Foundation Taps Visionaries to Reform U.S. Justice System

Open Society Institute awards fellowships to reporters, lawyers, and advocates
in 14 states

NEW YORK, April 29 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Open Society Institute today
awarded Soros Justice Fellowships to 17 outstanding individuals working to
restore fairness to a deeply flawed system.

The lawyers, advocates, scholars, and journalists will tackle issues from
death penalty reform and the criminalization of immigrants to juvenile justice
and the challenges of parenting in prison. The Soros Justice Fellows will
receive a total of more than $1.3 million.

"At a time of uncertainty and hardship for many in America, criminal justice
looms as one of our most pressing challenges," said Ann Beeson, executive
director of the Open Society Institute's U.S. Programs. "The new group of
Soros Justice Fellows will bring fresh ideas to fix a failed system that
breaks America's promise of fairness under the law."

Among the new fellows is a community organizer in Nashville whose son was
murdered in street violence and who spent more than half her life entangled in
the criminal justice system. She will train current and former gang members to
become advocates for reform.

Another fellow, a lawyer in Seattle, will challenge a common police practice
that targets homeless and poor people and bans them from entire city
neighborhoods. In Virginia, a parent whose son was incarcerated in the
juvenile justice system is now a full-time advocate for reform in a state that
houses youth in adult jails.

The fellows will each receive a stipend of $45,000 to $79,500 to undertake
projects lasting 12-18 months.

Since 1997, The Open Society Institute has awarded more than $14 million in
grants to Soros Justice Fellows as part of a broader effort to strengthen
justice in the United States. In the last 25 years, the foundation has given
away over $7 billion to build open, democratic societies around the world,
including more than $940 million in the United States. For more information
on the Soros Justice Fellowships, please visit http://www.soros.org/

2009 Soros Justice Fellows

Mass Incarceration
Khalilah Brown-Dean; scholar; Yale University; New Haven, CT
Brown-Dean will test voter registration and mobilization strategies in five
high-incarceration communities in Connecticut. Although Connecticut reformed
its felony disenfranchisement laws in 2001, confusion about voter eligibility
has resulted in weakened civic engagement.

Renay Frankel; lawyer; Committee for Public Counsel Services; Boston, MA
Frankel will create an innovative partnership between criminal and civil legal
services in Massachusetts to ensure more effective legal representation for
low-income defendants. A lack of coordination among attorneys can result in a
person pleading guilty to a criminal charge without understanding that a
conviction can significantly hamper their ability to find a job, secure
housing, or pursue an education.

Patrice Gaines; author; Lake Wylie, SC
Gaines will write a series of articles exploring the impact of mass
incarceration on African American communities. In some neighborhoods, half of
the young male population is in prison or on probation or parole.

Catherine Greensfelder; lawyer; National Housing Law Project; Oakland, CA
Greensfelder will work with community organizations to improve access to
housing for formerly incarcerated people. Laws that ban individuals with
recent convictions from public housing have led to endemic homelessness among
people on parole and probation.

Lauren Melodia; community organizer; Center for Community Alternatives; New
York, NY
Melodia will work with community members in rural "prison towns" to re-think
their local economies. In New York, as in many other states, the warehousing
of urban residents in remote rural prisons has proven to be a poor substitute
for viable economic development. Melodia's project involves a collaborative
effort to help these rural areas develop sustainable models for growth.

Nancy Mullane; broadcast journalist and producer; San Francisco, CA
Mullane will produce a radio documentary about men and women awaiting parole
in California. A 1988 law politicized the parole process by making the
governor, and not parole boards, the final authority on early release
decisions for people serving life sentences with the possibility of parole.
Mullane's project will take listeners inside a world where people struggle to
reform their lives amid diminishing hope that they will ever be granted
parole.

Jessica Pupovac; journalist; Chicago, IL
Pupovac will explore the emerging crisis of an aging prison population. By
2010, one-third of all federal and state prison inmates will be over the age
of 50--a development that portends significant hardship for people both inside
and outside of prison.

Immigrant Detention and Wrongful Arrest
Sam Brooke; lawyer; Southern Poverty Law Center; Montgomery, AL
Brooke will engage in advocacy and public education to curb arbitrary
detentions and abuses at Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in the
southeastern United States.

Amalia Greenberg Delgado; lawyer; American Civil Liberties Union of Northern
California; San Francisco, CA
Greenberg Delgado will develop a public education program to counter myths
about immigrants and crime, and advocate for improved law-enforcement
practices in immigrant communities. State and local police in California
increasingly target people based not on suspected criminal activity but on
supposed immigration violations. This tactic has made immigrant neighborhoods
less safe and places a severe burden on families and communities.

Juvenile Justice
Liane Rozzell; community organizer; Legal Aid Justice Center; Charlottesville,
VA
Rozzell will build an organization of family, youth, and community allies to
reform Virginia's juvenile justice system. Many children in Virginia are
incarcerated or placed in the adult system, and children of color are targeted
disproportionately.

Reentry
Clemmie Greenlee; community organizer; Urban EpiCenter; Nashville, TN
Greenlee will train current and former gang members in Nashville to advocate
for criminal justice reform. A formerly incarcerated community organizer and
advocate, Greenlee believes that gang-involved youth have the potential to
become positive agents of change. Since the murder of her son over a decade
ago, Greenlee has devoted herself to helping those with criminal records
transform their lives and their communities.

Policing
Anita Khandelwal; lawyer; The Defender Association; Seattle, WA
Khandelwal will challenge a common practice by the Seattle Police Department
that targets homeless and poor people and bans them from entire city
neighborhoods for years at a time.

Death Penalty
Wyatt Feeler; lawyer; ACLU Capital Punishment Project; Durham, NC
Feeler's project seeks to bring a measure of fairness to the jury selection
process and thereby reduce the number of death sentences. Jury selection in
death penalty cases is heavily skewed in favor of the prosecution. As a
result, jurors in capital cases tend to be more willing than the public at
large to sentence defendants to death.

Kristin Traicoff; lawyer; Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana; New
Orleans, LA
Traicoff will challenge Louisiana's lethal injection protocol. Lethal
injection enjoys an undeserved reputation as a humane way to kill. For years,
advocates and medical professionals have maintained that the process can
produce excruciating pain.

Halting the Export of Prisoners
Carrie Ann Shirota; lawyer and advocate; Maui Economic Opportunity, Inc.;
Wailuku, HI
Shirota will work to mitigate and reduce the transfer of incarcerated
Hawaiians to mainland prisons thousands of miles away. Hawaii's growing
reliance on transfers severs family ties, disconnects Hawaiians from cultural
traditions, gives rise to prison gangs, and complicates community
reintegration.

Parenting from Prison
Shannon Heffernan; broadcast journalist and producer; Chicago, IL
Heffernan will go into prisons and communities in the Chicago area to record
the sorrows and aspirations of incarcerated parents. Although two-thirds of
people in federal prisons and over one-half of those in state prisons are
parents of minor children, few Americans understand the trials and heartbreak
of those who try to maintain family ties while incarcerated.

Children's Literature and Criminal Justice
Katheryn Russell-Brown; scholar; Gainesville, FL
Russell-Brown, a criminologist and law professor, will develop children's
books on criminal justice issues to help young people understand the court
system, corrections, and the police. Despite the myriad ways the criminal
justice system affects American families and communities, books for young
children seldom discuss these issues.

The Open Society Institute, a private operating and grantmaking foundation,
works to build vibrant and tolerant democracies whose governments are
accountable to their citizens. To achieve its mission, OSI seeks to shape
public policies that assure greater fairness in political, legal, and economic
systems and safeguard fundamental rights. OSI works in over 60 countries in
Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, as well as the
United States.

SOURCE Open Society Institute

Amy Weil, Aweil@sorosny.org, +1-212-548-0381, or Karynn Fish,
kfish@sorosny.org, +1-212-548-0906, both of the Open Society Institute