Truthout
Inimai M. Chettiar
Inimai M. Chettiar is the Director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program. The Justice Program seeks to secure our nation’s promise of ‘equal justice for all’ by creating an effective, rational and fair legal system. It proposes and works to enact data-driven policy and legal reforms aimed at two main goals: ending mass incarceration and closing the justice gap for low-income Americans.
With expertise in applying economics and cost-benefit analysis to criminal justice reform efforts, Ms. Chettiar joined the Brennan Center in July 2012 to lead the team. She focuses on using this analysis to demonstrate that helping struggling communities can help the country as a whole achieve economic and social prosperity. She is listed in the national directory as a Top Wonk in criminal justice, economic policy, and race and economics. Her scholarship focuses on viewing policies as investments that lawmakers should evaluate based on what economic and societal benefits they produce. She received this training at NYU Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity, where she led litigation and policy projects using cost-benefit analysis to reform a variety of federal laws.
Lauren-Brooke Eisen is Counsel in the Brennan Center’s Justice Program where she focuses on improving the criminal justice process through legal reforms. Previously Ms. Eisen was 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.
Ms. 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, Ms. Eisen worked as a beat reporter for a daily newspaper in Laredo, Texas where she covered criminal justice issues. Ms. Eisen has taught an undergraduate seminar on mass incarceration at Yale, supervises NYU Law students who participate in the Brennan Center Public Policy Advocacy Clinic, and is currently an adjunct instructor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.