George is a Professor and the Department Chair of the Division of Justice and Law Administration at Western Connecticut State University. It was during his time working as a probation officer in the state’s Judicial Branch when a colleague first planted the idea of teaching in his head. After obtaining a PhD in Criminal Justice, George began teaching at Western Connecticut State University, starting as a part-time adjunct professor and advancing to where he is today as both a full professor and Chair of the department. Needing to supplement the in-class academia with real world exposure, George requires his classes to join him on trips to area prisons where he shows students that all humans, even felons, deserve basic human dignity.
Transcript
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.
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