2008 Soros Justice Fellows

Sujatha Baliga
Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth
Oakland, CA

Sujatha Baliga will assist the Oakland juvenile justice system in adopting restorative justice practices to decrease its reliance on incarceration and other forms of punishment. Her project will implement a system to help offenders and victims of crime collectively resolve conflicts and root out the causes of juvenile offending. By tracking youth participants and assessing victim and community responses, the project aims to show that restorative practices can decrease the number of youth who end up in facilities, strengthen neighborhoods most affected by mass incarceration, and save public dollars.

Baliga was drawn to restorative justice through her work involving crime victims and the accused. After working with survivors of domestic violence, rape, and child sexual abuse, she became an appellate public defender, most recently in death penalty cases. Baliga is a consultant to the Stanford Criminal Justice Center and has taught Restorative Justice at New College School of Law and the California Institute for Integral Studies. She is frequently invited to address groups of prisoners and restorative justice programs. Baliga also serves as volunteer counsel to the Liberation Prison Project, an organization dedicated to assisting Buddhist prisoners. She earned her BA from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, her JD from the University of Pennsylvania, and has held two federal clerkships. Her research interests include victims’ voices in restorative justice practices, the forgiveness of seemingly unforgivable acts, and Tibetan notions of justice.

Caroline Cincotta
ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project
San Francisco, CA

Federal prisons bar the vast majority of noncitizens from participating in rehabilitative early-release programs, subjecting them to longer sentences and harsher conditions. This disparity undermines the value of early-release programs and represents a rarely acknowledged inequity in the criminal justice system. It also leads to harmful effects that extend well beyond the prison walls. Given that a large and increasing proportion of the federal prison population consists of noncitizens, this problem has enormous practical and moral impact.

Caroline Cincotta will research, analyze, and develop legal challenges to these discriminatory practices. She will use the problem of ineligibility for early-release programs as a wedge to launch a broader attack on other problems noncitizens face in the criminal justice system.

Presently clerking for the Honorable Marsha S. Berzon of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Cincotta received her BA from Reed College in 2000 and graduated summa cum laude from New York University School of Law in 2007, where she graduated first in her class. Prior to law school, she worked as a program director at the Tahoe-Baikal Institute and as a researcher and translator at the Memorial Human Rights Center in St. Petersburg, Russia. During law school, she interned at the Immigration Unit of the Legal Aid Society and the Immigrants' Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. She spent a summer working for the Central and East European Law Initiative of the ABA in Chisinau, Moldova.

Craig Gilmore
Los Angeles, CA

While countless books, articles, and films discuss prisons, surprisingly little basic information is available about the various aspects of the system and how they interact. Craig Gilmore’s Prison FAQs is a multimedia project that aims to fill this gap and satisfy a pressing need in the prison reform movement. Covering a variety of topics (“The Costs of Prisons,” “Prison Towns,” “Race and Prisons,” “Types of Custody,” “Probation and Parole,” “Gender and Prison,” “Civil Commitment”), Prison FAQs will offer a comprehensive but accessible primer on the prison system, its components, and social issues relevant to life in and out of prison.

Gilmore is an organizer with the California Prison Moratorium Project, which he co-founded in 1998. He is a regular contributor to Prison Focus and is co-author with Kevin Pyle of The Real Cost of Prisons Project comic book Prison Town: Paying the Price and other essays. He lectures widely on a range of subjects, including the impact of prisons on towns where they are based, prisons and environmental justice, and prison financing. He has been active for years in Californians United for a Responsible Budget, the No New Jails Coalition, and LA Prison Times newspaper. Gilmore is a board member of A New Way of Life Reentry Project in Los Angeles and in 2003 was awarded the Ralph Santiago Abascal Award for Environmental Justice Activism.

Paul Hofer
Washington, DC

Federal sentencing guidelines are supposed to reduce unwarranted disparities and establish fair and effective sentencing practices in the federal courts. However, since the mid-1980s, the average time served in federal prisons has doubled; the population of federal prisons has more than quintupled; over half of the incarcerated population is made up of drug offenders; and the sentencing gap between African-Americans and whites has widened dramatically.

Paul Hofer will review and document the critical steps in the unraveling of federal sentencing reform. Resulting in a series of articles written for general consumption in popular magazines as well as for professional audiences, Hofer's project aims to spark discussion and debate by policymakers and advocates, bringing about improvements in the federal sentencing system.

Hofer received his BA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, his JD from the University of Maryland School of Law, and his PhD from Johns Hopkins University. He has taught courses at Johns Hopkins on law, psychology, and public policy. In 1986 he joined the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, D.C., working closely with the Criminal Law Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States. In 1995 Hofer worked as Special Projects Director at the United States Sentencing Commission. He has worked on numerous government reports, law review articles, and other scholarly publications, including Fifteen Years of Guidelines Sentencing.

Harry Levine
New York, NY

From 1997 to 2006, the New York City Police Department arrested and jailed more than 360,000 people for possessing small amounts of marijuana—ten times more arrests than in the previous decade—most of them young Black and Latino men. Yet rates of marijuana use peaked in the early 1980s and have never again neared those levels, and white residents are consistently shown to have the highest rates of marijuana use. Expanding upon his previous work on the topic, Harry Levine will conduct new research on the racial bias in marijuana arrests and in other misdemeanor policing and prosecution practices.

Levine is Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. Much of his research and writing has focused on drugs, alcohol, and food in social and political contexts. Among other works, he is the author of The Discovery of Addiction: Changing Conceptions of Habitual Drunkenness in America, The Secret of World Wide Drug Prohibition: The Uses of and Varieties of Drug Prohibition, and, with Craig Reinarman, Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice. He has received several awards for his work and in 2007 received the Alfred R. Lindesmith Award for Distinguished Scholarship.

Shadd Maruna
Belfast, Northern Ireland

The popular American ideal of redemption sits in stark contrast to the harshly punitive and unforgiving nature of much of the U.S. criminal justice system. Shadd Maruna will complete a book on the state of the redemptive ideal in U.S. criminal justice. Redemption RIP? will analyze famous stories of redemption, explore the future of redemption as an ideal, ask whether we still believe in it, and argue why we should.

Maruna is a reader in criminology at the Queen’s University Belfast School of Law. Previously he taught at the State University of New York, Albany, and the University of Cambridge. He has 12 years of experience working with formerly incarcerated people and their families in the U.S., the U.K., and Ireland, including a recent study of former political prisoners incarcerated during the conflict in Northern Ireland. His book Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives was named the “Outstanding Contribution to Criminology” by the American Society of Criminology in 2001. His other books include Rehabilitation: Beyond the Risk Paradigm, After Crime and Punishment: Pathways to Reintegration, and The Effects of Imprisonment. He has been a Fulbright Scholar and a Guggenheim Fellow, and was named the Distinguished New Scholar in Corrections and Sentencing by the American Society of Criminology.

Janet Moore
Ohio Justice & Policy Center
Cincinnati, OH

Ohio’s system of providing counsel to indigent criminal defendants is inefficient, ineffective, and in need of significant improvements. At the same time, Ohio jail and prison populations are soaring, with low-income individuals and members of racial and ethnic minorities imprisoned in disproportionate numbers. Recently, the American Bar Association criticized the state’s inadequate qualification standards for counsel appointed to death penalty cases. Through her Ohio Indigent Reform Initiative, Janet Moore will build a coalition demanding a state-wide, standards-based, politically independent, fully funded indigent defense system; conduct a public education campaign directed toward opinion-shapers and policymakers; and promote model programs for recruitment, training, and placement of qualified indigent defense attorneys and mitigation specialists who can work together to advocate for clients at all levels.

Moore received JD and MA degrees from Duke University, an MA in Divinity from the University of Chicago, and a BA in Religion from Kalamazoo College. At Duke, she served as Editor-in-Chief of Law & Contemporary Problems, the nation’s first interdisciplinary law journal. She has clerked for the Honorable J. Dickson Phillips, Jr., on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. She spent seven years litigating death penalty cases in North Carolina, winning some form of relief for about 70 percent of her clients. Moore has also contributed to criminal justice reform through teaching, publication, community organizing, and drafting legislation and attorney performance standards. In 2006, she joined the Ohio Justice & Policy Center, where she serves as Director of the Race and Justice Project.

Joshua Perry
Orleans Public Defenders
New Orleans, LA

From the systematic, excessive detention of defendants before they've been charged, to the jailing of citizens simply due to their inability to pay fines, to the refusal of public agencies to provide requested public documents, attorneys at the Orleans Public Defenders (OPD) face a long list of problems in providing their clients with adequate and meaningful defense. With more than double the national average in caseloads, OPD attorneys have no sustained ability, in the course of representing clients, to challenge these types of long-standing and deeply-entrenched injustices in New Orleans criminal courts. Joshua Perry will coordinate a project to bring new tools to help the OPD address these issues.

An OPD staff attorney, Perry represents clients in cases ranging from simple drug possession to violent felonies. He graduated with an honors degree in English and American Literature from Harvard College, and magna cum laude from New York University School of Law, where he was inducted into the Order of the Coif. In law school, he litigated prisoners’ rights cases in federal court as a Civil Rights Clinic student practitioner, served as an associate editor on the New York University Law Review, and interned with the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center and the Defender Association of Philadelphia. He has been a speechwriter, a teacher, and a freelance journalist.

Susan Phillips
Los Angeles, CA

Susan Phillips will complete Operation Fly Trap: Gangs, Drugs and the Law, a book that tells the story of an FBI-led task force that attempted to dismantle a drug distribution network in two African American neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Seeking to recast the gang/drug link as an issue of community social justice rather than strictly criminal justice, Phillips recounts the significant damage sustained by the families of those targeted, particularly women and children in poverty. The book demonstrates that the sweep had no effect on overall levels of violence, drug use, or drug sales in the two neighborhoods.

Phillips has studied Los Angeles gangs since 1990. She received a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from UCLA in 1998, where she served as a lecturer for four years. She received a Getty Research Institute Fellowship in 1996 to complete her first book, Wallbangin: Graffiti and Gangs in L.A. Most of Phillips’s work has focused on gang cultural expression and the broader relationship between gangs and the larger society. Her current work was originally funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Phillips teaches environmental and urban studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA.

Luissana Santibañez
Grassroots Leadership
Austin, TX

The fastest growing portion of the federal detention population is immigrant detainees, many of whom are held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement or U.S. Marshall Services facilities. These facilities often fail to provide basic necessities like medical care, legal materials, means for communicating with the outside world, and even fresh air. The detentions not only affect the immigrants themselves but also tear apart their families. Against this backdrop, Luissana Santibañez will establish a Texas-based network of former detainees and family members of current detainees to elevate community awareness and build support for policies that protect detainees' rights.

Santibañez is an immigrant rights community organizer who helped organize several major demonstrations in Austin against punitive immigration policy. She works with Texans United for Families, a coalition that aims to close down the privately owned T. Don Hutto immigrant detention center, where more than 200 children and their parents are being incarcerated for noncriminal immigration violations. Santibañez is the co-founder of Madres en Defensa de la Educacion de Nuestras/os Hijas/os, serves on the board of People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources, and is a member of Austin’s American Friends Service Committee Advisory Council. Santibañez’s involvement in immigration detention advocacy began when her mother was detained at a Corrections Corporation of America center in Houston, Texas. Santibañez graduated from the University of Texas.

Alexandra Smith
Urban Justice Center
New York, NY

For any prisoner, a stay in solitary confinement—which entails being locked in a single cell for 23 hours a day without stimulation or social contact—can be frightening. For those with psychiatric disabilities, the isolation and idleness can have even more profound negative effects. New York State holds prisoners in solitary confinement at a rate nearly four times the national average, and a quarter of those subjected to this treatment have some form of mental illness. Although New York recently passed legislation aimed at diverting people with psychiatric disabilities from solitary confinement, the law’s successful implementation will depend in large part on sustained community involvement. Alexandra Smith will serve as an outside monitor of the law’s implementation, provide community outreach, and build on the pre-existing movement of community members and mental health advocates committed to ensuring proper treatment of people with psychiatric disabilities.

Smith is the coordinator of Mental Health Alternatives to Solitary Confinement and supports the work of the Urban Justice Center to ensure that people receiving mental health treatment in New York jails and prisons are provided with appropriate discharge planning services before being released from custody. She also works with the New York Association of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services and helped to organize its annual Legislative Day. Recently, Smith worked with the Center for Constitutional Rights and Safe Streets in New Orleans to organize a hearing on the role of policing in the reconstruction of New Orleans. She contributed to a report with Break the Chains about the disproportionate number of young people of color being targeted for marijuana arrests. She has facilitated social justice workshops and organized with parents around social justice issues. Smith is completing her master's in Social Work at Hunter College. She completed her undergraduate studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

William Sothern
New Orleans, LA

William Sothern will complete two books about the culture and morality of the death penalty in the United States. The first book, Put Away Childish Things, is a nonfiction narrative illustrating the realities of the death penalty in the Deep South, told through Sothern’s experiences as a Louisiana capital appeals attorney and as a young man who narrowly avoided incarceration following a felony drug bust. The book will challenge the dominant conservative rationales for harsh punishments and the death penalty by contrasting the second chances Sothern was afforded with the abysmal treatment many of his clients received at similar stages in their lives. The second book, Until You Are Dead, is an anthology that considers the death penalty in the U.S. today through a variety of cultural voices.

Sothern is a New Orleans writer and anti-death penalty attorney. He serves as deputy director of the Capital Appeals Project and was previously a staff attorney at the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center. His appellate work and oral advocacy before the Louisiana Supreme Court has led to the reversal of several death sentences. Since Hurricane Katrina, Sothern has written more than twenty articles about social justice issues in New Orleans for national publications such as The Nation, where he is a regular contributor, Salon, The Brooklyn Rail, and The New York Times. His book Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City was published by the University of California Press in 2007. Sothern is also the co-director of Reprieve US, a nonprofit organization that recruits and places international lawyers and students at death penalty offices in the South.

Patricia Soung
Children and Family Justice Center, Bluhm Legal Clinic
Chicago, IL

The United States is one of a handful of countries that allows youth under 18 to receive life sentences without parole. The sentence has been handed out to over 2,000 juvenile offenders, and more than half of the states require juvenile life without parole for certain offenses. Patricia Soung will work on legal advocacy, coalition-building, and outreach to challenge juvenile life without parole and achieve fairer sentencing for youth in Illinois.

Soung earned her JD from Northwestern University School of Law, where she served as co-Executive Articles Editor of the Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights and Vice-President of the Asian Pacific American Law Student Association. During law school she conducted independent research on juvenile justice and education issues, worked with several criminal and juvenile justice clinics, and served as a board member of Cross-City Campaign for School Reform and a planning member of the Harvard University Annual National Symposium on Education Reform. Prior to law school, Soung worked to increase the capacity and support of youth social justice efforts across the country as the Director of Education and Outreach for the Funders’ Collaborative on Youth Organizing in New York and a Fellow at the Tides Foundation in San Francisco. She graduated from Stanford University with honors in 2001, where she earned several distinctions for her commitment to public service and advocacy in anti-poverty projects.

Jennifer Thompson-Cannino
Winston-Salem, NC
Ronald Cotton
Mebane, NC
Erin Torneo
Los Angeles, CA

Over 200 people in the U.S. have had their convictions overturned by DNA evidence. Three-quarters of these cases involved mistaken eyewitness testimony, making it the leading cause of wrongful conviction. Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption, by Ronald Cotton and Jennifer Thompson-Cannino (with Erin Torneo), will illuminate the problems with eyewitness testimony through Thompson-Cannino and Cotton's own story.

Thompson-Cannino has become an outspoken opponent of the death penalty, frequently addressing the need for judicial reform. After a brutal rape she suffered as a 22-year-old college student, Thompson-Cannino gave eyewitness testimony that sent Ronald Cotton to prison not once, but twice, for crimes he did not commit. Together, they successfully lobbied state legislators to change compensation laws for the wrongly convicted in North Carolina. Thompson-Cannino is now a member of the North Carolina Actual Innocence Commission, the advisory committee for Active Voices, the Constitution Project, and Mothers for Justice. Her op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, the Durham-Herald Sun, and the Tallahassee Democrat.

Ronald Cotton was arrested in 1984 and wrongfully convicted of first-degree rape, sexual offense, and breaking and entering, and sentenced to life in prison plus 54 years. Cotton won a new trial in 1987, only to be charged and convicted of a second rape, resulting in two life sentences. Largely through his persistence in proclaiming his innocence and the development of sophisticated DNA tests, Cotton was exonerated in 1995, after serving nearly eleven years. With Thompson-Cannino, he has spoken at various venues including Washington and Lee University, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Georgetown Law School, the Chicago Museum for Contemporary Photography’s Innocence Exhibit, and the Community March for Justice for Troy Anthony Davis in Savannah, Georgia.

Erin Torneo’s work has appeared in various publications including the Kyoto Journal, SEED, Cosmopolitan, Variety’s V-Life, the Independent, and indiewire. In 2007, she was awarded a nonfiction fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. Picking Cotton will be her second book.

Shantel Vachani
Learning Rights Law Center
Los Angeles, CA

Shantel Vachani will launch an alternative sentencing project to address the disproportionate confinement of minority youth with disabilities. These individuals are pushed out of schools and into the juvenile justice system as a result of systemic failures at various levels. Vachani’s approach links mental health interventions, special education, legal reforms, community organizing, and advocacy to address the issues facing disabled youth at their point of entry into the system. The project brings together community stakeholders to tackle the root causes of delinquency, with an emphasis on prevention and rehabilitation rather than incarceration.

Vachani received her BA in International Development Studies and Psychology from UCLA in 2000 and is completing a joint degree at the UCLA School of Law and School of Social Welfare. She is the founder of the UCLA South Asian Law Student’s Association and Co-Chair of the Diversity Action Committee. Vachani was a law clerk at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, she participated in an effort to document labor conditions on the Gulf Coast, resulting in a publication entitled And Injustice for All: Worker’s Lives in the Reconstruction of New Orleans. Vachani also served as a clinical therapist at the Koreatown Youth and Community Center, where she provided counseling to court-mandated youth returning from juvenile institutions.

Brackette Williams
American Friends Services Committee
Tucson, AZ

For three decades, states have expanded their use of solitary confinement and "supermax" units as a means for controlling prisoners, despite a lack of evidence that they reduce prison violence or increase public safety. While the majority of people who have been held in long-term isolation are released back into the community, most have little or no access to treatment to assist in overcoming the effects of their experiences.

Using anthropological research methods, Brackette Williams will examine the experiences of people who spent one or more years in single or multiple periods of solitary confinement in supermax units in Arizona. Williams will identify how these experiences affect re-entry and family and community reintegration, with a goal of empowering people to become leaders in progressive justice reform.

Williams received a BS from Cornell University, a master's in Education from the University of Arizona, and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the Johns Hopkins University. She has taught at Duke University, Queens College, and Graduate Center of New York City, the New School for Social Research, the University of California at Berkeley, the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Arizona, where she also served as director of African American Studies. In 1997 she received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and has been conducting research and writing on death penalty and prison issues. The first of her two books, Making Kinds Kindly: An Ethnography of Concepts and Categories in U.S. Death Penalty Classification and Activism, is forthcoming.