The Research Services division of CMIT will fill a need in the CJ Center community at SHSU for the continued pursuit of academic excellence in the area of corrections through close cooperation with outside agencies by:
- Acting as a liaison between CJ students and the research units of CJ agencies in Texas;
- Working with the CJ faculty to develop research agendas and facilitate access to data and corrections officials;
- Providing educational programs to the CJ student body on corrections issues by hosting guest speakers, organizing seminars with corrections officials, and arranging tours of correctional facilities; and
- Developing, over time, a financial support mechanism to support students and practitioners in conducting research in the field.
For more information, contact Dr. Gaylene Armstrong
CMIT Welcomes New Research Director, Dr. Gaylene Armstrong
Dr. Gaylene Armstrong comes to Sam Houston State University as an Associate Professor in the College of Criminal Justice and Research Director for the Correctional Management Institute of Texas. Dr. Armstrong’s research focuses on correctional program and policy evaluation within institutional and community corrections settings. She has expertise with both adult and juvenile offender populations and has evaluated programs and policies for specialized populations, such as sex offenders and female offenders. A few of Dr. Armstrong’s ongoing research projects include a randomized experiment of a Maricopa County, Arizona, jail-based re-entry program for sex offenders that includes GPS monitoring of offenders; a randomized experiment of a Texas state jail re-entry program; and, through a partnership with the American Correctional Association, an evaluation of the influence of labor contracts on PREA-related issues for prison administrators.
In 2003, Dr. Armstrong was nominated for the Carnegie foundation’s U.S. Professor of the year Award for excellence in teaching. In 2004, Dr. Armstrong was awarded the American Society of Criminology Division on Corrections and Sentencing Young Scholar Award for her research. In 2007, Dr. Armstrong was awarded the Academy of Experimental Criminology’s Young Experimental Scholar Award. Dr. Armstrong was recently named a female “Academic Star” in the November 2007 Journal of Criminal Justice Education in a study that sought to examine, “employment patterns and publication trajectories of 88 female graduates who graduated between 1996 and 2006 from 18 North American doctoral programs in criminology/criminal justice” (Rice et al., 2007).
Rice, S., Terry, K., Miller, H., & Ackerman, Alissa. (2007). Research trajectories of female scholars in criminology and criminal justice. Journal of Criminal Justice Education, (18)3, 360-384.