College of Criminal Justice graduates Diana K. Peel and Lisa Gilliland, both 2007 graduates, have illuminated aspects of prison inmate conditions through grant-funded research projects. Peel, who focused on the isolating effect of distance on prison inmate family relations, and Gilliland, who looked at patterns in the treatment of women prisoners, presented their findings to the larger criminal justice community in public forums.

Peel received a Provost’s Undergraduate Research Grant for her honors thesis project titled, “The Spatial Displacement of Prisoners Under Sentence of Death in Alabama,” which she presented at the annual meeting of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences in Seattle.

Gilliland collected and analyzed gender-specific imprisonment data as an undergraduate research assistant on “The Punitiveness Project,” thanks to a grant from the Women’s Prison Association, and presented her findings at the Prisoner Reentry Institute of John Jay College of Criminal Justice.