Staff & Volunteers
The Prison Policy Initiative's accomplishments are those of a much larger organization. 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 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 four 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.
Some of his most recent work has brought the need for criminal justice and electoral reform to new audiences, including reports exposing the entire mass incarceration pie, 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).
He is @PWPolicy on Twitter.
Aleks Kajstura, JD, Legal Director. Aleks has worked with the Prison Policy Initiative in various capacities since 2003, and has been our legal director since 2009.
A 2008 graduate of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Aleks played a central role in building the Prison Policy Initiative’s campaign against prison gerrymandering, including her publication, Prison Gerrymandering in Massachusetts: How the Census Bureau prison miscount invites phantom constituents to town meeting. Aleks has also led the organization's work on its second major issue, sentencing enhancement zones, authoring The Geography of Punishment: How Huge Sentencing Enhancement Zones Harm Communities, Fail to Protect Children and Reaching too far: How Connecticut’s large sentencing enhancement zones miss the mark.
Aleks continues to shed light on other hidden aspects of mass incarceration, for example sparking a New York Times editorial by highlighting mass incarceration's impact on women in States of Women's Incarceration: The Global Context.
In her spare time, Aleks plays hockey, competes in triathlons, and serves on the Finance Committee for the Town of Sunderland.
Bernadette Rabuy is the Senior Policy Analyst at the Prison Policy Initiative. Bernadette’s research has focused on prison and jail visitation and making key criminal justice data accessible to the public. She co-authored the first comprehensive national report on the video visitation industry, Screening Out Family Time: The for-profit video visitation industry in prisons and jails, which has played a key role in protecting in-person family visits in Portland, Oregon and the state of Texas from the predatory industry. Her research was also essential to the movement that led the largest video visitation provider, Securus, to stop its automatic bans on in-person visits.
Bernadette has analyzed key Bureau of Justice Statistics data to make the criminal justice system easier to understand and therefore reform. She co-authored the report, Prisons of Poverty: Uncovering the pre-incarceration incomes of the imprisoned, which for the first time provides national income data for incarcerated women and Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2016, which answers essential questions like how many people are locked up, where, and why.
Bernadette is a graduate of University of California, Berkeley and has previously worked with the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, Voice of the Ex-Offender, and Californians United for a Responsible Budget. You can say hi at @BRabuy.
Wendy Sawyer is the Policy Analyst at Prison Policy Initiative. Wendy earned a Master’s in Criminal Justice from Northeastern University and a Bachelor’s in Afro-American Studies from the University of Massachusetts. She has worked as an investigator for the Civilian Complaint Review Board in New York and as a research associate for the Institute on Race and Justice in Massachusetts. She is the author of Punishing Poverty: The high cost of probation fees in Massachusetts, a report comparing probation rates and incomes across the state, which shows that probation fees hit poor communities hardest.
Lucius Couloute is our Policy & Communications Associate and leads our work bringing accountability to the video visitation industry.
He is also working on a PhD dissertation at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst examining the role of race and insecure employment experiences during prisoner reentry. His academic work has appeared in Sociology Compass and his most recent analysis for the Prison Policy Initiative tackled the unique harms of putting older people in solitary confinement.
Students, interns and volunteers
Alex Clark is a Summer 2017 research intern at the Prison Policy Initiative. Alex completed a number of (to-be-published) projects about campaign finance, the monopoly dominance of certain companies that sell phone calls to the families of incarcerated people, and worked with Solitary Watch on a forthcoming report. Her written work includes New data: The rise of the “prosecutor politician” and Seizing Chicago: Drug stings and asset forfeiture target the poor. In September, she will be spending the semester abroad in Beijing as a junior studying international affairs at George Washington University. She is also working on a double minor in Political Science and Ethics.
Stephen Raher is a lawyer in Oregon who works with us through our Young Professionals Network on projects at the intersection of criminal justice and finance or criminal justice and telecommunications. He wrote our report on the abusive release card industry and our comprehensive reply to sheriffs about their claim that they need to make money on phone calls home from their facilities.
Emily Widra will graduate from the Smith College School of Social Work in August 2017. During the 2015-2016 year, she interned with us one afternoon a week helping on various research projects, including a collecting historical crime data and organized criminal justice survey datasets to fuel future reports. She continues with us on a part-time basis and has published blog posts on what the psychology research says about the limits of video visitation technology, an analysis of Travis County, Texas' experiments replacing in-person visitation with video visitation, and why Black women are disproportionately affected by HIV.
Consultants
Bill Cooper helps us access and analyze geographic and demographic data.
Bob Machuga designed our new site and has developed our new branding in addition to making videos and maps about prison-based gerrymandering for us.
Jordan Miner develops the code behind some of our interactive features and internal tools. He made our map of sentencing enhancement zones in Hampden County Massachusetts interactive, upgraded our Prisoners of the Census FAQ, and created a lot of clever little features that help various parts of our websites talk to each other. Jordan lives in Illinois.
Recommended Reading:
Prison Gerrymandering Project
We are leading the movement to protect our democracy from the Census Bureau's prison miscount.
Legal Resources for Incarcerated People
The internet's first always-up-to-date list of organizations that provide legal services and resources for incarcerated people, organized by state.
Tracking State Prison Growth in 50 States
State-by-state briefing on prison growth (and occassional contraction) from 1978 to 2012
Events
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