In the Trenches, Listening to the Noise

"You could hear the clanking of the cell doors," senior Bea Jauregui recalls. "It was very dank, and I hadn’t realized before that the inmates were allowed to mill around as much as they did."

Jauregui (pronounced Jur-AY-gee) is describing her first visit to the State Correctional Institution at Graterford, Pennsylvania’s largest maximum security prison. "I wasn’t really overwhelmed," she makes a point of noting, "it’s just that the facility is such a huge place. The main corridor is a quarter mile long."

It sounds a little like whistling past the graveyard. The knot in her stomach wasn’t the usual sensation undergraduates feel when they cross the campus to take, say, a final exam. Jauregui is a Benjamin Franklin Scholar and University Scholar who has earned a place on the Dean’s List every semester since matriculating to Penn with a Mayor’s Scholarship. Elected Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year, the double major in psychology and sociology is accustomed to the abdominal jitters that accompany high academic achievement. This time, though, she was embarking on an educational adventure in unfamiliar territory, outside the order and safety of the laboratory and classroom. Bravado or not, she was uncowed.

Jauregui had responded to a job posting in Career Services. The Vera Institute for Justice, a research institute in New York City that develops innovative criminal justice and social reform initiatives, was looking for a graduate student to collect data and interview convicts participating in one of its programs. While only a sophomore at the time, she was hired by Vera anyway, based on her academic record and research skills honed by almost two years of data collecting and analysis in a sleep deprivation lab in the Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry. "I don’t think there was too much in the way of competition to go hang out in a maximum security prison," Jauregui adds.

Twice a week for over a year, she made her way through the general cell block to a restricted area, where she conducted exit interviews with parole violators who were part of the state Department of Corrections’ Residential Substance Abuse Treatment program. She observed program activities and interviewed staff, but mostly she met with drug dealers, petty thieves, sex offenders, and murderers as a liaison from Vera, which had been charged with carrying out an evaluation of the program.

Jauregui had long been intrigued by the psychology of violent criminal behavior and, before studying at Penn, had briefly considered a career as a "profiler" for the FBI. "I used to think there was something wrong with these people," she says, "that they had some sort of pathology, an inherent psychological abnormality."

Two features of her experience at Graterford changed that assumption: she quickly became aware of how the prisoners were not like her, although not "abnormal," but mostly she was struck by how they were very much like her after all.

Primed by television to expect "bad-ass prisoners full of hostility," she was delighted to discover how much like her they were, despite criminal histories that were pages long. "A lot of these guys were eager to talk and to have someone listen to them. It was usually quite amiable." She calls the prisoners "guys," as though she were talking about classmates she’d meet on Locust Walk. Some inmates, she found, dreamed the same dreams for their future as she did. Others held incisive perspectives on how their life choices had led them to become incarcerated at Graterford. "They just seemed so normal," she says. "I couldn’t chalk it up anymore to some sort of freaky, psychological deviance. They were just regular guys, trapped in circumstances of poverty, surrounded by drugs and alcohol with little hope for an escape."

With no affluent suburbanites in the program, she came to see poverty as a decisive factor that led these people to crime. "Oftentimes," she observes, "their whole family would be drug dealers—it was the only example of success they saw." She was particularly struck by how many prisoners did not know the names and ages of their children, and she was disturbed by how the predominately white corrections officers treated the inmates. "I think when I started, the program had 60 people: there were four white males and six or seven Hispanics. Everybody else was black. There’s definitely something going on there."

Jauregui used structured interviews and was responsible for gathering and analyzing a significant portion of the data used to carry out an assessment of the program’s effectiveness. She was also responsible for monitoring the human interaction, which wasn’t captured by the data—things like staff-inmate relations, class meetings, and recreational activities.

Being immersed in both the science and the human element, she came to see how data can easily mislead those who interpret it. The program’s classes, for instance, were held in a common room where other inmates would be playing cards, watching TV, or talking loudly. When program supervisors saw that a large percentage of the inmates were participating in the classes, they would conclude the numbers signified a high measure of success. Jauregui would point out that the class environment was extremely noisy and chaotic, and those attending the classes would often be doodling or sleeping or sitting in the back of the room, unable to hear the lessons above the noise. "These are the kinds of things people who were just reading a report or seeing some numbers wouldn’t be able to see."

Jauregui already understood the value of quantified data for scientific endeavors. She now came to appreciate the vital role of qualitative research. The theory she had learned on campus taught her the importance of muting extraneous "noise" in order to run scientifically valid experiments. "Graterford wasn’t a nice, controlled lab setting," she remarks. "In the lab, everything is very contained and controlled and accounted for. When I got to this place, I realized there’s a whole lot that gets lost in these controlled settings. It was a big mess."

In her senior thesis, Jauregui is building on her experiences at Graterford, exploring what features of a society lead it to establish a retributive or a restorative justice system. In the former, a society seeks primarily to punish criminals; in the latter, responses to crime are aimed at restoring the violated social order, often by having the offender pay some kind of restitution to the aggrieved. Using the Human Relations Area Files, an ethnographic database compiled by anthropologists from all over the world, she is trying to determine whether herding societies are more retributive than premodern, nonherding societies. "It’s a hypothesis that’s widely assumed, but no one has ever tested it," says sociology professor Larry Sherman, her thesis advisor. "She’s really doing pathbreaking stuff that could have major implications for understanding and shaping penal policy."

Ethnography is one of those messy sciences that relies on immersion and observation to understand a culture or a situation. Juaregui’s use of an ethnographic database underscores her newfound appreciation for getting her hands dirty. "I really think that if we want to understand things like human behavior and solve social problems, we need to get in there and see what’s happening."