Law Students and Incarcerated Students Re-Imagining the Criminal Legal System from the Inside-Out

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

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The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program has been bringing together university students and incarcerated students for semester-long courses held inside a prison or jail for 23 years. Inside-Out’s pedagogy emphasizes dialogue and collaboration, and invites participants to become leaders in addressing injustice. The injustice in our criminal legal system is on the minds of many Americans today. Because lawyers are charged with rectifying injustice, legal educators have an obligation to prepare the next generation of lawyers for this large and complicated task. The time has come for law schools to join other higher academic disciplines in recognizing the transformative potential of Inside-Out. The Inside-Out experience provides future lawyers a complex, nuanced understanding of the system, its problems and the needs of the people who are subject to it. It is important to distinguish Inside-Out from the valuable learning opportunities provided to law students through public interest lawyering. While these opportunities teach law students to be excellent poverty lawyers, they do not bring law students closer to their clients’ lived experiences. Inside-Out’s pedagogy affords participants the opportunity to encounter each other as equals, across both structural and social barriers. As a result of the Inside-Out experience, law students (the “outside” students) are better equipped to think critically about the social impacts of their legal work. They will have had the rare opportunity to learn first-hand with and from their classmates in correctional settings (“inside students”) through their shared insights, perspectives, and experiences. Together, all students contemplate, discuss and collaborate on ideas for reforming our broken criminal legal system. This session will introduce clinicians to the transformative power of the Inside-Out experience to enhance justice learning for law students, and to inspire the next generation of lawyers to do the hard work necessary to reform our criminal legal system.