Jessica Jackson | |
---|---|
Born | Jessica Hurst January 20, 1982 Alabama |
Nationality | American |
Citizenship | American |
Education | Santa Clara University School of Law |
Occupation | Human rights attorney Activist Politician |
Organization | REFORM Alliance #cut50 American Constitution Society |
Children | 2 |
Jessica Jackson is an American human rights attorney [1] and Chief Advocacy Officer at REFORM Alliance. [2] She is also the co-founder of Dream Corps JUSTICE, a national bipartisan effort aimed at reducing America's incarceration rate. [3] [2] She served as the youngest mayor of the city of Mill Valley. [2]
Jackson was raised in Mill Valley, California. [2] She attended Hyde School in Woodstock, CT where she was nominated to the school's inaugural Alumni Hall of Honor in 2016. [4] [5] At age 18, Jackson dropped out of high school and received her GED. [2]
When Jackson was 22, her then-husband was sentenced to six years in prison for a nonviolent drug offense. [2] Jackson had a newborn baby and no job, so she moved in with her mother. [2] Her husband's prison sentence motivated her to go to college and law school so that she could become a lawyer and fight for families like her own. [2]
Jackson received her bachelor's degree in Political Science and English from the Honors College of the University of South Florida. In 2011, she received her J.D. from Santa Clara University School of Law, where she received the Dean's Leadership Award. [6] [7]
Jessica Jackson was elected to the Mill Valley City Council in November 2013, becoming the youngest ever elected official in Marin County. [8] In 2015, she was elected to serve as Mayor of Mill Valley. [2] [9] In addition to her duties on the Mill Valley City Council, Jackson served as Mill Valley's representative to the Association of Bay Area Governments. [10] She also served as a board member of the American Constitution Society Bay Area chapter. [11]
Jackson began her career as a human rights attorney at the Habeas Corpus Resource Center in San Francisco, California, where she represented California death row inmates in their appeals. [12] Jackson met Van Jones during a chance meeting and began talking with him and a law school friend, Matt Haney, about criminal justice reform. [2] Over breakfast they scribbled ideas on a napkin which later led to the formation of #cut50. [2] In 2015, she joined with Jones to co-found #cut50, an organization focused on bipartisan solutions to criminal justice reform issues. [13] [14] [15] [16] While leading her national initiative, #cut50, Jessica helped ban the shackling of jailed pregnant women in 14 states. Her “Dignity for Incarcerated Women” campaign enlisted formerly incarcerated women and dozens of celebrities to deepen the focus on women's issues. [17] At the helm of #cut50, Jessica built the biggest national grassroots network for bipartisan reform, #cut50's Empathy Network. [18] She also produced the first-ever Bipartisan Criminal Justice Summit, attracting leaders as diverse as Newt Gingrich and then Attorney General Eric Holder. [19] Jackson handed over her leadership role at #cut50 to focus on her job at Reform Alliance, but currently serves in a supportive role at #cut50. [2]
Jackson worked with #cut50, members of Congress, and the Trump Administration to develop and pass the First Step Act of 2018. [2]
In 2019 she stepped down from the Mill Valley Council and moved to Alexandria, Virginia to become the Chief Advocacy Officer at Reform Alliance, an organization committed to reforming supervision laws across the country. [20] She is tutoring Kim Kardashian in law. [20] [2]
Jackson has received several awards and accolades. She is the recipient of the 2017 John Kable, QC, Memorial Young Justice Professional Award, the 2018 ACLU Benjamin Dreyfus Civil Liberties Award, the 2019 Alexander Law Prize from Santa Clara University [21] and the 2019 American Constitution Society Fearless Advocate Award. [22] She is a 2021 World Economic Forum Young Global Leader [23] .
The Sentencing Project is a Washington, D.C.-based research and advocacy center working for decarceration or to reduce the use of incarceration in the United States and to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system. For three decades the organization, with a small staff and funding from foundations and individuals, has regularly produced nonpartisan reports and research used by state and federal policymakers, administrators and journalists as they consider crime and punishment.
The term "prison–industrial complex" (PIC), derived from the "military–industrial complex" of the 1950s, describes the attribution of the rapid expansion of the US inmate population to the political influence of private prison companies and businesses that supply goods and services to government prison agencies for profit. According to this concept the most common agents of PIC are corporations that contract cheap prison labor, construction companies, surveillance technology vendors, companies that operate prison food services and medical facilities, correctional officers unions, private probation companies, lawyers, and lobby groups that represent them.
Prison Fellowship is the world's largest Christian nonprofit organization for prisoners, former prisoners, and their families, and a leading advocate for justice reform.
Prison reform is the attempt to improve conditions inside prisons, improve the effectiveness of a penal system, or implement alternatives to incarceration. It also focuses on ensuring the reinstatement of those whose lives are impacted by crimes.
Mary Fallin is an American politician who served as the 27th governor of Oklahoma from 2011 to 2019. A member of the Republican Party, she was elected in 2010 and reelected in 2014. She was the first and so far only woman to be elected governor of Oklahoma. She was the first Oklahoma congresswoman since Alice Mary Robertson in 1920.
The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights is a non-profit strategy and action center based in Oakland, California. The stated aim of the center is to work for justice, opportunity and peace in urban America. It is named for Ella Baker, a twentieth-century activist and civil rights leader originally from Virginia and North Carolina.
Anthony Kapel "Van" Jones is an American news and political commentator, author, and lawyer. He is the co-founder of several non-profit organizations, a three-time New York Times bestselling author, a CNN host and contributor, and an Emmy Award winner.
The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law is a law and public policy institute generally considered liberal or progressive. The Brennan Center's mission is to "work to reform, revitalize, and when necessary, defend our country's systems of democracy and justice." It was created in 1995 in honor of Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan and envisioned as a hybrid organization combining a public interest law firm and traditional think tank. The Guardian has described the Brennan Center as "the foremost non-partisan organization devoted to voting rights."
Cindy Hyde-Smith is an American politician serving as the junior United States Senator from Mississippi since 2018. A member of the Republican Party, she was previously the Mississippi Commissioner of Agriculture and Commerce and a member of the Mississippi State Senate.
Vanita Gupta is an American civil rights attorney serving as United States Associate Attorney General since April 22, 2021. Gupta served as the president and chief executive officer of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and as the head of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice, where she was the chief civil rights prosecutor for the United States from 2014 to 2017.
Agnes Gund is an American philanthropist and arts patron, collector of modern and contemporary art, and arts education and social justice advocate. She is President Emerita and Life Trustee of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Chairman of its International Council. She is also Chair Emerita and board member of MoMA PS1. In 1977, in response to New York City's fiscal crisis that led to budget cuts that virtually eliminated arts education in public schools, Gund founded Studio in a School, a non-profit organization that engages professional artists as art instructors in public schools and community-based organizations to lead classes in drawing, printmaking, painting, collage, sculpture, and digital media, and to work with classroom teachers, administrators, and families to incorporate visual art into their school communities.
Colleen V. Chien is an American attorney and academic working as a law professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, where she teaches Patent Law, International Intellectual Property and Remedies.
Proposition 47, also known by its ballot title Criminal Sentences. Misdemeanor Penalties. Initiative Statute, was a referendum passed by voters in the state of California on November 4, 2014. The measure was also referred to by its supporters as the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act. It recategorized some nonviolent offenses as misdemeanors, rather than felonies, as they had previously been categorized.
Criminal justice reform addresses structural issues in criminal justice systems such as racial profiling, police brutality, overcriminalization, mass incarceration, and recidivism. Reforms can take place at any point where the criminal justice system intervenes in citizens’ lives, including lawmaking, policing, sentencing and incarceration. Criminal justice reform can also address the collateral consequences of conviction, including disenfranchisement or lack of access to housing or employment, that may restrict the rights of individuals with criminal records.
Carmen Beatrice Perez is an American activist and Chicana feminist who has worked on issues of civil rights including mass incarceration, women's rights and gender equity, violence prevention, racial healing and community policing. She is the President and CEO of The Gathering for Justice, a nonprofit founded by Harry Belafonte which is dedicated to ending child incarceration and eliminating the racial disparities in the criminal justice system. She was one of four national co-chairs of the 2017 Women's March.
The First Step Act (FSA), formally known as the Formerly Incarcerated Reenter Society Transformed Safely Transitioning Every Person Act, is a bipartisan criminal justice bill passed by the 115th Congress and signed by President Donald Trump in December 2018. The First Step Act, among other changes, reforms federal prisons and sentencing laws in order to reduce recidivism, decrease the federal inmate population, and maintain public safety.
Matthew Craig Haney is an American politician from San Francisco. He is a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, representing District 6. Haney is a leader in the progressive movement in the Bay Area and California.
Dream Corps is a non-profit co-founded by Van Jones, Jessica Jackson, and Matt Haney.
Decarceration involves government policies and community campaigns to reduce the number of people held in custody or under custodial supervision in the United States. Decarceration, the opposite of incarceration, also entails reducing the rate of imprisonment at the federal, state and municipal level. Home to 5% of the global population but 25 percent of its prisoners, the U.S. possess the world's highest incarceration rate: 655 inmates for every 100,000 people, enough inmates to equal the populations of Philadelphia or Houston.
Cynthia Ellen Jones is a criminal defense attorney and professor of law at American University Washington College of Law specializing in criminal law and procedure as well as bail reform. Jones is an expert in racial disparities in the pretrial system and previously served as the Director of the Public Defenders Service in Washington, D.C. She is a leading scholar in criminal procedure. In 2011, she was awarded the American University Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching. Jones serves as the director of the Stephen S. Weinstein Trial Advocacy Program at the university. She has authored three textbooks related to criminal law and procedure.