A woman approached a table with a sign that read Quick Loans and Pawn Shop. The agent behind the sign immediately picked up her cellphone and launched into an animated conversation.
“I’m busy! I’m on the phone!” she told the customer.
Scenes like this played out all around the large meeting room at the CUNY Graduate Center, where our Options Center held its “Inside and Out: Unlocking Success for Justice-Impacted Scholars” conference. The attendees were participating in a simulation, taking the part of people who had just been released from prison. Their goal was to get photo IDs, housing, jobs and food. But they were running into roadblocks at every turn—from unsympathetic agents to mountains of red tape.
After several minutes of hustling around the room, with little or no progress to show, the attendees sat at large tables to discuss how the simulation was going.
“Raise your hand if you ate this week,” said Professor Efraín Marimón, director of the Restorative Justice Initiative at Penn State University. He scanned the room as a smattering of people raised their hands. “Only three or four. And how are you all feeling now?”
“I’m anxious. I’m hungry. I’m angry!” said one participant, still in character. He wondered aloud why the system hadn’t arranged for him to get a desperately-needed state ID before he was released.
Many of the participants work with people coming out of the carceral system. After the simulation, one said he was shaken: “I thought I had a decent understanding of the reentry experience, but my mind is blown.”
In 2023, the federal government reversed a decades-old policy and began allowing incarcerated people to receive Pell Grants to fund their college education. The Options Center immediately began planning to serve this population with college access and success programming—to help them get into, and graduate from, higher education.
“Our reentry simulation was designed to let people experience the barriers that this population faces for their day to day needs before you even get to the college part,” said Options Center Deputy Director, Latiqua Washington. “We wanted to fully understand their requirements and the systemic barriers they face so we can ensure they have a seamless experience of access to resources.”
The conference featured a keynote by Dr. Bettina Love, whose book Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal won our Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice last year. In a rapid-fire talk, she recapped the last 40 years of US education policy, calling much of it unsupported by science.
“In the 1980s and 90s we begin to see education reform and crime reform merge and put targets on black and brown children’s backs,” she said. Then the George W. Bush years brought the No Child Left Behind Act, which instituted a system of rewards and punishments for schools based on standardized testing. “What data do they have showing closing schools will work? What data do they have that high stakes testing will work?” she asked rhetorically. “But when it comes to black bodies, the solution is always punitive.”
While her assessment of the past was scathing, she offered hope for the future: “I believe the pendulum of justice will swing back. It may not swing back as fast as you’d like, but it will swing back.” When it does, she said, our job is to be ready—not to rebuild flawed institutions like affirmative action, but to create something better.
“If we are going to think boldly and imaginatively we cannot ask for those same things,” she declared. “We cannot keep asking for the crumbs of justice and calling it justice.”