ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project

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.

San Francisco, CA