From inside the walls of correctional facilities nationwide, Lolita DeSousa is getting a real-life look at prison culture.  A graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, she considers herself lucky to be one of the few students chosen to participate in a landmark study about prison life.

UMass, Lowell and the University of Maryland are running the study together after the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) awarded them a grant to evaluate the effectiveness of NIC's Institutional Culture Initiative (ICI), which includes a protocol for assessing prison culture, which is being piloted at select prisons across the country.

According to DeSousa, who began her graduate studies in criminal justice at UMass, Lowell in Fall 2003, she was in the right place at the right time when the study's co-principal investigators, Don Hummer and Jim Byrne, both professors at the school, asked her to come on board.

"They needed someone pretty much to do some data entry for surveys," DeSousa said.  "I volunteered.  I said [that] I would love to get involved in the project."

DeSousa's project responsibilities include traveling to various prisons, in undisclosed locations, to collect information about the efforts of the prison culture assessment teams there.  While DeSousa observes the people working on the teams, the teams are focused on what is going on in the institutions and collecting information about incidents and sanctions so they can make determinations about the facility's culture.

The data obtained during these field visits will help DeSousa and her colleagues evaluate the effectiveness of the ICI, which is truly a monumental project, according to Hummer.

"It's groundbreaking because this is data that normally you don't get from prisons," Hummer said.  "This includes incidents of not just inmate violations, but also inmates-on- staff [assaults] and staff-on-inmates [incidents].  Any formal incident is contained within this data."

By collecting and analyzing this data, NIC and other project participants ultimately hope to effect a culture change in the nation's prisons.

"We're doing problem solving policing within facilities," Hummer said.  "We're trying to address smaller issues before they become larger ones.  We're looking at how to address minor issues before they become major institutional problems."

The overall significance of the project as a whole is the fact that something like this has never been attempted before, Hummer said.

"The main thing for us is that nothing like this has ever been done before, as far as we know, in terms of trying to change institutional culture from the top down," Hummer said.

According to Hummer, the university's grant is only for three years, but, if they can secure additional funding, the project will extend for five years to allow the researchers to obtain follow-up data after the pilot programs have been implemented to improve prison culture.  That way, they will have something to compare the information they are gathering now to in order to determine if the ICI is an effective program

Although DeSousa will be graduating from UMass Lowell in December with a masters degree in criminal justice, she hopes to continue working with the project to see it through to its completion.

"I'd love to stay involved," she said.

For the time being, though, DeSousa is thrilled to be part of such an important project and, even though she has only visited one prison so far, she is enjoying her involvement.

"It's giving me perspective [and] pointing me toward a different field.  [It's giving me] an outlook [on] another part of the criminal justice system, which is prisons," DeSousa said.  "Going through the [criminal justice] courses [as a graduate student], you get a little bit of everything, but having the hands-on experience is great."

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To contact the UMass Criminal Justice Department, call (978) 934-4139