Johanna Wald

Johanna Wald is a writer and researcher who has written and presented extensively about issues related to criminal and juvenile justice reform, educational equity, and implicit bias. Between 2006 and 2018, she served as Director of Strategic Planning at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School.  During that time, she worked closely with FrameWorks Institute on a multi-year project aimed at developing new public messages focused on justice reform, co-wrote a chapter on “Implicit Bias in Criminal Justice” in an anthology entitled Implicit Bias Across the Law, directed research projects focusing on prosecutorial reform and police in schools, and organized a national conference, with the ACLU, on “Re-imaginging the Role of the Prosecutor.” Her policy paper on de-biasing strategies as a tool to reduce racial disparities in school discipline was published by the Equity Project at Indiana University. She also developed and widely presented for audiences that included judges, defense attorneys, philanthropists, and educators, a workshop on implicit bias and strategies for reducing its effects. Prior to that, she served as a Policy Analyst at the Civil Rights Project, where she organized the first national conference on the school-to-prison pipeline, and co-edited a journal entitled “Deconstructing the School to Prison Pipeline,” that was published by Jossey-Bass. She has written law review articles, policy briefs, book chapters, and op eds on policing, prosecutorial reform, juvenile justice, school discipline, and other aspects of the justice system that have been published in Slate, salon.com, the Crime Report, U.S.A. Today, the Marshall Project, the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, and Education Week. She and Lisa Thurau have co-authored several reports and op-eds.