Appendix C

Speaker Biographical Sketches

Queen Adesuyi is a policy coordinator at the Drug Policy Alliance’s (DPA) Office of National Affairs (ONA) in Washington, D.C., where she supports ONA’s work to advance DPA’s federal legislative agenda. Her areas of focus include marijuana legalization with a racial justice focus, collateral consequences, and reentry hurdles for those involved in the criminal justice or juvenile justice systems. She also cochairs the Reentry and Housing Coalition, a broad coalition of advocates with the mission of expanding access to affordable housing for those involved with the justice system. Adesuyi, who hails from the Morris Heights section of the Bronx, is an alumna from Georgetown University, where she majored in American Studies and minored in Women’s and Gender Studies. Prior to joining DPA, Adesuyi worked with the Georgetown University Prisons and Justice Initiative, the National Reentry Network for Returning Citizens, the office of Congressman Jose E. Serrano (D-NY), Mic.com, and the New York Times.

Leo Beletsky, J.D., holds a joint appointment at Northeastern University with the School of Law and Bouvé College of Health Sciences. His expertise is in the use of law to improve health, with a focus on drug policy, reducing the spread of infectious disease, and the role of the criminal justice system in shaping public health outcomes. Throughout his career, Professor Beletsky has applied his skills and expertise in service to governmental agencies and nongovernmental organizations, including the United Nations, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the City of New York.

Prior to joining the Northeastern community, Professor Beletsky was on the faculty of the Division of Global Public Health at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, where he retains an adjunct appointment. He received his undergraduate training in geography from Vassar College and Oxford University, a master’s in public health from Brown University, his law degree from Temple University School of Law, and his postdoctoral training at the Yale University Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS. He is a member of the New York State Bar.

Kassandra Frederique is New York State Director at the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA). Frederique previously ran the day-to-day operations of the statewide campaign to end New York’s racially biased marijuana arrests, which cut the number of NYC marijuana arrests in half. Frederique also represented DPA as a member of Communities United for Police Reform, which focused on addressing stop-and-frisk policies and broader police reform and accountability measures bridging the gap between the war on drugs and policing. As a coauthor of Blueprint for a Public Health and Safety Approach to Drug Policy and as technical advisor to Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick’s The Ithaca Plan, Frederique cultivates and mobilizes powerful coalitions in communities devastated by drug misuse and drug criminalization to develop municipal strategies to foster healthier and safer communities. A native New Yorker, Frederique holds an M.S. in Social Work from Columbia University and earned a B.S. in Industrial Labor Relations at Cornell University.

Judge Gregory E. Jackson is a native Washingtonian. He was appointed by President George W. Bush to the District of Columbia Superior Court in 2004. He began his legal career in 1978 as an Honor Law Graduate at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In 1986, Judge Jackson was sworn in as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Following a successful career at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, he was appointed General Counsel for the D.C. Department of Corrections in 1999 and held that position until his appointment to the bench. As an associate judge, Judge Jackson served in the Civil Division and Domestic Violence. From January 2012 until December 2016 Judge Jackson served as the presiding judge for the Superior Court Drug Intervention Program, also known as Drug Court. He has traveled to Bolivia, Northern Ireland, and Uruguay to participate in drug court training for criminal justice professionals. Judge Jackson retired in July 2017 but continues to serve as a Senior Judge.

Alec Karakatsanis is the Founder and Executive Director of the Civil Rights Corps, a nonprofit organization dedicated to groundbreaking systemic litigation and advocacy challenging pervasive injustices in the

American criminal legal system. Alec graduated from Yale College in 2005 with a degree in Ethics, Politics, and Economics and Harvard Law School in 2008, where he was a Supreme Court Chair of the Harvard Law Review. Alec is the author, among other things, of “Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers,” 128 Harv. L. Rev. F. 253 (2015), and “The Human Lawyer,” 34 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Soc. Change 563 (2010). He was recently awarded the 2016 Trial Lawyer of the Year by Public Justice for his role in bringing constitutional civil rights cases challenging the money bail system and the 2016 Stephen B. Bright Award for contributions to indigent defense in the South by Gideon’s Promise. His work to end modern debtors’ prisons was recently profiled in Harvard Magazine.

Beau Kilmer, Ph.D., is a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, where he codirects the RAND Drug Policy Research Center. He also serves as the interim director of RAND San Francisco Bay Area and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Kilmer’s articles have appeared in leading journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and his commentaries have been published by CNN, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Newsweek, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and other outlets. His coauthored book on cannabis legalization was published by Oxford University Press, and the second edition was released in 2016. Kilmer received a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Public Service Award for his “leadership and innovation in the areas of alcohol and drug-impaired driving program and policy research” and his coauthored work on 24/7 sobriety received honorable mention for the Behavioural Exchange Award for Outstanding Research. Before earning his doctorate at Harvard University, Kilmer received a judicial administration fellowship that supported his work with the San Francisco Drug Court.

Marc Mauer is one of the country’s leading experts on sentencing policy, race, and the criminal justice system. He has directed programs on criminal justice policy reform for 30 years and is the author of some of the most widely cited reports and publications in the field. The Atlantic has described him as a scholar who has “reframed how Americans view crime, race, and poverty in the public sphere.” His 1995 report on racial disparity and the criminal justice system led the New York Times to editorialize that the report “should set off alarm bells from the White House to city halls—and help reverse the notion that we can incarcerate our way out of fundamental social problems.” Race to Incarcerate, Mauer’s groundbreaking book on how sentencing policies led to the explosive expansion of the U.S. prison population, was a semifinalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 1999. A second edition was published in 2006 and a 2013 graphic novel version was cited by the American Library Association

as one of the “Great Graphic Novels” of the year. Mauer is also the coeditor of Invisible Punishment, a 2002 collection of essays by prominent criminal justice experts on the social cost of imprisonment, and he is coauthor of the forthcoming book, The Meaning of Life: The Case for Abolishing Life Sentences. Mauer began his work in criminal justice with the American Friends Service Committee in 1975 and served as the organization’s National Justice Communications Coordinator. Since joining The Sentencing Project in 1987, he has testified before Congress and state legislatures, has frequently appeared on radio and television networks, and is regularly interviewed by the New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, and many other major media outlets. In 2005, he became Executive Director of The Sentencing Project. Mauer has received the Helen L. Buttenweiser Award from the Fortune Society (1991), the Donald Cressey Award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency for contributions to criminal justice research (1996), the Alfred R. Lindesmith Award from the Drug Policy Alliance for achievement in drug policy scholarship (2003), the Maud Booth Correctional Services Award from Volunteers of America (2008), the John Augustus Award from the National Association of Sentencing Advocates (2009), the Margaret Mead Award from the International Community Corrections Association (2009), the Inside/Out Summit Award from Centerforce (2011), and the Randy Steidl Excellence in Justice Award from Indiana State University (2018). A graduate of Stony Brook University, where he received his bachelor’s degree, Mauer earned his Master of Social Work from the University of Michigan.

Scott Nolen, Ph.D., is the director of the Drug Addiction Treatment program at the Open Society Institute–Baltimore. Nolen has held a variety of research, legislative, and advocacy positions in the public health and juvenile and criminal justice fields. Before joining the Open Society Institute–Baltimore, he worked as a health scientist in the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Strategic Planning, Legislation, and Scientific Policy. As a part of the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities, Nolen led a project focused on driving the national discussion on health disparities. Prior to that, Nolen was the director of the Equal Justice Program at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, which allowed Nolen to act as a health care and criminal justice advocate who could combine his legal training with his background in social science research. From 2008 to 2009, Nolen served as a Congressional Fellow focusing on health care for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. As a child psychology fellow for the New York State Psychiatric Institute, Nolen conducted and published research on mental health and juvenile justice issues and led probation officer training on identifying suicidal youth.

He also worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital Adolescent Medicine Clinic, where he provided mental health services to youth in schools, emergency rooms, and outpatient clinics. Nolen holds a law degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Duke University.

Daniel Raymond has worked in the field of harm reduction for over two and a half decades. As the Harm Reduction Coalition’s Deputy Director of Planning and Policy, Daniel oversees the organization’s policy, capacity-building, and overdose prevention departments. Daniel works with federal and state officials, advocates, and providers to expand critical drug user health interventions. Daniel has served on Governor Cuomo’s Heroin and Opioid Task Force, the Food and Drug Administration’s Antiviral Drug Advisory Committee, the American Medical Association Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement Hepatitis C Workgroup, and the AASLD/IDSA Hepatitis C Guidance Panel.

Peter Reuter, Ph.D., is Professor in the School of Public Policy and the Department of Criminology at the University of Maryland. From 1981 to 1993 he was a Senior Economist in the Washington office of the RAND Corporation. He founded and directed RAND’s Drug Policy Research Center from 1989 to 1993. His books include (with Robert MacCoun) Drug War Heresies: Learning from Other Places, Times and Vices (Cambridge University Press, 2001 with Letizia Paoli and Victoria Greenfield), and The World Heroin Market: Can Supply be Cut? (Oxford University Press, 2009). In recent years he has researched money laundering controls and illicit financial flows. Chasing Dirty Money (2004, with Ted Truman) provided the first analytic study of anti-money laundering. From 1999 to 2004 Dr. Reuter was editor of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. From 2007 to 2011 he served as the first president of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy. He recently chaired a National Academy of Sciences panel on illicit tobacco markets. Dr. Reuter received his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale.

Josiah (Jody) D. Rich, M.D., M.P.H., is Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, and he is a practicing infectious disease specialist since 1994 at the Miriam Hospital Immunology Center, providing clinical care for over 22 years, and at the Rhode Island Department of Corrections caring for prisoners with HIV infection and working in the correctional setting doing research. He has published close to 190 peer-reviewed publications, predominantly on the overlap between infectious diseases, addictions, and incarceration. He is the Director and Cofounder of the Center for Prisoner Health and

Human Rights at the Miriam Hospital (www.prisonerhealth.org). He is also a cofounder of the nationwide Centers for AIDS Research collaboration in HIV in corrections initiative. He is the principal investigator of three R01 grants and one K24 grant, all focused on incarcerated populations. He has served as an expert for the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and many others. He has been appointed by Rhode Island Governor, Gina Raimondo, to the Overdose Prevention and Intervention Task Force Expert Team, selected to advise the task force and formulate a strategic plan to address addiction and stop overdose in Rhode Island. The RI Overdose Prevention and Intervention Task Force was created to propose a strategic plan that puts forth the most effective initiatives in the areas of prevention of opioid addiction, reversal of opioid overdose, treatment of opioid addiction, and recovery to reduce addiction and stop overdose death in Rhode Island.