CRJ 476: Inside Out Prison Exchange

Course Description

This community-based course, taught in a local correctional facility, brings university students and incarcerated students together to study as peers. Together students explore issues of crime and justice, drawing on one another to create a deeper understanding of how these issues affect our lives as individuals and as a society. The course creates a dynamic partnership between UMD and a correctional facility to allow students to question approaches to issues of crime and justice in order to build a safer and more just society for all. The course encourages outside (UMD) students to contextualize and to think deeply about what they have learned about crime and criminals and to help them pursue the work of creating a restorative criminal justice system; it challenges inside students to place their life experiences into larger social contexts and to rekindle their intellectual self-confidence and interest in further education. (F, W).