Staff & Volunteers

The Prison Policy Initiative's accomplishments are those of a much larger organization, but all of our work is done by our part-time Executive Director and the part-time volunteers he coordinates. Learn more about our current and past staff.

Staff

Peter Wagner, JD, Executive Director. Peter Wagner teaches, lectures, and writes about the negative impact of mass incarceration in the United States. His current focus is on demonstrating - through graphics, legal research, and state-by-state analyses - how the U.S. Census Bureau's practice of counting the nation's mostly urban prisoners as residents of the often remote communities in which they are incarcerated distorts the democratic process. The New York Times editorial board has written 11 editorials supporting his efforts to change the way prisoners are counted, and the Boston Globe identified him as the "leading public critic" of the prisoner miscount. He has presented his research at national and international conferences and meetings, including a Census Bureau Symposium, a meeting of the National Academies, and keynote addresses at Harvard and Brown Universities. Mr. Wagner's publications include Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York (2002); The Prison Index: Taking the Pulse of the Crime Control Industry (2003); and, with Eric Lotke, Prisoners of the Census: Electoral and Financial Consequences of Counting Prisoners Where They Go, Not Where They Come From, [PDF] 24 Pace L. Rev. 587 (2004).

Current volunteers

Elena Lavarreda, a 2008 graduate of Smith College, works 2 days a week as a Policy Analyst. Most recently, she has co-authored reports about prison-based gerrymandering in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

Leah Sakala works with us on Fridays as a Policy Analyst. She co-authored Reaching too far, coming up short: How large sentencing enhancement zones miss the mark and she is the editor of our research database. She is a student at Smith College and an organizer of Smith Students for Social Justice and Institutional Change.