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

Alison Shames is a Director at CEPP, where she also serves on the organization’s Board of Directors. Ms. Shames leads many of CEPP’s pretrial projects, including the Advancing Pretrial Policy and Research initiative, which she helped develop and for which she has served as Co-Director since its launch in 2018. She is also the Director of the Illinois Pretrial Fairness Act Project, through which CEPP helps stakeholders implement the Pretrial Fairness Act, a groundbreaking law that abolishes the use of financial conditions of pretrial release.

Before joining CEPP, Ms. Shames was a justice consultant and worked with organizations and jurisdictions to implement new programs, conduct strategic planning, and author reports. Prior to that, she served as the Associate Director and Director of Programs for the Center on Sentencing and Corrections at the Vera Institute of Justice; a policy manager for the Attorney General’s Department of New South Wales, Australia; and a law clerk to a federal district court judge in New Orleans. Ms. Shames received her JD from New York University School of Law and her BA from the University of Pennsylvania.