The Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination will co-sponsor a brown bag seminar focusing on voting rights restoration in New Jersey, "To Vote Has Value to the Soul: The Protector for all Other Rights," with the Princeton Prison Teaching Initiative (PTI) on Monday, March 2, 2020, at 12:00 p.m., in 019 Bendheim Hall. The seminar will feature Ronald Pierce, Democracy and Justice Fellow at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. Participants should bring their own lunch. To attend the session, RSVP online.

Ronald Pierce was named the inaugural Democracy and Justice Fellow at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice (NJISJ) based in Newark, NJ, in 2018. The Democracy and Justice Fellowship is awarded to a previously incarcerated person who has demonstrated great compassion and advocacy for individuals in prison and those released. The two-year program provides gainful employment and networking opportunities for a talented and dedicated person who has a felony conviction. As a Democracy and Justice Fellow, Pierce is working to tear down the many barriers to re-entry. While the lack of housing and employment present tremendous challenges for those newly released, Pierce believes restoration of voting rights is the greatest concern. A healthy democracy demands full, unfettered civic engagement, according to Pierce, who last casted a vote in 1985. (Read more about Mr. Pierce's journey from incarceration to Democracy and Justice Fellow online at: https://bit.ly/2HNGqTO). 

The LISD-PTI Brown Bag Series is a new initiative jointly launched in the Fall of 2019 by the Liechtenstein Institute and Princeton University's Prison Teaching Initiative, and is meant to foster discussion of both prison pedagogy and the contemporary landscape of incarceration reform and abolition among the wider Princeton community. The Prison Teaching Initiative seeks to bridge Princeton University’s academic and service-driven missions by providing the highest quality post-secondary education to incarcerated students in New Jersey; offering Princeton University graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and staff innovative, evidence-based pedagogy training and the chance to diversify their teaching portfolios through intensive classroom experience; and fostering a robust campus dialogue on mass incarceration and its relationship to systemic inequalities in access to education. LISD currently supports two PTI graduate student fellowships.