Andrea James

Andrea James is the Founder and Executive Director of Families for Justice as Healing, the founder of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, a 2015 Soros Justice Fellow, and the author of Upper Bunkies Unite: And Other Thoughts On the Politics of Mass Incarceration.

Andrea worked within the criminal justice system for more than 25 years, from her days as a youth worker to her work as a criminal defense attorney. In 2009 she was sentenced to serve a 24-month federal prison sentence. After a lifetime of work seeking justice on behalf of disenfranchised people, she was stunned at what she encountered upon entering the federal prison system as an incarcerated person and uses her experience to raise awareness of the affect of incarceration of women on children and communities, and to shift from a criminal legal system to a system focusing on human justice.