Understanding Link Between Crime and Punishment

The Stonehill Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program brings together student scholars and faculty mentors to pursue in-depth, faculty-led research across disciplines. The program provides students the unique opportunity to contribute meaningfully to active research and reflects the college’s commitment to experiential learning. This story explores a recent project. 

How does the severity of a country’s sentencing laws impact the number of its human trafficking cases?  

Adam Ammirata ’26, a psychology and criminology major, has spent his summer trying to find out.  

It’s a heavy topic for a student research project, but an ideal fit for Ammirata, who has long envisioned a career in the prison system — in the name of social justice.  

“I’m interested in the societal factors that push people to risk it all and end up in prison,” Ammirata said. “They did something horribly wrong, and there’s no looking past that. But why did they do it?” 

“Many times, they’re part of a cycle of trauma,” he continued. “They didn’t get the support they needed. There’s a lot of injustice in the justice system.” 

The genesis of Ammirata’s SURE project is a dissertation by Professor Candence Wills de Jesus, who teaches in the Criminology Department and is his faculty advisor. Her dissertation explored institutional responses to human trafficking.  

Wills de Jesus emphasizes that human trafficking encompasses many more forms than most people realize — sex work, forced labor, forced criminality, forced marriage and even organ selling are all types of present-day trafficking.  

“The United Nations defines human trafficking through act, means and purpose,” she said. “This includes acts that use force, fraud or deception with the purpose of exploitation, often but not always, for monetary gain.” 

Overcoming Hurdles Tied to Recordkeeping Inconsistencies 

For his research, Ammirata has pored over annual reports on human trafficking published by the U.S. State Department to gather data on the topic — a task more challenging than he had anticipated.  

“The way the reports present information isn’t consistent from year to year,” he explained. “For example, if the victim is a child, the punishment often increases, but the reports don’t always list those aggravating circumstances.”  

He continued: “This means that one year the report lists the punishment as 15 years in prison, while in the next it’s life in prison for the same crime. I have to ask myself, ‘What changed in that year?’ I have to read and think about it really critically.” 

Ammirata has also found that for some countries, information on human trafficking penal codes is limited, in another language, or even non-existent — adding further challenges to the task.  

Due to the nature of the work, there are fewer opportunities for students to gain real-life experience in this field compared to other career paths. That has made the experience offered by the SURE program especially valuable to Ammirata. 

“You have to be 18 years old to work or volunteer in a prison,” he said. “That’s very limiting to gaining experience. [As a freshman] If I had to wait until then, I would have had to wait three years before I could dive in and confirm it was my interest.” 

Eventually, Ammirata plans to pursue a Ph.D. in forensic psychology — and he believes his SURE project experience will be a valuable asset on that path.  

“If I’m completing a dissertation, I can’t research a huge topic like human trafficking, because it’s so broad,” he said. “This project helped me learn how to narrow it down to something feasible. It’s a great skill I can apply in many places.” 

Ammirata continued: “I’m excited that this type of experience can help me achieve the career where my passion lies.”