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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.

Position Description

ISLG is hiring a Senior Research Associate to work on multiple research projects in the Institute’s criminal justice portfolio. The projects will include the Reducing Revocations Challenge, a national initiative to reduce probation revocations by supporting action research in up to 10 jurisdictions around the country; the Safety and Justice Challenge, a national initiative to reduce jail populations and racial and ethnic disparities through the planning and implementation of system-wide criminal justice reforms in 52 jurisdictions around the country; and a research consortium in which ISLG is responsible for developing, awarding, and managing research projects to advance knowledge in the field about how to effectively and fairly reduce jail populations and disparities. Broadly, the work across these projects will involve collaborating with various types of partners to build research projects and ensure that they are carried out with rigor, translating research findings into concrete policy and practice solutions, and developing performance metrics to track progress and impact as solutions are implemented. The Senior Research Associate will report to the Research Director or Associate Research Director and will work closely with other project staff on project activities.

Responsibilities

The Senior Research Associate will be responsible for the following specific tasks:

• Developing criminal justice research projects, including design parameters
• Overseeing proposal selection and review processes
• Managing grantees as they carry out various types of action research—including reviewing and approving study designs, findings, report drafts and other research products
• Helping practitioners use research findings to inform the development of policy and practice strategies
• Planning and facilitating peer learning events, including webinars and cross-jurisdictional calls
• Assisting in the planning and facilitation of a multi-site summit
• Helping identify promising strategies and interventions for investment by criminal justice funders
• Overseeing administrative contracts
• Developing data requests and data collection protocols for criminal justice agencies, community-based service providers, and other relevant organizations providing data for Institute research projects
• Overseeing the cleaning, coding, merging, and preparing administrative data files for analysis

• Creating performance metrics from case-level data and using them to assess the progress and impacts of criminal justice reforms
• Designing and creating reports, dashboards and other types of data visualization for practitioners and policy audiences
• 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
• Supervising associate and analyst staff on project work
• Traveling to meetings, conferences, and making site-visits, as needed