Bernadette Rabuy

Bernadette Rabuy is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Prison Policy Initiative. Bernadette’s research has focused on prison and jail visitation and making key criminal justice data accessible to the public. She co-authored the first comprehensive national report on the video calls industry, Screening Out Family Time: The for-profit video visitation industry in prisons and jails, which has played a key role in protecting in-person family visits in Portland, Oregon, California, and Texas. Her research was also essential to the movement that led the largest video call provider, Securus, to ends its automatic bans on in-person visits.

Bernadette is passionate about making the criminal justice system easier to understand and therefore reform. She co-authored the report, Detaining the Poor: How money bail perpetuates an endless cycle of poverty and jail time, which finds that the median bail bond amount in the U.S. represents eight months of income for the typical detainee.

In her day job, Bernadette is a Trial Attorney in the Homicide & Major Crime Defense Unit at New York County Defender Services. She is grateful to the following organizations that have allowed her to become a stronger advocate: Southern Poverty Law Center, Prison Law Office, National Council on Crime and Delinquency, VOTE, and Californians United for a Responsible Budget. She is a graduate of University of California, Berkeley and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law. You can say hi at @BRabuy.