Keith Wattley

Keith Wattley is the founding executive director of UnCommon Law, where he leads the largest ever team of attorneys and advocates focused on trauma-informed counseling, legal representation, and policy advocacy on behalf of people serving life sentences. He believes that by demonstrating what’s possible through a healing approach to even the most serious crimes, a very different world of alternatives to incarceration becomes viable. He seeks to end the discriminatory process through which parole boards decide who comes home from prison, while also establishing new norms for what constitutes an equitable workplace for those returning from or otherwise impacted by incarceration.

Keith was an inaugural Obama Foundation Fellow and was awarded the James Irvine Foundation’s Leadership Award. He is active on several boards and teaches at the UC Berkeley School of Law, where he supports law students providing guidance to people navigating California’s discriminatory parole process – which affects roughly half of California’s 96,000 imprisoned people.