When I presented my proposal for a “Youth Center for Social Rehabilitation” as my thesis project to my advisor at the university I clearly remember it being immediately rejected with the words “do something more likely to develop during your career Victor”. So I continued with a different project because the reality was that I did not know much about detention and correctional design at the time. Curiosly my first job was at a firm that had extensive experience with Justice projects in México and since 2009 I have fully dedicated my career to the design of the correctional environment. These days and from there on “maximum, medium, minimum security, female, male” are the types of words that most frequently surround my actual work context in a project. I truly enjoy working in the correctional design environment, it is my passion and I really think that I have made the appropriate decision for my professional path. I constantly look for the opportunity of learning more and increasing my skills in this subject. This is why the AAJ conference will be of great benefit to me, since I will get to meet people working directly in the justice design field, whose knowledge has been applied and developed in other countries. I will also be exposed to design, operations, and security matters that can give me the resources to compare, analyze and assess for future use, or in my case, to compare to current practices applied in Mexico. Although the current correctional design approaches in Mexico are often very similar to those in the US in some cases they can also be quite different; however, there is always room for improvement and providing new insights that can little by little lead to improvements. Additionally the knowledge and experience that I gain during the conference will be shared among my peers and coworkers in Mexico thus continuing to spread the knowledge.
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