Last Friday, I wrapped up my first full week of working as a Summer Fellow at the Columbia Justice Lab! I’ve had a wonderful time getting acquainted with all of the teams at the Lab — there’s a group of five summer fellows (some of whom are doing Laidlaw at Columbia College!), and we’ve been meeting all the full-time workers who are on various projects, such as Square One or Emerging Adult Justice. This summer, I’ll personally be working with the Probation and Parole Project to conduct actionable research and policy development on probation and parole in the United States. The goal of the project is to make probation and parole less punitive and more oriented towards restorative justice. So far, I’ve looked into the data available from the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS) on the Justice Outcome Explorer website. I’ll be working with Jaclyn Davis, a postdoctoral research scholar at the Lab, to analyze and clean this data. I'm really looking forward to honing my data analysis skills and applying them towards policy-making!