Since the 1990s, the community of scholar-activists who have had contact with the criminal legal system has grown rapidly, solidifying into an international movement. Drawing on in-depth conversations with system-affected academics as well as his own experience with incarceration, Grant E. Tietjen traces the history, positive impacts, and future promise of this movement. By offering networks of support to system-affected people seeking higher education and using the perspectives afforded them by their lived experiences to push their disciplines forward, the movement effects reciprocal changes between the individual and the entire institution of higher education. These changes, Tietjen argues, ripple outward and stand to contribute to the wider movement against carceral responses to harm.

About the Author

Grant E. Tietjen is Associate Professor in the School of Social Work and Criminal Justice at the University of Washington Tacoma.

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System-affected academics are building a movement — and transforming the academy

In October of 2002, I was sitting in the commons area of a cellblock in the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City, waiting my turn to catch a prison plane to my assigned penitentiary. I was both stressed out and exhausted, wired with anxiety.

Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations

Introduction: The Just World Hypothesis Becomes an Unbalanced Equation
1. Finding Out That the Door Is Open
2. The Journey of Higher Education
3. Building a Prison-to-School Pipeline: We’re Connected
4. Reaching Hearts and Minds and Eliminating the Social Need for Incarceration
5. The Academic and Public Voice: Writing in the SAA Movement
6. Retroflexive Transformation: Finding a Place and Creating Space

Appendix A: Terminology
Appendix B: Research Methodology
Notes
References
Index

Reviews

"This well-researched and well-written book examines the careers of scholars affected by the criminal justice system. Grant Tietjen does so not from a redemption narrative perspective, but from the perspective of empowerment. Justice Lessons presents a social movement of system-affected academics who use higher education to fight for equality and opportunity for fellow peers with carceral contact. The book also presents a hopeful vision for progressive change that happens when system-contacted students and scholars organize."—Jeffrey Ian Ross, author of Introduction to Convict Criminology

“It takes great courage to write about your experience of imprisonment, and it takes real intelligence to generate a new criminological project from this unusual involvement. There’s plenty of both in Justice Lessons, and by including diverse criminological insights from other academics with experience of the criminal legal system, Tietjen adds generosity. Everyone can learn something from these lessons.”—Rod Earle, author of Convict Criminology: Inside and Out

"The injection of lived experience into criminological scholarship and education has saved the field of criminology from itself—and from near-certain demise. Among the many incredible contributions of this long-anticipated new book is the way Tietjen chronicles this remarkable story of criminology’s redemption. We all owe him and the lived experience movement our thanks."—Shadd Maruna, author of Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives

"Through interviews with system-affected academics, Tietjen interweaves personal experiences as a system-affected individual with cutting-edge scholarly articulation of why the legal system must be radically transformed. This book underscores the very reason why those closest to the problem need to be part of the solution."—Calvin John Smiley, author of Purgatory Citizenship: Reentry, Race, and Abolition

"Justice Lessons is a powerful treatise against an increasingly neoliberalized ivory tower that devalues the lived experiences of those who walk its halls. Tietjen provides a paradigmatic and novel framework to underscore the power and intelligence of system-affected scholars and students by arguing for including organic knowledge within academic discourses. This book is a sobering and unique commentary on diversity and inclusion processes in higher education."—Jason M. Williams, coeditor of Abolish Criminology

About the Book

About the Author

From Our Blog

System-affected academics are building a movement — and transforming the academy

Table of Contents

Reviews