Office Hours

Giselle Kowalski:
Hi everybody, my name is Giselle Kowalski and I'm the digital content producer here at Texas State University. You're listening to Office Hours and today I'm here with Tyson. So you got to talk with Dr. Angela Jones from the School of Criminal Justice here at Texas State. How did that go?

Tyson Taylor:
It was awesome. Dr. Jones was super insightful and I found our conversation to be very informative and very beneficial and she gave me a lot of great information, advice, tips on criminal justice system, as well as ultimately being on a jury. And as a young person like myself who's never been on a jury before, I found this conversation to be very beneficial. And I think anyone who listens to this episode of the Office Hours can benefit from it no matter how old you are.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, for sure. I definitely benefited from learning from her too because I too have not been on a jury and fingers crossed that it doesn't happen. But if it does, I'll have a different insight on it. So we hope you enjoy this conversation between Tyson and Dr. Angela Jones.

Tyson Taylor:
To start us off, can you tell us what your name is and what you teach here at Texas State?

Dr. Angela Jones:
Hi, yes. I am Dr. Angela Jones and I teach in the School of Criminal Justice and Criminology. I teach courses like Research Methods, Theory, and Wrongful Convictions.

Tyson Taylor:
How long have you been teaching at Texas State?

Dr. Angela Jones:
Let's see, I think my first year was 2016, so this will be my eighth year now.

Tyson Taylor:
Well, we'd like to start off the Office Hours podcast with an icebreaker. So today's question is, if you could watch a movie for the first time, what would it be and why?

Dr. Angela Jones:
Mine would be very cheesy. It would be "Love, Actually." I think that's one of the best movies ever, brings me to tears the 50th time I've watched it, so the first time is very special though.

Tyson Taylor:
Awesome. All right, so we're really going to get into it. We're going to take it back to the beginning. Can you tell me where you grew up and what was it like growing up there?

Dr. Angela Jones:
I grew up in Florida, in Lakeland, Florida, which is sandwiched between Orlando and Tampa. Growing in Florida was great. You never had to go far to go on vacation. You could go to the beach. I grew up living at the beach, way too many sunburns, but I loved it. It was a really fun childhood.

Tyson Taylor:
Yes, ma'am. And growing up in Lakeland, Florida, what were some of the first couple of jobs that you held, maybe in high school, middle school?

Dr. Angela Jones:
My first job was a very short-lived gig as a barista. I hate coffee. I hate the smell of coffee. And so that job lasted less than a week where I was like, "I can't do it." But I worked in a number of jobs in the restaurant industry before I moved into retail. Worked at Bed Bath and Beyond for a little bit during college and then before I started going to graduate school, then working as a research assistant.

Tyson Taylor:
And you went to the University of Central Florida to get your bachelor's and then you went to the University of South Florida. What was it like going to those two different universities and how did they impact you into the person you are today?

Dr. Angela Jones:
Oh, UCF was probably the best four years of my life. College, I think for anybody, is just such an awesome experience and I really enjoyed my time there and meeting the professors that I did. I'm a first-generation college student, so for undergrad and certainly beyond that. And so I knew nothing about graduate school or research or anything like that. And so the professors that I met there were the ones that literally changed my life. They were the first ones to ask me what I thought about graduate school or what I was interested in, what I thought about doing after graduation. That really made me kind of open my horizons and think that there was a bigger world out there than what I thought coming into school. And so that was what led me to go to USF for my master's degree. And I was thinking, "Let me just try this on." And then I was like, "This is amazing." But this particular program wasn't the right fit for me, but I knew I wanted to get my Ph.D. once I started graduate school.

Tyson Taylor:
And your expertise is in the legal system and criminology. Can you tell me where that interest began? Was it at UCF? Was it at USF? How did you get your start and interest in this field?

Dr. Angela Jones:
My whole life really. I grew up with my mom watching "Unsolved Mysteries" and "20/20s" and "Datelines" and that was so cool to me. It was like, "How do I figure it out? How did the police figure out who did it?" So I was really always into those kinds of shows and I thought I wanted to be a police officer, which terrified my mother, so she was very happy when I pivoted away from that in college.

Tyson Taylor:
After your master's degree, you ultimately left Florida and went to New York and you got your Ph.D. at City University in New York. What was that like? Did it meet your expectations? Why did you go there?

Dr. Angela Jones:
The opportunity to live in New York City, I was like, "Can't pass this up." And it was as good as I hoped it would be, maybe even better. It's such a nice place to live for a finite amount of time while you're young and carefree. So I really enjoyed the experience of living in a place like that. But the program itself was phenomenal. People that I had read their research for years, it was just really ecstatic that there were so many of them in one department and I had the opportunity to work with all of them. That was something I really enjoyed and was so different from everything I had experienced in Florida, really just got me out of my comfort zone, for sure.

Tyson Taylor:
And you do a lot of work with jurors in terms of decision-making and implicit bias training. Do you have any tips for someone like myself who's never been on a jury before?

Dr. Angela Jones:
Try to be as much as you can make yourself be open-minded, not coming in thinking that this person is most likely guilty or that you're going to lean one way or the other, really being open to what the evidence is that's presented to you and letting the evidence alone be what convinces you one way or the other. Knowing how high the threshold is for conviction, that idea of that beyond a reasonable doubt is so high that if the state has not met that, has not really truly convinced you and you could see alternative explanations, that that is all that's needed for you to acquit a defendant.

Tyson Taylor:
Your work focuses on the intersection of psychology with the legal system. What kind of patterns have you been observing in crime and law within the past few years?

Dr. Angela Jones:
I've been all over the place lately with some of the research I've been doing, collaborating with some of my colleagues in the department, doing some public opinion research, which I find really fascinating because the criminal justice system is inherently political and it's definitely swayed by public opinion. And public opinion is swayed by what politicians are saying about whatever's the latest crime that happened and making some assumptions or stating some beliefs that may be totally separated from reality in terms of how crime-ridden is this city or that city and what the politicians and the prosecutor doing to make things better or worse. All these feelings people have that are really strong. I've been really interested in that lately to see how can we better assess those opinions and what impact do they have on the policies that are actually being implemented, especially in a place like Central Texas where there's a lot of heated opinions and a lot of different political beliefs that are intersecting right now in the criminal justice system.

Tyson Taylor:
What's one thing that you wish everybody knew about legal system, law, criminology?

Dr. Angela Jones:
One thing regarding juries, I think that would be useful because that's probably the most common way people are going to interact with the criminal justice system. It's a precious right. We are so lucky to live in the United States to have the opportunity to influence our justice system in that way and be a part of a group of jurors, whether it's six or nine jurors depending on the crime or the jurisdiction, to really come together and come to a unanimous decision that will dictate someone's future and affect the rest of their lives. That's such a heavy burden, but it's also just a really awesome responsibility.
So if you ever get that jury summons in the mail, you're like, "Oh man," think of just changing your perspective in that way. I wish I would get one of those in the mail and I have a few times, but then every time I tell them what I do, they're like, "No, you can't serve on this jury." But it would be such an amazing opportunity. And I feel like if we made it easier for people to participate and then they understood how important that right is, that can make a big difference in making the jury pool more diverse and people having more trust in our jury verdicts.

Tyson Taylor:
You spent almost your whole life studying this field. What does criminology, the legal system, just the way that law works, what does it mean to you and influence you in the person you are today?

Dr. Angela Jones:
It's made me appreciate that the system is made up of humans and humans are fundamentally flawed. They make mistakes even when they're not trying to and they're trying to do the best they can, they can make mistakes. And it's made me realize the importance of having safeguards in place that can protect us from making mistakes that can devastate people's lives, especially studying wrongful convictions. You can see how one thing goes wrong and it becomes this domino effect and then everything after that goes wrong and then everyone cites, "Well, this other thing happened that made this person look guilty." And they all start to connect the dots, but it all started with one big mistake, often an innocent mistake, and it can have those devastating results.

Tyson Taylor:
What has been the best advice a mentor in your field has given you that you've applied to multiple aspects in your life?

Dr. Angela Jones:
Probably to just keep trying, to be so stubborn and sometimes to be more stubborn than other people, to don't give up. And it's not to be steadfast in your beliefs, it's to go where the data or the science takes you and to being open to being wrong. But the stubbornness comes into, I want to see this through because I'm trying to pursue truth. I am trying to figure out what's really going on here or what's a way I can best solve a problem, and being open to wherever the data takes you. It can get really easy to be convinced by your own beliefs and letting that blind you, because researchers are humans too. So I try to be aware of that. My mentor was like, "Be stubborn and you always keep pushing, but don't be stuck or glued to your own ideas. Be open to others."

Tyson Taylor:
Knowing what you know about life in the law and the way our minds work, is there anything you wish you could tell your younger or someone maybe my age?

Dr. Angela Jones:
Every time I teach the wrongful convictions class at the undergraduate level, I always have so many students who are like, "This should be a required course for the university. Everyone should know about this stuff." And I do think that the more I learn about the criminal justice system and how everyone comes in contact with it in some way or they know someone who has at some point in their lives, it is stunning how little so many people know about it or how it works, or if they ever find themselves in court and they don't know what to do or all of these things, the one thing I could recommend is just educate yourself on your rights, your fundamental constitutional rights. If you ever find yourself pulled over by police or if you ever get arrested, if you get called for jury duty, educate yourself on what your rights are because no one else is actually going to be looking out for you. You have to look out for yourself.

Tyson Taylor:
Getting away from the law system, more so just undergraduates making their way through college back into the real world, what are some life tips that you learned throughout your journey in your career?

Dr. Angela Jones:
There will be politics everywhere you go. This would be a question of going back to my younger self, giving myself some advice if I were younger, to try to be patient and talk less and listen more. Be a scientist in that way where you're observing, observing and just taking it all in like a sponge because that information will be really useful for you later on. You don't always have to comment on everything or chime in on everything that's happening, but be a sponge in any opportunity given to you or anything you can get involved in. Do it, because even if you end up deciding it's not for you, if you do an internship and you're like, "Ah," you learned something from that. You narrow the choices of what you are into by eliminating things you're not into and so just taking full advantage.

Tyson Taylor:
I appreciate you telling me that. It's very helpful. All right, Dr. Jones, thank you so much for talking to me. Your insights were very valuable and I think everybody can appreciate them. Thank you so much.

Dr. Angela Jones:
Thank you for having me.

Tyson Taylor:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Office Hours. We hope you enjoy this conversation. Make sure you tune in next time to learn more about the experiences of our amazing Texas State faculty. Also remember to follow us on our social media @TXST. This podcast is a production of the Division of Marketing and Communications at Texas State University. Podcasts appearing on the Texas State University Network represent the views of the host and guests, not of Texas State University. Once again, I'm Tyson and I'll see you next time.