L.B. Eisen

Lauren-Brooke Eisen is the senior director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program, where she leads the organization’s work to reduce America’s reliance on incarceration. Her team focuses on exposing the profound social and economic hardships that impact those who encounter the justice system. The team also seeks to create policies that shrink the justice system’s size and scope while improving the humanity and fairness of America’s criminal legal system.

Eisen has authored dozens of nationally recognized reports and articles on how to reduce America’s reliance on incarceration. Her work has been featured in media outlets across the country, including the New York Times, USA Today, Time, 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 author of Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Columbia University Press, 2017) and received a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to conduct international research on public-private partnerships in corrections. Eisen is also the editor of Excessive Punishment: How the Justice System Creates Mass Incarceration (Columbia University Press, 2024). Eisen is a member of the Council on Criminal Justice and formerly served on the New York City Bar’s Task Force on Mass Incarceration, and on the advisory board for the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison. She co-chaired Manhattan DA-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 Victims Bureau. Before entering law school, Eisen worked as a beat reporter for a daily newspaper in Laredo, Texas, covering criminal justice and immigration. Eisen holds an AB from Princeton University and a JD from the Georgetown University Law Center.