Jennifer Peirce is a doctoral candidate in criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), in New York City. She is a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar and a Doctoral Fellow with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada). Jennifer’s research examines prison reform processes and the implementation of minimum standards for the treatment of prisoners in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her dissertation, supervised by Dr. Jeff Mellow, is a mixed-methods study of the Dominican Republic’s human rights-oriented prison reform experience, with an emphasis on the perspectives of prisoners. Her research is published in the Queen’s Law Journal and she has written on criminal justice issues in Latin America for Foreign Affairs, the Inter-American Development Bank, and Insight Crime. Her award-winning paper is titled “From necessary to arbitrary: The evolution of prisoner-led governance and shifting perceptions of violence in Dominican prisons.”