This report for the Urban Institute’s Prison Research and Innovation Initiative (PRII) documents the challenges and opportunities in improving prison living and working conditions through participatory research. Its findings are informed by interviews with incarcerated people, corrections staff, facility leadership, researchers, and state-level policymakers, practitioners, and advocates. The report shares key lessons, including strategies for improving stakeholder engagement, guidance for navigating institutional barriers, and areas where the initiative successfully demonstrated participatory research approaches in corrections settings. Overall, the participatory approaches were successful, giving disempowered groups a meaningful opportunity to improve prison conditions and empowering prison leaders to try new approaches.

Why This Matters

State prisons in America touch millions of people every day—over a million people are incarcerated in them (PDF) and 180,000 corrections officers work in them. Despite their reach, prisons remain among the least understood public institutions, and of the research that does exist, few studies have recognized the people with direct experience as critical to this work. This research takes a “nothing about us without us” approach, providing urgently needed insights into prison conditions and demonstrating how participatory research can drive meaningful reform for both incarcerated people and corrections staff.

Key Takeaways

PRII demonstrated that participatory research in prison settings can lead to meaningful improvements in transparency, facility culture, and living and working conditions for incarcerated people and corrections staff. Despite persistent challenges, including COVID-19 disruptions and chronic staffing shortages, PRII fostered empowerment and collaboration among its many stakeholders and can serve as proof of concept for future participatory research efforts in prisons.

Key findings include the following:

• Certain innovations not only delivered concrete changes to facility conditions, such as a staff decompression space, reworked grievance policies, enhanced mental health support, and a commercial driver's license course, but also enabled cultural shifts that improved communication among prison stakeholders and reduced some of the us-versus-them mentality common in corrections, according to interviewees.
• Climate surveys and participatory innovation sessions helped build trust and highlight insights from incarcerated people and staff. Incarcerated people and staff are key to unpacking and contextualizing survey findings.
• Prisons are, and will continue to be, challenging environments for implementing innovations and facilitating cultural shifts. Resistance from corrections leadership, resource constraints, and entrenched hierarchies limited the scale and speed of reforms.

Recommendations for others pursuing participatory research in corrections settings include the following:

• Secure and maintain up-front buy-in at all levels of corrections agencies and clearly define roles and expectations from the outset.
• Treat facility leadership as a distinct stakeholder group with unique motivations.
• Identify on-the-ground champions to drive implementation and navigate bureaucracy.
• Use mixed methods to reduce survey fatigue and incorporate diverse perspectives.
• Prioritize small, visible wins to build momentum and trust while not overpromising on what a project will achieve.
• Expand community-engaged research and cross-agency collaboration to other settings.

These findings point to a replicable model for using research to drive incremental but impactful change in corrections environments, a model that succeeds to the extent that it leverages participants’ direct experience.

How We Did It

To inform our process evaluation, Urban researchers conducted 112 interviews with 100 unique stakeholders, including incarcerated people (n = 33); corrections staff (n = 25); and local research partners, prison research and innovation managers (research-corrections liaisons embedded in the facilities), practitioners, and state-level leaders (n = 42) from the five participating states. We complemented interviews with document reviews and observations of project activities. Using NVivo, a qualitative analysis software, we used deductive and inductive coding to identify key themes and takeaways to understand and assess the implementation and impact of participatory research in the five states.