Today@Sam Article

Graduate Students Honor Victims Through Texas Prison Museum Exhibit

April 17, 2024
SHSU Media Contact: Mikah Boyd

By Kim Foster

Visitors to the Texas Prison Museum this month have an opportunity to experience a limited-time exhibit created by Sam Houston State University’s College of Criminal Justice (SHSU CJ) graduate students. The exhibit features memorials honoring murder victims with a focus not on how they died, but how they lived.

“It’s about who they were as people,” SHSU Department of Victim Studies Chair Shelly Clevenger said. “Because often when we talk about murders portrayed in the media, it’s about how they died, not how they lived.”

The memorials were created as an assignment in Clevenger’s Murder and Victimization class, an Academic Community Engagement (ACE) course. Students were instructed their installment must feature someone from Texas and could be from any point in time, recent or historical.

“When I first learned about the assignment, I was not sure where to begin or how to approach it,” said Jason Palmi, an SHSU CJ graduate student. “I wanted to be respectful of the victim and be able to properly and respectfully tell their story within my project as well as being respectful to the family.”

After a recent collaboration with the Houston Toy Museum, Clevenger was inspired to work with the Texas Prison Museum for this assignment. For Texas Prison Museum Director David Stacks, the answer was a resounding yes.

“Being a retired employee of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, and having seen the devastation of violent crime, my thoughts on the proposed partnership were quite clear and pointed,” Stacks said. “What a great opportunity to pay homage to victims of all crimes.”

Palmi, a retired sergeant for the Sacramento Police Department, says the assignment provided a broader perspective.

“During my 31-year career in law enforcement, I thought about the victims, but my main goal was identifying and arresting the perpetrator,” Palmi said. “I appreciate how this course focuses on the victim and the victim's family and friends who lost their loved one to murder.”

“Hopefully people will have more empathy for murder victims and their families,” Clevenger said. “Maybe the next time they hear a news story about someone being murdered they think about that as a person and not just someone who was murdered.”

The exhibit will be on display at the Texas Prison Museum through the end of the summer. For more information about the SHSU College of Criminal Justice’s Department of Victim Studies, click here.

Academic Community Engagement (ACE) is a teaching method that combines community engagement with academic instruction. This pedagogy encourages students to use the skills, knowledge and dispositions learned in the classroom to collaborate with community partners to contribute to the public good. SHSU offers hundreds of ACE courses within an academic year.

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