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This February marked my one year anniversary of working at Prison Policy Initiative as a work study student from Smith College. While here, I have worked on a variety of projects including cross-checking annotations in 2010 Locator<\/a>, finding citations for Please Deposit All of Your Money: Kickbacks, Rates and Hidden Fees in the Jail Phone Industry<\/a>, and sorting through the petition to the FCC<\/a> that called for federal regulation of exploitive prison telephone rates.<\/p>\n Since September of 2013, one of my main projects has been curating PPI\u2019s very own Research Clearinghouse<\/a>, home to one of the largest collections of empirical research about prisons on the internet with topics ranging from the Death Penalty<\/a> to Families<\/a> to Prison and the Economy<\/a>. My job is to read through all of the latest reports from myriad organizations and sort them into the Clearinghouse so that they are accessible and easy to locate. This past week, the database reached a large milestone; on Wednesday, we broke 1800 reports!<\/p>\n The Research Clearinghouse is great because of the span and magnitude of the research that it holds. As a history major, I love exploring patterns and trends over time; with articles ranging in publication from 1982-today, the Clearinghouse offers a unique way to understand some of the changes the United States criminal justice system has undergone in the last thirty years. The Clearinghouse is also a great place to look if you are interested in researching a topic, but don\u2019t know where to start. Best of all, the Clearinghouse is free and easy to use; all of the reports have been sorted into categories and there is a search function as well. <\/p>\n