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CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance (ISLG): Overview

ISLG is an institute within the City University of New York. The Institute’s mission is to help achieve improvements in the financing, delivery, and measurement of critical public services by assisting current and future leaders in government, non-profit organizations, and the private sector, in the U.S. and internationally, by offering research, technical assistance, and education and training. The Institute’s director, Michael Jacobson, previously served as New York City’s Probation and Correction Commissioner and president of the Vera Institute of Justice.

Project Description

ISLG is hiring one or more Senior Research Associates to work on various research projects in the Institute’s criminal justice portfolio. Primary among them is the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), a $100 million initiative funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to reduce over-incarceration by changing the way America thinks about and uses jails.  To date, the Foundation has awarded 20 jurisdictions grants to implement strategies across the criminal justice system that will reduce jail populations and racial and ethnic disparities. ISLG is one of several organizations providing technical assistance and counsel to the 20 jurisdictions as they plan and implement reforms. Our primary role is to monitor and assess the performance of participating sites to demonstrate progress over time and help sites make adjustments in practices as needed. Specifically, using local criminal justice data from each site, we are working to create and track performance measures related to the broad goals and objectives of the initiative. ISLG also serves as the data liaison for the initiative, collecting and managing local system-wide criminal justice data for all 20 sites in support of the Challenge’s broader research and evaluation agenda.

The Senior Research Associates may also have opportunities to work on other projects currently in development at the Institute. These projects could involve helping criminal justice partners build data and analytical capacity, developing performance measures, conducting quantitative analyses of criminal justice data at different system points, and/or assisting in the development of research projects.

Position Description

ISLG is looking to hire one or more Senior Research Associates (SRAs) to plan and/or oversee data collection, management, analysis, and/or performance measurement work; and to provide technical assistance to government and other partners, on the SJC and potentially other research projects within the Institute’s portfolio. Each SRA will report to the Research Director or Associate Research Director, and will work closely with other project staff on project activities. Specifically, each SRA will be responsible for some subset of the following:

• Developing data requests and data collection protocols for criminal justice agencies, community-based service providers, and other relevant organizations providing data for various Institute-related research projects
• Cleaning, coding, merging, and preparing administrative data files for analysis
• Working with partners to develop and operationalize performance measures and develop reporting systems
• Creating performance measures and dashboards and other progress reports from case-level data
• Analyzing and interpreting performance measurement trends—including policy and practice implications of those trends
• Conducting and/or overseeing quantitative analysis
• Documenting methodology, validation, and testing to facilitate replication of analyses
• Developing codebooks, file specifications, and other resource documents
• Building and managing relationships with government, community, and other partners; and working collaboratively with them on all aspects of the work
• Presenting research and policy work to a wide range of audiences
• Writing reports, memos, briefs and other materials.
• Conducting data and systems reviews
• Supervising associate and analyst staff on project work
• Traveling to meetings, conferences, and making site-visits, as needed

SRAs will also contribute to developing the ISLG’s broader research agenda, together with the Institute’s Research Director and other senior research staff.