Lauren-Brooke Eisen

Lauren-Brooke Eisen is Director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, a nonpartisan law and policy institute that seeks to improve systems of democracy and justice. Eisen manages a team that focuses on exposing the profound social and economic hardships that impact those who encounter the justice system while creating policies that ultimately shrink its size and scope. Previously Eisen served as a Senior Program Associate at the Vera Institute of Justice in the Center on Sentencing and Corrections where she worked on policies that aimed to improve public safety while reducing prison populations. Eisen also served as an assistant district attorney in New York City where she served in the Appeals Bureau, the Criminal Court Bureau, and the Sex Crimes Special Victims Bureau where she prosecuted a wide range of misdemeanor and felony cases. Before entering law school, Eisen worked as a beat reporter for a daily newspaper in Laredo, Texas where she covered criminal justice issues. Eisen has taught an undergraduate seminar on mass incarceration at Yale, serves as an adjunct instructor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and supervises NYU Law students who participate in the Brennan Center Public Policy Advocacy Clinic. Her work has been published in The New York Times, USA Today, Politico, The Atlantic, Time, Fortune, The Marshall Project, MSNBC, US News & World Report, Roll Call, The Hill, HuffPo, Daily News, Vox, The National Book Review, The Crime Report, Hollywood Reporter, The Times-Picayune, The New York Law Journal, and The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. Eisen has appeared on National Public Radio, CNN, CBS News, NBC News, MSNBC, Washington Post TV, and Al Jazeera News and was featured in the documentary Redeeming The State. She serves on the Advisory Council of the New York City Bar’s Task Force on Mass Incarceration and holds an AB from Princeton University and a JD from the Georgetown University Law Center. She is the author of Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Columbia University, 2017).