Annual Maud Booth Award Recognizes Leaders in the Field of Correctional Reforms

NEW ORLEANS – Volunteers of America, a national leader for more than a century in advocating prison reform, will honor Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, at its annual Maud Booth Correction Services Award lunch on Monday, August 11 in New Orleans. The lunch begins at 1 p.m. and is organized as part of the American Correctional Association’s 138th Congress of Correction Conference at the Morial Convention Center, located at 900 Convention Center Blvd.

Mauer is one of the country's leading experts on sentencing policy, race and the criminal justice system. He has directed programs on criminal justice policy reform for 30 years and is the author of some of the most widely-cited reports and publications in the field, including “Young Black Men and the Criminal Justice System” and the “Americans Behind Bars” series.

His 1995 report on racial disparity and the criminal justice system led The New York Times to editorialize that the report “should set off alarm bells from the White House to city halls – and help reverse the notion that we can incarcerate our way out of fundamental social problems.”

Mauer's groundbreaking book, “Race to Incarcerate,” which talks about how sentencing policies led to the explosive expansion of the U.S. prison population, was a semifinalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 1999. Mauer is also the co-editor of “Invisible Punishment,” a 2002 collection of essays by prominent criminal justice experts on the social cost of imprisonment.

(l to r) Daniel L. Lombardo, President and CEO, Volunteers of America Delaware Valley; Marc Mauer; Charles Gould, National President and Chief Executive Officer, Volunteers of America.	Marc Mauer, Executive Director of The Sentencing Project and recipient of the 2008 Maud Booth Correctional Services Award.

Mauer began his work in criminal justice with the American Friends Service Committee in 1975. Since then he has testified before Congress and state legislatures. He frequently appears on radio and television networks, and is regularly interviewed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Public Radio and many other major media outlets. He became executive director of The Sentencing Project in 2005.

“Like Maud Booth, who founded Volunteers of America more than a century ago, Marc Mauer is a modern-day advocate working to challenge and change the status quo of our American society and its treatment of prisoners and the ex-offender population,” said Charles Gould, national president and chief executive officer of Volunteers of America. “He is a leader in the correctional field whose work demonstrates compassion and the belief in the human potential of those who are incarcerated.”

The Maud Booth Correctional Services Award, named for one of the co-founders of Volunteers of America, is given each year to a leader whose work has had an important impact on the criminal justice system.

Maud Booth’s legacy in the correctional field set a standard that continues to this day. From 1896 until her death in 1948, Booth campaigned against abuses in the prison system, and gradually did away with the lock step, the ball and chain, prison stripes, and the indiscriminate use of solitary confinement. She also helped to ease the transition from prison into the community by establishing the first national system of halfway houses.