Race and Pretrial Detention: Why Data Matters

Tenille Patterson is an Executive Partner with the Pretrial Justice Institute, where in partnership with Meghan Guevara, she leads PJI’s strategic visioning, program implementation and organizational management activities. Tenille has spent over 15 years as a nonprofit executive leader supporting mission critical organizations serving communities subject to systemic disinvestment, injustice and neglect. At PJI, Tenille oversees the finance, human resources, operations, and communications portfolios.    Tenille has a Bachelor of Science degree in accounting from Morgan State University and is a certified public accountant.

Wendy Sawyer is the Research Director at the Prison Policy Initiative. Wendy earned a Master’s in Criminal Justice from Northeastern University and a Bachelor’s in Afro-American Studies from the University of Massachusetts. Before joining the Prison Policy Initiative, she worked as an investigator for the Civilian Complaint Review Board in New York City and as a research associate for Northeastern's Institute on Race and Justice.

Most recently, Wendy co-authored Arrest, Release, Repeat: How police and jails are misused to respond to social problems with Alexi Jones. Their report offers the first national estimates of how many individuals go to county jails each year, and how many are jailed repeatedly; it also finds troubling demographic and health disparities between people who were recently jailed and those who were not. Other recent publications include Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie and States of Incarceration: The Global Context, both co-authored with Peter Wagner.

Previously, Wendy authored Youth Confinement: The Whole Pie, a report illustrating where, why, and under what conditions justice-involved youth are held by the state, which finds that many of the problems of the criminal justice system are mirrored in the juvenile system. Also in 2018, she wrote The Gender Divide: Tracking women's state prison growth, finding that in many states, treating women's incarceration as an afterthought has held back efforts to decarcerate. Her 2016 report, Punishing Poverty: The high cost of probation fees in Massachusetts, shows that probation fees hit poor communities hardest. In addition to these reports, Wendy conducted the Prison Policy Initiative's frequently-cited 2017 50-state surveys of wages for prison labor and medical copays charged to incarcerated people, and she frequently contributes shorter briefings on recent data releases, academic research, women's incarceration, pretrial detention, probation, and more.

Doug Smith is Senior Policy Analyst for the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition. Since joining TCJC in 2015, he has developed policies to reduce Texas’ over-reliance on incarceration and improve conditions of confinement and reentry for people leaving prison. He previously served as a Policy Analyst in the Texas House of Representatives’ Committee on Human Services, as well as a Legislative Director for a member of the House. Doug’s passion for criminal justice reform stems from his own experience in the criminal justice system, where he served six years in prison for crimes committed as a direct outcome of addiction. In addition to his state-level advocacy work with TCJC, Doug is a member of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Reentry Task Force, and he serves as Treasurer on the Board of Directors for the Austin Sobriety Center. He is also an Assistant Adjunct Professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Social Work, teaching Advanced Policy. Doug graduated magna cum laude from St. Edward’s University in 1994 and earned his M.S.S.W. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000.