about the Cell.

For people who were experiencing this cell, I began to think about their perspectives when they were actually inside. For example, if people had prior contact with the criminal justice system, would they be more impacted by the Interactive Prison Cell than those who had little or no contact with the system? After experiencing this Cell, how would people view the functionality of the criminal justice system in the first place? This was the topic that I aimed to explore for my research project. 

The current study seeks to determine how public attitudes are formed regarding the operational goals of the criminal justice system. Specifically, does vicarious or personal contact with the criminal justice system shape public perceptions about how the system should function?

For this test, I had two hypotheses. The first hypothesis was that if a person had a vicarious experience with the criminal justice system ("Do you have a relative or a personal friend who is or has been incarcerated?"), then they were more likely to view the criminal justice system as needing to be more rehabilitative rather than retributive. My second hypothesis was that if a person had a personal experience with the criminal justice system ("Have you ever visited a carceral setting such as a prison or a jail?"), then they were more likely to view the criminal justice system as needing to be more rehabilitative rather than retributive. 
This was the questionnaire that I gave to participants after they experienced the Interactive Prison Cell: 

 
I was able to gather surveys from 61 individuals, but only 51 of the surveys were completed entirely. Although this was not the number of responses I wanted, it is enough to run statistical analysis. 
  
Originally, I wanted to control for political affiliation, as liberals tend to view the criminal justice system as needing to be more rehabilitative. However, because 88% of my respondents answered "mostly liberal" (I am in Santa Cruz after all), I controlled for gender instead, as my sample was more even and because females tend to view the system as needing to be more rehabilitative rather than retributive.

After running a means-comparison test using SPSS (a statistical analysis program software for the social sciences), my numbers indicated that there was no correlation between whether people who had prior contact with the criminal justice system thought that the system should be more rehabilitative rather than punitive. In other words, the majority of people who answered my survey thought that the criminal justice system should be more rehabilitative regardless of their experiences.

For a more descriptive analysis of my research, here is a link to my completed paper - warning: it is 27 pages.