Associate professor of criminal justice to present "My Time Behind Bars: Going to Prison and Jail for Teaching and Research"

The University of Southern Indiana College of Liberal Arts will host its first Liberal Arts Faculty Colloquium for the fall 2019 semester featuring Dr. Melissa Stacer, associate professor of criminal justice, at 3 p.m. Friday, September 13, in Kleymeyer Hall in the Liberal Arts Center.

Since 2011, Stacer has been spending time in prisons and jails. What began as field trips for criminal justice students evolved into a large research project exploring the impact of correctional facility tours on students. After years of taking students to these facilities, Stacer was able to attain her goal of conducting research with incarcerated individuals themselves via surveys and interviews. This presentation discusses these projects and focuses on her experiences going behind bars: the joys and difficulties of taking students on such trips, the preparations involved in going to a correctional facility, and the experience of sitting face to face with the convicted.

Stacer's teaching and research interests are in the area of corrections, specifically institutional corrections (jails and prisons). Additional research interests are in prison culture, prisoner misconduct, reentry, collateral consequences of incarceration, and criminal justice education. She teaches courses on corrections, prisons, death penalty, the effects of incarceration, community corrections and criminological theory.

Each fall and spring semester, USI faculty members from the College of Liberal Arts present individual, free public lectures featuring their current research. To see the current lineup of speakers for this semester, visit USI.edu/liberal-arts/special-programs/liberal-arts-faculty-colloquia

For more information contact Dr. Urska Dobersek, assistant professor of psychology, at 812-464-1952 or udobersek@usi.edu.