معرفی
Premal Dharia serves as Executive Director of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration at Harvard Law School, where she teaches courses including Anti-carceral Organizing and Lawyering and the Institute to End Mass Incarceration Clinic for Spring 2026. She regularly participates in Harvard Law School's Trial Advocacy Workshop and the Bronx Defenders' Defenders Academy.
With twenty years of experience challenging criminal justice injustice, Ms. Dharia spent fifteen years as a public defender across Washington D.C., Baltimore, and Guantanamo Bay. Her career includes building public defender offices in Palestine (2014), serving as Director of Litigation at Civil Rights Corps, and founding the Defender Impact Initiative (DII) in 2019 to position public defenders as systemic change agents.
Her research examines criminal legal system transformation through lenses of racial justice, inequality, and political economy, with particular focus on reimagining public defense's role in structural reform. Ms. Dharia's publications analyze carceral systems' fundamental flaws rather than treating them as 'broken' but functioning as designed to inflict racialized harm.
She serves on boards including Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop, Second Look Project, and Law & Justice Journalism Project, while co-chairing the American Bar Association's Pretrial Justice Committee and advising the International Legal Foundation and Family Justice Law Center.
Ms. Dharia earned her undergraduate degree in History and African-American Studies from Brown University (focusing on comparative post-colonial studies) and her law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, bringing this interdisciplinary perspective to her criminal justice reform work.
