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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Scott Hechinger is Senior Staff Attorney and Director of Policy at Brooklyn Defender Services (BDS), one of the largest public defense firms in the country, representing about half of all those arrested in Brooklyn each year. As public defender, Scott serves in criminal court every day, advocating for thousands of low-income individuals accused of crimes ranging from low-level misdemeanors to the most serious felonies, from arraignment to trial, while bearing witness and sharing high impact stories of the everyday injustices he sees. As Director of Policy, Scott has leveraged his experience and expertise in court to lead criminal justice reform efforts outside of it on a range of issues driving mass incarceration. Scott co-founded the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, an independent 501(c)(3) that has paid bail for thousands of low-income New Yorkers so they can fight their cases from a position of freedom.

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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Radley Balko writes and reports on criminal justice, the drug war and civil liberties for The Washington Post's Opinion section. He was previously a senior writer and investigative reporter at the Huffington Post, and a reporter and senior editor for Reason magazine. He is author of the acclaimed books "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces" and "The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South" (co-authored with Tucker Carrington). His work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Mississippi Supreme Court and three federal appeals courts. He also occasionally writes about the music and culture of Nashville, Tennessee, where he lives. In 2011, the Los Angeles Press Club named Balko "journalist of the year." He has also won the Innocence Project's Journalism Award, the NACDL's Champion of Justice Award, the Bastiat Prize for Journalism, and the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project's Champion of Justice award. In 2016, Politico named him one of the 50 "thinkers, doers, and visionaries transforming American politics."

Rachel Barkow is the Vice Dean and Segal Family Professor of Regulatory Law and Policy at NYU School of Law, where she is also the Faculty Director of the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law. She is the author of Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration (Harvard University Press/Belknap). From 2013 to January 2019, she was a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission. She currently serves on the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office Conviction Integrity Policy Advisory Panel.

Rebecca Brown joined the Innocence Project in 2005 and directs its federal and state policy agenda, which seeks to prevent & reveal wrongful convictions and assure compensation for the wrongfully convicted upon release from prison. Rebecca and her team have successfully lobbied the passage of more than 150 laws at the state-level. She has also served as a Policy Analyst for the Mayor's Office in New York City and a Senior Planner at Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services (CASES), where she conducted research, evaluation and planning work around its alternative to incarceration programs.

Rebecca has presented at judicial conferences, state bar associations, and diverse criminal justice & academic conferences, and has been sought out as a subject matter expert by such high-profile media outlets as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, VICE, Slate, BBC, CBS News and the American Bar Association Journal.

Rebecca graduated from Barnard College and holds a Masters in Urban Planning, with a concentration in economic and community development from the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service at New York University, where she was the recipient of the Public Service Scholarship.

Soledad O’Brien is an award-winning journalist, speaker, author and philanthropist who anchors and produces the Hearst Television political magazine program “Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien.” O’Brien, founder and CEO of Starfish Media Group, also reports for HBO Real Sports, the PBS NewsHour, WebMD and has authored two books. She has appeared on networks, Fox and Oxygen and anchored and reported for NBC, MSNBC and CNN. She has won numerous awards, including three Emmys, the George Peabody award, an Alfred I DuPont prize and the Gracie. Newsweek Magazine named her one of the “15 People Who Make America Great.” With her husband, she is founder of the PowHERful Foundation that helps young women get to and through college. Follow her on Twitter: @soledadobrien

Rabia Chaudry is an attorney and a partner at the Chaudry and Anwer Immigration Law Firm based in Northern Virginia, where she supervises asylum cases and immigration appeals. She is well known as the co-host and co-producer of the hit criminal justice podcast Undisclosed and the political podcast The 45th, with nearly 300 million downloads combined. She is also the author of the NY Times Bestselling book, "Adnan's Story", and Executive Producer of the Emmy-nominated HBO docuseries "The Case Against Adnan Syed".

Chaudry is a recent Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), where she researched the intersection of religion and violent extremism. Prior to this, Chaudry served as an International Security Fellow at the New America Foundation (NAF), where she led a Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) community project in partnership with Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Her work at NAF focused on the empowerment of American Muslim communities in social media advocacy. She is a Vanguard Board Member of the Aspen Institute, Fellow of the Truman National Security Project, a Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute, and on the Board of the Muslim Jewish Advisory Council and the Inter Muslim Jewish Alliance. She is a frequent writer and public speaker on issues of criminal justice, national security, civil rights, and faith.

Josie Duffy Rice is a journalist and lawyer whose work is primarily focused on prosecutors, prisons, and other criminal justice issues. Currently, she is President of The Appeal, a news publication that publishes original journalism about the criminal justice system.

Josie co-hosts the podcast Justice in America with Clint Smith. She is a 2019 Type Media Fellow, and a Civic Media Fellow at University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Appeal, Slate, Gawker, Ebony, and Spook Mag, among others.

Previously, she was a staff writer at Daily Kos, where she covered prosecutors and criminal justice. She is also the co-founder and former editor-in-chief of Seven Scribes, a website that featured essays, fiction, interviews, investigative journalism, and cultural analysis by young writers of color. Josie previously worked on voting rights and criminal justice policy at the Center for Popular Democracy.

Josie’s a graduate of Harvard Law School and received her bachelor’s degree from Columbia University. She lives in Atlanta with her husband and son.

Tom Meagher is the managing editor for digital and data journalism. A veteran reporter and editor, he previously led an interactive team for the Digital First Media newspaper chain and was the data editor at the Newark Star-Ledger. He got his start in journalism covering night cops for a small daily paper in Kansas. Meagher's reporting at The Marshall Project on crime trends won a Data Journalism Award, and his work on The Next To Die covering executions in America received the international Malofiej's first human rights special award.

Nico Pitney is political director at NowThis, which is regularly the most-watched news outlet on social media in the world. Each month, NowThis averages over 2 billion views and reaches 60% of U.S. 18- to 34-year-olds. Previously, Nico was executive editor, Washington bureau chief, and VP of product at HuffPost. He was a founding editor of ThinkProgress and deputy research director at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C.

Erin L. George is the Civil Rights Campaigns Director at Citizen Action of New York where she advances statewide legislative and policy campaigns to end mass criminalization and incarceration and transform New York's justice system. Citizen Action’s campaigns build collective power to advance bold policy solutions that achieve structural change, dismantle root drivers of oppression and advance racial equity and justice. Much of Erin’s current work focuses on jail decarceration, overhaul of pretrial laws and practices (bail, discovery) and district attorney accountability. Prior to joining Citizen Action, Erin coordinated the #CLOSErikers and #FREEnewyork campaigns at JustLeadershipUSA, and worked to advance immigrant rights, health justice and environmental justice at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. Erin has worked on campaigns to end the drug war and advance justice for people who use drugs and as an advocate for youth and families impacted by the criminal legal and child welfare systems. Erin has a Masters in Social Work and Minor in Public Policy from Columbia University. Follow her on twitter @erinleighgeorge.

Danielle Sered envisioned, launched, and directs Common Justice. She leads the project’s efforts locally and nationally to develop and advance practical and groundbreaking solutions to violence that advance racial equity, meet the needs of those harmed, and do not rely on incarceration. Before planning the launch of Common Justice, Danielle served as the deputy director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s Adolescent Reentry Initiative, a program for young men returning from incarceration on Rikers Island. Prior to joining Vera, she worked at the Center for Court Innovation's Harlem Community Justice Center, where she led its programs for court-involved and recently incarcerated youth.

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun, (with Marwan Hisham). Her reportage has been published in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. She has been the recipient of a Yale Poynter Fellowship, a Front Page Award, was shortlisted for a Frontline Print Journalism Award and longslisted for a National Book Award. She is often asked to discuss her work chronicling the conflicts of the 21st Century, and has appeared on All In with Chris Hayes, Amanpour, NPR, BBC News, and more. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the United States Library of Congress and the New York Historical Society. She recently concluded the Spring 2019 artist in residence at NYU's Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies

Jamil Smith is a Senior Writer at Rolling Stone, where he covers national affairs and culture. His career has run the gamut from politics to sports and back again, from Emmy Award-winning work as a producer with NFL Films and MSNBC to reporting and commentary for the New Republic and MTV News, where he also hosted podcasts. His work has been featured on the cover of Time, on the airwaves at WNYC and KCRW, and on the opinion pages of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post

William spent nearly 10 years on the public policy and comms teams at Google in Europe, Asia and the U.S. He was head of public policy for Google in Pakistan and Hong Kong, and ran their APAC public policy campaigns team. In the U.S. he worked on their corporate communications team and was a company spokesperson on topics including anti-trust, copyright, litigation and a range of complicated problems for the company. He now runs the Worker Agency, an advocacy campaigns company based in San Francisco. They represent clients including RAICES, Mijente, the Justice Teams Network and Gig Workers Rising. William grew up in Ireland and had been living in the U.S. since 2015.

Nick Encalada-Malinowski joined VOCAL-NY in April 2017 to work on our Criminal Justice and Civil Rights Campaigns, which include ending Broken Windows policing, closing the jails on Rikers Island and removing barriers for people on parole, among other issues. Before joining VOCAL, Nick worked at Brooklyn Defender Services, where he focused on policy issues, client engagement and community outreach.

Khalil A. Cumberbatch currently serves Chief Strategist at New Yorkers United for Justice. He previously served as Associate Vice President of Policy at the Fortune Society, a reentry organization whose goal is to build people and not prisons; as well as Manager of Trainings at JustLeadershipUSA, a national non-profit dedicated to cutting the US correctional population in half by year 2030. He is also a lecturer at Columbia University School of Social Work.

In December 2014, after being held for five months in immigration detention, Khalil was one of two recipients to receive an Executive Pardon from NYS Governor Andrew Cuomo to prevent his deportation from the United States.

Lisa Schreibersdorf is the founder and Executive Director of Brooklyn Defender Services ("BDS"), a public defense organization that represents 30,000 people each year who face the loss of liberty and separation from their families in criminal, child welfare and deportation proceedings. BDS attorneys and service providers also provide critical legal and related services in education, housing, and benefits matters. Ms. Schreibersdorf spearheaded the policy and advocacy work of BDS by creating a centralized policy unit that advocates for needed change in the many forums that prosecute and punish Brooklyn’s communities of color.

Derrick Hamilton is an advocate, an exoneree, and co-Founder of Family and Friends of the Wrongfully Convicted. During more than two decades incarcerated, convicted of a murder he did not commit, he earned a high-school-equivalency diploma, took a class on how to conduct legal research, and became a reknowned “jail-house lawyer.” While incarcerated, he also strategically used media and movement building to win his own early release after 21 years in 2011, initially on parole, after working to organize a protest outside Brooklyn State Supreme Court and catching the attention of the Daily News, who wrote a powerful story about his case. Four years later, in 2015, he was exonerated and finally cleared his name.

Since his release, he has continued his fight for justice in individual cases, writing legal briefs, investigating, and working with families and friends of individuals incarcerated to tell more nuanced and complicated stories about their loved ones. Hamilton also collaborates with local and national organizations, like the Innocence Project, to fight for broader systemic changes, most recently helping to lead the successful fight to overhaul New York state’s unfair criminal discovery rules, which allowed prosecutors to withhold evidence and which, in part, led to his wrongful conviction.

Bianca is the Founder & Executive Director of Worth Rises (@worthrises), where she combines her direct experience with the criminal legal system and expertise in financial and legal services to challenge the prison industrial complex. She coordinates the #ZeroProfits coalition in New York City, which successfully passed legislation that made phone calls free from city jails, a national first. As a national leader in the prison phone justice movement, Bianca supports campaigns to eliminate or considerably reduce the cost of calls from prisons and jails across the country.

Previously, Bianca worked for the Brennan Center for Justice, Campaign to End Mass Incarceration at the American Civil Liberties Union, and co-founded College Pathways at Rikers Island, a preparation program for incarcerated students interested in pursuing higher education. Bianca has also worked at various state and local corrections agencies, including New York City, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, and consulted to the Association of State Correctional Administrators. Before committing her career to justice, Bianca worked as a financial analyst at Citigroup and Morgan Stanley

Bianca is a Galaxy Leader and has been an Equal Justice Works Fellow, Harvard University Presidential Public Service Fellow, Ford Foundation Public Interest Fellow, Paul & Daisy Soros New American Fellow, and an Education Pioneers Analyst Fellow. Bianca holds a B.A. from Columbia University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

As Chief Policy Counsel, Scott oversees The Bronx Defenders public policy agenda, coordinating and advancing policy reform work across the criminal, family, social work, immigration, and civil practices. He manages The Bronx Defenders' criminal justice reform efforts in the areas of bail, discovery, and speedy trial and is also lead counsel on Trowbridge v. DiFiore, a federal civil rights case challenging delays in misdemeanor cases in Bronx Criminal Court. Scott previously developed and managed The Bronx Defenders Marijuana Arrest Project and The Bronx Defenders Fundamental Fairness Project. Scott graduated from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Affairs and received his J.D. in 2007 from Harvard Law School, where he was the Special Projects Editor for the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. He clerked for the Honorable Nancy Gertner in the Federal District Court of Massachusetts before joining The Bronx Defenders.

Yung-Mi was born in Korea and spent six years of her childhood in Uganda, East Africa. She received her bachelor of arts degree from the University of Chicago and her juris doctorate degree from Boston University School of Law.

Yung-Mi began her legal career as a law secretary to the Honorable Ellen L. Koblitz of the Superior Court of New Jersey. As a law secretary she mediated small claims cases, researched and wrote bench memoranda, and drafted legal opinions. When her clerkship ended, Yung-Mi pursued her interest in criminal defense work and joined the Law Offices of Brian J. Neary, an AV rated criminal defense firm in Hackensack, New Jersey, where she worked for more than four years. She appeared in municipal, state, appellate and federal courts handling a wide variety of cases ranging from homicides to juvenile delinquency proceedings to traffic matters. She was also a part time public defender in the Closter Municipal Court.

Yung-Mi then moved to New York City and became a staff attorney at Neighborhood Defender Services of Harlem. Her cases included both felonies and misdemeanors. In August, 1998, she joined BDS where she is a supervising attorney

Topher Sanders covers race, inequality and the justice system for ProPublica. In 2019, he was part of a team that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Public Service and won the Peabody and George Polk awards for their coverage of President Trump’s family separation policy. In 2018, he and reporter Ben Conarck received the Paul Tobenkin award for race coverage and the Al Nakkula award for police reporting for their multi-part investigation “Walking While Black,” which explored how jaywalking citations are disproportionately given to black pedestrians. His reporting has won a number of other national awards including a NABJ Award, an Online Journalism Award, the John Jay College/Harry Frank Guggenheim award for excellence in criminal justice reporting and he is a two-time winner of the Paul Tobenkin award for coverage of racial intolerance and discrimination.

In 2016 Sanders co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit working to increase the number of investigative reporters and editors of color. He is a graduate of Tuskegee University and started his journalism career at The Montgomery Advertiser in Montgomery, Alabama.

Andrea Nieves (she/her) is a Senior Policy Attorney at New York County Defender Services (NYCDS). She graduated from Occidental College and New York University School of Law. While in law school, Andrea participated in the NYU Capital Defender and Juvenile Defender clinics, experiences that cemented her commitment to advocating for the rights of people accused of crimes. Andrea previously worked as a capital defense attorney at both the Center for Death Penalty Litigation and Fair Trial Initiative in Durham, North Carolina where she represented people accused of capital murder at trial and in their post-conviction appeals. Before joining NYCDS she was the Senior Policy Attorney at Brooklyn Defender Services and Senior Legal Counsel at The Justice Collaborative.