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

Virginia Bersch is a Senior Fellow at CEPP, where her work focuses on pretrial justice and research-informed improvements to criminal justice policy and practice. She brings more than two decades of experience advancing policies across local, state, and national systems to help public agencies and practitioners improve outcomes for the people and communities they serve.

Before joining CEPP, Ms. Bersch served as Director of Criminal Justice, Pretrial, at Arnold Ventures, where she led a national portfolio focused on bail reform. In that role, she developed research, implementation, and advocacy partnerships; supported state and local reform efforts; and helped guide national strategy for the Public Safety Assessment and related pretrial initiatives. Prior to Arnold Ventures, Ms. Bersch held leadership roles in Maryland state government, including as Chief of Policy, Research & Training at the Governor’s Office of Crime Control & Prevention, where she directed policy and cross-agency implementation initiatives on issues including pretrial reform, firearms regulation, violence reduction, human trafficking, and domestic violence response. She began her public safety work in the Baltimore city government, supporting neighborhood-based outreach and police-community partnerships. Ms. Bersch received her BS and BA from Boston University.