Staff & Volunteers

The Prison Policy Initiative's accomplishments are those of a much larger organization. In fact, until November 2009, all of our work was done by our part-time Executive Director and the part-time volunteers he coordinated. Thanks to your support, we've added staff and our capacity to help make social change is growing quickly. Learn more about our current and past staff.

Staff

Peter Wagner, JD, Executive Director. Peter Wagner teaches, lectures, and writes about the negative impact of mass incarceration in the United States. His current focus is on demonstrating - through graphics, legal research, and state-by-state analyses - how the U.S. Census Bureau's practice of counting the nation's mostly urban prisoners as residents of the often remote communities in which they are incarcerated distorts the democratic process. The New York Times editorial board has written 11 editorials supporting his efforts to change the way prisoners are counted, and the Boston Globe identified him as the "leading public critic" of the prisoner miscount. He has presented his research at national and international conferences and meetings, including a Census Bureau Symposium, a meeting of the National Academies, and keynote addresses at Harvard and Brown Universities. Mr. Wagner's publications include Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York (2002); The Prison Index: Taking the Pulse of the Crime Control Industry (2003); and, with Eric Lotke, Prisoners of the Census: Electoral and Financial Consequences of Counting Prisoners Where They Go, Not Where They Come From, [PDF] 24 Pace L. Rev. 587 (2004).

Aleks Kajstura, JD, Legal Director Aleks began her career with the Prison Policy Initiative in 2003 helping to digitize criminal justice reports, and soon thereafter was editing our research database. She helped develop our Prisoners of the Census project and to prepare evidence for the Southern Center for Human Rights' Whitaker v. Perdue case. Last but not least, Aleks led our school zone project and was lead author of the report, The Geography of Punishment: How Huge Sentencing Enhancement Zones Harm Communities, Fail to Protect Children. After graduating from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in May 2008, Aleks assumed the position of President of the Prison Policy Initiative Board of Directors. After a clerkship at the Connecticut Superior Court, she joined the Prison Policy Initiative full-time as our legal director in November 2009.

Elena Lavarreda, a 2008 graduate of Smith College, is a part-time Research Associate. Most recently, she has co-authored reports about prison-based gerrymandering in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

Current volunteers

Olivia Cummings is a 2009 graduate of Smith College. She helps with research and media outreach 2 afternoons a week.