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CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance (ISLG): About Us 

The CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance has a mission to improve the financing, delivery, and measurement of critical public services through research, technical assistance, and education. We lead projects aimed at reforming the criminal justice system, measuring urban inequality, expanding the reach of social service providers, and more. Each project has a dedicated team of research and policy experts who collaborate closely with internal and external organizations. For more information about ISLG, please visit www.islg.cuny.edu. 

Our Goals for Diversity and Inclusion 

We strive to foster an office environment and an approach to work that welcomes and respects different perspectives, backgrounds, and life experiences. We are working towards our goal of recruiting and retaining staff, interns and advisory group members who are diverse in terms of race, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, religion, veteran status, socioeconomic status, disability, and justice system involvement. 

Who we are looking for

ISLG is recruiting up to two (2) CUNY undergraduate and/or graduate student interns to work on a variety of research projects including:

• Pretrial Justice Reform – Interns will provide data, analytic, and research support to the  John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), an initiative to reduce over-incarceration by changing the way America thinks about and uses jails. Data and research has been a key feature of the initiative since its inception and CUNY ISLG serves as the primary partner across the SJC network processing and managing criminal legal system data provided by partner sites across the U.S. Additionally, CUNY ISLG manages the SJC Research Consortium, a pre-qualified group of research organizations that conduct research studies developed by CUNY ISLG to support knowledge development across the broader initiative - documenting what we have learned across jurisdictions about pretrial justice reform and systems change. An intern will support these two broader workstreams in the following ways: 
  • Data Management and Analytic Work: Interns will work closely with ISLG researchers and data scientists to translate practical data analysis needs and supports into programming work. This work may include: 1) developing syntax to process, validate, and standardize administrative data files; and 2) conducting quantitative analysis (descriptive statistics, etc.) across administrative data files.
  • Research Support: Interns will support efforts to summarize findings within specific SJC research priority areas (for example, equity, public safety, and pretrial decision-making) from relevant research projects and published materials. The aim will be to draw out larger lessons learned for the criminal legal field and for jurisdictions as they work to sustain reform efforts. These summative materials may be utilized in various policy and issue briefs.

• Hate Crime Detection, Reporting, and Prosecution – ISLG is currently leading two research projects, funded by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), related to the detection, reporting, and prosecution of hate crimes in New York City and across the country. The intern will assist in conducting background research on hate crimes and community responses to them; attend local community meetings with project partners and take notes; gather available administrative data on hate crimes and identify areas of overlap and/or gaps; research the latest methodological approaches to analyzing hate crimes including social network analysis; and prepare presentations for academic and community audiences.

The core of this internship is creating community and peer-to-peer learning among ISLG interns; to foster community we will have bi-weekly, in-person convenings that will cover a range of topics such as relationship building, project management, etc.

We are hiring interns to work at ISLG for 10 weeks during the summer months. Interns will have a hybrid work schedule and report to a designated ISLG staff member. Interns will work on a range of tasks within the project(s) listed above as well as others not listed here. Tasks that the interns may be responsible for include:

• Writing syntax to process, validate and standardize case-level administrative data files for analysis;
• Attending local community meetings with project partners and taking notes;
• Conducting literature reviews around a variety of topics;
• Synthesizing research publications across SJC priority areas, including those identified above;
• Contributing to public-facing written products, including policy and issue briefs, and presentations for academic and community audiences; and
• Other tasks as needed to support ISLG’s work.