Course provides students with community development experience

Posted on January 7, 2019 by Leslie Wells

SPEA graduate student Riley Sandel speaks to a group of community members gathered to discuss gentrification.

As nearly 100 people gathered in a local community room to discuss gentrification, seven graduate students from SPEA’s Public Policy Process course eagerly waited to begin the meeting. The group spent the past semester developing the topic and format of the meeting, collaborating with local organizations, and reaching out to community members impacted by or simply interested in gentrification.

Riley Sandel, a SPEA MPA student, helped organize the event. He earned his undergraduate degree in architecture, but knew he wanted to build more than skyscrapers. He wanted to build up communities.

That desire led him to SPEA to pursue a master’s degree in public affairs. The Urban Affairs concentration gives him the ideas and skills needed to address the specific challenges and opportunities found in urban areas. Sandel says this meeting and topic provided the perfect opportunity to practice those skills.

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Reducing recidivism through the hiring process

Posted on December 17, 2018 by Leslie Wells

This story was written by Jody Sundt, Sara Johnson, and Leslie Wells and was originally published in Perspectives, the Journal of the American Probation and Parole Association.

A movement is gaining momentum to shift the culture of corrections, including how probation officers manage offenders in the community (Taxman & Belenko, 2012). Rather than solely focusing on tracking compliance and sanctioning probation violations, more departments are switching to an evidence-based approach that focuses on reducing criminogenic risks and needs with proven strategies that improve public safety.

While there has been progress in training employees in these evidence-based practices (Chadwick, Dewolf, & Serin, 2015), significant challenges remain in building the organizational capacity to support the high levels of treatment fidelity needed to realize public safety goals and reach large numbers of offenders (Salisbury, Sundt, & Boppre, in Press). Organizational policies and practices, for example, need to be aligned with new expectations about how probation officers should perform their jobs. Similarly, we need models to ensure that agencies are hiring people into the system with the skills and orientations necessary to be successful (Fixen, Naoom, Blase, Friedman, & Wallace, 2005).

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SPEA’s Evan Lowder effects community change through her research

Posted on December 10, 2018 by Leslie Wells

SPEA postdoctoral research associate Evan Lowder

Sitting in her office on the fourth floor of SPEA, Evan Lowder spends much of her time scanning through spreadsheets and poring over research literature. She’s working to combine the two into analysis she hopes will be used to inform policies and practices throughout Indiana and beyond.

“I think there’s an obligation for researchers to ask how we can advance the state of science and knowledge around these issues to bring that work back into communities,” says Lowder, who earned her doctorate in psychology at North Carolina State University.

Her focus on socially relevant research is what landed Lowder a position as a postdoctoral research associate with SPEA, working primarily with associate professor Brad Ray, who serves as the director for the Center for Health and Justice Research with the IU Public Policy Institute.

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African Americans at increasing risk of lethal fentanyl-related overdose

Posted on December 3, 2018 by Leslie Wells

As stricter prescribing rules make prescription opioids less accessible, those with opioid use disorder are turning to synthetic substances instead. This shift has led to a recent rise in overdose deaths linked to synthetic opioids, like fentanyl. New research from the Center for Health and Justice Research (CHJR) at the Indiana University Public Policy Institute finds a dramatic increase in these deaths in recent years, along with an increasingly high risk of death for African Americans.

SPEA associate professor Dr. Brad Ray leads the CHJR and in his latest research on opioid deaths, published in the journal Addictive Behaviors, examined fentanyl-related overdose trends in Marion County, Indiana from 2010 through April 2017.

During that time, rates of overdoses involving fentanyl rose significantly. Those rates had remained lower than 15 percent from 2010 through 2013. However, they skyrocketed in recent years. By 2017, nearly half of all overdose deaths involved fentanyl. As time passed, there was also a shift from fentanyl simply being one opioid in the victim’s system to being the only opioid.

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Going beyond a business degree

Posted on November 26, 2018 by Leslie Wells

Tasha Phelps standing on IUPUI campus — Tasha Phelps, SPEA alumna and Phelco Technologies president & CEO.

SPEA alumna Tasha Phelps spent more than two decades building her information technology company from the ground up. A business degree helped lay the foundation for Phelco Technologies but as its focus shifted from the private sector to contracts with law enforcement and state government agencies, Phelps knew her business degree alone would not be enough.

“I wanted to be able to communicate better and at a different level with my clients,” she recalls.

Phelps needed—and wanted—to learn more about this new breed of clientele and how her company could help them assess the impact of their IT systems on public safety.

After a conversation with SPEA Executive Associate Dean Tom Stucky, Phelps enrolled in SPEA’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management graduate certificate program. Even though she earned that certificate, she wasn’t finished learning.

“It was the carrot in front of me,” she recalls. “Earning my master’s would … allow me to have more informed conversations with the clients I serve.”

She wanted to learn how criminal justice and public safety organizations operated, and how citizens can impact those agencies. So Phelps continued on, earning her Criminal Justice and Public Safety master’s degree from SPEA in 2016.

“The education at SPEA is what gave me the insight into how public safety professionals are trained to think and behave,” Phelps says. “I can’t put into words how critical that level of information is to someone in this industry.”

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