Join the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement (NACOLE) on Tuesday, March 24, 2020, at 4 EDT, for a Discussion of Strategies for Prisons, Jails and Oversight Bodies During the COVID-19 Crisis. NACOLE is bringing together national experts, members of the oversight community and others to share information about what jurisdictions across the country are doing to address COVID-19 in jails and prisons, strategies for reducing jail and prison populations, important COVID-19 policy recommendations, practices across the country and what the current crisis says about the past, present and future of American carceral policy. This will be an interactive discussion that will allow attendees to ask questions and share experiences from their jurisdictions.
Cathleen Beltz, J.D., M.A.: Cathleen Beltz is an attorney with more than 20 years of experience in the field of jail and prison research and reform. She was appointed Assistant Inspector General with the Los Angeles County Office of Inspector General by the LA County Board of Supervisors in May 2014. Beltz is responsible for managing oversight of the LA County jail system, including eight facilities with more than 4,000 Sheriff's personnel and 16,000 incarcerated people. Previously, Beltz served as Deputy Special Master monitoring the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation-Division of Juvenile Justice for compliance with the Farrell v. Beard consent decree covering medical and mental health care, education, sexual behavior treatment, safety and welfare and general conditions of confinement. She conducted an audit and policy analysis for the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department on its use of strip searches and safety cells, which led to substantial reforms. Beltz has taught university courses in quantitative and qualitative research methods using surveys of corrections officers at Missouri prisons. She serves on the board of directors of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement and has co-chaired it’s annual conference committee for the last three years
Michele Deitch, J.D., M.Sc.: Michele Deitch is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, where she holds a joint appointment at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and at the School of Law and teaches graduate-level courses on criminal justice policy. She is widely recognized as one of the country’s leading experts on the issue of correctional oversight and has written and published extensively on this topic. She won the 2019 NACOLE Flame Award, NACOLE’s highest honor, for her contributions to law enforcement oversight. Michele chaired conferences on prison oversight at the University of Texas in 2006 and 2016, events that brought together the nation’s top correctional oversight practitioners, corrections officials, advocates, and scholars. Among other publications, she helped edit and produce a law review volume titled Opening Up a Closed World: A Sourcebook on Prison Oversight, and co-authored an Op-Ed in The New York Times titled “What’s Going On In Our Prisons?.” She co-chairs (with Michael Mushlin) the American Bar Association’s subcommittee on correctional oversight and helped draft the ABA’s policies on this issue as well as the ABA’s standards on the treatment of prisoners. She served as a full-time court-appointed monitor of conditions in the Texas prison system in the landmark class action lawsuit of Ruiz v. Estelle, and she has also consulted with a number of prison and jail systems, as well as juvenile confinement agencies, to conduct cultural assessments and address conditions and safety issues in their facilities. A former recipient of a Soros Senior Justice Fellowship, she holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, a master’s degree in Psychology from Oxford University, and a B.A. from Amherst College.
Sharon Dolovich, Ph.D., J.D.: Sharon Dolovich is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, and Director of the UCLA Prison Law & Policy Program. She teaches courses on criminal law, the constitutional law of prisons, and other post-conviction topics, and her scholarship focuses on the law, policy, and theory of prisons and punishment. Dolovich has been a visiting professor at NYU, Harvard, and Georgetown, and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She served as Deputy General Counsel for the Los Angeles Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence, which was charged with investigating use of force in the L.A. County Jail and making recommendations for institutional reform. She also has served as an expert witness and as a consultant on myriad prisoners’ rights cases, and has testified before the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons and the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission.
Max Huntsman, J.D.: Max Huntsman has been a public servant for almost thirty years. He is a graduate of Yale Law School, and as a deputy in the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, his work included investigations and prosecutions into allegations of public corruption and law enforcement conduct. In 2013, he was appointed as the first Los Angeles County Inspector General. For the last six years, he has managed a staff of diverse professionals working to establish civilian oversight of law enforcement.
Aaron Littman, J.D., M.Phil.: Aaron Littman is a Binder Clinical Teaching Fellow at UCLA School of Law, where he teaches a police accountability clinic and is developing an appellate prisoners' rights clinic. He has a J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.Phil. in Criminological Research from the University of Cambridge, and a B.A. in political science from Yale College. Before coming to UCLA, he clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and for Judge Myron Thompson in the Middle District of Alabama. He also worked as a staff attorney in the impact litigation unit of the Southern Center for Human Rights, where his practice involved class action challenges to solitary confinement and inadequate mental healthcare in prisons and jails and to suspicionless mass searches, as well as representation of individuals in postconviction proceedings. His previous scholarship includes Prison Visitation Policies: A Fifty State Survey, 32 Yale L. & Pol'y Rev. 149 (2013) (with Chesa Boudin and Trevor Stutz), reprinted in Prisoners and the Law (Ira P. Robbins, ed.).