Angela House, a reentry home in Houston, helps women just out of prison find housing, provides mental health resources and access to medication and offers addiction counseling. It also supports families by providing childcare options for women while they work. Despite being a resource for women, there are still myriad issues that these women must navigate post-prison.
Two Honors College students and their faculty mentor wanted to be more involved with this vulnerable population. The Action Research in Communities Program (ARC) is housed in the UH Honors College and the Office of Undergraduate Research and Major Awards. ARC introduces undergraduates to research and requires a capstone project that enacts real change in the city of Houston.
UH biomedical student Nabeela Siddeeque was infuriated when she first participated in a book club that studied “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” by Michelle Alexander. “The book explained how slavery wasn’t really abolished in our country. It simply transformed into mass incarceration,” said Siddeeque. Siddeeque’s ARC project was an ambitious one – to start a creative program for women who were reentering society after prison.
Building on her work during a summer research fellowship program offered by the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Data Science Institute and the Humana Institute at UH, she brought her plan to faculty mentor Ariel Ludwig, Ph.D. Ludwig teaches in the Data and Society program in the Honors College and researches the intersection of systemic racism and mass incarceration. “In my career,” said Ludwig, “I have come to see mass incarceration as one of the most important civil rights issues of our time.”
The HPE Data Science Institute allows experts like Ludwig to use the resources housed there, like the supercomputers, to do data analytics. “Data science intersects with mass incarceration at nearly every point,” said Ludwig. “For instance, even prior to a person’s arrest, predictive policing may guide allocation of police resources and time. On the other side of the process, algorithms are used to inform parole decisions and monitoring practices. While data science has often served to shore up existing practices and disparities, it is possible to use them to work toward a just and compassionate future.”
“I used to think jail was a clean-cut issue. If you were bad you went to jail and if you were good, you avoided it. I learned that these women, due to poverty and generational issues, had no means by which to post bail. They didn’t have counselors, jobs, education or childcare. I felt like I needed to see something change,” said Siddeeque.
Siddeeque is looking forward to attending medical school in the near future, and the positive changes she made in the lives of the women at Angela House will resonate for a long while and be her legacy.
Image: Getty Images/iStock/ojoel
