AAACE 2021 Annual Conference

reentry, citizenship rights, social injustice

In the United States, there are many citizens who do not possess citizenship rights and have become what some scholars and activists refer to as marginalized citizens. The current research discusses the employment of CRT as a lens to analyze the reentry community participants’ and their perspectives on citizenship rights.

A social injustice with race centered is directly related to the alarming number of blacks who have lost their citizenship rights as a result of criminalization in the U.S. Upon conviction, these individuals lose the right to vote; the right to bear arms; right to participate on a jury; the right to serve as a fiduciary and travel is often restricted to the state of residence. Many returning residents serve their time for the accused crimes, but do not obtain restoration of their citizenship rights. Reentry programs have been employed nationwide to assist returning citizens with successfully reintegrating into society. Most scholarly research on reentry discusses successful reintegration as the need for housing, employment and reduced recidivism. I argue reentry to the community remains unsuccessful without the restoration of citizenship rights. In this roundtable session, I will discuss how not having citizenship rights are socially unjust as people of color; specifically blacks in our society are overrepresented. In the current research, CRT is used as the critical lens needed for analyzing the reentry participant’s past education in social studies on citizenship to answer the research question “What are the reentry participant’s perspectives on citizenship education and restoration?"