Faculty Pursuits: Week of March 10, 2025

Dr. Sarah Lazzari (Criminology) and her Heidelberg Research Team have been working on an ongoing evaluation of a prison re-entry program. Her team, which includes Maddie Moore '24, Logyn Chamberlin '24, Paige Collins '25, and Dominic Regalado '27,  are working within their second prison. The evaluation started with Ohio Reformatory for Women. They are now working with men incarcerated at London Correctional Institution (LoCI). The participants are all men currently housed within the Horizon Prison Initiative (HPI), which is a religious based reentry program. HPI started at LoCI in 2012. Dr. Lazzari's team is the first to begin looking at the impacts of the program. HPI runs from August to May and includes five pillars: Cognitive Restructuring, Spiritual Development, Outside Family Reunification, Learning to Live Together, and Education.

Program evaluations often start from the perspective of the facility or the organization. The research team wanted to talk to the participants about their experiences in the program first. We wanted to know, from their perspective, what they think is important about HPI. The team administered to surveys to participants in August 2024. The team will return to LoCI in May of 2025, as the program is nearing completion. One of the unique componenets of HPI is the use of peer mentors. Men who have completed at least one cycle of HPI are able to take on leadership roles and also facilitate classes. Therefore, the team wanted to assess similarities/differences in the thinking of the men who have completed HPI and those who are in their first cycle of HPI.

The initial findings were shared with the men in HPI, through a Microsoft Teams call, and information about the study was published in the prison newsletter. The research team will also be traveling to Denver, in order to present their findings at the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.