By Ben Justice, Ra’Zulu Ukawabutu, and Tommie Willis

Imagine never accessing the internet, using today’s technologically advanced phones, being denied access to the information highway or simply being able to search for basic information on Google, or browse libraries. While this is unimaginable to most, it is the reality for a large percentage of individuals returning to society following incarceration.

Crafting an effective computer-use policy for New Jersey prisons is daunting, however. The work requires understanding a wide range of research from the fields of education, computing, security, and law. Moreover, the work requires analyzing existing policies not only within New Jersey, but across 49 other states and multiple countries. Most importantly, however, the work requires an understanding of the needs and experiences of incarcerated people themselves, who are rarely, if ever, represented among researchers or policymakers. Our team is excited and uniquely qualified to do this work.

  • Ra’Zulu Ukawabutu, Research Assistant, is an incoming master’s student in the Bloustein School of Public Policy.  While incarcerated in New Jersey’s Department of Corrections (DOC), Ra’Zulu earned an associate degree in liberal studies and a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Rutgers University.  Ra’Zulu has extensive experience as a certified paralegal, legal researcher, and motion and brief writer. He was the former executive director of the Inmates Legal Association, Inc. (ILA), a non-profit organization in New Jersey State Prison (NJSP) responsible for providing legal assistance to other prisoners. He has also served as the executive director of the Lifers’ Group Inc. (LG’s), a non-profit organization located in East Jersey State Prison (EJSP), Rahway, New Jersey, that is dedicated to mentoring at-risk youths, and high school and college students.
  • Tommie Willis, Research Assistant, is also an incoming master’s student in the Bloustein School of Public Policy, where his concentration is the consequences of juvenile waiver hearings and the repercussions following those hearings. Prior to this program, he was a certified paralegal, earned his associate degree in liberal studies from Mercer County Community College and bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Rutgers while incarcerated in the East Jersey State Prison system. Along with Ra’Zulu, Tommie was a participant in the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons (NJ STEP) program, a consortium of various colleges of New Jersey that support for-credit, college-level educational programming for people who are incarcerated in New Jersey prisons.
  • Benjamin Justice, Principal Investigator, is a Distinguished Professor of Education at Rutgers University and author or editor of three books and numerous articles on education, criminal justice, and history. A former high school social studies teacher, Ben is currently writing a book about how criminal legal processing in the United States is a form of civic education.

Together, we are excited to learn from each other, from research, and from model policies across the country and across the world to develop a blueprint for NJ prisons that could not only equip these returning citizens with useful computer literacy, but that would also undoubtedly reduce the rate of recidivism. New Jersey’s current policy fails to appreciate the necessity of basic computer literacy for its incarcerated citizens returning to society. Equipping returning citizens with computer literacy would provide them with a necessary skillset that would increase their chances of employment. It is our hope to give an empirical voice to the desperate need for modern computer access and training, as well as change the way justice-impacted future citizens’ brains get wired by everyday mundane psychological degradation of internet illiteracy.