Soffiyah Elijah

Jill Soffiyah Elijah is an American lawyer, author and social justice activist.

Education

Elijah holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University and a Juris Doctorate degree from the Wayne State University Law School in Detroit, Michigan.[1][2]

Career

Following law school, she worked as a supervising attorney at the Neighborhood Defender Service in Harlem, New York, and in the juvenile rights division of the New York Legal Aide Society.[2][3] Beginning in 1992, she taught in the defender clinic at CUNY law school.[2] She was a clinical faculty member and the director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard University.[4]

Elijah was the first black director of the Correctional Association of New York, a position she held for five years.[5] At the Correctional Association, she worked with the Marshall Project to prosecute several guards Attica Prison for brutality against inmates.[6][7] In 2016 she founded the Alliance of Families for Justice, an American organization that advocates for those with family members in prison.[8][9] As a lawyer she has represented Marilyn Buck and Sundiata Acoli in court.[10]

As an author she has written opinion pieces for the New York Daily News,[11] The Hill,[12] Democracy Now! and the New York Times.[13][14]

References
  1. "The League - Jill Soffiyah Elijah Alumni Spotlight". theleagueonline.org.
  2. Karlin, Rick (20 February 2012). "Capital Profile: J. Soffiyah Elijah". Times Union.
  3. "Soffiyah Elijah". The Center for the Humanities.
  4. Esquivel, Adolfo Perez. Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners. PM Press. ISBN 978-1-60486-149-5.
  5. McMahon, Lisa. "Niagara University's Transformative Visions Presidential Series Discusses Criminal Justice, Policing, and Prisons". news.niagara.edu.
  6. Tatusian, Alex (15 November 2019). "Happy Birthday to The Marshall Project". The Marshall Project.
  7. "Finalist: Tom Robbins of The Marshall Project and Michael Schwirtz and Michael Winerip of The New York Times". www.pulitzer.org.
  8. "New Yorker of the Week: Soffiyah Elijah". www.ny1.com.
  9. Gorce, Tammy La (23 April 2021). "How a Leader in Criminal Justice Reform Spends Her Sundays". The New York Times.
  10. Sullivan, Bobby. Revolutionary Threads: Rastafari, Social Justice, and Cooperative Economics. Akashic Books. ISBN 978-1-61775-697-9.
  11. Elijah, Soffiyah. "'No new jails' means same old jails". nydailynews.com.
  12. Charles, J. B. (14 May 2017). "Honoring mothers on both sides of the bars on Mother's Day". TheHill.
  13. "Opinion | The Horror at the Attica Prison". The New York Times. 3 March 2015.
  14. "New York Ordered to Vaccinate Incarcerated People; Will Gov. Sign Bill Curbing Solitary Confinement?". Democracy Now!.
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