Andrea James

Founder of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls

**Andrea James** is the Founder of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, Founder of Families for Justice as Healing, the author of Upper Bunkies Unite: And Other Thoughts On the Politics of Mass Incarceration, a 2015 Soros Justice Fellow, and a 2016 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights award recipient. Andrea worked within the criminal justice system for more than 25 years and is a former 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. James uses her experience to raise awareness of the effect of incarceration on women, children, and communities,and further the shift from a criminal legal system to a system focusing on human justice.