The Arkansas Department of Corrections awarded faculty at the School of Criminal Justice and Criminology at UA Little Rock a multi-year contract ($453,000) to examine prison culture and climate. This project is being led by Dr. Mary Parker who has worked with the Arkansas Department of Corrections for over 20 years. Dr. Parker is joined by Drs. Robert Lytle and Molly Smith.
To describe the study, Dr. Parker said that “we are one of the few large-scale projects that include visitors and volunteers. Families are a critical dynamic to incarceration and adding their perspective to the study gives us invaluable information on the impact of incarceration on friends and families of those incarcerated.” She added that most people “do not realize it but hundreds of volunteers work in prison providing religious programming, therapy groups, dog training, meditation, etc. for the inmate population. We will be surveying a sample of this population to gain their perspectives on what we can do better in our individual prison to improve multiple dynamics of the culture in prison.”