Trauma Response in Prisons and the effect of COVID-19

The criminal legal system within the United States has been under a critical review from the public in more recent years, which was heightened with the death of George Floyd in summer of 2020. With police brutality being investigated more in depth, it is important to try to understand how this impacts every aspect of the criminal legal system, including those who are incarcerated. My research URSP project seeks to understand traumatic experiences among people who are incarcerated and how the COVID-19 pandemic affected their incarceration experiences. My team and I had to overcome the challenges that come with conducting research with a vulnerable population during COVID-19. The original goal for data collection was to host interviews virtually through the platform Zoom. However, due to complications with the prisons it was not feasible for us to conduct research in this way. This led to a lot of meetings discussing the best way to move forward, which we decided was to mail residents questionaries who have mailed our research team in the past and originally, we believed that the changes were small enough to justify submitting an appendix to our previous IRB application, however we were instructed to submit an entirely new IRB application which caused for significant delays in sending out the questionaries. The new IRB application with the new questions was approved in the end of June and we were able to make envelopes to be sent out the following week. The next steps in my project are to wait for the responses to the questionnaire and transcribe and the data as it comes in. This project has shown me how to adapt to real world problems within research and I am very appreciative for the opportunity.

Hi, my name is Brooke D’Antonio and I am a senior here at George Mason University I am studying conflict analysis and resolution with a concentration in justice and reconciliation and I will be graduating in December. The project that I am currently trying to research is focusing on trauma response within prisons and specifically how COVID-19 has affected people in prisons and what trauma they have experienced while being in prisons during the pandemic. In my video presentation here today, I would like to discuss the process of what it is like to conduct a research project like this in a global pandemic because Due to the nature of things constantly changing our whole project was started over multiple times in order for us to gather the data we need to collect research. Because we are working in prisons which is a very vulnerable population to begin with conducting research during COVID-19 has proven to be very difficult. The original plan was to do zoom interviews with residents and staff members to figure out how COVID-19 has affected everyone. However, because the prisons were not taking any researchers at the moment because they were handling the global pandemic, we had to switch gears a little bit. So, our next plan was to mail back residents who have already been mailing with us through a bigger project that my whole team is a part of so that we can send out questionnaires with all our research questions on it so they can answer it properly. I am part of a giant team about 15 to 20 people who are at each doing their own research projects surrounding what it is like in prisons to gather more data on what prison is so they can use it in future research. So, our whole team put together a questionnaire so we can send it out to the residents so everyone can get their data accurately represented. In doing so we had to submit a whole new proposal to the IRB because originally, we predicted that we would just submit an amendment to our original proposal that we submitted for the interviews. The IRB did not approve of us submitting an amendment to that because it was a different type of process, we were going through so we submitted a whole new proposal which did cause some delays in us writing the questionnaire and getting it approved so we can send it out. We did get the final approval at the end of June so then we were able to process the questionnaires and send them out which is the current part of the process. We are currently waiting on we did send them out a couple weeks ago and we are waiting on the results so we can interpret the data we receive and go from there with our research questions. The whole process has been changing of course but due to the nature of it is expected for our research job like this and I am very appreciative for the opportunity to learn how research works in the real world as well as working on a team with creating my own questions and having mentors and coworkers who support the type of research I will be doing. And am very appreciative for URSP and I hope that once my data is collected, I therefore can go further with my research on trauma within prisons because I think it’s very important research to be conducting. I hope everyone has a very nice day and I can’t wait to hear everyone else’s projects.