From Research to Real-World Impact: Lessons from My Time at the Wilson Center
Samantha Richter Reflects on her Time in Our McAtee JustScience Lab
I replayed the same forty-five seconds of audio three times before I realized I'd stopped transcribing altogether.
It was 10:30 p.m. on a Tuesday in my second semester of freshman year. My roommate had just gotten home, filling our dorm with the familiar sounds of keys dropping and backpack thudding against the floor. I hunched over another interview transcript for the Wilson Center for Science and Justice's reentry research. The work should have felt tedious: scrubbing names, matching timestamps, cleaning up the conversation between a Wilson Center staffer and a formerly incarcerated man. I was making the raw audio clear and anonymous for the next stage of research analysis.
But in that third forty-five-second loop, something shifted.
He was explaining how reentry isn't one obstacle but a compounding cascade of them. How not having a state ID meant he couldn’t get a job. How not having a job meant he couldn’t secure housing. How lacking both meant he violated parole conditions he’d never been given the tools to meet. That's how he ended up back inside for the third time, he said. Not because he didn’t want to succeed, but because the system’s expectations outpaced its support.
I had heard statistics about recidivism before, but I had never heard someone map the logic of their own re-incarceration with such painful clarity.
I remember sitting there in the blue glow of my laptop, realizing I had stumbled into something that mattered deeply to me. I didn’t yet know that this moment would quietly shape the rest of my Duke experience, let alone the direction of my career.
That moment captured, in many ways, what the Wilson Center would come to mean to me. It was where research stopped feeling abstract and technical and started feeling relational and personal.
Research Work at the McAtee JustScience Lab
Over the next year and a half, as a research assistant with the McAtee JustScience Lab, I watched that early reentry interview project unfold from start to finish. I worked on participant recruitment, reaching out to reentry councils and nonprofits across North Carolina, organizing outreach campaigns, and helping distribute materials. I sat in on interviews with formerly incarcerated individuals across urban and rural counties, hearing conversations that were often raw, generous, and deeply grounding. Alongside that, I handled the less visible work: maintaining IRB protocols, cleaning and de-identifying transcripts, and developing a detailed NVivo guide and qualitative codebook to ensure our analysis was systematic.
Eventually, I was asked to help synthesize that work into a final report: Bridging the Gap: Aligning Policy with Lived Experience to Strengthen Reentry in North Carolina. Writing it meant analyzing patterns across dozens of interviews and asking hard questions about where systems fall short, even when programs exist on paper. Themes surfaced again and again: housing instability, employment barriers, limited agency over release location, and reentry planning that started far too late. What stayed with me most was how often people described reentry not as a lack of programmatic or personal effort, but as a lack of coordination. Reentry to society often feels less like being guided than being mechanically processed.
By the time I wrote the press release for the report three years later, I realized how much both the project and I had changed since that first transcript. I had started by cleaning audio until midnight in my dorm room. I ended by helping translate lived experience into something meant to inform policy and practice.
What makes the Wilson Center unique is that this kind of translation happens across so many topic areas, every day. Legal expertise, empirical research, policy analysis, and active advocacy exist in constant conversation. Instead of siloed work passing between disconnected hands, ideas get challenged, refined, and reshaped with real-world application in mind. Research isn't about producing answers in isolation. It's about building a shared understanding of what deserves attention and how to act on it effectively and responsibly.
Building Something Practitioners Could Actually Use
That culture became even clearer during my final semester, when I worked on a different reentry project at the McAtee JustScience Lab. While it touched on many of the same themes like housing, employment, health benefits, and childcare, the purpose was different. This work wasn't about analyzing the system. It was about creating a practical reentry toolkit for practitioners helping people navigate reentry. Legal aid workers, case managers, social workers, and others needed clear guidance on how to understand and act on the law and policy in their day-to-day work. I listened to interviews with practitioners across the state, cataloged their insights, helped figure out who else should be included, and worked on drafts meant to be used practically.
Throughout my time at the Center as a student, I was constantly struck by how much work happened in casual, but curiosity-fueled conversation. I was once pulled me into a discussion about diversion programs and treatment alternatives in North Carolina, not because I had answers, but because the project lead thought the research questions mattered and I might learn something from sitting with them. Conversations like that reinforced that justice reform is cumulative work that builds across disciplines, across years, and across relationships.
Carrying the Work Beyond Duke
The questions I learned to ask in the McAtee JustScience Lab, and the standards for rigorous, human-centered research at the Wilson Center, followed me beyond Duke. The summer before my senior year, I interned with RESCALED, a European prison reform organization, curious about how legal frameworks and reentry policy worked in different national contexts. The experience raised new questions that became the foundation of my senior thesis on Europe's small-scale detention house movement. I was able to pursue that work in part because of the qualitative research skills I'd learned at the Wilson Center: how to conduct interviews, how to listen for patterns, how to let the questions lead me rather than forcing predetermined answers.
Today, I'm working in the privacy and data governance unit at the ACLU, where my focus has shifted toward protecting vulnerable populations in an era of expanding surveillance, opaque algorithms, and rapidly emerging technologies. But the through-line remains. Looking ahead, I plan to spend the next year or two at a policy organization or think tank working at the intersection of AI governance and criminal justice reform before pursuing graduate school. I'm drawn to this emerging space where questions about power, accountability, and human dignity are becoming increasingly urgent.
I’m grateful for the way the Wilson Center welcomed me early on and trusted me with real responsibility. I was given room to ask questions, to make mistakes, and to grow into work that felt both rigorous and deeply human. More than anything, I’m grateful for the way the Wilson Center reshaped how I understand research itself. Not as a prestige pursuit or individual achievement, but as a shared responsibility that starts with listening. I didn’t know it then, replaying those forty-five seconds of audio late one night freshman year, but I was beginning to learn how I want to approach work that matters to me, and who I hope to become in the process.