Careers at RFCUNYJob Openings

The CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance (ISLG) has a mission to improve the financing, delivery, and measurement of critical public services through research, technical assistance, and education. We lead projects aimed at reforming the criminal legal system, measuring urban inequality, expanding the reach of social service providers, and more. Each project has a dedicated team of research and policy experts who collaborate closely with internal and external organizations. Our staff have the opportunity to work with colleagues and supervisors across projects and with different types of expertise. We are seeking new team members with enthusiasm to shape the future of state and local policy. 

Our Goals for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

We strive to foster an office environment and an approach to work that welcomes and respects different perspectives, backgrounds, and life experiences. We are working towards our goal of recruiting and retaining staff and board members who are diverse in terms of race, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, religion, veteran status, socioeconomic status, disability, and legal system involvement.

Who we are Looking for

We are hiring a Research Associate to support our work on a number of criminal justice projects in the Institute’s research portfolio. This is an excellent opportunity for a civic-minded professional interested in a public policy environment. CUNY ISLG’s research projects span government policymaking in New York City and nationally, and cover a number of areas including criminal justice, racial equity, infrastructure and transportation, government operations, and finance. Broadly, our criminal legal research projects involve assessing implementation of reform efforts, tracking progress and impacts related to criminal legal system reform through performance metrics, project development, and grants management.

While the exact mix of projects will be determined based on need and candidate skills at the time of hiring, some examples of projects that the Research Associate might be tasked with supporting are the following:

Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC): Launched in 2015 by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the SJC is a multi-year, nationwide effort to inspire local criminal justice reform and change the way communities think about and use jails. Since its inception, the SJC has relied heavily on data to develop reform strategies and assess progress toward initiative goals. This wealth of data presents a unique opportunity to understand the factors, circumstances, and practices that drive jail populations and the disparities that exist across the criminal legal system. CUNY ISLG serves as the primary data and analytic partner for the SJC initiative. In this capacity, CUNY ISLG collects and manages administrative data submitted at regular intervals by partner agencies, collaborates with and provides data to other research partners, produces performance metrics, and conducts analyses to assess SJC objectives such as reductions to jail populations and racial/ethnic disparities.

Comprehensive Opioid, Stimulant, and Substance Use Program (COSSUP): CUNY ISLG is the research and evaluation partner for an initiative funded under the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) through which five Pennsylvania counties are receiving funding and technical assistance to implement programs aimed at addressing substance use disorders (SUDs) and opioid use disorders (OUDs) and reducing overdose deaths among people under probation supervision and individuals recently released from incarceration. CUNY ISLG’s work consists of three interconnected workstreams: (1) a high-level process assessment of implementation efforts across the sites and the site-specific strategies within and across sites; (2) a performance measurement framework to track both cross-site and site-specific metrics over time; and (3) a quasi-experimental outcome evaluation to assess the impact of site strategies.

Building Data-Informed Decision-Making Towards Decarceration in Fulton County: Through Microsoft’s Justice Reform Initiative, CUNY ISLG is conducting a foundational data capacity-building initiative centered around the development and opening of the Center for Diversion and Services (CDS), an alternative drop-off option for law enforcement officers to use in lieu of the county and city jail for individuals experiencing behavioral health concerns. This initiative is comprised of three overlapping components: (1) a landscape review of pathways into and out of jail and associated data resources; (2) development of a performance measurement framework to set key performance indicators that can be tracked to better understand the jail population and impact of the Diversion Center; and (3) support for an accompanying data tool.

For the above projects and/or others, the Research Associate will report to a Senior Research Associate or Program Director on a range of tasks depending on the project, which may include but are not limited to:

Research and analysis

• Carrying out policy and practice reviews;
• Conducting interviews, focus groups, and observations;
• Developing, tracking, and interpreting performance metrics, including their policy and practice implications;
• Conducting quantitative analysis, including descriptive analysis, and potentially higher-level multivariate analyses;
• Conducting qualitative analysis, including content analysis and development of themes;
• Synthesizing and interpreting findings

Using analysis to inform policy and practice

• Designing and creating reports, dashboards and other types of data visualization for practitioners and policy audiences;
• Providing technical assistance to government and community partners, as needed, to develop criminal justice reform strategies and build data and analytical capacity;
• Working closely with government partners and other project collaborators on all aspects of the work

Research development

• Conducting literature reviews and analysis to identify areas of opportunity in criminal justice research;
• Developing criminal justice research projects;
• Crafting Requests for Proposals (RFPs) and managing application and scoring processes

Grants Management

• Monitoring grantee progress in meeting the research goals and objectives;
• Developing processes to ensure that grantees are meeting project milestones and deliverables;
• Reviewing budgets;
• Troubleshooting issues as they arise;
• Liaising regularly with grantees;

Data management

• Developing data requests and data collection protocols for criminal justice agencies, community-based service providers, and other relevant organizations;
• Cleaning, coding, merging, and preparing administrative data files for analysis or transcribing and coding qualitative interview and focus group data;
• Developing codebooks, coding schemes, file specifications, and other resource documents

This position is hybrid and based in New York City. CUNY ISLG staff work out of the Midtown office two days a week of their choosing and the remaining three days a week remotely.