Danielle C. Jefferis is the Clinical Teaching Fellow in the Civil Rights Clinic at the University of Denver College of Law. Her scholarship, teaching, and practice focus on prison and detention, with an emphasis on the for-profit prison industry. Before joining the Denver Law faculty, Jefferis was the Nadine Strossen Fellow with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project in New York. There, she worked on issues related to post-9/11 racial and religious discrimination and the intersection of national security and criminal law. Jefferis received her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a Public Interest Law Scholar and graduated cum laude, and her B.A. from New York University, where she majored in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and received the Ibn Khaldun Prize for Excellence and Achievement in the Study of the Arabic Language. She is on Twitter at @jeffdanielles.
Prison abolitionism has gained traction. Louisiana, for example, has taken steps recently to reduce the population of the state’s prisons. In June 2017, the “world’s prison capital” passed a series of laws designed to cut the state’s prison and community supervision populations by ten and twelve percent. The movement has been largely successful, by some…
