IJRD team members have partnered with the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services for a three-year initiative to provide reentry support services to all incarcerated individuals in Nebraska’s criminal justice settings preparing to return home to the community. The initiative will utilize both staff and peer-led delivery of data-driven reentry support services.

The Nebraska Department of Correctional Services (NDCS) is launching a significant three-year initiative in partnership with IJRD faculty and Well-Being and Equity Innovations, Inc. to provide reentry support services to all incarcerated individuals, using both staff and peer-led delivery of the 5-Key Model. The partnership will result in expanded service delivery across Nebraska facilities, the creation of toolkits and protocols to ensure sustainability of service delivery, and an evaluation of the peer-led 5-Key Model program.

Learn more about an innovative collaboration between the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services and IJRD to deliver the 5-Key Model to every individual incarcerated in Nebraska state prisons using peer facilitators and professional reentry service providers.

Carrie Pettus, associate professor, executive director and founder of Florida State University’s Institute for Justice Research and Development (IJRD), received the 2022 Social Policy Researcher Award from the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) for her notable research contributions to criminal justice policy reform.

“I am truly honored to be recognized by the social work research community for contributing to policy reform,” Pettus said. “I would be remiss if I did not recognize and thank all of the partners I work with communities, corrections, policing, prosecution and leaders at the state and national level that use my research to help enact solutions to some of society’s greatest challenges.”

FSU Research Team was awarded more than three million dollars in its quest to end racial inequalities in health care. The National Institutes of Health Director's Transformative awarded the money to FSU. The university says the money will be used to research behavioral and social issues in the health care system. "So the idea is to develop a paradigm for tackling complex systems using system science and then marrying them with people who develop interventions," says Sylvie Naar, who is with the Center for Translational Behavioral Science. According to FSU officials, racism in health care leads to significant health disparities and results in poor outcomes in diagnosing patients with physical and mental health conditions. The goal of this research will be to reduce and eliminate such issues.

Read this op-ed to learn how racial disparities fuel breast cancer mortality for Black women. Earlier this month a team of Florida State University researchers received a National Institutes of Health Director’s Transformative Research award worth $3.1 million to investigate racial inequities in the nation’s healthcare system. The project is expected to focus on the impact of racism in primary care that leads to significant health disparities in the diagnosis and treatment of physical and mental health conditions. Associate Professor of Social Work Carrie Pettus said the approach will allow them to understand areas of bias within the health system from a wide variety of perspectives including patients, community members, health administrators, healthcare providers, and experts in the field. "What we're trying to do is move beyond just documenting racial bias and take action to implement solutions. We believe the most effective way to do this, based on prior research, is to have the stakeholders including the ones perpetuating bias to help generate the solutions," Pettus said. "That way they will be able to adopt policies and practices and sustain them moving forward."

There is no denying that racism is a public health emergency in America. Read this guest commentary by IJRD's Founding Executive Director in the Orlando Sentinel which details data-driven strategies to move beyond documenting racism and take bold action to disrupt racial bias & promote equity across the criminal justice system.

A team of Florida State University researchers has received a National Institutes of Health Director’s Transformative Research Award worth $3.1 million to investigate racial inequities in the nation’s health-care system. The award is the first of its kind to be administered by the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities, part of the NIH.

FSU College of Medicine Distinguished Endowed Professor Sylvie Naar is principal investigator for the five-year grant, along with Assistant Vice President for Research and Academic Affairs Norman Anderson and College of Social Work Associate Professor Carrie Pettus.

Criminal justice reform and real change are possible — and happening now — through successful partnerships between researchers, policymakers and corrections officials. South Carolina emerges as an example of true successful collaboration.

The numbers are the problem for Associate Professor of Social Work Carrie Pettus at Florida State University. More than 12,000 people are released from state and federal prisons each week, and 77% of formerly incarcerated individuals return to prison within five years. “If you can imagine going to a doctor and they say here’s this medical intervention that works 23 percent of the time, would we continue to use that intervention? No,” Carrie Pettus, founding executive director of IJRD, said.

Pettus leads is leading a team of 70 researchers and practitioners dedicated to using science to create data-driven solutions to drive down reliance on the criminal justice system. IJRD creates models for correctional systems to assist formerly incarcerated individuals struggling to re-enter society. They train law enforcement officers on identifying and addressing post-traumatic stress disorder among their colleagues. They address trauma among men in prisons. It’s a whole-system approach to the criminal justice system.