Gomez is a justice-impacted graduate student at UC Irvine, in the Masters of Advanced Studies in Criminology, Law and Society program and UCI LIFTED’s program officer. She lives in Chula Vista. Reiter is a professor in criminology, law and society and at the School of Law at the University of California Irvine and the faculty director of UCI’s LIFTED program. She lives in Long Beach.
at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility keeps surprising us. LIFTED accepts junior-level students, who meet standardized application requirements that guarantee transfer admission to UC campuses; existing state and federal financial aid programs for low-income students cover students’ tuition costs. At leastwill eventually be released, as two of our students already have been.
Second, we have watched our students learn to relate to their past failures in new ways. The majority of our students never finished high school, and sought alternative communities through outlets like drugs and gangs. In their application essays to UC Irvine, nearly every one of them wrote about some aspect of these prior experiences apologetically, accepting individual responsibility for their own failures.