2018 Awards & Grants

 

Below are descriptions and images from selected outstanding faculty, staff, and students who received an award or grant this year:

• Jackie Baltazar, Undergraduate Student – Student Employee of the Year Award from Washington State University. Check out the Academic Success and Career Center (ASCC).

• Elizabeth Drake, Doctoral Candidate – Dissertation Year Fellowship from WSU Graduate School
• Elizabeth Drake, Doctoral Candidate – Julia and Arnold Greenwell Scholarship from WSU Graduate School

• Zachary Hamilton, Professor – Grant: Optimizing Juvenile Assessment Performance
  • ABSTRACT: Strategies for prevention and risk management among offender and youth populations have received a significant research and investment over the past two decades. Juvenile justice systems have increasingly embraced the adoption of risk assessment tools (Barnoski, 2004; Campbell, Schmidt, & Wershler, 2016) in order to improve outcomes for youth and families. However, the development and validation of amount of instruments have been constrained to just a small number of contributors, and instruments are repeatedly implemented off-the-shelf in jurisdictions other than where the instruments were created (Hamilton et al., 2016a). Presently, it is estimated that 35 juvenile risk assessments are in use in the U.S (OJJDP, 2010) and over 86 percent juvenile justice agencies’ employ strategies that involve the use of actuarial assessments of risk (Schwalbe, 2009). As the field of juvenile justice continues to advance assessment efforts, it has been recognized that the predominant use of assessments to date has been the implementation of standard off-the-shelf instruments developed on a single offender sample, yet subsequently used for prediction on populations and jurisdictions in which the instrument was not designed to serve. In recent years, there has been increased awareness among researchers and practitioners alike that a one-size-fits-all approach to risk management may not optimally capture risk when applied across multiple differing jurisdictions (Wilson & Gutierrez, 2014). For instance, prior analyses of the Washington State derived Positive Achievement Change Tool (PACT) and the Iowa Delinquency Assessment (IDA) have identified sources of substantial variations in predictive accuracy (Barnoski, 2012; Hamilton & van Wormer, 2015). Identified variations were suspected to be due to methodological and jurisdictional differences. We contend that, if isolated and assessed, instrument variations have the ability to further improve recidivism prediction, when elements such as item selection, weighting, gender specificity, and outcomes specific modeling are optimized for a given jurisdiction. The PACT was originally developed for the Washington State Juvenile Court Administrators (WSJCA) and was designed to serve the population of probation youth in Washington State. It has since been adopted by many states, is delivered under several names (i.e. Back on Track [BOT], IDA, Oregon Risk Need Assessment [RNA], Utah Protective and Risk Assessment [PRA], and the Youth Assessment and Screening Instrument [YASI]), representing one of the most prominent juvenile risk-need assessment instruments in use today (currently used in 19 states and parts of Canada). However, like many other tools it is applied as an off-the-shelf package and its application and weighting is not designed to vary by the state or jurisdiction implemented.

• Sisouvanh Keopanapay, Undergraduate Advisor – ACADA Professional Development Stipend Award from Washington State University

• Faith Lutze, Professor – President, Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS)

• Amber Morczek, Doctoral Candidate – 2018 Young Alumnus Achievement Award from State University of New York College at Buffalo
• Amber Morczek, Doctoral Candidate – WSU GPSA Award of Excellence, Graduate Student Instructor

• • Mary Stohr, Professor – Fellows Award by the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences for a “distinguished contribution to justice education and scholarship“
  • Mary Stohr, Professor – Coramae Richey Mann Leadership Award by the Minorities and Women Section of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences is “the highest honor of the Section. Recipient’s must be a contributor to the ethnic and racial diversity in criminal justice education and must endeavor to advance critical thinking concerning women and must have made substantial contributions to the emerging body of knowledge about gender issues in criminology and criminal justice“.

Dr. Mary Stohr, Nicole Leeper, and Wes Jennings. (photo by ACJS)