Reversing the School to Prison Pipeline: Justice Involved Women Students in Higher Education

• In Event: Education and Prisoner Reentry: Processes and Impact

Abstract

Unique features of women’s pathways to lawbreaking also shape their trajectories to desistance. Formerly incarcerated women face a number of barriers to successfully reentering society after prison. Along with the demands of supervision, finding employment, reuniting with children and family, and staying away from drugs, they must rescue a damaged identity.

Recent work in theorizing desistance demonstrates that personal narratives of condemnation embedded in one’s deviant identity must be replaced by narratives of desistance, wherein an individual’s life script must now be grounded in her redemption or rationale for going straight. But what makes this paradigm shift in the self a possibility? We demonstrate that the higher education environment can provide what Giordano and colleagues (2002) refer to as “hooks for change” that can accomplish the identity work involved in desistance. This study, based on interviews with women currently or recently enrolled in institutions of higher education, examines higher education as a structure within which reform can take place and where women can revise condemnation scripts into redemption scripts (see Rumgay 2003). Our findings suggest that women’s relationships with peers, professors, and other supportive individuals are crucial to the success of cognitive transformations involved in desistance work.

Authors

• Marilyn M Brown, University of Hawaii at Hilo

• Barbara E Bloom, Sonoma State University