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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.