Dismantling Mass Incarceration with Premal Dharia ’00

Brown alumna Premal Dharia ’00 — a former public defender who has spent her career working against the harms of the criminal system — will speak about our system of mass incarceration and her recently released book (with co-editors James Forman, Jr, and Maria Hawilo), Dismantling Mass Incarceration: a Handbook for Change.Premal Dharia is the executive director of theInstitute to End Mass Incarcerationat Harvard Law School and coeditor in chief of the online publicationInquest. Previously, she spent nearly 15 years representing people charged with criminal offenses in three different places: the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., the Office of the Federal Public Defender in Baltimore, Maryland, and the military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In 2014, she was selected for a three-month fellowship to help build out and train three new public defender offices in the West Bank. She brought these years of experience to Civil Rights Corps, where she was the Director of Litigation. In 2019, she received a fellowship through the Reflective Democracy Campaign, which investigates the demographics of, and works to dismantle structural barriers around, political power. During that time, she started the Defender Impact Initiative, which focused on the role public defenders can play in the broad movement to end mass incarceration. The work and ideas of DII have been incorporated into the Institute to End Mass Incarceration. Ms. Dharia serves on the boards of the Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop, the Second Look Project, and the Law & Justice Journalism Project. She is on the Fellows Advisory Council of the International Legal Foundation, and is on the Academic Advisory Board of the Family Justice Law Center. She is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation. She graduated from Brown University with a degree in History and African-American Studies, with a focus on comparative postcolonial studies, and from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She is an editor ofDismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change.Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP to indicate your interest in attending the event. Seats are limited and will be given to the first guests to arrive.