Texas Prison Bid'ness

Nick Hudson is a junior at the University of Texas at Austin studying philosophy and government. He has worked on prison and criminal justice issues for two and a half years with the ACLU of Texas and Grassroots Leadership.

Nick worked to improve prison conditions as a volunteer and work-study with the ACLU of Texas Prison and Jail Accountability Project. He updated the ACLU of Texas Prisoner Resource Guide in 2007, and helped monitor conditions of confinement inside of Texas prisons. Nick also served as the ACLU of Texas legislative liaison for criminal justice sentencing during the 2007 legislative session.

Nick has worked against private prison expansion with Grassroots Leadership since January of 2006. He authored Ground Zero: The Laredo Superjail and the No Action Alternative in July of 2006, and has spoken for Grassroots Leadership at criminal justice hearings before the Texas Senate.

Bob Libal is a Texas organizer for Grassroots Leadership focusing on the expansion of the private federal detention system. He is a 2003 graduate of the University of Texas, where he was involved with numerous social justice campaigns.

For three and a half years, he served as co-coordinator of Grassroots Leadership’s Not With Our Money campaign. He has advocated for federal detention reform and against private prison expansion with South Texans Opposing Private Prisons and Texans United for Families.

Bob co-authored Progress or Profit: Positive Alternatives to Privatization and Incarceration in Shelby County, Tennessee and Considering a Private Jail, Prison, or Detention Center? A Resource Guide for Public Officials in Texas. He currently lives in Austin, Texas, and can be reached using our contact form.

Kathleen Pequeño is a communications and technology specialist in Portland, Oregon. She was one of the original staff members of Western Prison Project (now Partnership for Safety and Justice), working to change the criminal justice system in Oregon, and has been writing for several years on the need for criminal justice reform and on the movement for criminal justice reform. She currently edits Justice Matters, the quarterly newsletter of Partnership for Safety and Justice.

Kathleen was first drawn into criminal justice reform through her work against domestic and sexual violence in the 1990s. Since 2000, she has worked in Oregon to create changes to the criminal justice system to redirect it away from expensive, ineffective punishments and towards effective solutions to preventing crime.

Her writing has covered many aspects of the need for change in the criminal justice system, including a piece about the proposed private prison in Northeast Portland she wrote in late 2006.

As of November 2007, Kathleen is a former contributer to Texas Prison Bid'ness.

Nicole Porter is a native Texan who currently resides in Houston. Porter is the former Director of the ACLU’s Prison & Jail Accountability Project (PJAP). PJAP’s mission was to monitor the conditions of confinement in Texas jails and prisons.

She became interested in criminal justice issues when many of the young men she grew up with in the Greater Greenspoint area of Houston became casualties of the state's failed sentencing policies.

Porter graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a Master's Degree in Public Affairs from the LBJ School. Her master’s thesis addressed exploring self employment as an economic strategy among formerly incarcerated African Americans. Porter received her BA in International Affairs from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. She also studied African Politics at the University of Ghana, West Africa.

Previously, Porter worked for the Appleseed Foundation, National Women’s Political Caucus, and the American Prospect Magazine.

Judy Greene is an independent criminal justice policy analyst and a founder of Justice Strategies. Her areas of expertise include private prisons, sentencing, and corrections policy. Judy began her prison privatization research almost a decade ago as a Senior Research Fellow for the Institute on Criminal Justice at the University of Minnesota Law School. Prior to that post Judy was director of the State-Centered Program for the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.  read more »