University of Puget Sound Launches New Crime, Law, and Justice Studies Minor

The CLJS program fills a need at Puget Sound that Erzen has seen emerging over the last five years, since integrating her university classes with the classes she teaches at the Washington Corrections Center for Women through Freedom Education Project Puget Sound (FEPPS), a program she co-founded with a group of incarcerated people. As part of her Prisons, Gender, and Education class, students from the university join students in the prison as co-learners and research partners, where they work together in study halls. Through this class and two others she teaches that explore crime and punishment in America, as well as by writing nearly 40 letters of recommendation for students applying to law school, Erzen has seen firsthand the increased interest and demand for opportunities to study criminal justice and law. 

But the CLJS program goes beyond a traditional criminal justice program by bringing both social justice and interdisciplinary approaches to the topic. 

“You cannot study crime, policing, and prisons without looking at how they intersect with questions of justice, fairness, and structural inequality in the U.S.,” Erzen says. “The classes are designed to explore questions that help students think about the tensions between social justice and our criminal legal system.”

The program incorporates existing courses offered by nearly every department on campus. Students can take an English class about crime novels and how they shape public perceptions of crime, and a class on traditional criminology in the sociology and anthropology department—and both count toward the minor. “One discipline cannot give us all the answers,” Erzen says. A multidisciplinary framework offers “perspectives [that] demonstrate the complexity of issues of law, crime, and justice, and force students to approach these issues in ways they wouldn’t necessarily do in a traditional criminal justice program.”

Additionally, Erzen created two classes unique to the program. The first, an introductory course, guides students through each aspect of the current criminal legal system, including interactions with police, lawyers, and judges; trial proceedings; plea bargaining and sentencing; and processing into prison. The second class has students participating in one of two experiential learning opportunities—volunteering with FEPPS in the Washington Corrections Center for Women or completing a collaborative research project about the history of the prison using information from incarcerated students and the Washington State Archives.

To complete the minor, students work on a capstone project where they conduct research for or about an organization related to their interests. For example, a student who is interested in carceral systems might choose to focus on an organization that works in the Northwest Detention Center or with a legislator involved in prison reform, while a student interested in forensics and criminology could examine how Tacoma police officers utilize forensic science. 

Erzen’s hope is that the program will set a foundation for students to enter a variety of fields, from law to nonprofit work to law enforcement, and create solutions to the criminal and social problems being faced by communities and institutions today. 

“I’ve seen so many people I first met as students in prison who are now in law school and running organizations, and I see students who first helped when we started FEPPS on campus now coming back to do things like creating film series in the prison,” she says. “These students are building the world we want to live in, one where we can begin to imagine alternatives to the way we live now and to assumptions we have about safety and punishment. It inspires me.”