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Experts - Nancy La Vigne

Nancy La Vigne

Vice President for Justice Policy, The Urban Institute

Nancy La Vigne is vice president for justice policy at the Urban Institute. She publishes research on prisoner reentry, criminal justice technologies, crime prevention, policing, and the spatial analysis of crime and criminal behavior. Her work appears in scholarly journals and practitioner publications and has made her a sought-after spokesperson on related subjects.

Before being appointed vice president, Nancy was a senior research associate at Urban, directing groundbreaking research on prisoner reentry. Before joining Urban, Nancy was founding director of the Crime Mapping Research Center at the National Institute of Justice. She later was special assistant to the assistant attorney general for the Office of Justice Programs within the US Department of Justice. She has also been research director for the Texas sentencing commission, research fellow at the Police Executive Research Forum, and consultant to the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

Nancy was executive director for the bipartisan Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections Reform and was founding chair of the Crime and Justice Research Alliance. She served on the board of directors for the Consortium of Social Science Associations from 2015 through 2018. She has testified before Congress and has been featured on NPR and in the Atlantic, New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune.

Nancy holds a BA in government and economics from Smith College, an MA in public affairs from the LBJ School at the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD in criminal justice from Rutgers University. [Source]

Nancy participated in the first Square One Roundtable convening “Examining the History of Racial and Economic Inequality: Implications for Justice Policy and Practice.”

Work
Roundtable Paper: Community-Driven Models for Safety and Justice