Cynthia Chandler

Cynthia Chandler is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Justice Now, a human rights organization building a movement among women in prison and local communities to build a safe, compassionate world without prisons. Before co-founding Justice Now with the support of Echoing Green, Cynthia founded Women's Positive Legal Action Network--the first organization advocating on behalf of HIV+ people in women's prisons. Women’s PLAN merged into Justice Now in 2000. Cynthia has helped launch several other social justice organizations, including Critical Resistance; TGI Justice Project; and the Eviction Defense Center. She has worked on issues of women's heath, racial justice, and abolition for more than twenty years, and speaks and publishes regularly on these topics. In 2010, she was awarded a Gevelber Distinguished Lectureship on Public Interest Law from Northeastern University School of Law.