-: My name is George Kain.
I am a full professor
in the Division of Justice and Law Administration
at Western Connecticut State University.
My particular research interest is in the area
of capital punishment,
and I've done a lot of writing and presenting nationally
and internationally on that particular topic.
I was instrumental in helping Connecticut to
abolish the death penalty
here in Connecticut in 2012.
I've testified in other state legislatures
that were considering abolition,
most of whom went to abolition.
But if you're asking me the biggest project
that I'm working on and I've been working on
since I've been here, is the collaboration
in connection with students with the outside world.
We take a tremendous amount of pride
in creating our students to be ambassadors
of this university.
And one of the ways that that becomes very visible
is when those of us in the faculty
take our students to the real world
and create outside opportunities for them.
For example, I take my students to prison.
Bringing students into this environment
and giving them an opportunity to sit down
with people who've been convicted of serious crimes
opens their world a little bit more to realize
number one, we're all human beings.
Number two, we make mistakes.
Sometimes we've made bigger mistakes than others and
there are people in prison that deserve to be in prison.
But we can't forget that they're human beings.
And we can't forget that they have a dignity about them.
Most of the work that I'm doing now is in administrative.
In fact, I'm only teaching one course per semester now,
because the administrative work in a department
as large as ours is over, it's a lot of work.
It's very taxing.
So not only am I trying to schedule
and trying to make people happy on the faculty side,
I'm also trying to make sure that students
get what they need and trying to make them
as happy as they can be,
not just in terms of the number of courses that we offer,
but also to make sure that the courses are matched up
with what their needs are,
and also that they're ready to take the courses
that they want to take.
We're offering next semester over 65 sections
in Justice and Law courses alone,
and trying to manage that can be difficult sometimes.
So we have to rely not just on full-time faculty,
but we have to rely on a lot of different adjuncts.
And we're very fortunate here at West Conn
to have a wonderful bank of adjuncts that we can call on.
People who've been judges, state's attorneys,
private attorneys, working in all different aspects
of criminal justice, law enforcement and corrections,
police officers, probation officers,
so we're able to really match the course content
and the material with the person's strength
and what their background is.