In the News

Carrie Pettus-Davis, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, has been tapped to serve as executive director for the research initiative of a new public, private and academic partnership aimed at lowering incarceration rates in the United States.

Illinois has officially thrown its hat in the ring to take on one of the state’s most entrenched institutions – prisons. These days, it seems that nearly everyone agrees that reducing incarceration is necessary, whether for financial, social, or political reasons. But as we attempt to reverse mass incarceration, we could learn an important lesson from our history by asking – how do we avoid the mistakes made with deinstitutionalization?

Florida State University has received a grant totaling nearly $1.2 million from the National Institute of Justice to evaluate the effectiveness of a comprehensive trauma-based re-entry program for young adult men.

A team of researchers including Carrie Pettus-Davis, Stephen Tripodi and Tanya Renn of the Institute for Justice Research and Development at the FSU College of Social Work will conduct a 5-year randomized controlled trial. The study will be aimed at addressing trauma as a key mechanism to reduce reincarceration for young men who have been identified as moderate-to-high-risk for returning to prison after release.

The Dallas City Council approved up to $500,000 in housing and job training support for people leaving prison in what a supporter called a first step toward reimagining public safety, the Dallas Morning News reports. The council’s unanimous vote will use state grant money to try to reduce recidivism, an effort that includes a two-year contract with the Regional Black Contractors Association of North Texas Inc.

Dallas was recently a test site for a prison reentry pilot program. The program’s leader, Carrie Pettus-Davis, a criminal justice researcher and founding executive director of the Institute for Justice Research and Development at Florida State University, said the city was well ahead of the curve on providing reentry services for its large ex-offender population.

Learn about a collaboration between the St. John's County Sheriff's Office and IJRD to offer law enforcement agencies an innovative peer-to-peer training course to help them to address experiences of extreme stress and witnessed violence on the job. Sheriff Hardwick had this to say: “We are grateful to IJRD for developing this one-of-a-kind training that is critically important to our law enforcement personnel who are constantly exposed to violence & suffering, which, in turn, manifests as post-traumatic stress.”