Justice Lessons

System-Affected Scholars and the Future of Criminal Justice Transformation

Grant Tietjen, Grant E. Tietjen

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9780520394087
• eBook ISBN: 9780520394094
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education Administration
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Subvention
• Imprint
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Just World Hypothesis Becomes an Unbalanced Equations
• 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