Broadening Access to College for Justice-Involved People: A Critical Policy Analysis of "Beyond the Box" Legislation in Maryland and Louisiana

• In Event: The Carceral University: The Intimate Relationship Between Higher Education and State-Sanctioned Policing

Abstract

The “Ban the Box” (BTB) movement, which first focused on public employment but has since expanded, seeks to decrease the structural barriers that prevent people with justice involvement from successfully reintegrating into their communities upon their release from incarceration. Two states, Louisiana and Maryland, have passed legislation that restricts and regulates when and how public colleges and universities can ask applicants about their justice-involvement history. The purpose of this study was to interrogate the underlying assumptions and conceptual logics that underpin problem representations in BTB legislation in Maryland and Louisiana. We drew on critical policy analysis (Apple, 1982) alongside Carol Bacchi’s (2012) “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) approach, both of which help researchers understand the framing of the problem to analyze how policy makers understand the issue and subsequently attempt to solve the problem, and addressed the following research questions: (a) What is the ‘problem’ represented to be in Maryland and Louisiana's BTB legislation?, and (b) What are the potential consequences of this representation of the ‘problem’? For this comparative case study, we systematically analyzed policy artifacts including legislative histories and hearings, as well as the enacted policy.

Data were analyzed using a systematic, team-based coding process. Preliminary findings indicate the issue of college access for justice-involved students in Maryland and Louisiana are consistently represented as a tractable and easily fixable “problem” rather than systemic ones. This sort of framing centralizes the problem to the question (or “box”) that alone unfairly denies applicants opportunities to pursue and realize the benefits associated with a college education. In the legislative hearings for the bills, the problem is also understood and constructed to be noncomplex—mere vestiges of the ban the box policy movement in employment. This study is timely as a growing number of states and institutions consider passing BTB policy. Indeed, findings from this study have the potential to influence policy at the ground level by underscoring that problems (like access to college for justice-involved students, which BTB aims to address) must be framed in their full context so to maximize the effectiveness of subsequent policy proposals.

Author

• Royel M. Johnson, University of Southern California