Premal Dharia is the executive director of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration at Harvard Law School and co-editor-in-chief of the online publication Inquest. She is an editor of  Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change (forthcoming July 9, 2024).

Previously, Ms. Premal Dharia spent nearly 15 years representing people charged with criminal offenses. She represented in three different places: the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C.; the Office of the Federal Public Defender in Baltimore, Maryland; and the military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Furthermore, in 2014, she was selected for a three-month fellowship to help build out and train three new public defender offices in the West Bank.

She brought these years of experience to Civil Rights Corps, where she was the Director of Litigation. The combination of all these experiences sparked an interest for Ms. Dharia in what the role of lawyers in the work to end mass incarceration is and could be, in the role of public defenders specifically, and in what different approaches to systemic change might look like. In 2019, Ms. Dharia started building a new initiative to help address these questions. She was a Criminal Justice Fellow at the Reflective Democracy Campaign. The Reflective Democracy Campaign supported the launch of the Defender Impact Initiative (DII). The Institute to End Mass Incarceration has incorporated the work and ideas of DII.

Speaking Engagements and Academic Service

Ms. Dharia has spoken and written widely on systemic challenges in the criminal system and racial and carceral injustice. She has written for The Washington Post, Slate, CNN, and other publications. She has coached and trained lawyers at various stages of their careers in trial advocacy and courtroom skills. Conferences, public panels, organizational and educational events, and radio and podcast programs across the country have invited her to speak. She has served as a keynote and plenary speaker and spoken to a wide range of audiences.

Ms. Dharia serves on the Boards of the Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop, the Law & Justice Journalism Project, and the Second Look Project. She is on the Fellows Advisory Council of the International Legal Foundation. Also, she is on the Academic Advisory Board of the Family Justice Law Center. She is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. Furthermore, she is co-chair of the Pretrial Justice Committee of the Criminal Justice Section of the American Bar Association. Ms. Dharia graduated from Brown University with a degree in History and African American Studies, with a focus on comparative postcolonial studies, and from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.