Board of Directors and Advisory Board

Board of Directors*

  • Lucius Couloute, Director
    Assistant Professor of Sociology, Trinity College (bio) From 2017-18, while working on his dissertation, Lucius Couloute worked with the Prison Policy Initiative as a Policy Analyst. He led our work examining reentry and the effects of criminalization, as well as our campaign to bring accountability to the video calling industry. Some of his groundbreaking analyses for the Prison Policy Initiative tackled homelessness, (un)employment, and educational attainment among formerly incarcerated people. His academic work has appeared in Victims & Offenders, Socius, Sociology Compass, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, and the Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy. Lucius is currently leading research projects examining the exploitation of criminalized people, the experiences of Black women with criminalized partners, identification-attainment among those leaving prisons, and guaranteed income among people with felony records. From 2019-2024 Lucius held an appointment at Suffolk University and is currently an assistant professor of sociology at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. He joined the Prison Policy Initiative's Advisory Board in 2019 and currently serves on the Prison Policy Initiative's Board of Directors.
  • Laurie Jo Reynolds, Clerk
    Policy advocate, researcher, and artist (bio) Laurie Jo Reynolds is a policy advocate, researcher, and artist who challenges the demonization, warehousing, and social exclusion of people in the criminal legal system. Reynolds was the organizer of Tamms Year Ten, the grassroots campaign to close the notorious Illinois state supermax prison, shuttered by Governor Pat Quinn in 2013. Along with Solitary Watch, she co-leads the ongoing participatory project Photo Requests from Solitary. Reynolds also coordinates the Chicago 400 Alliance, developed in collaboration with people with past convictions who have been forced into homelessness due to Illinois housing banishment laws. The alliance has demonstrated how registry laws mandate adversarial police contact and have expanded the policing, surveillance, and incarceration of poor people in Chicago. She serves on the board of Narrative Arts, the legislative team of Parole Illinois, and is the UIC faculty advisor to the YES APPLY ILLINOIS! campaign to remove invasive and humiliating questions about past convictions from the admissions process in public higher education. Reynolds is Associate Professor, Public Arts, Social Justice, and Culture, in the School of Art & Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
  • Paul Watterson, President
    Attorney (bio) Paul Watterson is counsel to a New York based law firm, Schulte Roth & Zabel. Previously he was an officer of a bank in New York and London, and he has held various government positions, including Assistant to the Mayor of New York City. He is a graduate of the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and the Law School at Harvard University.
  • Tracy Velázquez, Treasurer
    (bio)Tracy Velázquez has served as Policy Director for the Council for Court Excellence since December 2023. She has over 15 years’ of experience in the justice field, including the Pew Charitable Trusts, where she served as Senior Manager of Research, Strategy and Development for the Trusts’ Safety and Justice portfolio and at the Vera Institute of Justice, the Justice Policy Institute, and American University. Velazquez also has worked on public health issues, including as executive director of the Montana Mental Health Association, where she led advocacy efforts that resulted in the creation of a statewide suicide prevention office and funding for behavioral health services for people leaving prison. Velazquez has a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University, a Master of Science in Justice, Law and Criminology from American University and a Master of Public Policy from Montana State University. She has spoken at numerous national conferences, is an author on several peer-reviewed journal articles and has been interviewed by and had opinions published in national media, including CNN, the New York Times, NPR and the Washington Post.
  • Peter Wagner
    Executive Director (bio) Peter Wagner is an attorney and the Executive Director of the Prison Policy Initiative. He co-founded the Prison Policy Initiative in 2001 in order to spark a national discussion about the negative side effects of mass incarceration. His report, Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York, launched the national movement to end “prison gerrymandering” more than a decade ago. His research and advocacy caught the attention of the press — including 21 New York Times editorials — and led multiple states and more than 200 local governments to end prison gerrymandering.

    Under his leadership, the Prison Policy Initiative has helped propel other parts of the criminal justice reform movement forward by achieving critical victories in regulating the exploitative prison and jail telephone industry and quantifying the counter-productive effects of geography-based punishments.

    Through strategic collaborations, he has brought the need for criminal justice and electoral reform to new audiences, including authoring reports exposing the "whole pie" of mass incarceration, helping Hank Green explain the failed mass incarceration experiment in a VlogBrothers video, working with Josh Begley to put each state’s overuse of incarceration into the international context, and putting the problem of prison gerrymandering onto theatre screens nationwide.

    In recognition of the victories he led on this and other issues, he is the recipient of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ Champion of State Criminal Justice Reform Award (2013) and the American Constitution Society’s David Carliner Public Interest Award (2014).

*Organizations for identification purposes only.


Advisory Board*

  • Alec Ewald, Political Science, University of Vermont
  • Nora V. Demleitner
  • Amy Fettig, Deputy Director, Fair and Just Prosecution
  • Alex Friedmann
  • Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Earth and Environmental Sciences, City University of New York
  • Barbara Graves-Poller, City of Kingston, New York
  • Ruth Greenwood, Professor and Director of the Election Law Clinic, Harvard Law School
  • Daniel Jenkins, democracy activist, plaintiff, Longway v. Jefferson
  • Eric Lotke, attorney, researcher and author
  • Stephen Raher, attorney and researcher
  • Bruce Reilly, Formerly Incarcerated, Convicted People and Families Movement
  • Brigette Sarabi, Founder, Partnership for Safety and Justice
  • Jason Stanley, Professor of Philosophy, Yale University
  • Heather Ann Thompson, Professor of History, University of Michigan
  • Janice Thompson, Midwest Democracy Network
  • Angela Wessels
  • Brenda Wright, NAACP Legal Defense Fund
  • Rebecca Young, Attorney

In memory

*Organizations for identification purposes only.



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