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| Carrie Petrucci & Friends Outside As former graduate students move out into the UCLA community, they often retaintheir links to the university and can become a bridge between town and gown. |
Neva Pemberton, M. Belinda Tucker and Gwendelyn Rivera
WHEN CARRIE PETRUCCI WAS a doctoral student in social welfare at UCLA in 2000, she sat in on a couple of meetings with Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Science Belinda Tucker and others who were considering a study on how the incarceration of sons, brothers, and fathers affects families. Though their efforts continued, the project they anticipated never got off the ground.Then, earlier this year, Professor Tucker called Dr. Petrucci to say that funding for such a project might be available through UCLA in LA’s community partnership grants. As it happens, Dr. Petrucci was already consulting with the perfect partner for such a study: Friends Outside, a 52-year-old nonprofit whose Los Angeles chapter was founded by a UCLA alumna, Martha Jane Dowds.Friends Outside provides a range of services to inmates, ex-inmates, and their families. Through interviews with families, the researchers hope to describe the psychosocial impacts of incarceration on adult family members and close ties of inmates, identifying specific risks and protective factors.Mary Weaver, the current Friends Out-side director, believes the study will help her tailor services for maximum impact and strengthen her proposals to funding sources: “It’s all about outcomes—being able to prove that what you’re doing is working,” she says.Meantime, former doctoral student Carrie Petrucci will be working with two current graduate students—Gwendelyn Rivera and Neva Pemberton—and Tucker and Weaver to gather and analyze the data. The current graduate students will do the qualitative interviews, including open-ended questions about how families are impacted. “I wish it could be me,” Dr. Petrucci says.