“This is Part of my Final Grade”: A LatCrit Critique of Prison Tours as Pedagogical Tools in Criminal Justice Education

Abstract

The proliferation of criminal justice programs brings new pedagogical challenges for educators who look for innovative ways to help students build lasting connections between theory, research, and practice. Prison tours are a well-known experiential learning practice in criminal justice courses. Educators have emphasized the benefits of using prison tours in providing students with first-hand knowledge of the criminal justice system, but critics have questioned their educational value, and the subjectivity of students’ personal experiences are rarely considered. In this article, I use LatCrit to problematize the use of prison tours as pedagogical tools in criminal justice courses, focusing on my status as a Latinx scholar and educator. I combine counter-story telling and autoethnography to highlight my own prison tour experience. I question the educational benefits of prison tours and discuss the potential harms they can cause Latinx students who have previously come into contact with the criminal justice system.

Keywords:

• Prison tours
• LatCrit
• experiential learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Throughout this article, I use the term Latinx to describe and refer to those who are of Latin American descent. The use of this term is not without controversy, as research and public media have demonstrated heterogeneity in how individuals of Latin American descent self-identify (Noe-Bustamante, Mora, & Lopez, 2020). I explicitly use the term Latinx because of its ability to allow me to remain neutral in terms of gender, sexuality, region, socioeconomic status, race, and age. While the Latino/a or Hispanic are also commonly used, I do not use Hispanic due to its explicit reference to Spanish colonization and do not use Latino/a, though a pan-ethnic label, as it does not provide visibility to differences in self-identification.

2 Importantly, it should be noted that, similar to many other academic disciplines, criminology and criminal justice continue to fall victim to White ideological foci in research and teaching, with the work of White scholars serving as canon for the entire discipline. Because of this, diverse, non-White perspectives like the one presented here, are rarely centralized. As such, the intervention presented here directly builds upon the work of both Latinx and Black criminologists (see for example: León, 2021).

3 While the term “racial anxiety” has been used to describe the racial fear White people experience during interracial interactions, it has also been used to describe the anxiety BIPOC people experience when presented with the possibility of discriminatory treatment or racial microaggressions during interracial interactions (Godsil, 2015, 2017; Godsil, Tropp, Goff, & Powell, 2014; Richardson, 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kay S. Varela

Kay S. Varela is a Presidential Postdoctoral Scholar in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on Critical Race Theory; critical criminology and punishment; risk assessment; and qualitative methods. Specifically, her research focuses on the ways in which race, class, and gender impact perceptions of and experiences with public and personal safety.