Raj Jayadev is a community organizer creating a model of grassroots collective action that gives individuals facing incarceration, their families, and their communities an active role in their defense.

Jayadev’s work in criminal justice reform has grown out of his social activism work with Silicon Valley De-Bug (De-Bug), an organization he co-founded in 2001. De-Bug began as a magazine about issues affecting low-wage manufacturing, temporary workers, and it has since evolved into a multidimensional platform for community organizing, social justice advocacy, and multimedia storytelling by low-income, minority, incarcerated, and other disenfranchised communities.

Jayadev’s work in criminal justice reform has grown out of his social activism work with Silicon Valley De-Bug (De-Bug), an organization he co-founded in 2001. De-Bug began as a magazine about issues affecting low-wage manufacturing, temporary workers, and it has since evolved into a multidimensional platform for community organizing, social justice advocacy, and multimedia storytelling by low-income, minority, incarcerated, and other disenfranchised communities.

Kassandra Frederique is New York State Director at the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA).

Frederique previously ran the day-to-day operations of the statewide campaign to end New York’s racially biased marijuana arrests, which cut the number of NYC marijuana arrests in half. Frederique also represented DPA as a member of Communities United for Police Reform, which focused on addressing Stop & Frisk and broader police reform/accountability measures bridging the gap between the War on Drugs and policing.

In addition to working for policy solutions to reduce the harms associated with drug use, Frederique works with communities throughout the state to address and resolve the collateral consequences of the War on Drugs – state violence. As a co-author of Blueprint for a Public Health and Safety Approach to Drug Policy and as technical advisor to Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick’s The Ithaca Plan, Frederique cultivates and mobilizes powerful coalitions in communities devastated by drug misuse and drug criminalization to develop municipal strategies to foster healthier and safer communities.

Frederique’s professional focus includes building a reparative justice framework that positions Black and Latinx leaders to create solutions that not only end and repair the harms of the drug war but also create accountability structures between policymakers and people who use drugs. She is currently working on an emerging body of work that discusses Black recreation and drug use.

A native New Yorker, Frederique holds a M.S. in Social Work from Columbia University and earned a B.S. in Industrial Labor Relations at Cornell University.

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Alec graduated from Yale College in 2005 with a degree in Ethics, Politics, & Economics and Harvard Law School in 2008, where he was a Supreme Court Chair of the Harvard Law Review. He is the founder of Civil Rights Corps, a non-profit organization dedicated to groundbreaking systemic litigation and advocacy challenging pervasive injustices in the American criminal legal system.

Alec is the author, among other things, of The Punishment Bureaucracy, Yale L.J. F. (2019), Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers. Alec was awarded the 2016 Trial Lawyer of the Year for his role in bringing constitutional civil rights cases around the country challenging the money bail system and the 2016 Stephen B. Bright Award for contributions to indigent defense in the South. Alec’s work at Civil Rights Corps challenging the money bail system in California was recently honored with the 2018 Champion of Public Defense Award by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. His civil rights work to end modern debtors’ prisons was recently profiled in Harvard Magazine.

Alec is interested in ending human caging, surveillance, the death penalty, immigration laws, war, and inequality. He also likes playing the piano, soccer, and making weird paintings.

Samuel Sinyangwe (@samswey), 27, is a policy analyst and data scientist who works with communities of color to fight systemic racism through cutting-edge policies and strategies.

Samuel co-founded Mapping Police Violence to support activists across the country to collect and use data to fight police violence and co-founded Campaign Zero to advocate for local, state, and federal policy solutions to end police violence.

Samuel has been featured on MSNBC, CNN, BBC, LA Times, the Forbes 30 under 30 and The Root 100. Previously, Samuel worked at PolicyLink to support a national network of 61 Promise Neighborhoods communities to build cradle-to-career systems of support for low-income families.

He grew up in Orlando, FL and graduated from Stanford University in 2012, where he studied how race and racism impact the U.S. political system. sam@thisisthemovement.org

Born in 1980, Reginald Dwayne Betts was raised in Suitland, Maryland. He is married to Terese Marie Betts and the father of Micah and Miles. A poet, memoirist, and lawyer, his writing and research investigate, explore, and grapple with the central role of incarceration to the American experience.

His latest collection of poetry, Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books, 2015) received the 2016 PEN New England Award in Poetry. His first collection of poems, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, won the Beatrice Hawley Award. Betts’ memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, was the recipient of the 2010 NAACP Image Award for non-fiction. Betts has received fellowships from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies, the Open Society Institute, and New America.

He holds a B.A. from the University of Maryland; an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College, where he was a Holden Fellow; and, a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was awarded the Israel H. Perez Prize for best student note or comment appearing in the Yale Law Journal. He is a Ph. D. in Law candidate at Yale and as a Liman Fellow, he spent a year representing clients in the New Haven Public Defender’s Office.

Andrea James, J.D., is the Founder and Executive Director of the National Council For Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, Founder of Families for Justice as Healing, author of Upper Bunkies Unite: And Other Thoughts on the Politics of Mass Incarceration, a 2015 Soros Justice Fellow, and recipient of the 2016 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights award.

As a former criminal defense attorney and a formerly incarcerated women Andrea shares her personal and professional experiences to raise awareness of the affect of incarceration of women on themselves, their children and communities. Her work is focused on ending incarceration of women and girls as we know it today, and contributing to the shift to a justice system led by community solutions.

Jonathan Rapping is a nationally renowned criminal justice innovator and 2014 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellow, who moved from Washington, D.C. to Atlanta, because he found the injustice within our criminal justice system – particularly in the South – to be unacceptable.

In 2007, Rapping founded Gideon’s Promise and began an initiative to change the public defense landscape across America by grooming a generation of public defenders – many of whom are often so overwhelmed by crushing caseloads that they are unable to provide their clients the representation the Constitution demands – to rise up and fight against the injustice within our justice system.

In his quest to train and equip public defenders with the resources necessary to ensure all citizens receive their Constitutional right of “equal justice for all,” Rapping and his organization have become symbols of a new civil rights movement.

Professor Rapping received a J.D. from the George Washington University School of Law, a M.P.A. from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, and a B.A. from the University of Chicago. He is currently a Professor at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School.

Emily Bazelon is the author of two national bestsellers Charged and Sticks and Stones. She’s a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine, the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School, and a co-host of the Slate Political Gabfest, a popular weekly podcast.

Before joining the Times Magazine, Emily was a writer and editor for nine years at Slate, where she co-founded the women’s section DoubleX. Emily is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School.