Congratulations to Chiara Packard who recently received a Mellon-Wisconsin Summer Fellowship and a Student Research Fellowship from the Institute for Research on Poverty for 2021-2022. These fellowships will support her as she conducts ethnographic fieldwork in two District Attorney’s offices throughout the coming year.
Chiara is a PhD candidate with research interests in the sociology of punishment, criminal justice, inequality, and discretion. Her research is unified by an interest in why communities adopt different systems of punishment and how those different systems shape people’s experiences. Her dissertation project is a mixed-methods study that explores prosecutorial decision-making across contexts using interviews, observations, and analysis of criminal case data.