Dear RSF:

Please join us in the library Wednesday, November 20, at 11:00 for Larisa Heiphetz’ seminar “Redemption in the Context of the Criminal Justice System.”

Heiphetz received her BA in Psychology from Pennsylvania State University in 2008 and her PhD in Psychology from Harvard University in 2013.  She has been an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Columbia University since 2016.  As a post-doctoral fellow, she taught in the psychology department at Boston University.  She was granted the American Psychological Association Dissertation Award in 2015, and the Association for Psychological Science awarded her its Rising Star in 2017.  While at Harvard, Heiphetz worked with incarcerated students at the Suffolk County House of Correction.  Her students’ requests to have psychological research better reflect their lived experiences has influenced her current research on how adults and children perceive prisoners and the prison system.

During her year at the Foundation, Heiphetz is writing several articles.  Using experimental and interview data, she is investigating the extent to which adults and children view incarceration as the results of their choices and behaviors, or societal factors such as socioeconomic inequality.  She has been testing interventions to explore whether providing alternative frameworks might improve perceptions of those people who have come into contact with the criminal justice system and reduce the stigma against them.  Her initial paper uses studies conducted with 6-8 year-olds and adults to demonstrate how essentialism colors perceptions of prisoners.  Heiphetz’ second paper explores the consequences of those essentialist views of prisoners, and her final paper reviews the role parental incarceration has on the perceptions of the children of those prisoners.