The criminal justice system is undergoing a drastic transformation. In the United States, prisons are becoming overcrowded, citizens are calling for widespread reform, and early racial divides from the beginning of the country are still lurking within the shadows.

Through the lens of the Collaborating Across Boundaries program, an initiative being conducted at The College of New Jersey, two professors are using their contrasting courseworks to build a relationship between different branches of knowledge. Computer science and penology, which is the study of punishment, are usually opposite disciplines that have little in common. As combined forces, they’re taking steps to reverse the issues within law and order by pairing with a local community partner, in this case The Campaign to End the New Jim Crow.

Dr. Monisha Pulimood is the chair of the computer science department at the college. She has a grant from the National Science Foundation along with fellow Professor Kim Pearson and Dr. Diane Bates. She teaches Software Engineering, where students engineer computer programs to solve problems. Instead of “toy projects,” or what she calls the class exercises, they get to apply themselves to real life topics.

“I’ve been thinking for a couple of years now about wanting to do something related to mass incarceration,” she said. “One of the things that I wanted for my students is that I want my students to be thinking about social issues and putting their disciplinary work in the context of what’s going on in society.”

The year has given rise to new conversations on racial injustice due to the police killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, with protests springing up across the nation. According to ACLED’s study “Demonstrations & Political Violence In America: New Data for Summer 2020,” between May and August, more than 10,600 demonstrational events occurred across the country.

Dr. Margaret Leigey is the chair of the criminology department. Together with Pulimood, they have designed a program for the remote fall semester at The College of New Jersey where students from both of the courses join forces to produce meaningful, collaborative work.

Under the guidance of their professors, the teams are to make interactive websites or applications that address a particular aspect that would help The Campaign to End the New Jim Crow in their efforts.

“Each group is producing a project. There’s different areas focusing on bail reform or looking at bias in risk assessment tools, so they each have their project and then they’ll present them to the community partner,” she said.

According to the grassroots organization’s website, The Campaign to End the New Jim Crow “is committed to building a movement with the goal of replacing prisons and life-long discrimination with caring communities.” Yumiko Mishima is their connection to the students from the Trenton chapter, with the ultimate goal of featuring the most successful projects as solutions for reform on the website.

Able to set their own schedules, the classes have been meeting frequently over Zoom to get work done together. They get to address social goals as unlikely teams who may have never had the chance to do business under one central focus before from their respective backgrounds.

“What really attracted me to this opportunity was the chance to work with a completely different discipline in a completely different way than our students typically do,” Leigey said. “Our students would never really have the opportunity to build computer applications if not for this collaboration and so it was really exciting.”

Pulimood echoed that sentiment.

“They’re treating each other as equals in the collaboration, which is really something that is not easy to do when we’re all so used to working with people who are like us and in the same disciplines,” she said.

At Collaborating Across Boundaries’s conclusion, the students will have experience in each other’s company, highlighting each other’s strengths from two distinguished fields of study.

Teaming up with Pulimood has made Leigey grateful for what has transpired thus far for both the faculty and undergraduates alike. While it might have fared differently as an in-person project, they’re satisfied with the results.

“I also really wanted to find ways to engage students, especially this semester while we would be remote, and I wanted them to have something,” Leigey said of the circumstances, “It was just really a fantastic opportunity that has been really successful so far.”