When Becky Pettit first joined the faculty of UT Austin’s Department of Sociology in 2014, she was ready for a change. Throughout graduate school and her years as a professor and sociologist at the University of Washington Seattle, Pettit’s research had concentrated on racial and ethnic inequality within the criminal legal system. Now she was ready to cede the floor to other researchers and pursue other research interests.
Slowly but surely, though, the field drew her back. First a colleague asked her to work on a study of legal fines and fees in Texas, and Pettit was fascinated by Texas’ sheer size and diversity. That study then led to a partnership with Home2Texas, a program that supports summer internships. With Pettit’s collaboration, Home2Texas began sending students to their home communities to interview judges and ask questions about the criminal legal system.
By the time university administrators asked Pettit to conduct an assessment of who at UT was researching the criminal justice system, she was well placed to take on the project. What she soon discovered was that faculty and postdocs from across the university were tackling the subject from an enormous range of disciplines and perspectives — her survey identified more than 70 researchers in total across 10 colleges, schools, and units — but that more organizational support was needed to foster collaboration and engagement.
Thus was born the Initiative for Law, Societies, and Justice, of which Pettit is now advisory chair. Its stated purpose is to “bring together scholars, students, policymakers, and practitioners” on issues related to the criminal legal system, including policing, prisons and jails, policy development, and the justice system’s impact on various social and economic outcomes. If it sounds like a broad remit, that’s because it is, but the initiative is already moving projects forward across UT, the Austin community, and the state at large.
“One of the things that’s special about the initiative is being able to find the people, and they’re everywhere, who are interested in building a community of practice around these issues,” says Pettit. “It’s not just about research or just about education but it’s about system reform, getting research into the hands of policy makers and planners, and being responsive to the community.”
As an example of on-the-ground work the initiative has supported, Pettit cites researcher Lorna Hermosura’s project, Step Up Texas, which provides trauma-informed restorative justice training for school personnel and law enforcement in eight Texas counties. In part because of the initiative’s early support of Step Up Texas, Hermosura was well-positioned to support the grieving community of Uvalde in the immediate aftermath of the 2022 school shooting. That initial support has since grown into an independent project focused on restorative justice in Uvalde, led by history professor Monica Muñoz Martinez. In a full-circle moment, Martinez’s project was one of the initiative’s three grant recipients for 2022.
The initiative has also worked hard to develop new research projects and collaborations both across UT and between the university and the greater Austin community. When the City of Austin’s Office of Violence Prevention reached out to the university about conducting a study of safety in the city, for instance, Pettit and the initiative helped both to conceptualize the project and to build a team of researchers and community organizers to help complete it.
Those partnerships with community organizations are essential to the initiative’s work; without them the initiative wouldn’t exist in its current form. Their importance is reflected in the initiative’s board of trustees, which includes scholars and researchers as well as community leaders and people who have experienced incarceration first-hand. The initiative also hosts a series of community listening sessions to learn more about how the system impacts Texas residents.
“The community is at the heart of everything we do,” Pettit says. “One of the big motivators for the initiative is that Texas has the single largest prison and jail system in the U.S. Around 200,000 people are incarcerated in this state today, and we want to put that into context of what that means for the state and what that means for our students, many of whom have had contact with that system either directly or indirectly, and for their families and communities. We’ve really been trying to be mindful and to make sure that the people who are most impacted are in this conversation with us from the beginning.”
That’s not to say that the logistics of community involvement have always been easy — the background checks mandated by university policies make it difficult to involve people who have been incarcerated, for example — but Pettit says the commitment to overcome these and other obstacles runs deep.
“One reason I feel very compelled and supported to say yes when someone calls and ask for research help is that I feel like it’s not me saying yes,” Pettit continues. “I’m working together with many campus leaders who want us to be a better partner with the community.”
The initiative’s dedication to community involvement extends to its educational work. It supports projects like the Texas Prison Education Initiative, which provides low-cost college courses to incarcerated students in the greater Austin area, and is partnering with other Austin-area institutions of higher education to offer community-based classes.
Closer to home, Pettit says the initiative is developing new educational offerings at UT and involving undergraduate and graduate students in its work. The demand has long been there, Pettit says, and the initiative is happy to supply opportunities for deeper learning.
“Our students are very interested in these issues, and classes that are taught in these areas across campus are routinely full,” Pettit says, “but it hasn’t always been easy for students to identify the opportunities on campus to learn more about these criminal justice issues. The Initiative for Law, Societies, and Justice emerged from a need to make that easier.”
With the launch of a new Bridging Disciplines Program (BDP) certificate with a focus on criminal law, justice, and inequality, the initiative seems well on its way to achieving that goal. The certificate program, which accepted its first cohort of students this semester, allows undergraduate students to pursue a specialization that complements their major, and the initiative hopes the criminal law, justice, and inequality BDP — which requires 19 hours of coursework, including a research or internship experience — will help prepare students for careers in fields ranging from the criminal legal system, policy, and advocacy to education, social work, and journalism.
That range gets to the core of what the Initiative for Law, Societies, and Justice is about, both now and looking forward. Pettit and the initiative she’s helping to shape believe that examining, studying, and shaping the criminal legal system from multiple perspectives and disciplines can only improve the society we all share, and that work starts at the initiative itself.
“When I think about what we’ve done so far, I’m most proud of the way in which we’ve been able to build a network of scholars and community folks who cut across issues and also status and rank,” Pettit says. “We have undergrads from UT and Austin Community College. We have grad students for a lot of different departments, and faculty and staff from different departments too. And I think the thing that’s really important is that this isn’t about me. This isn’t my initiative. There is just so much interest and so much work to be done.”