My project has been proving to be a little bit more difficult than I thought. I expected more of my initial contacts to respond to my emails and then lead me to other people to interview. I have a lot of contacts from the District Attorney’s office, the ACLU, and from Junior Trip. In reality, almost all of my initial contacts did not respond except one. The one that did respond was Catherine Weigley at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice working on the Goldring Reentry Initiative. We were able to meet and schedule an in-person interview in Philadelphia. She has said that she has several other people she can put me in contact with.

Contrary to my own belief before starting my project, I have had to rely a lot more on other people to find contacts. My mom’s connections at Columbia and from her past work have proven very helpful and put me in contact with several people. Marion has been a huge help, putting me in contact with two people and an organization. Karyn has given me a parent that has potential contacts. Almost every person that I have spoken to or emailed has thought of other people that they can put me in contact with. I was even able to be put in contact with Judge Robert Rosenthal, an LREI alum and trustee, and we have scheduled an interview for this week in his chambers.

My other expectation (or something I just did not think about) was that people would respond faster than they do. Communicating via email is proving to be more difficult than I thought it would be, especially with the kinds of people that I am contacting. Most of these people have very pressing and important jobs that make it more difficult for them to respond to emails in a timely manner. My experiences the past week have shown me that responding to emails within the few minutes that they are sent and/or right when I see them is very important and staying on top of responding in general. There have been a few times where I open an email and forget to respond because it is already marked as read. Something that has helped in the past week is keeping a spreadsheet of everyone I have contact information for and checking boxes if I have already contacted them.

Lastly, I expected my interviews to go differently. While I’ve only done one interview so far, it truly went so well. I met with Alexcia, the wife of a formerly incarcerated man who had to raise their daughter herself. She was such a genuinely warm and nice person that she instantly made me feel comfortable. She treated me to lunch near the school she works at and was very open and willing to tell her story. She is an inspiration and a badass, to be frank.

I think this project will genuinely be so important in telling stories of those impacted by the criminal legal system on several sides. I know I will learn so much from this project and I am so excited to be doing this.