Unfinished Justice: Educational Barriers in the Lives of the Wrongfully Convicted

Wrongful criminal convictions are signs of the imperfections of the United States judicial system and epitomize the effects of an unsymmetrical fight against crime (Nowotny et al., 2022). In the opinion of Zalman et al. (2012), “no problem challenges the legitimacy of the criminal justice system more than the conviction of factually innocent individuals” (p. 51). The United States imprisons more individuals than all developed countries (The Sentencing Project, 2019; Wilcox & Taylor, 2022), with an excess of 2.1 million individuals detained in correctional facilities (Maruschak & Minton, 2017; Nowotny et al., 2022). The problem addressed by this study is the barriers exonerees face obtaining a post-secondary education and the lack of support systems intended to help exonerees in their efforts to obtain higher education (Baduria, 2022; Haimson, 2021). Currently, a limited number of support systems designated for exonerees exist after their liberation from incarceration; in reality, parolees receive more support services than exonerated individuals (Baduria, 2022). Heilbrun et al. (2020) found that most jurisdictions in the United States do not offer re-entry services to exonerated individuals. Kwakye et al. (2020) discovered that the Covid-19 pandemic brought to light severe or bleak equity gaps in education that restrict the possibilities for social and economic mobility and study inequalities in post-secondary education that must be resolved with an emphasis on confronting the persistent inequalities between some individuals.