Latina/o/x Criminology and Justice: Pedagogy, Curriculum, Representation, and Reflections. An Introduction to the Special Issue

The United States (US) has almost two-thousand public postsecondary institutions, which provide more than thirteen million undergraduates (nearly three million of them are Latina/o/x) with what is perhaps the key to economic security in the modern economy—a degree in higher education. As the primary and most affordable access points to public postsecondary education the nation’s democracy, economy, and labor force are fundamentally founded on an educated citizenry. It is also clear that the number of Criminology and Criminal Justice (CCJ) programs, student enrollment, and faculty and staff hires have dramatically increased in the past two decades in the US (Cao, 2020; Stringer & Murphy, 2020). It is argued that this growth in CCJ reflect a historical social, cultural, and policy shift from social control to public-scrutiny about law enforcement and community relationships, especially for underresourced and marginalized minority communities (Russell-Brown, 2021; Stringer & Murphy, 2020). In essence, it can be argued that the expansive growth of CCJ in recent history is fundamentally being driven by the public and social demand for a systemic change of a criminal legal system that has historically and persistently reproduced racial/ ethnic disparities and inequality. This is important to consider while over 60,000 CCJ degrees are awarded annually and establishes that CCJ majors is much greater than many other social science disciplines (Sloan, 2019; Sloan & Buchwalter, 2017; Stringer & Murphy, 2020). This same pattern is also reflected in post-graduate degrees as well (Cooper, Updegrove, & Bouffard, 2019; Stringer & Murphy, 2020). Nevertheless, Latina/o/x individuals remain overrepresented in all aspects of the criminal legal system, yet Latina/o/x students remain underrepresented and marginalized. In a recent article by Vélez and Peguero (2023), the US Latina/o/x population