"Prosecution in the eyes of the justice-involved: A community-based participatory research approach" (by Belen Lowrey-Kinberg): Review 2

Vote: Publish pending major changes.

I have recommended a decision of “publish pending major changes” because I think there are certain things that would strengthen this paper. I think all my recommendations can be addressed with a bit of effort and thought.

1. In the abstract, maybe reconsider the wording of “interview protocols for prosecutors” because this phrasing suggests that you were creating interviews for prosecutors themselves to use.

2. On page 3, in the overview section, some citations would be helpful.

3. On the same page, it’s Karl Marx, not Carl Marx. In that same paragraph, I am not convinced by the claim that “members of society are likely to view exchange value knowledge as valuable, accurate, and absolute.” One of the biggest criticisms academics get is that we are in the “ivory tower” and that our research doesn’t/shouldn’t have real-world implications. I think there is a real skepticism about our authority, especially in the current socio-political context when “truth” and “facts” are constantly being questioned in the public sphere. The author should address this public skepticism instead of framing the view that academics’ authority is trusted as uncontroversial.

4. The author repeatedly states that this is the first CBPR study in the courts context. I think once is sufficient.

5. Why did the authors want participants who were charged with at least one felony offense? Why were misdemeanors excluded?

6. I was not clear on the rationale behind researchers keeping their cameras off during the focus groups. I think that, in general, qualitative researchers favor transparency (especially in the CBPR context), and having researchers silently observe sessions off-camera seems to run counter to that. I can imagine some participants felt uncomfortable about being observed by people they couldn’t see. Also, how many researchers were there? Why were multiple researchers needed?

7. Did the moderator get compensated for his time?

8. How was informed consent handled? Did the moderator seek it or did the researcher(s)?

9. Because the team used a moderator, I am not convinced by the author’s argument about transferring power to participants (under cultural humility). Rather, it seems like the research team transferred power to the moderator. Since he too was system-impacted, this is not meaningless, but it isn’t the same as transferring power to the participants.

10. The author should explain why they excluded themes discussed by fewer than 4 participants from the interview protocol. There were only 24 participants to begin with, so why was 4 the number chosen? It doesn’t make sense to quantify qualitative results in this way, especially when the sample size is (understandably and appropriately) small. Additionally, if the entire point of CBPR is to give people who are not heard a voice, excluding views simply because more people didn’t share them is extra problematic.

11. I appreciated the author sharing what the focus group results were, but I found that section very descriptive, and I was constantly left wondering “so what?” To me, the real contribution of this paper is not in the outcome of the focus groups, but in the methodological contribution. The focus group results themselves are not unique or surprising; every system-impacted group wishes for more humanizing treatment, for example. I’d recommend the author cut down this section and/or delve into further detail on how and why they went about incorporating the findings into the interview protocols.

12. Related to the interview questions, given the critical lens of the paper generally, I was surprised to see how the author handled the issue of racial bias/racism in the criminal legal system. The participants were talking about “slavery, segregation, and racial oppression” but the author reduced these weighty ideas to two questions about “racial disparities” in the interview protocol. Racism cannot be reduced to “racial disparities,” and I think it does participants a disservice to water down their views into a question as mild as “why do you think racial/ethnic disparities exist?” Again, I am extra critical here because the whole point of CBPR is to elevate and take seriously community members’ views. It felt like the researchers were uncomfortable having the more difficult conversation about race/racism with prosecutors, so they instead asked about racial disparities. The author should address this, and more generally address how this gap can be bridged when CBPR scholars are working with system-impacted people and criminal-legal professionals simultaneously.