Prison to Promise: Breaking the Cycle of Incarceration

Hear Rosalind Kabrhel, Associate Professor and Chair of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative (BEJI) as she discusses an innovative criminal justice education initiative and breakfast.

The United States incarcerates more of its population than any other country in the world. Though most people who are incarcerated leave prison and reenter society, the retributive sentencing outcomes of our legal system, along with the collateral consequences from the negative stigma of incarceration itself, prevent many from achieving success upon reentry into the general community. This doesn’t merely impact individuals; it impacts their children, their families, and their communities by preventing their full engagement with civic life.

Professor Kabrhel will discuss innovative criminal justice education in the legal studies program and how students learn through hands-on experience. Professor Kabrhel will also delve into the work of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative (BEJI), a campus-wide initiative that harnesses the power of higher education to promote positive outcomes for people emerging from incarceration. https://www.brandeisphoenix.org/events.html

Since 2019, BEJI has been an expression of Brandeis’s foundational commitments to social justice and democratic inclusion. This initiative was founded by faculty in Legal Studies and English with commitments to civil rights, community-engaged learning, and critical inquiry into the carceral system. Drawing from her experience as a law practitioner, Prof. Kabrhel also teaches courses about the criminal justice system and provides experiences for students to learn first-hand about the collateral consequences of incarceration.

The program is open to the public. For more information, contact uowbncphx@gmail.com.

Speaker Bio: Roz Kabrhel is associate professor of the practice in legal studies and program chair.  She received her BA from the University of North Carolina and her JD from The Catholic University of America.

Professor Kabrhel has been teaching at Brandeis since 2008 and has developed courses in which she draws heavily from her personal experiences as an attorney-in-practice utilizing actual case models for teaching topics in law.

Previously, she served as an Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division pursuing cases under the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act and anti-discrimination laws.   She has also worked for state and federal legislators – performing political investigations, issue advocacy, due diligence research, and legislative drafting.

She has a particular interest in cases of wrongful convictions and the social/political/legal responses to problems in our criminal justice system. In 2019, Professor Kahrbhel co-founded the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative and she will share more about it during her talk.