Reading “Women Don’t Riot” After the Riot: Creating a University-Prison Collaboration

We examine a case study of a collaboration between a University and a Women’s Correctional Institution: an Inside Out college course that brings together incarcerated and traditional students. We analyze the creation of a class in the aftermath of a riot in the region and in the ongoing context of internal and external reforms. We provide specific examples of mistakes, lessons learned, and the impact of our pedagogical values and techniques, and provide links to our class materials. We emphasize communication between the institutions, from the students to instructors, among the instructors, and from instructors to students. In the classroom, we exploit our expertise and our non-expertise as learners together to break down perceived barriers. We also emphasize the value of self-care and recognition of all students as agentic. We conclude with a call for future research that attends to student agency and that examines who benefits from prison-university partnerships

‘Nobody Worries about our Children’: Unseen Impacts of Sex Offender Registration on Families with School-age Children and Implications for Desistance

The current paper presents findings from a qualitative study using a web-based survey (n = 58) and open-ended interviews (n = 19) to investigate the impact of sex offender law and policies on family members of convicted sex offenders. Specifically, this paper discusses the impact sex offender policies and ‘extra-legal’ restrictions made by employers and landlords on housing and income stability, as well as impacts on family dynamics: a far less examined consequence of sex offender laws. Participants described how their children missed out on family bonding activities due to restrictions placed on their registrant parent, such as having their father attend school events, taking their children trick-or-treating, and going on family vacations. Responses indicated that policies intended to protect children and families are in reality tearing these family members’ lives apart. As a result, registrants and their families experienced social rejection and isolation, both of which are obstacles in the process of desistance from offending behavior and successful reintegration. Experiences of these family members shed light on the unintended punitive consequences of current sex offender policy and the critical need for reform