Armando Lizarraga
For Armando Lizarraga growing up, family trips involved going to visit his father in prison.
“When my dad was incarcerated, we never talked about it,” Lizarraga recalls of how his family dealt with his father’s status as an inmate of the California correctional system. “It was something that kind of happened.”
It wasn’t until Lizarraga got to college that he began to fully understand the profound impact that his father’s incarceration had on his childhood and education. A pivotal moment came in 2016, when Lizarraga transferred from El Camino Community College to UCLA. There, he discovered an organization called Underground Scholars, which provides support to students who are formerly incarcerated or who — like Lizarraga — have somehow been impacted by America’s criminal justice system.
Lizarraga’s involvement in the group ultimately led him to embark on his current research project as a doctoral candidate in educational leadership and policy at The University of Texas at Austin. There, Lizarraga is examining a program that requires women parolees in Texas to pay back special student loans for incarcerated people as a condition of their parole. If they fail to do so, they could be reincarcerated.
Lizarraga’s supporters say his research offers valuable insights into the intersection of incarceration, gender, and student debt.
“His research reveals the injustices embedded within current financing systems and highlights how policies intended to increase access can instead further marginalize and oppress those they aim to help,” says Dr. Denisa Gándara, associate professor of educational leadership and policy and Lizarraga’s advisor and committee chair at The University of Texas at Austin. “His work has the potential to inform future policy design at both state and federal levels.”
Dr. Stella Flores, the John E. Cawthorne Millennium Chair Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Higher Education at Boston College, says Lizarraga is tackling a difficult subject that often gets overlooked. Flores was formerly a professor at UT Austin.
“Armando is one of our most fearless graduate students, taking on the hard truths and myths of incarceration with compassion, empathy, and clarity,” Flores says. “His dissertation proposal on incarcerated women is already award-winning, and its early evidence forces us to confront injustices too long ignored as a matter of history and current public policy.
“Most importantly, his work reminds us that research is not only for the academy — it can be an instrument for dignity and change when properly supported and implemented,” Flores adds.
Lizarraga’s groundbreaking research project likely never would have happened were it not for his discovery of Underground Scholars during his time as an undergraduate at UCLA.
“When I was at UCLA, I got really involved with this group and kind of started to unpack what incarceration was, and the impact that it had over my education,” Lizarraga says. As he got to know students who were reinventing themselves through education after being incarcerated, Lizarraga began to see commonalities in their lives. They built bonds on the strength of the fact that he is the child of an incarcerated parent.
“So that’s kind of what sparked that interest,” Lizarraga says of what led to his research project on women parolees facing the threat of being locked up for not paying back their student loans.
Lizarraga says the aim of his research is to “humanize policy.”
“I’m looking at the potential predatory nature of this loan and how it plays out in the lives of incarcerated women,” Lizarraga says.
That task will be easier to do thanks to one of the women parolees he met while in the early stages of his research.
“I said, ‘Do you know anybody that has been reincarcerated for nonpayment?’” Lizarraga recalls of their encounter. “And she’s like, ‘You’re looking at her.’ So then I was like, ‘Well, okay, let’s talk about it.’”
Now, Lizarraga is on a mission to make sure these women’s stories don’t get overlooked in policy discussions about student debt.
“We say that we want to reimagine education, and we always think about it in the context of a university or college,” Lizarraga says. “But we don’t think about learning in college happening inside a carceral facility. It’s ‘out of sight, out of mind.’”
