(In)Justice in Higher Education: A Normative Analysis of College Access for People With Conviction Histories

• In Event: Examined Pasts, (Un)Certain Futures in Higher Education

Abstract

In this paper, we advance an empirically-grounded normative argument for expanding college access and inclusion for students with histories of involvement in the criminal legal system. Our normative argument proceeds through several steps. First, we establish that exclusion of people with arrest/conviction histories from higher education is a problem of justice that warrants greater attention from scholars and practitioners, drawing on extant empirical research. Second, we identify the normative assumptions that policies and practices of exclusion in this context rely on. We, then, analyze the empirical and ethical grounding of each of these assumptions. Through this analysis, we appeal to three theoretical dimensions of justice: racial, economic, and epistemic.

Authors

• Rebecca M Taylor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Nicole Lindahl-Ruiz