Angelyn C. Frazer-Giles
Angelyn C. Frazer-Giles is the Executive Director of the National Network for Justice (NNJ). She has over 25 years’ experience in community organizing, policy analysis and advocacy on civil and human rights issues and criminal justice. Previously she was the Director of State Legislative Affairs and Special Projects for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) where she was responsible for the development, articulation, and strategic vision of NACDL’s agenda on the state level.
Angelyn is a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York with a degree in Fashion Buying and Merchandising, has a B.A. in Latin American Studies from the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, studied Spanish at the Universidad De Guadalajara in Jalisco, México and received her Paralegal certificate from Delaware State University. Angelyn has traveled to Italy, Portugal, Cuba, Greece, the Caribbean and Honduras the birth place of her parents. She is also a licensed instructor of Zumba®, Zumba Gold®, Zumba Sentao™ and Aqua Zumba®.
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
Juston L. Cooper
Juston L. Cooper, is a native of Denver Colorado and is the Deputy Director at Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition (CCJRC). He has a proven record of success with state and local elected officials in political engagement strategy, policy planning and development, organizational development, budgeting, collaboration and coalition building, facilitation, strategic planning and management. He has been instrumental to the public sector in addressing criminal justice reform and has an extended career with non-profit agencies committed to systems integration, juvenile justice and youth intervention initiatives.
He holds a Master’s in Public Administration from the University of Colorado at Denver and a Bachelor’s of Science in Business Marketing from Metropolitan State University.
Stephen Johnson Grove
Stephen JohnsonGrove is Strategy Director for the Ohio Transformation Fund, a collaborative of Ohio-based and national foundations supporting criminal-justice reform and related work in that state. In that role, much like NNJ does on a national level, Stephen cultivates connections between organizations and advocates across the state and provides resources to grow and strengthen the field.
From 2005-2019, Stephen was an attorney at the Ohio Justice & Policy Center where he was a leader in co-authoring and championing the (unfortunately unsuccessful) Ohio statewide Issue 1 in 2018; winning local and statewide Fair Hiring (ban the box) reforms; expanding record-sealing (expungement) access; creating two related rehabilitation certificates that allowed Ohio job seekers with criminal records to get licenses and jobs; initiating the most powerful collateral-sanctions database of a single state’s laws in the country; and, for several years, running OJPC’s Cincinnati-based outreach legal clinics in soup kitchens and community centers.
Before that, he spent time teaching English to refugees in rural Georgia and as an attorney for homeless veterans in Philadelphia. Stephen earned his law degree from Temple University and his bachelor’s degree from Penn State. He lives with his family in Cincinnati.
Lorenzo Jones
Lorenzo Jones is the co-founder and co-executive director at the Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Justice. He has more than 25 years of experience mentoring community leaders and organizing communities to make systemic change.
From 2005 – 2016, Jones served as the executive director of A Better Way Foundation (ABWF), a Connecticut-based organization that used advocacy and organizing to build power in urban, suburban, and rural communities most affected by mass incarceration, the drug war, and the inequitable access to resources. During his tenure, ABWF made community organizing a fundamental part of their policy reform strategy. He built numerous campaigns that ran the spectrum of criminal justice and drug policy reform objectives.
He lives in Hartford, Connecticut, with his wife Kimberly. They have three children –Jordan, Lorenzo Jr., and Loren. Born and raised in Chicago, Jones is an avid fan of the Bears and the Blackhawks.
Laura Sager
Laura Sager was most recently the Executive Director of Safe & Just Michigan.
Prior to joining Safe & Just Michigan, Sager was the Campaign for Justice executive director, which worked to reform Michigan’s public defense delivery system. She worked for over a decade at Families against Mandatory Minimums, a national non-profit sentencing reform organization, serving as national executive director and state campaign director. In Michigan, she led a bipartisan campaign that reformed Michigan’s harshest-in-the-nation mandatory minimum drug laws and supported the expansion of drug treatment and drug courts.
A nationally-recognized expert on criminal justice reform, Sager’s work has been featured in documentaries, on 60 Minutes II, the O’Reilly Factor, From the Heartland, and in television, print, and radio outlets across the nation.
Sager attended Michigan State University. She makes her home in Lansing, Michigan and has recently retired where she is volunteering on several social justice issues.
BOARD MEMBERS
Juan Cartagena
One of the nation’s leading voices on equality and nondiscrimination, Constitutional and Civil Rights Attorney Juan Cartagena inspires change to systems that marginalize communities of color. As a public speaker, El Diario columnist, and Rutgers University lecturer, Juan focuses extensively on Puerto Rican and Latino rights issues, including the community impacts of mass incarceration.
Juan is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Columbia University School of Law and is the recipient of multiple awards, including Dartmouth College’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Social Justice Award, and the U.S. Hispanic Leadership Institute’s Cesar Chavez Community Service Award. Juan lives in and represents the State of New Jersey, having previously served as a Municipal Court Judge in Hoboken and as General Counsel to the Hispanic Bar Association of New Jersey.
John S. Cooper
John S. Cooper is the Executive Director of Safe & Just Michigan, a criminal justice policy and research organization based in Lansing, MI. He joined Safe & Just Michigan in 2017 as its Policy Director after serving as a criminal justice policy advisor to State Representative David LaGrand (D – 75th, Grand Rapids).
Cooper’s research and advocacy is focused on Michigan’s adult criminal legal system, with an emphasis on strategies to reduce Michigan’s prison population, remove barriers to successful reentry, and increase the use of effective alternatives to incarceration.
During his tenure at Safe & Just Michigan, Cooper has led several legislative campaigns to reform Michigan’s criminal legal system, including the successful campaign to enact “objective parole,” 2018 PA 339.
Before he joined Rep. LaGrand’s office, Cooper spent seven years as a litigator in the Washington, D.C. office of Latham & Watkins LLP. He also served as a law clerk to Hon. Boyce F. Martin, Jr., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit.
Cooper obtained his juris doctorate from the University of Virginia School of Law after graduating with honors from Calvin College. He lives in his hometown of Grand Rapids with his wife, Julia.
Pastor Kenneth Glasgow
The Rev. Kenneth Glasgow, national president and founder of The Ordinary People Society, or TOPS, and a renowned voting-rights organizer and veteran criminal-justice and drug-policy-reform activist. Glasgow became aware over a decade ago of Alabama’s “moral turpitude” clause, a vague provision in Alabama’s constitution that barred people incarcerated on felony charges, many of whom were black, the right to vote based on nothing but the corrosive intentions of a white supremacist state that was able to use the war on drugs as cover. Glasgow sued the state and won. This allowed him to enter prisons and educate incarcerated people about their right to vote, which is a critical part of his ministry. Eventually, in 2017, Alabama passed the “Definition of Moral Turpitude Act right to vote to thousands of people in the state.
In December 2017, Glasgow’s tireless work contributed to the upset victory of Doug Jones in the special senatorial election in which Donald Trump had supported Jones’ opponent, accused child molester Roy Moore. Though Glasgow had been organizing for decades, it was his influence in that contentious Senate race that pushed him into the national spotlight. In the weeks leading up to the election, Glasgow mobilized TOPS branches in the Alabama cities of Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, Montgomery, Enterprise, Dothan, Abbeville, Geneva, Gordon and Bessemer, and registered thousands of formerly and currently incarcerated people, many of whom were serving time for low-level drug crimes and other petty offenses.
Caroline Isaacs
Caroline Isaacs, Program Director, American Friends Service Committee—Arizona.
Caroline Isaacs is the Program Director for the American Friends Service Committee’s Arizona office. She has worked for AFSC since 1995, starting out as an intern.
Through research, documentation, media work, and policy advocacy, American Friends Service Committee – Arizona (AFSC-AZ) challenges criminalization, opposes prison expansion, and advocates for policy change to reduce the size and scope of the criminal punishment system, which encompasses not just physical places of incarceration, but also the proliferation of systems of control, surveillance, and supervision.
Caroline holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the College of Wooster and a Masters in Social Work from Arizona State University. She has authored several reports on the poor performance of private prison companies in Arizona, conditions in correctional facilities, and criminal justice policy and sentencing, including (most recently), Community Cages: Profitizing Community Corrections and Alternatives to Incarceration (August 2016) and A New Public Safety Framework for Arizona: Charting a Path Forward (December 2016).
Andy Ko
Andy Ko has been engaged in justice policy and law reform efforts for over 30 years. Prior to arriving at Partnership for Safety and Justice in 2014, he spent 15 years leading drug policy reform efforts at the Open Society Foundations, the American Civil Liberties Union, and ACLU of Washington. While in Seattle, he was founding director of the Drug Policy Reform Project, where he helped overhaul the state’s criminal sentencing scheme, develop Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD), and create and implement successful strategies for marijuana policy reform and ending the War on Drugs. Earlier in his career, Andy represented homeless and low-income people at the Legal Aid Society of New York City and and at Columbia Legal Services in Washington. He is a graduate of Tufts University and New York University School of Law.
Nsombi Lambright
Nsombi Lambright is the Executive Director of Director of One Voice, a statewide leadership development and policy advocacy organization, headquartered in Jackson, MS. The mission of One Voice is magnify voices of traditionally silenced communities in the South. Our work is to build leadership in an effort to address structural oppressions that show up in the institutions that are significant in our lives, including the public education system, voting, the environment, and the criminal justice system.
Nsombi sits on the boards of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Mississippi Low Income Child Care Initiative. She is also a Life Member of the NAACP.
Nsombi also serves on the City of Jackson’s Civil Service Commission and Criminal Justice Taskforce and also served on the transition team of Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba.