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JLI’s Membership

The Jailhouse Lawyer Initiative (JLI) is proud to have a membership of over 1,000 incarcerated jailhouse lawyers from across the United States, spanning both state and federal systems. 

JLI members are more than incarcerated individuals—they are legal practitioners and human rights defenders who use the law to advocate for themselves and their communities. While most have not received formal legal training, their knowledge and skills are grounded in lived experience and years of direct engagement with the legal system. 

Our members conduct legal research and writing, file administrative remedies, and bring cases in both state and federal courts—many of which they have won. Their expertise challenges the notion of who holds legal authority and affirms the critical role jailhouse lawyers play in advancing access to justice from within the walls of incarceration. 

JLI members are grouped into three different categories: general members, active members, and advisors. While all JLI members have access to JLI’s legal education, active JLI members are those who have signed onto our , which commits jailhouse lawyers to ethically and zealously advocating for the people that they assist.

Inside Advisors

Among JLI’s national membership are fourteen incarcerated jailhouse lawyers who serve as the inaugural cohort of our Inside Advisory Board. Each advisor brings years of firsthand legal experience and a deep commitment to advancing justice from within the carceral system. These advisors are not only practitioners of the law—they are movement leaders and legal empowerment strategists who serve as a vital compass for JLI’s work. To read more about JLI’s inside advisor program and the 2025 cohort, see here.

JLI Founder, Jhody Polk 

Jhody Polk, d’Alchemist, is the founder of the Legal Empowerment & Advocacy Hub (LEAH) and the Jailhouse Lawyers Initiative (JLI), housed at the Bernstein Institute for Human Rights at ÈâÂþÎÝ School of Law. A 2024 Global Freedom Fellow and inaugural Future Freedoms Fellow at the Center on Gender and Extreme Sentencing, Jhody is a nationally recognized leader in legal empowerment and justice transformation. She has received numerous accolades, including the 2019 Peacebuilder of the Year Award, the 2020 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Legacy Award, and the 2018 Soros Justice Fellowship. She serves on the Board of Namati, is a member of the U.S. Legal Empowerment Network, and co-founded the International Incarcerated Paralegals Congress (IIPC). Jhody is widely known for her work as a Central Florida Organizer on Amendment 4, which restored voting rights to over a million Floridians with felony convictions. She is also the Legal Empowerment Fellow at the Global Justice Clinic at ÈâÂþÎÝ Law, the 2023 inaugural Pathways to Research and Advocacy Fellow with the Fortune Society and Center for Justice Innovation, and formerly the Director of Community Justice at the River Phoenix Center for Peacebuilding. She also led as Director of the Alachua County Reentry Coalition in her hometown of Gainesville, Florida. During her incarceration, Jhody found her legal identity, becoming a jailhouse lawyer, teacher, and translator of the law inside the prison law library. She does not describe herself as "justice-impacted" but rather as "Justice Living." Through her work and life, she actively advances SDG 16 and establishes legal empowerment as a proactive tool of abolition in the U.S.

Managing Attorney, Tyler Walton 

Tyler is a lawyer and researcher working at the Bernstein Institute for Human Rights at ÈâÂþÎÝ School of Law. He has worked closely with Jhody Polk since 2019 to implement the vision for JLI. Tyler’s work focuses on legal empowerment, transferring the power of the law into the hands of people navigating those legal systems. In addition to his work with people incarcerated in the US, Tyler has also worked with communities displaced by extractive industries in Zimbabwe, advocated for the adoption of participatory action research methods by communities legal empowerment practitioners, and facilitated convenings of legal empowerment practitioners in the United States and around the world.

Director of Community Engagement, Darren Breeden

Darren Breeden is the Director of Community Engagement at ÈâÂþÎÝ’s Jailhouse Lawyers Initiative (JLI) located within the Bernstein Institute for Human Rights. Breeden is a graduate of Bard College, received his paralegal certification in 1994, and from Columbia University in 2022. He is a staunch advocate for Legal Empowerment; specifically, the right of former jailhouse lawyers to contribute to oppressed communities by utilizing legal skills in community based justice hubs.

 

Membership Coordinator, Sophia Opferman

Sophia joined the Jailhouse Lawyers Initiative as the inaugural Membership Coordinator in May 2024 after graduating from ÈâÂþÎÝ’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. At Gallatin, Sophia studied the intersections of Human Rights, Postcolonialism, and Law, with a focus on the tensions between law as a tool for mass injustice and the potential for law as an avenue for systemic change. Sophia’s academic interests have translated into their work with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated communities, where she feels the tensions of the law are most evident. Sophia was a 2022 Gallatin Human Rights Fellow, where they worked as a community organizer with the Urban Justice Center’s Freedom Agenda Project, advocating for the decarceration of New York City and the closure of Riker’s Island. In 2023, she was an ÈâÂþÎÝ Changemaker Fellow and received the Gallatin Dean’s Award for Summer Research, during which she worked as an intern with the Jailhouse Lawyers Initiative, researching legal empowerment as a pathway toward abolition. Sophia is also a volunteer writer with the Remedy Project, where she assists incarcerated people in Federal Prisons in filing Administrative Remedies.

Participatory Action Researcher; Director of Feminist Circles, Chinyere Okafor

Chinyere Okafor is a Ph.D. candidate in Critical Social/Personality Psychology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Their research explores the intersections of Participatory Action Research (PAR), healing justice, Black madness studies, and the experiences of marginalized genders navigating institutional violence, belonging, and exclusion. A few of her research experiences includes Youth Participatory Research (YPAR) projects with Black youth navigating gendered sexual violence by school campus police, teaching research skills to young people of color to conduct their own study to present to policymakers in New York City, and supporting an intergenerational racial healing, truth, and reconciliation commission in Texas. As an advisor between JLI and the Smith College School for Social Work’s Community-Based Anti-Racism Experience (CBARE) program, Chinyere brings social work students into critical conversations and support to address the needs and requests of jailhouse lawyers. Additionally, Chinyere co-leads the JLI’s Feminist Circles and PAR work in efforts to further inclusive, justice-driven initiatives that center justice-impacted voices. With a focus on education, healing and social justice, Chinyere’s work is dedicated to dismantling systems of oppression and fostering spaces of care and belonging for historically excluded communities.

Legal Fellow, Christine ElDabh ‘23

Christine ElDabh is a Legal Fellow with the Jailhouse Lawyers Initiative (JLI) at the Bernstein Institute for Human Rights, where she supports the legal and policy advocacy work of incarcerated jailhouse lawyers, manages JLI’s inside advisory board, and co-supervises the development of JLI’s  legal education modules with clinic students at ÈâÂþÎÝ School of Law and Fordham Law School. Christine is also a parole advocate with the ÈâÂþÎÝ Parole Advocacy Project and Appellate Advocates and  preparing incarcerated people in New York  to appear before the Board of Parole.  She is a 2023 graduate of ÈâÂþÎÝ Law where she was a student advocate in the Global Justice Clinic working on legal empowerment projects with  JLI and co-represented an incarcerated client in a parole denial appeal in the Civil Rights in the Criminal Legal System Clinic. While in law school, she interned with the ACLU Human Rights Program and the Brennan Center for Justice, and she researched issues related to environmental justice and transportation infrastructure inequality in US cities as a Paul Weiss fellow with the Center on Race, Inequality & the Law and research assistant to Professor Deborah Archer. Before law school, Christine was a program officer at the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham Law School. In that role, she researched the impacts of the NYPD’s broken windows policy on communities of color and co-authored advocacy reports calling for drug policy reform in Washington DC and anti-carceral juvenile justice reform in Kenya. She received her BA from the University of Virginia.

 

 

Sukti Dhital, Executive Director, Bernstein Institute for Human Rights

Sukti is the Executive Director of the Bernstein Institute for Human Rights. She also serves as a Supervising Attorney with the Global Justice Clinic, and in the last five years, has co-supervised JLI projects with clinic students. Sukti also supports JLI’s infrastructure, strategy, and development efforts, with deep appreciation for its unique and urgent mission and values. Previously, Sukti was the Executive Director and Co-founder of Nazdeek, a legal empowerment organization that works closely with indigenous and Dalit women to advance human rights through a community-driven approach. Prior to Nazdeek, Sukti was the Director of the Reproductive Rights Unit at the Human Rights Law Network, India and assisted in securing landmark social and economic rights judgments. She has also worked at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project. Sukti serves as a Steering Committee member of the Legal Empowerment Fund, a member of the Grassroots Justice Network's Network Advisory Council and an Advisory Board member of the WIEGO Law Programme. Sukti received her JD from Northeastern University School of Law and BA from University of Michigan. She is a mother of 2 beautiful kiddos and a deep believer in community justice as the pathway to liberation.