Jolene Forman

Jolene Forman is the Chief Program and Advocacy Officer at The Just Trust. She has spent over two decades working on criminal justice reform. She has led legal and legislative advocacy, reentry, in-prison programming, and philanthropic initiatives. Prior to joining The Just Trust, Jolene was the Criminal Justice Policy Director at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Before moving to the philanthropic sector, she worked at the Drug Policy Alliance and the ACLU of Northern California. At the Drug Policy Alliance, she directed the organization’s national marijuana policy work; played a key role in California’s Proposition 64 campaign, which legalized marijuana and reduced and removed several criminal penalties; authored several pieces of legislation across multiple states; and drafted numerous amicus briefs challenging the application of draconian criminal laws. While at the ACLU, she managed then Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Marijuana Policy in California and worked extensively on the Proposition 47 campaign, which reduced several drug and property-related felonies to misdemeanors. Jolene earned her J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law and M.Sc. in Criminal Justice Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of several reports on the criminal legal system and co-author of two law review articles. Her work has been quoted in many media outlets, including the New York Times, the Economist, the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, CNN, USA Today, and Reuters. She has been featured on MSNBC’s The Docket, as well as several public radio shows. In her free time, she spent nearly a decade as a restorative justice practitioner inside San Quentin State Prison and currently sits on the boards of the Clean Slate Initiative and is a member of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel's international advisory council.

Travel, hiking, music, food, justice, and contemporary fiction

Advocacy, Criminal Law, Drug Policy, Justice Reform, Philanthropy, Policy