Panelist Profiles
Symposium: After the War on Crime: Race, Democracy and a New Reconstruction
Jessie Allen is an Associate Counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. She works on litigation and public education regarding felony disenfranchisement laws and policy analysis for the Center’s Fair Courts Project. Currently, Ms. Allen is the lead attorney on Johnson v. Bush , a class action lawsuit challenging Florida ‘s permanent disenfranchisement of anyone convicted of a felony. She joined the Brennan Center following her clerkship with Judge Edward R. Korman on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Previously, she clerked for Judge Pierre N. Leval on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and was a Bristow Fellow in the Office of the Solicitor General at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington , D.C. She is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University Law School and graduated from Brooklyn Law School . Her articles and essays have appeared in Dissent , The American Lawyer , Brooklyn Law Review , Seattle Law Review , Vermont Law Review and South African Journal on Human Rights.
Elijah Anderson is the Charles and William L. Day Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania . An expert on the sociology of black America, he is the author of the classic sociological work, A Place on the Corner: A Study of Black Street Corner Men (1978; 2003) and numerous articles on the black experience, including “Of Old Heads and Young Boys: Notes on the Urban Black Experience” (1986), commissioned by the National Research Council’s Committee on the Status of Black Americans, “Sex Codes and Family Life among Inner-City Youth” (1989), and “The Code of the Streets,” which was the cover story in the May 1994 issue of The Atlantic Monthly . For his ethnographic study Streetwise: Race, Class and Change in an Urban Community (1990), he was honored with the Robert E. Park Award, for the best published book in the area of Urban Sociology, of the American Sociological Association. Dr. Anderson authored the “Introduction” to the republication of The Philadelphia Negro by W.E.B. DuBois (1996), and his expanded version of the Atlanic piece, The Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City , published by W.W. Norton (1999), he was honored with the Karmarovsky Award of the Eastern Socioligical Society. Professor Anderson has served as Visiting Professor at Swarthmore College , Yale University , and Princeton University . In addition, he has also won the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching at Penn and was named the Robin M. Williams, Jr., Distinguished Lecturer for 1999-2000 by the Eastern Sociological Association. Other topics with which he concerns himself are the social psychology of organizations, field methods of social research, social interaction, and social organization. He received a B.A. degree from Indiana University , an M.A. degree from the University of Chicago , and a Ph.D. degree from Northwestern University , where he was a Ford Foundation Fellow. Professor Anderson is the past Vice President of the American Sociological Association.
Katherine Beckett is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Law, Societies & Justice Program at the University of Washington in Seattle . Katherine received her Ph.D. from UCLA’s Department of Sociology in 1994. Her interests include crime and drugs, punishment and social control, culture and media, gender, and reproduction. She is the author of two books: The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America (with Theodore Sasson) and Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics .
Father Gregory J. Boyle, S.J. is a Jesuit priest who is Founder and Executive Director of Jobs for a Future/Homeboy Industries, a nationally recognized employment referral center and economic development program for at risk and gang involved youth. As Executive Director Father Boyle is a nationally renowned speaker at conferences for teachers, social worker and criminal justice workers about the importance of adult attention, guidance and unconditional love in preventing youth from joining gangs.
Father Boyle received a MA in English from Loyola Marymount University , a Masters of Divinity from the Weston School of Theology, and an STM degree from the Jesuit School of Theology. Before becoming Pastor of Dolores Mission in 1986, Father Boyle taught at Loyola High School and worked with Christian Base Communities in Cochabamba , Bolivia . He has also served as Chaplain of the Islas Marias Penal colony in Mexico and Folsom Prison. He is currently a member of the State Commission on Juvenile Justice, Crime and Delinquency Prevention, and serves on the National Youth Gang Center Advisory Board
Todd Clear
Todd Clear is Distinguished Professor, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, and Executive Officer of the Program of Doctoral Studies in Criminal Justice, The CUNY Graduate Center. He received his Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from The University at Albany . Professor Clear has published three recent books on the topic of “community justice:” Community Justice ( Wadsworth , 2003), What is Community Justice? (Sage, 2002) and The Community Justice Ideal , (Westview, 2000). He is currently involved in studies of religion and crime, the criminological implications of “place,” and the concept of “community justice,” and serves as founding editor of Criminology & Public Policy , published by the American Society of Criminology.
Sandy Close is executive director of Pacific News Service. She received a BA from the University of California , Berkeley in 1964, then moved to Hong Kong where she worked as the China editor for the Far Eastern Economic Review. Upon her return to the U.S., she founded The Flatlands newspaper, a raw voice of the inner city communities of Oakland, Ca. In 1974, she became executive director of Pacific News Service, helping to develop it into one of the most diverse sources of literary voices and analytical ideas in the U.S. news media. In 1991 she founded YO! (Youth Outlook), a collaboration of writers and young people, and in 1996 she co-founded “The Beat Within,” a weekly newsletter of writing and art by incarcerated youth. In 1996 Close founded New California Media (NCM), a nationwide association of over 700 ethnic media organizations, producing an awards program, an inter-ethnic media exchange and multicultural, multilingual social marketing campaigns. In 1995, Close received a MacArthur Foundation “genius award” for her work in communications. In 1997 a film she co-produced, “Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien,” won the Academy Award for best short documentary.
Jessica Delgado graduated from Boalt in 1998. Since graduating, Ms. Delgado has worked exclusively as a criminal defense attorney at Monterey County Public Defender and currently at Santa Clara County ‘s Office of the Public Defender.
Joe Domanick is an award-winning investigative journalist and author, is the Senior Fellow for Criminal Justice of the Institute for Justice and Journalism at the University of Southern California ‘s Annenberg School for Communication. His latest book is Cruel Justice: Three Strikes and the Politics of Crime in America’s Golden State . His previous book, To Protect and Serve: The LAPD’s Century of War in the City of Dreams , won the 1995 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Non-Fiction Book. His first book, “Faking it in America ,” is about one of the most audacious stock market swindles of the 1980s. Domanick’s feature articles and opinion pieces have appeared in The New York Times , Los Angeles Times , Los Angeles Times Magazine , Los Angeles Herald Examiner , San Francisco Chronicle , New York Daily News , Los Angeles Magazine , California Magazine , Washington Journalism Review , Playboy , Ms. , Spin , Good Housekeeping , Buzz and the LA Weekly . From 1999 through 2001, Domanick hosted a twice-weekly radio show on news and current affairs on radio station KPFK-FM. (Pacifica Radio Network). He teaches journalism at the School of Journalism of USC Annenberg’s School for Communication and continues to freelance. Domanick has graduate degrees in social science from Hunter College , CUNY; education and sociology from Columbia University and broadcast journalism from the USC Annenberg School of Journalism.
Troy Duster is Professor of Sociology at New York University and he also holds an appointment as Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California , Berkeley . From 1996-98, he served as member and then chair of the joint NIH/DOE advisory committee on Ethical, Legal and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project (The ELSI Working Group ). He is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Social Science Research Council, and in 2002-2003 served as chair of the Board of Directors of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. He is currently the President of the American Sociological Association. He is the former Director of the American Cultures Center and the Institute for the Study of Social Change, both at the University of California , Berkeley.
Christopher Edley, Jr. joined Boalt Hall as dean in 2004 after 23 years on the law faculty at Harvard University . He earned a law degree and a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard, where he served as an editor and officer of the Harvard Law Review .
Following graduation Edley joined President Jimmy Carter’s administration as assistant director of the White House domestic policy staff. Edley served as national issues director for the 1988 Michael Dukakis presidential campaign, and as senior adviser on economic policy for President Bill Clinton’s transition team in 1992. In the Clinton administration, he worked as associate director for economics and government at the White House Office of Management and Budget from 1993 to 1995 and as special counsel to the president in 1995–directing a White House review of affirmative action. He returned to the Clinton White House in 1997 as a consultant to the president’s advisory board on the race initiative. Edley’s academic work is primarily in the area of civil rights, with additional concentrations in public policy and administrative law. He has taught federalism, budget policy, Defense Department procurement law, national security law and environmental law. Edley is a co-founder of the Civil Rights Project, a renowned multidisciplinary research and policy think tank focused on issues of racial justice. He is currently serving a six-year term on the bipartisan U.S. Civil Rights Commission and is a member of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform. His recent publications include Not All Black and White: Affirmative Action, Race and American Values, which grew out of his work as special counsel to President Clinton; and Administrative Law: Rethinking Judicial Control of Bureaucracy .
Craig Haney
Craig Haney is a Professor of Psychology at the University of California , where he has taught since 1977. Professor Haney has a Ph.D. from Stanford University and a J.D. degree from the Stanford Law School . He is a prolific scholar who has published extensively on a wide variety of topics in the general area of psychology and law, including the role of social science in legal decision making. Haney’s empirical research focuses on the causes of violent crime, various aspects of the system by which the death penalty is imposed in the United States , and the psychological effects of prison conditions.
Professor Haney has testified as an expert witness in many trials around the country, addressing a variety of important issues in the areas of criminal justice and constitutional law. His research, writing, and testimony has been cited in many state and federal courts, and he is often quoted in The New York Times , The Nation , National Public Radio, and numerous other national news outlets, discussing various aspects of psychological jurisprudence.
Ian Haney Lopez joined the Boalt faculty in 1996 after spending the previous year at Boalt as a visiting professor. In 1998, he was a visiting professor at Yale Law School . After graduating from law school, Ian Haney Lopez clerked for Judge Harry Pregerson, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in Los Angeles , then taught at the University of Wisconsin Law School as an assistant professor. From 1994 to 1995 he was a Rockefeller Fellow in Law and Humanities at Stanford University . Haney López writes about race relations and law. His most recent book, Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice (Belknap/Harvard, 2003), uses the legal history of the Mexican-American civil rights struggle in Los Angeles to explore the relationship between legal violence and self-conceptions of racial identity. His previous book, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (N.Y.U. 1996), examined a series of cases brought under U.S. naturalization law between 1790 and 1952 that maintained a racial bar on citizenship.
Kamala D. Harris is the first African American woman in California, and the first Indian American woman in the United States, to serve as District Attorney. Inaugurated on January 8, 2004, Harris pledged to redouble the Office’s efforts to combat violent crime, protect San francisco neighborhoods, and improve the juvenile justice system. The election as San Francisco District Attorney was Harris’ first run for public office.
District Attorney Harris is a veteran prosecutor with thirteen years of courtroom experience. She was the Deputy District Attorney in Alameda County from 1990 to 1998 and then joined the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office as the Managing Attorney of the Career Criminal Unit. The San Francisco City Attorney recruited Ms. Harris to join the City Attorney’s office in August 2000, where she led the division on Families and Children.
The daughter of an Indian mother, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, a renowned breast cancer specialist, and an African American father, Donald Harris, a Stanford economics professor, Harris was raised in Berkeley. Her parents were both active in the civil rights movement and instilled in her a strong commitment to justice and public service. That commitment led Harris to Howard University, America’s oldest black university, and subsequently to Hastings College of the LAw, where she received her J. D. degree in 1989.
A longtime community leader in the Bay Area, Ms. Harris serves on several boards and committees, and is a recipient of many awards for the excellence of her work. She is the of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art mentoring program which has served hundreds of people from the inner city.
Tom Hayden
Tom Hayden has been a long time activist since the 1960’s. He spent 18 years on the California legislature, elected to the State Assembly in 1982 and the State Senate in 1992. Mr. Hayden’s legislative record includes groundbreaking legislation on behalf of women, African-Americans and Latinos, Holocaust survivors and this generation’s immigrants working in sweatshops. Mr. Hayden was recognized as the legislature’s foremost watchdog against special interest waste and abuse of power in cases ranging from the LA subway controversy to the UC Irvine fertility scandal. He led the battles in Sacramento to stop university tuition increases, reform the K-12 system, and clean up fiscal mismanagement at LAUSD. Hayden is a professor at Occidental College and is the author of eleven books, including most recently, Street Wars, Gangs and the Future of Violence, (2004). He is a Social Science Advisor at Animo Public Charter Schools , and the Los Angeles Director of No More Sweatshops!
Van Jones
Van Jones is the founder and executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights (EBC). Based in the Bay Area, EBC challenges human rights abuses in the U.S. criminal justice system. EBC also advocates for investments in community programs, job training, and education as an alternative community safety agenda. Van received his BA in journalism from the University of Tennessee at Martin in 1990 and his J. D. degree from Yale Law School in 1993.
Barry A. Krisberg
Barry A. Krisberg has been the president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD) since 1983. He received his Masters in criminology and a doctorate in sociology, both from the University of Pennsylvania . He is known nationally for his research and expertise on juvenile justice issues and is called upon as a resource for professionals and the media. Dr. Krisberg has held several educational posts, and is currently Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Hawaii and a lecturer in the legal studies department of the University of California at Berkeley . Dr Krisberg was appointed by the legislature to serve on the California Blue Ribbon Commission on Inmate Population Management. He has several books and articles to his credit including Crime and Privilege; Juvenile Justice: Redeeming Our Children, and A Sourcebook: Serious, Violent, & Chronic Juvenile Offenders with James C. Howell, Ph.D.; J. David Hawkins, Ph.D.; and John J. Wilson, Esq.
Gerald Lopez
Gerald Lopez a 1974 Harvard Law School graduate and author of Rebellious Lawyering, has become perhaps the nation’s leading theorist about lawyering as problem solving and has been among the country’s leading on-the-ground practitioners of and advocates for comprehensive and coordinated problem solving in low-income, of color, and immigrant communities through what he’s championed as a rebellious vision of progressive law practice. He co-founded at Stanford the Lawyering for Social Change Program and at UCLA the Program in Public Interest Law and Policy, among the nation’s first sequenced curricula in public interest work. Now at NYU, he teaches a Community Outreach, Education, and Organizing Clinic, a Community Economic Development Clinic, and a Latinas and Latinos in New York City course for undergraduates and graduates across the university. In 2003, he founded the Center for Community Problem Solving at NYU, which teams up with low-income, of color, and immigrant communities to solve social, economic, and legal problems that residents and service providers report facing. Along the way, López and the Center aim to change the way we tackle problems, to make democratic accountability fundamental to politics, markets, and civic life, and to make equal citizenship a concrete everyday reality and not just a vague constitutional promise.
Bill Lyons
Bill Lyons is an associate professor of political science at the University of Akron and the Director of the Center for Conflict Management there. Professor Lyons has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Washington . He is a former Fulbright scholar, whose first book, The Politics of Community Policing: Rearranging the Power to Punish was published by the University of Michigan Press in 1999. He is currently working on a second book (with Julie Drew) titled, Punishing Schools: Fear and Identity in a Zero Tolerance Culture , expected to come out in 2005. Professor Lyons was selected by the students at the University of Akron as Campus Wide Faculty of the Year for 2003-2004.
Teresa Miller
Teresa (Teri) Miller is an Associate Professor of Law at the State University of New York at Buffalo . Professor Miller’s research focuses broadly on criminal punishment, incarceration, and extended punishment through civil penalties. In the past few years, she has examined the significance of sexual coercion and the conflation of gender, sexual orientation and biological sex in the federal jurisprudence of cross-sex prison searches and explored the role of feminist legal theory in resolving the debate surrounding these searches. More recently, her interest in the substantial representation of non-citizens in U.S. jails and detention centers led her to focus on the relationship between renewed severity in the immigration system and the “severity revolution” within the criminal justice system. She is co-editor of Civil Penalties, Social Consequences , an anthology of essays on the impact of collateral civil penalties and the harmful social policies they advance, forthcoming from Routledge in late 2004.
Jonathan Simon , before joining the Boalt Hall faculty in 2003, Simon was a professor at the University of Miami School of Law. He has been a visiting professor of law at Yale Law School and New York University School of Law. Previously, he was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan from 1990 to 1992. Prior to that, he clerked for Judge William C. Camby Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Simon is the author of Poor Discipline: Parole and the Social Control of the Underclass, 1890-1990 (1993) and the co-editor of Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility (with Tom Baker, 2002) and Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law: Moving Beyond Legal Realism (with Austin Sarat, 2003). He has also published numerous articles and book chapters covering a variety of legal topics. In 2003 Simon joined the Law and Society Association’s board of trustees and executive committee.
Donald Specter
Donald Specter has been the Director of the Prison Law Office, San Quentin , California since 1984. Mr. Specter manages and directs the legal and administrative operations of a nonprofit eleven-attorney office providing free legal services to California state prisoners. Mr. Specter has been lead counsel in numerous successful institutional reform litigation, with assistance from major Bay Area law firms, through federal and state class actions challenging various conditions of confinement system-wide at all 32 state prisons, and at individual prisons, including Pelican Bay, San Quentin and Vacaville . Mr. Specter also has an extensive appellate practice, including one argument before the U.S. Supreme Court, six arguments before the California Supreme Court (two death penalty cases), numerous prison conditions cases and criminal appeals before state and federal appellate courts. He has been chair of the State Bar’s Commission on Corrections, has spoken to local and national audiences of attorneys and correctional officials and is frequently interviewed by the local and national media. Mr. Specter earned his B.A. in Economics from New College in Florida in 1974 and his J.D. from the University of San Francisco School of Law in 1978.
Susan Tucker
Susan Tucker is the Director of The After Prison Initiative, a program of the U.S. Justice Fund of the Open Society Institute, a not-for-profit operating and grantmaking foundation established by international financier George Soros to promote civil society. The After Prison Initiative was created to decrease the number and racial disproportionality of people going back to prison and to assure community safety and well-being by promoting policies and practices that facilitate responsible, lawful citizenship after prison, including political and economic re-enfranchisement of the formerly incarcerated, public accountability for successful reentry and justice reinvestment to guarantee a reasonable social return on justice policies and spending. Previously, Susan was Director of Policy and Research for Victim Services (now Safe Horizon) in New York City , where she wrote and lectured on victim activism, the inter-generational cycle of domestic violence, intimate violence as a workplace issue and re-visioning ESOL to include anti-racism curricula. She worked as Associate Professor at NYU School of Law, Director of Alumni Affairs at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and as a criminal trial and appellate lawyer in New York City . Susan received her J.D. from New York University School of Law and her B.A. in political science from Barnard College.
Loïc Wacquant is Distinguished University Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the New School for Social Research, Professor of Sociology at the University of California-Berkeley, and a Researcher at the Center for European Sociology in Paris . His interests comprise comparative urban marginality, the penal state, bodily crafts, racial domination, and the politics of reason. His recent books are Body and Soul , Ethnographic Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (2004), Punir les pauvres. Le nouveau gouvernement de l’insécurité sociale (2004), Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of Neoliberal Penality (2005), and The Mystery of Ministry : Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics (2005). His ongoing investigations include a carnal anthropology of desire and domination and a historical sociology of racial rule on three continents. He is a co-founder and editor of the interdisciplinary journal Ethnography and a regular contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique.
Jennifer Warren
Jenifer Warren is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, based in the Sacramento bureau. For the past five years, she has covered corrections and criminal justice policy. Her interest in the beat grew out of an ongoing series she wrote on the steep decline in parole dates granted to eligible inmates by former Governor Gray Davis, whose handling of the issue resulted in a case heard by the California Supreme Court. Based in Sacramento for nine years, Warren previously covered the Legislature and the environment. Earlier posts at the Times include San Francisco bureau chief; Inland California bureau chief; legal affairs reporter; and roving state correspondent. A graduate of UC San Diego, her professional honors include the 2004 Award for Journalistic Integrity presented by California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, marking recognition of her coverage of the state’s troubled prison system.
Franklin Zimring
Franklin Zimring was a member of the University of Chicago law faculty as Llewellyn Professor of Law and director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice. He joined the Boalt faculty in 1985 as director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute. His major fields of interest are criminal justice and family law, with special emphasis on the use of empirical research to inform legal policy. He is best known for his studies of the determinants of the death rate from violent attacks; the impact of pretrial diversion from the criminal justice system; and criminal sanctions.
He has been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University , and a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences. He is a fellow of the American Society of Criminology and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 1998, he has been an expert panel member for the U.S. Department of Education Panel on Safe, Disciplined and Drug-Free Schools and an advisory member for the National Research Council Panel on Juvenile Crime: Prevention, Intervention and Control. Zimring is the author or co-author of many books on topics including deterrence, the changing legal world of adolescence, capital punishment, the scale of imprisonment, and drug control. Recent books include The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment (2003), American Youth Violence (1998), and Crime is Not the Problem: Violence in America (with Hawkins, 1997).