Consultant, Federal Resource Center for Children of Prisoners
Panelist

Emani Davis has been advocating on behalf of children with parents in prison for 12 years. She is a 2003 graduate of Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY. Her father has been incarcerated in Virginia since she was six years old. She serves on the advisory board of the Federal Resource Center for Children of Prisoners at the Child Welfare League of America. In her capacity as a consultant to the Federal Resource Center, she has provided training and technical assistance for programs serving prisoners and children of prisoners. While in college, Emani worked with The Osborne Association as a Family Works Parenting Course Guest Instructor, leading lectures and discussions for incarcerated fathers about the impact of imprisonment on children in Sing Sing, Woodbourne and Shawangunk Correctional Facilities for men in New York State. She also worked supervising the Children's Center in the visiting room at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility. She has organized panels of children of prisoners and made presentations on children with parents in prison, including National Institute of Corrections Videoconference: Children of Prisoners: Children of Promise, A National Satellite and Internet Broadcast, June 18, 2003; and a keynote presentation at the Fathers Matter conference of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation (2004).

Executive director, Osborne Association
Panelist

Liz Gaynes is executive director of the Osborne Association, a 75-year-old nonprofit organization in New York City that provides a wide range of educational, employment, treatment and family services to individuals and families affected by incarceration. Under her leadership over the last two decades, Osborne has developed and operated a wide range of programs in community sites, as well as several state prisons, city jails, and courts. Programs include drug treatment as an alternative to incarceration, employment placement for people with criminal records, parenting programs and children’s centers in men’s prisons, and a range of other prison, reentry and family services. Liz serves on the board of directors of Family and Corrections Network. She began her career as a criminal defense attorney.

Liz received the Jessie Ball duPont Fund Award for leadership in 2000, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Drum Major for Justice Award from the Center for Law and Justice at the State University of New York at Albany in 2003. In 2004, Liz and her daughter Emani Davis were nominated for the World’s Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child for their work defending the rights of children with parents in prison.

Director, The After Prison Initiative, Open Society Institute
Moderator

Susan B. Tucker is the director of The After Prison Initiative, a program of the Open Society Institute's U.S. Justice Fund. 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.

Before coming to the Open Society Institute, Tucker 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 (English for speakers of other languages) to include anti-racism curricula. Previously she worked as an associate professor at New York University 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. Tucker received her J.D. from New York University School of Law and her B.A. in political science from Barnard College.