Lauren-Brooke Eisen

Lauren-Brooke Eisen is the senior director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program, where she leads the organization’s work to ensure a more fair, humane, and effective justice system. Her team focuses on exposing the profound social and economic hardships that affect those who encounter the justice system in addition to holding our broader Democratic institutions accountable for producing better public safety outcomes.

Eisen has authored dozens of nationally recognized reports and articles on reducing overincarceration. Her work has been featured in media outlets including the New York Times, USA Today, Governing, Time, Just Security, U.S. News & World Report, the Daily News, and the Marshall Project, and she has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, CBS News, NBC News, Fox News, National Public Radio, as well as many other television and radio news programs.

Eisen is the editor of Excessive Punishment: How the Justice System Creates Mass Incarceration (Columbia University Press, 2024) and author of Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Columbia University Press, 2017). After the book was published, Eisen received a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to conduct international research on public-private partnerships in corrections. Eisen also co-wrote a chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Prosecutors and Prosecution (Oxford University Press, 2021); contributed a chapter on the criminal justice process in New York State for New York’s Criminal Justice System (Carolina Academic Press, 2019). Eisen has also authored numerous law review articles.

Eisen is a member of the Council on Criminal Justice and previously served on the New York City Bar’s Task Force on Mass Incarceration. She co-chaired Manhattan District Attorney–elect Alvin Bragg’s transition team and served on the transition committee for Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez. Eisen taught an undergraduate seminar on mass incarceration at Yale University, served as an adjunct instructor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and currently teaches for the Columbia University Pre-College Program.

Before joining the Brennan Center, Eisen was a senior program associate at the Vera Institute of Justice, where she worked on the sentencing and corrections team to implement policies in multiple states to improve public safety while reducing prison populations. She also previously served as an assistant district attorney in New York City, where she worked in the appeals bureau, the criminal court bureau, and the sex crimes special victim’s bureau. Before entering law school, Eisen worked as a beat reporter for a daily newspaper in Laredo, Texas, covering criminal justice and immigration. She holds a BA from Princeton University and a JD from the Georgetown University Law Center.