“There are few things that matter in the world that can’t be studied in Vermont,” argued UVM Political Scientist Frank Bryan. Bryan studied the “truths of the universe” through examining how community is built through local decision-making in Vermont town meetings.
Over the years of studying Vermont’s efforts to involve local communities and citizens in criminal justice, Kathy Fox believes that the Vermont ethic of “participatory democracy, civic engagement, and communities taking care of their own” has enabled Vermont to be a world leader in its approaches to community justice.
The Center for Research on Vermont has selected Kathy Fox, professor of sociology at the University of Vermont, as the 2016 Frank M. Bryan Vermont Scholar, for a Vermont research project on offender reintegration.
The Frank M. Bryan Vermont Scholar Summer Research Award provides $5,000 dollars in summer salary to faculty and independent scholars conducting Vermont research. The award is named in honor of Frank M. Bryan (who retired in 2013) -- an internationally recognized scholar who devoted much of his career to studying democracy with Vermont as the laboratory. A founding member of the Center for Research on Vermont, Bryan is a trustee of the Vermont Historical Society and the recipient of the Center’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2013).
Fox’s research plan stems from her years of experience conducting qualitative research on offender reintegration in Vermont, specifically focusing on the ways in which the state has used federal funding for innovative programs to help released prisoners transition home. Fox has also conducted extensive evaluations on Vermont’s Circles of Support & Accountability (CoSA) program for high-risk offenders released from prison. The CoSA program employs local volunteers to support and monitor high-risk offenders in the community.
Vermont runs the largest CoSA program in the United States, yet no systematic quantitative analysis has been done on the program’s effectiveness in terms of reducing reoffending or other objective measures. Fox’s research aims to analyze the relative success of CoSA in Vermont through examining data from 160 CoSA files. Her project will focus on evaluating whether CoSA works differently for violent and other types of offenders, a groundbreaking task that no researcher in the world has yet done.
Kathy Fox’s research will pose significance on local, national, and international levels in determining best program practices for prisoner reintegration and models for managing crime risk in communities.