As the cutting-edge Prison Law and Policy Program nears its 10-year anniversary at UCLA Law, its faculty director, Sharon Dolovich, reflects on her early days as a trailblazing scholar in the field.
Meet the Next Generation
Anna Norkett Kao ’24 was inspired to go to law school because her brother had been incarcerated. When she met Dolovich and learned about the Prison Law and Policy Program, it all clicked.
“I have learned from the greatest professors in this field and developed relationships with classmates who are dedicating their lives to helping those most vulnerable. Daily, I’m surrounded by people who inspire me, challenge me, lament with me, hold me accountable and encourage me to keep going. The opportunities I’ve had to jump into this work even as a student are incredible and will forever shape me as an advocate,” she says.
Norkett Kao has been involved in several initiatives under the umbrella of the program, including the Behind Bars Data Project, the Prisoners’ Rights Clinic and the Incarcerated Persons Pen Pal Project, which she led last year through the Law Students for Decarceration group.
After graduation, she hopes to gain experience in litigation and eventually become a professor of prison law and policy at a law school in Texas.
“I’d like to equip and inspire the next generation of advocates for the incarcerated, as I have been equipped and inspired at UCLA. I’ve watched as a few key professors have shaped dozens— even hundreds—of students over the years into passionate, skilled advocates for the incarcerated, and I would love to bring similar opportunities to students in a different part of the country,” she says.
UCLA Law Students Publish Report on Conditions in California Prisons During the Pandemic
In 2023, UCLA Law’s Prison Accountability Project, led by a team of student researchers, published a report that details incarcerated individuals’ experiences in California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) facilities during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Supported by their faculty advisor, Dolovich, the report’s co-authors—third-year students Nora Browning, Joseph Gaylin, Shireen Jalali-Yazdi and Kamilah Mims—and a team of student volunteers transcribed and coded hundreds of calls and letters from people incarcerated in 28 CDCR facilities between April 2020 and April 2021, utilizing data provided by UCI’s PrisonPandemic project.
They identified routine medical abuse and neglect, unsanitary conditions, extreme isolation and physical violence directed at incarcerated individuals, often unreported by official oversight bodies.
“In the absence of rigorous external oversight that centers the experiences of incarcerated people, my hope is that [this project] can provide advocates, lawyers and organizers with accurate information about widespread problems in California carceral institutions,” says Gaylin ’24, co-author of the report and founder of the Prison Accountability Project. Gaylin came to UCLA Law specifically for its Prison Law and Policy Program.
Building the Prison-to-University Pipeline
“Everyone is impacted by mass incarceration, whether they realize it or not,” says Brisely Martinez ’24.
Martinez is passionate about seeing more formerly incarcerated and systems-impacted people in the legal profession. She is a co-founder and co- president of the Alliance for Formerly Incarcerated and System Impacted Students (AFISIS), a new student-led group at UCLA Law focused on increasing the prison to university pipeline. Alicia Virani, the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Director of UCLA Law’s Criminal Justice Program, is the group’s faculty advisor.
Martinez is ‘systems impacted’ herself – that is, she has loved ones who have been impacted by the criminal legal system, mass incarceration and the hyper-criminalization of communities of color.
“For folks who have experienced anything in the criminal legal system, know that we are here; we exist, and we deserve to have access to the privilege of higher education,” she says.
AFISIS aims to help systems-impacted individuals from both the outside and the inside. Their goals include increasing the visibility of systems- impacted law students; creating pathways for formerly incarcerated and systems-impacted students to attend law school; and addressing the ways law schools and the legal profession themselves hinder those pathways.
Martinez is specializing in critical race studies and is a mentor in UCLA Law’s Law Fellows program, of which she is an alumna.
“My community is not just my ethnicity – it’s also people who have experienced the injustices that I have experienced. You don’t often think of diversity this way, but — to me — it is an identity, and to a lot of us it is,” she says. “When law schools talk about diversity, our voices and our community should be included in those conversations.”
The Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, UCLA Law’s environmental law hub, tracks many environmental bills that move through Sacramento each legislative session. But when Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 779 in October, students and faculty at the center paid extra close attention. Three UCLA Law students helped write the new groundwater law.