Criminal Justice Education and Recent Events
Statement from the Seattle University Crime & Justice Research Center and Department of Criminology, Criminal Justice, and Forensics on the weaponizing of criminal justice and the role of criminal justice education in restoring trust and repairing harm.
We strongly condemn the weaponization of criminal justice organizations and actors resulting in violence, death, and collective harm. We see the fear and distress these events cause to individuals and communities in contravention of the rule of law, and support efforts to restore community trust in the justice system and repair harm.
Criminal justice education is not an endorsement of misconduct. As educators, our responsibility is to prepare students to critically, ethically, and humanistically engage with the full scope of the criminal justice system, including its failures, reforms, and accountability mechanisms.
Our students enter roles with extraordinary responsibility. Many will serve in first-responder, law enforcement, court, corrections, and victim-service positions where decisions have profound consequences for human life, rights, and dignity.
The academic discipline of criminal justice originated in response to civil rights–era reforms and exists to professionalize justice-system roles. It has become one of the fastest growing and most highly enrolled areas of study at undergraduate and graduate levels, with a student body characterized by significant racial and gender diversity. Education and professional formation are essential tools for improving practice, strengthening accountability, and advancing justice within criminal justice institutions and organizations.
Seattle University’s Jesuit tradition calls for engagement rather than disengagement. We prepare students to enter criminal justice agencies equipped to make positive change, challenge harmful practices, and improve systems from within. Exposure to a broad range of agencies is essential to informed education. It is why we engage with local, state, federal, nonprofit, and private organizations to ensure students understand the complexity of the field they are entering.
Our mission is educational rather than partisan and remains constant across political administrations. Our students’ careers in local, state, and federal agencies span political administrations; their preparation must therefore be grounded in evidence, research, and professional standards independent of political ideology. Our curriculum, events, and initiatives connect theory and research to criminal justice practice in support of Seattle University’s Jesuit mission to educate leaders for a just and humane world.
An inclusive academic environment must allow students to openly explore the full range of criminal justice career paths without stigma. When particular agencies or roles become off-limits in classroom discussions or excluded from educational forums, students may be discouraged from entering professions where ethical leadership and reform-minded service are most needed. If informed, principled individuals are dissuaded from entering these professions, the result is a narrower and less accountable workforce—an outcome that risks greater harm to society. While our curriculum, events, and initiatives include critical and abolitionist perspectives, criminal justice as an academic discipline is fundamentally concerned with preparing students for professional roles within the system, and we remain committed to supporting open inquiry across viewpoints.
January 28, 2026