I am part
of the Change the Hole Mind team. Essentially, we’re researching what it’s like
to live and work in Restricted Housing Units in Pennsylvania State prisons.
Over the course of the summer and into the upcoming fall term, our team is
traveling to four different institutions, and at these institutions we
interview the inmates and corrections officers living and working in these
units. There are three teams, and each team chose a topic to research. My team
chose to research how inmates cope while living in RHUs, and how they go about
accessing this support. I became interested in the CTHM project because I’ve
always wanted to do something in the Criminal Justice field, and the use of
RHUs (solitary confinement) has been something that really interested me since
I visited Alcatraz prison when I was 13. Working on this project sets me up on
the path towards working as a researcher in the Criminal Justice field, and I
hope to apply this research to prison reform in the States. The workload of
this project really picks up once we’ve visited the institutions, so in the
week following the visits we transcribe all of the field notes we’ve taken,
analyze/code all of the data, and then query the results. During this term,
I’ve had to re-define solitary confinement. Whenever I thought of solitary
confinement in the past, I pictured inmates alone in small cells with little to
no light and limited social interaction. In the prisons that we’ve visited,
however, most of the inmates are doubled bunked (meaning they share a room with
another person), and they can easily talk to the inmates in the other cells.
Although the initial view that I had of solitary does exist in America, it
hasn’t been present in the institutions that I’ve visited, so I’ve had to
rethink my definition of the word. Overall, I’m just really excited to be
getting the chance to research what I’m interested in so early in my college
career, and I can’t wait to continue this type of research in the future!
