Dr. Ackerman is a criminal justice professor at California State University, Fullerton. She earned her Ph.D. in criminal justice from CUNY Graduate Center in 2009. As a survivor scholar, her primary research interests center around sex crimes policy and practice, the etiology of sexual violence, and restorative justice as a method of harm reduction for individuals impacted by sexual victimization. With over thirty peer-reviewed articles and numerous book chapters, she has published extensively on topics related to sexual abuse and sex crimes policy and practice. In 2018, she co-authored two books, The New Campus Anti-Rape Movement and Sex and Gender in the 2016 Presidential Election. Her most recent book on vicarious restorative justice will be published by Safer Society Press in 2019.

Paul Wright is the founder and executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center. He is also editor of Prison Legal News (PLN), the longest-running independent prisoner rights publication in U.S. history. He has co-authored three PLN anthologies: The Celling of America: An Inside Look at the U.S. Prison Industry (Common Courage, 1998); Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America’s Poor (Routledge, 2003); and Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Imprisonment (New Press, 2008). His articles have appeared in over 80 publications, ranging from Counterpunch to USA Today. Paul was released from prison in 2003 after serving 17 years in Washington state. He is a former military policeman and graduate of the University of Maryland. He also serves as vice president of the National Police Accountability Project.

Mr. Dubbeling is NARSOL’s attorney. A former Army Ranger and infantry officer, he attended law school on an Army scholarship and graduated summa cum laude from Indiana University in Bloomington in 2005. He served as a JAG attorney for six years which included two tours in Afghanistan. After leaving the Army, Paul clerked for Judge Neil M. Gorsuch (now a Justice Gorsuch) before going into private practice. He subsequently earned an M.B.A. from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Paul successfully prosecuted Does v. Cooper, a federal lawsuit which struck down most of North Carolina’s previous premises restrictions and is currently lead counsel for NARSOL’s legal challenge to the North Carolina registration laws, NARSOL v. Stein. More recently, Paul won an important procedural due process victory in Merideth v. Stein.

Dr. Dum is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Kent State University. He received a Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from the University at Albany in 2014. His 2016 book, Exiled in America: Life on the Margins in a Residential Motel (Columbia University Press) received the 2018 Scholarly Achievement Award from the North Central Sociological Association, an honorable mention in the 2017 PROSE Awards, and was long-listed for the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction. He has published articles in Criminology & Public Policy, The Journal of Experimental Criminology, and Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment. Professor Dum is also the co-founder of the ID-13 Prison Literacy Project, based at Lake Erie Correctional Institution in Conneaut, Ohio.

Guy Padraic Hamilton-Smith is a legal fellow for the Sex Offense Litigation Policy and Resource Center at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law, a 2019 Just Leadership LwC fellow, a member of the Law & Society Association’s division on Punishment & Society, and a graduate of the University of Kentucky College of Law. He regularly writes and speaks on issues related to sex offense registries, civil commitment, and punishment for a variety of audiences including Harvard Law’s Fair Punishment Project, the American Bar Association, the American Society of Criminology, the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, and the Texas Journal on Civil Liberties and Civil Rights. He has also been quoted in the media as an expert on these topics in several publications, including Rolling Stone.

A journalist by trade, Lenore spent 14 years at The New York Daily News as a reporter-turned-opinion columnist, and two more at The New York Sun. In 2008, after her column “Why I Let My 9 Year Old Ride the Subway Alone” landed her on every talk show from The Today Show to Dr. Phil, Lenore founded the book and blog Free-Range Kids. These launched the anti-helicopter parenting movement and garnered her the nickname, “America’s Worst Mom.” She got a promotion of sorts when Discovery Life tapped her to host the reality TV show, World’s Worst Mom. Lenore has lectured internationally from Microsoft to DreamWorks to the Sydney Opera House, and has been profiled everywhere from The New York Times to The New Yorker. Lenore received her B.A. from Yale University and a Masters from Columbia University.

Dr. Douard has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Illinois in Chicago, and a J.D. from Rutgers-Newark School of Law. He taught philosophy of science and philosophy of medicine for fifteen years, and then went to law school. He is currently a criminal defense appeals attorney, representing indigent criminal defendants. For three years he represented sex offenders who were being civilly committed under New Jersey’s Sexually Violent Predator Act. Douard has written papers on the monster metaphor as a dehumanizing way to frame sex offenders and recently published a book on the same subject with co-author Pamela Schultz.