Resources

toggle section menu

The following is an annotated contact list of people available to speak on the topic of incarceration from various perspectives.

(select one or multiple)

Speakers Bureau

Amber Annis, PhD Candidate
Name:
Amber Annis, PhD Candidate
Based:
Minneapolis
About:

<bio>

Tags:
Race, Scholar
Name:
Amber Annis, PhD Candidate
Based:
Minneapolis
About:

<bio>

Tags:
Race, Scholar
Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, PhD
Name:
Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, PhD
Based:
Santa Barbara
About:

Miroslava Chávez-García is Professor and Vice-Chair in the Chicana & Chicano Studies Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She received her doctorate in History from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1998. She is the author of States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (University of California Press, 2012) and Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (University of Arizona Press, 2004) as well as articles on gender, patriarchy, and the law in nineteenth century California.

Her most recent book, States of Delinquency, uses one of the harshest states—California—as a case study for examining racism in the treatment of incarcerated young people of color. Using rich new untapped archives,States of Delinquency is the first book to explore the experiences of young Mexican Americans, African Americans, and ethnic Euro-Americans in California correctional facilities including Whittier State School for Boys and the Preston School of Industry.

Currently, she is working on a family history of migration, courtship, and identity as told through over 200 personal letters exchanged among family members in the 1960s across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Tags:
Gender and Sexuality, Immigration, Scholar, Youth
Name:
Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, PhD
Based:
Santa Barbara
About:

Miroslava Chávez-García is Professor and Vice-Chair in the Chicana & Chicano Studies Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She received her doctorate in History from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1998. She is the author of States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (University of California Press, 2012) and Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (University of Arizona Press, 2004) as well as articles on gender, patriarchy, and the law in nineteenth century California.

Her most recent book, States of Delinquency, uses one of the harshest states—California—as a case study for examining racism in the treatment of incarcerated young people of color. Using rich new untapped archives,States of Delinquency is the first book to explore the experiences of young Mexican Americans, African Americans, and ethnic Euro-Americans in California correctional facilities including Whittier State School for Boys and the Preston School of Industry.

Currently, she is working on a family history of migration, courtship, and identity as told through over 200 personal letters exchanged among family members in the 1960s across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Tags:
Gender and Sexuality, Immigration, Scholar, Youth
Khalil Cumberbatch, MSW
Name:
Khalil Cumberbatch, MSW
Based:
New York
About:

Khalil A. Cumberbatch is a formerly incarcerated advocate for social justice movements within the NYC area. He has worked within the reentry community in NYC since 2010 when he was released after serving almost seven years in the NYS prison system. Since his release, Khalil has worked with various non-profits, including the Legal Action Center and JLUSA, as a service provider, policy analytic, advisor, board member, collaborator, and consultant.

Khalil graduated from CUNY Herbert Lehman College’s MSW program in May 2014 where he was awarded the Urban Justice Award for his work with underserved and marginalized communities that are negatively impacted by mass incarceration as well as high poverty and unemployment rates, lack of access to quality education, and other ineffective social “safety nets.”

Khalil currently serves as the Associate Vice President of Policy at the Fortune Society.

Tags:
Advocate, Formerly Incarcerated, Policy expert
Name:
Khalil Cumberbatch, MSW
Based:
New York
About:

Khalil A. Cumberbatch is a formerly incarcerated advocate for social justice movements within the NYC area. He has worked within the reentry community in NYC since 2010 when he was released after serving almost seven years in the NYS prison system. Since his release, Khalil has worked with various non-profits, including the Legal Action Center and JLUSA, as a service provider, policy analytic, advisor, board member, collaborator, and consultant.

Khalil graduated from CUNY Herbert Lehman College’s MSW program in May 2014 where he was awarded the Urban Justice Award for his work with underserved and marginalized communities that are negatively impacted by mass incarceration as well as high poverty and unemployment rates, lack of access to quality education, and other ineffective social “safety nets.”

Khalil currently serves as the Associate Vice President of Policy at the Fortune Society.

Tags:
Advocate, Formerly Incarcerated, Policy expert
Ronald Day, MPA
Name:
Ronald Day, MPA
Based:
New York
About:

As AVP of the DRCPP, Ronald Day oversees advocacy efforts to reduce reliance on incarceration, promote model programming for the incarcerated population, change laws and policies that create barriers for successful reintegration, and foster a just and equitable criminal justice system. He formerly served as the Director of Workforce Development for the Osborne Association where he managed youth and adult job training, and placement and mentoring programs. Ronald is a criminal justice doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center/John Jay College of Criminal Justice and an Adjunct Instructor at John Jay.

Tags:
Advocate, Formerly Incarcerated
Name:
Ronald Day, MPA
Based:
New York
About:

As AVP of the DRCPP, Ronald Day oversees advocacy efforts to reduce reliance on incarceration, promote model programming for the incarcerated population, change laws and policies that create barriers for successful reintegration, and foster a just and equitable criminal justice system. He formerly served as the Director of Workforce Development for the Osborne Association where he managed youth and adult job training, and placement and mentoring programs. Ronald is a criminal justice doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center/John Jay College of Criminal Justice and an Adjunct Instructor at John Jay.

Tags:
Advocate, Formerly Incarcerated
Marie Gottschalk, PhD
Name:
Marie Gottschalk, PhD
Based:
Philadelphia
About:

Professor Gottschalk specializes in American politics, with a focus on criminal justice, health policy, race, the development of the welfare state, and business-labor relations.

Her latest book is Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics(Princeton University Press, 2014). She is also the author of The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which won the 2007 Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, and The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Health Care in the United States (Cornell University Press, 2000).

Professor Gottschalk is a former editor and journalist and was a university lecturer for two years in the People’s Republic of China. She was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York and was named a Distinguished Lecturer in Japan by the Fulbright Program. She served on the American Academy of Arts and Sciences National Task Force on Mass Incarceration and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration. She is a contributor to the Academy's final report, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (National Academies Press, 2014).

She has a B.A. in history from Cornell University, an M.P.A. from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.

Tags:
Death Penalty, Economics and Labor, Race, Scholar
Name:
Marie Gottschalk, PhD
Based:
Philadelphia
About:

Professor Gottschalk specializes in American politics, with a focus on criminal justice, health policy, race, the development of the welfare state, and business-labor relations.

Her latest book is Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics(Princeton University Press, 2014). She is also the author of The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which won the 2007 Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, and The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Health Care in the United States (Cornell University Press, 2000).

Professor Gottschalk is a former editor and journalist and was a university lecturer for two years in the People’s Republic of China. She was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York and was named a Distinguished Lecturer in Japan by the Fulbright Program. She served on the American Academy of Arts and Sciences National Task Force on Mass Incarceration and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration. She is a contributor to the Academy's final report, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (National Academies Press, 2014).

She has a B.A. in history from Cornell University, an M.P.A. from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.

Tags:
Death Penalty, Economics and Labor, Race, Scholar
Taja-Nia Henderson, PhD
Name:
Taja-Nia Henderson, PhD
Based:
Newark
About:

Professor Henderson received her A.B. from Dartmouth College, and her J.D., M.A., and Ph.D. from New York University. At NYU School of Law, she was a Dean’s Scholar, Senior Notes Editor of the N.Y.U. Law Review, and recipient of the Gary E. Moncrieffe Graduation Award. After graduating law school, Professor Henderson served as the Derrick Bell Teaching Fellow in constitutional law at NYU School of Law and also clerked for the Hon. Consuelo B. Marshall, U.S. District Court, Central District of California.


Before joining the Rutgers faculty in 2010, Professor Henderson was an associate in the litigation group of Arnold & Porter LLP in New York, where her practice included commercial litigation and pro bono civil rights advocacy. Her teaching and research interests are in slavery, incarceration, offender reentry, law and society, and land use/property. Professor Henderson’s work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in N.Y.U. Law Review, Stanford Journal of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties, Lewis & Clark L. Rev., Columbia J. of Race & Law, the Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class, and the Law & History Review. In 2013, she was a fellow at the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History at the University of Wisconsin. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the DePaul Humanities Center, American Philosophical Society, Filson Historical Society, and the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.

Tags:
Economics and Labor, Race, Scholar
Name:
Taja-Nia Henderson, PhD
Based:
Newark
About:

Professor Henderson received her A.B. from Dartmouth College, and her J.D., M.A., and Ph.D. from New York University. At NYU School of Law, she was a Dean’s Scholar, Senior Notes Editor of the N.Y.U. Law Review, and recipient of the Gary E. Moncrieffe Graduation Award. After graduating law school, Professor Henderson served as the Derrick Bell Teaching Fellow in constitutional law at NYU School of Law and also clerked for the Hon. Consuelo B. Marshall, U.S. District Court, Central District of California.


Before joining the Rutgers faculty in 2010, Professor Henderson was an associate in the litigation group of Arnold & Porter LLP in New York, where her practice included commercial litigation and pro bono civil rights advocacy. Her teaching and research interests are in slavery, incarceration, offender reentry, law and society, and land use/property. Professor Henderson’s work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in N.Y.U. Law Review, Stanford Journal of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties, Lewis & Clark L. Rev., Columbia J. of Race & Law, the Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class, and the Law & History Review. In 2013, she was a fellow at the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History at the University of Wisconsin. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the DePaul Humanities Center, American Philosophical Society, Filson Historical Society, and the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.

Tags:
Economics and Labor, Race, Scholar
Elizabeth Hinton, PhD
Name:
Elizabeth Hinton, PhD
Based:
Cambridge
About:

Elizabeth Hinton is Assistant Professor in the Department History and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Hinton’s research focuses on the persistence of poverty and racial inequality in the 20th century United States. Her current scholarship considers the transformation of domestic social programs and urban policing after the Civil Rights Movement.

In her forthcoming book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (with Harvard University Press), Hinton examines the implementation of federal law enforcement programs beginning in the mid-1960s that laid the groundwork for the mass incarceration of American citizens. In revealing the links between the rise of the American carceral state and earlier anti-poverty programs, Hinton presents Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs not as a sharp policy departure but rather as the full realization of a shift towards surveillance and confinement that began during the Johnson administration.

Tags:
Economics and Labor, Race, Scholar
Name:
Elizabeth Hinton, PhD
Based:
Cambridge
About:

Elizabeth Hinton is Assistant Professor in the Department History and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Hinton’s research focuses on the persistence of poverty and racial inequality in the 20th century United States. Her current scholarship considers the transformation of domestic social programs and urban policing after the Civil Rights Movement.

In her forthcoming book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (with Harvard University Press), Hinton examines the implementation of federal law enforcement programs beginning in the mid-1960s that laid the groundwork for the mass incarceration of American citizens. In revealing the links between the rise of the American carceral state and earlier anti-poverty programs, Hinton presents Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs not as a sharp policy departure but rather as the full realization of a shift towards surveillance and confinement that began during the Johnson administration.

Tags:
Economics and Labor, Race, Scholar
Bob Libal, Attorney
Name:
Bob Libal, Attorney
Based:
Austin
About:

Bob Libal is Executive Director of Grassroots Leadership. Bob previously headed the group's Campaign to End Immigrant Family Detention, an effort that successfully led to the end of family detention at the notorious T. Don Hutto ”Family Residential Facility” in Taylor, Texas. He serves as co-chair of the Detention Watch Network, and as editor of the Texas Prison Bid'ness blog which monitors the private prison industry in Texas. Bob is a co-author of "A Prison is Not a Home," a chapter in the anthology Beyond Walls and Cages which analyzes the intersection of immigration and the prison industrial complex.

Tags:
Immigration, Policy expert, Youth
Name:
Bob Libal, Attorney
Based:
Austin
About:

Bob Libal is Executive Director of Grassroots Leadership. Bob previously headed the group's Campaign to End Immigrant Family Detention, an effort that successfully led to the end of family detention at the notorious T. Don Hutto ”Family Residential Facility” in Taylor, Texas. He serves as co-chair of the Detention Watch Network, and as editor of the Texas Prison Bid'ness blog which monitors the private prison industry in Texas. Bob is a co-author of "A Prison is Not a Home," a chapter in the anthology Beyond Walls and Cages which analyzes the intersection of immigration and the prison industrial complex.

Tags:
Immigration, Policy expert, Youth
Glenn Martin
Name:
Glenn Martin
Based:
New York
About:

Glenn E. Martin is the Founder and former President of JustLeadershipUSA (JLUSA), an organization dedicated to cutting the US correctional population in half by 2030. JLUSA empowers people most affected by incarceration to drive policy reform. Glenn is a national leader and criminal justice reform advocate who spent six years in New York State prisons. Prior to founding JLUSA, Glenn served for seven years as Vice President of Development and Public Affairs at The Fortune Society, one of the most respected reentry organizations in the country and six years as Co-Director of the National HIRE Network at the Legal Action Center. Glenn is Co-Founder of the Education from the Inside Out Coalition, a 2014 Echoing Green Black Male Achievement Fellow, a 2012 America’s Leaders of Change National Urban Fellow, and a member of the governing boards of the College and Community Fellowship, Prisoners’ Legal Services, the Petey Greene Program, the Reset Foundation, the New York Foundation, and California Partnership for Safe Communities.

Email:
Tags:
Advocate, Formerly Incarcerated, Policy expert
Name:
Glenn Martin
Based:
New York
About:

Glenn E. Martin is the Founder and former President of JustLeadershipUSA (JLUSA), an organization dedicated to cutting the US correctional population in half by 2030. JLUSA empowers people most affected by incarceration to drive policy reform. Glenn is a national leader and criminal justice reform advocate who spent six years in New York State prisons. Prior to founding JLUSA, Glenn served for seven years as Vice President of Development and Public Affairs at The Fortune Society, one of the most respected reentry organizations in the country and six years as Co-Director of the National HIRE Network at the Legal Action Center. Glenn is Co-Founder of the Education from the Inside Out Coalition, a 2014 Echoing Green Black Male Achievement Fellow, a 2012 America’s Leaders of Change National Urban Fellow, and a member of the governing boards of the College and Community Fellowship, Prisoners’ Legal Services, the Petey Greene Program, the Reset Foundation, the New York Foundation, and California Partnership for Safe Communities.

Email:
Tags:
Advocate, Formerly Incarcerated, Policy expert
Marc Mauer, MSW
Name:
Marc Mauer, MSW
Based:
Washington DC
About:

Marc Mauer is one of the country’s leading experts on sentencing policy, race and the criminal justice system. He has directed programs on criminal justice policy reform for 30 years, and is the author of some of the most widely-cited reports and publications in the field. The Atlantic magazine has described him as a scholar who has “reframed how Americans view crime, race, and poverty in the public sphere.” His 1995 report on racial disparity and the criminal justice system led the New York Times to editorialize that the report “should set off alarm bells from the White House to city halls – and help reverse the notion that we can incarcerate our way out of fundamental social problems.”

Race to Incarcerate, Mauer’s groundbreaking book on how sentencing policies led to the explosive expansion of the U.S. prison population, was a semifinalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 1999. A second edition was published in 2006 and a 2013 graphic novel version was cited by the American Library Association as one of the “Great Graphic Novels” of the year. Mauer is also the co-editor of Invisible Punishment, a 2002 collection of essays by prominent criminal justice experts on the social cost of imprisonment.

Tags:
Death Penalty, Economics and Labor, Race, Scholar, Solitary Confinement, Youth
Name:
Marc Mauer, MSW
Based:
Washington DC
About:

Marc Mauer is one of the country’s leading experts on sentencing policy, race and the criminal justice system. He has directed programs on criminal justice policy reform for 30 years, and is the author of some of the most widely-cited reports and publications in the field. The Atlantic magazine has described him as a scholar who has “reframed how Americans view crime, race, and poverty in the public sphere.” His 1995 report on racial disparity and the criminal justice system led the New York Times to editorialize that the report “should set off alarm bells from the White House to city halls – and help reverse the notion that we can incarcerate our way out of fundamental social problems.”

Race to Incarcerate, Mauer’s groundbreaking book on how sentencing policies led to the explosive expansion of the U.S. prison population, was a semifinalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 1999. A second edition was published in 2006 and a 2013 graphic novel version was cited by the American Library Association as one of the “Great Graphic Novels” of the year. Mauer is also the co-editor of Invisible Punishment, a 2002 collection of essays by prominent criminal justice experts on the social cost of imprisonment.

Tags:
Death Penalty, Economics and Labor, Race, Scholar, Solitary Confinement, Youth
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, PhD
Name:
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, PhD
Based:
New York
About:

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Ph.D. is professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He is the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a Harlem-based branch of the New York Public Library system and one of the world’s leading research facilities dedicated to the history of the African diaspora. Prior to joining the Schomburg Center in 2011, Muhammad was an associate professor of history at Indiana University.

Crain's New York Business chose Muhammad as one of its 40 under Forty class of 2011 honorees. In 2012, he was also listed as #49 on the Root 100.

Email:
Tags:
Economics and Labor, Race, Scholar
Name:
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, PhD
Based:
New York
About:

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Ph.D. is professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He is the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a Harlem-based branch of the New York Public Library system and one of the world’s leading research facilities dedicated to the history of the African diaspora. Prior to joining the Schomburg Center in 2011, Muhammad was an associate professor of history at Indiana University.

Crain's New York Business chose Muhammad as one of its 40 under Forty class of 2011 honorees. In 2012, he was also listed as #49 on the Root 100.

Email:
Tags:
Economics and Labor, Race, Scholar
Vivian Nixon, Reverend
Name:
Vivian Nixon, Reverend
Based:
New York
About:

Vivian Nixon is Executive Director of College and Community Fellowship (CCF), an organization committed to removing individual and structural barriers to higher education for women with criminal record histories and their families. She started at CCF in 2001 believing that lack of access to education severely impedes one’s ability to escape the cycles of poverty and criminal recidivism. She has worked in both corporate and non-profit sectors but has always had a passion for social justice. She identifies her most valued and life-changing experience as the time she spent as a peer educator in the adult basic education program at Albion State Correctional Facility in New York. Rev. Nixon is an ordained local deacon in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AMEC) and currently serves as an associate minister at Mt. Zion AMEC in New York City. She has received multiple honors including the John Jay Medal for Justice, the Ascend Fellowship at the Aspen Institute, the Soros Justice Fellowship, the Petra Foundation Fellowship, the Hudson Link for Higher Education Brian Fischer Award, the Citizens Against Recidivism Mary McLeod Bethune Award, and the Correctional Association of New York Lifting As We Climb Award. Her leadership activities include serving on the board of directors of the Fortune Society, and co-founding the Education Inside Out Coalition (EIO), a collaborative effort to increase access to higher education for justice involved students. Rev. Nixon holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the State University of New York Empire College and is currently engaged in graduate studies.

Tags:
Advocate, Economics and Labor, Gender and Sexuality
Name:
Vivian Nixon, Reverend
Based:
New York
About:

Vivian Nixon is Executive Director of College and Community Fellowship (CCF), an organization committed to removing individual and structural barriers to higher education for women with criminal record histories and their families. She started at CCF in 2001 believing that lack of access to education severely impedes one’s ability to escape the cycles of poverty and criminal recidivism. She has worked in both corporate and non-profit sectors but has always had a passion for social justice. She identifies her most valued and life-changing experience as the time she spent as a peer educator in the adult basic education program at Albion State Correctional Facility in New York. Rev. Nixon is an ordained local deacon in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AMEC) and currently serves as an associate minister at Mt. Zion AMEC in New York City. She has received multiple honors including the John Jay Medal for Justice, the Ascend Fellowship at the Aspen Institute, the Soros Justice Fellowship, the Petra Foundation Fellowship, the Hudson Link for Higher Education Brian Fischer Award, the Citizens Against Recidivism Mary McLeod Bethune Award, and the Correctional Association of New York Lifting As We Climb Award. Her leadership activities include serving on the board of directors of the Fortune Society, and co-founding the Education Inside Out Coalition (EIO), a collaborative effort to increase access to higher education for justice involved students. Rev. Nixon holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the State University of New York Empire College and is currently engaged in graduate studies.

Tags:
Advocate, Economics and Labor, Gender and Sexuality
Ronald Simpson-Bey
Name:
Ronald Simpson-Bey
Based:
Ann Arbor
About:

During his 27 years in a Michigan prison, Ronald Simpson-Bey earned a reputation as a staunch advocate, promoter and defender of prisoner rights. Today, just two years after his release, Ron continues his commitment to activism as an intern with AFSC’s Michigan Criminal Justice Program in Ann Arbor, where he’s establishing a groundbreaking prisoner co-mentorship program—the only one of its kind in the state.

Ron’s “Good Neighbor Project” will pair long-term prisoners with co-mentors on the outside. The goal of the program is to impart strong citizenship skills to the prisoners before they are released and re-enter society. “Prisons have gotten in the business of warehousing people instead of developing programs to help them become better citizens,” Ron explains. “When they get out they have few coping skills, and these people are your neighbors, church members, and people dating your sisters, brothers, and mothers.”

As a first-year goal, the Good Neighbor Project hopes to pair 100 prisoners with co-mentors. Secretly, Ron has a more ambitious goal: “I want to match 500 in the first year!”

Email:
Tags:
Advocate, Formerly Incarcerated
Name:
Ronald Simpson-Bey
Based:
Ann Arbor
About:

During his 27 years in a Michigan prison, Ronald Simpson-Bey earned a reputation as a staunch advocate, promoter and defender of prisoner rights. Today, just two years after his release, Ron continues his commitment to activism as an intern with AFSC’s Michigan Criminal Justice Program in Ann Arbor, where he’s establishing a groundbreaking prisoner co-mentorship program—the only one of its kind in the state.

Ron’s “Good Neighbor Project” will pair long-term prisoners with co-mentors on the outside. The goal of the program is to impart strong citizenship skills to the prisoners before they are released and re-enter society. “Prisons have gotten in the business of warehousing people instead of developing programs to help them become better citizens,” Ron explains. “When they get out they have few coping skills, and these people are your neighbors, church members, and people dating your sisters, brothers, and mothers.”

As a first-year goal, the Good Neighbor Project hopes to pair 100 prisoners with co-mentors. Secretly, Ron has a more ambitious goal: “I want to match 500 in the first year!”

Email:
Tags:
Advocate, Formerly Incarcerated
Heather Ann Thompson
Name:
Heather Ann Thompson
Based:
Ann Arbor, Michigan
About:

Heather Ann Thompson is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Dr. Thompson has written numerous popular as well as scholarly articles on the history of mass incarceration as well as its current impact. These include pieces for the New York Times, the Atlantic, Salon, Dissent, New Labor Forum, and the Huffington Post, as well as award-winning historical journal articles. Thompson recently served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the United States. She is the author of Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City (2001) and the forthcoming book "Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971." Thompson has consulted on several documentary films, including "Criminal Injustice at Attica," and she regularly speaks to radio and print journalists about issues related to policing, civil rights, urban crisis, and prisons.

Tags:
Economics and Labor, Scholar
Name:
Heather Ann Thompson
Based:
Ann Arbor, Michigan
About:

Heather Ann Thompson is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Dr. Thompson has written numerous popular as well as scholarly articles on the history of mass incarceration as well as its current impact. These include pieces for the New York Times, the Atlantic, Salon, Dissent, New Labor Forum, and the Huffington Post, as well as award-winning historical journal articles. Thompson recently served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the United States. She is the author of Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City (2001) and the forthcoming book "Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971." Thompson has consulted on several documentary films, including "Criminal Injustice at Attica," and she regularly speaks to radio and print journalists about issues related to policing, civil rights, urban crisis, and prisons.

Tags:
Economics and Labor, Scholar
John E. Wetzel
Name:
John E. Wetzel
Based:
Harrisburg
About:

Secretary Wetzel is widely recognized as one of the thought leaders in corrections today. With nearly 25 years of experience, his career began in Lebanon County (PA) as a corrections officer in 1989. His time there was followed by nine years at Berks County (PA) where he served as a correctional officer, counselor, treatment supervisor and finally director of the training academy. Then, in January 2002, he began his nine-year tenure as warden of the Franklin County (PA) Jail. It was there where he was credited with leading an effort that resulted in the transformation of their correctional system. Under his leadership, Franklin County saw a 20 percent reduction in their population while the crime rate declined. Franklin County was at the forefront of maximizing their correctional continuum to reduce reliance on incarceration while focusing on improving outcomes for offenders. Specifically they developed a day reporting center, established a jail industries program and initiated several programs targeting improved services for mentally ill offenders, not the least of which being a certified peer specialist program in 2006.

A national consultant and speaker whose areas of expertise include staffing, vulnerability assessment, mentally ill offenders, developing employment opportunities for formerly incarcerated offenders, population management, mitigating impacts on the families/children of incarcerated individuals and effecting system change.

He was appointed to the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons, by then-Governor Edward Rendell (D), as the board's corrections expert, where he subsequently led a change in the pardons process resulting in an increased production of the board while alleviating an elevated waiting time for applicants.

Email:
Tags:
Corrections, Policy expert
Name:
John E. Wetzel
Based:
Harrisburg
About:

Secretary Wetzel is widely recognized as one of the thought leaders in corrections today. With nearly 25 years of experience, his career began in Lebanon County (PA) as a corrections officer in 1989. His time there was followed by nine years at Berks County (PA) where he served as a correctional officer, counselor, treatment supervisor and finally director of the training academy. Then, in January 2002, he began his nine-year tenure as warden of the Franklin County (PA) Jail. It was there where he was credited with leading an effort that resulted in the transformation of their correctional system. Under his leadership, Franklin County saw a 20 percent reduction in their population while the crime rate declined. Franklin County was at the forefront of maximizing their correctional continuum to reduce reliance on incarceration while focusing on improving outcomes for offenders. Specifically they developed a day reporting center, established a jail industries program and initiated several programs targeting improved services for mentally ill offenders, not the least of which being a certified peer specialist program in 2006.

A national consultant and speaker whose areas of expertise include staffing, vulnerability assessment, mentally ill offenders, developing employment opportunities for formerly incarcerated offenders, population management, mitigating impacts on the families/children of incarcerated individuals and effecting system change.

He was appointed to the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons, by then-Governor Edward Rendell (D), as the board's corrections expert, where he subsequently led a change in the pardons process resulting in an increased production of the board while alleviating an elevated waiting time for applicants.

Email:
Tags:
Corrections, Policy expert