Ginny Oshiro (she/her) is a formerly incarcerated scholar working toward her doctoral degree at UC Irvine in the Criminology, Law & Society program in the School of Social Ecology. She is a current National Health Policy Research Scholar and a Women's Policy Institute Alum.
As a formerly incarcerated scholar, Ginny has learned that her lived experience is connected to larger communities and societal structures. The realization that she and her community were being impacted by the criminalization of addiction, the deinstitutionalization and criminalization of mental illness, the making of mass incarceration, and the construction of a refractory criminal justice system that was never made to support already disenfranchised populations, radically altered her personal and academic trajectory. This injustice has fueled Ginny’s passion for critical examination of criminal justice policies and practices that are both product and cause of the oppression of vulnerable communities.
Because research has often been the catalyst for meaningful reforms in the criminal justice system, she wishes to create an opportunity for change through such policies and practices.