Our team is built on individuals with various backgrounds in the criminal justice field.

Ms. Shames is co-director of the Advancing Pretrial Policy and Research (APPR) initiative. She is an innovative manager and lawyer with experience in private, government, and nonprofit organizations. She has a strong record of implementing programs and policies, managing complex projects, conducting strategic planning, delivering training and technical assistance to criminal justice policymakers and professionals, and authoring publications. Ms. Shames graduated magna cum laude from the New York University School of Law in 1997. Following graduation, she served as a law clerk in New Orleans and as an associate for a San Francisco-based law firm. Ms. Shames worked in Australia as corporate counsel to one of the country’s largest media and publishing companies and as a policy manager for the Attorney General’s Department of New South Wales. In 2008, she joined the Vera Institute of Justice as Associate Director and Director of Programs for Vera’s Center on Sentencing and Corrections, where she co-authored Reimagining Prison, which presents a transformative vision of incarceration, with human dignity as the foundational principle.