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Soffiyah Elijah

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American lawyer, professor, author and social justice activist

Jill Soffiyah Elijah is an American lawyer, author and social justice activist.

Education

Elijah holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University and a Juris Doctor degree from the Wayne State University Law School in Detroit, Michigan.

Career

Following law school, she worked as a supervising attorney at the Neighborhood Defender Service in Harlem, New York, and in the juvenile rights division of the New York Legal Aide Society. Beginning in 1992, she taught in the defender clinic at CUNY School of Law. She was a clinical faculty member and the director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard University.

Elijah was the first black director of the Correctional Association of New York, a position she held for five years. At the Correctional Association, she worked with the Marshall Project to prosecute several guards Attica Prison for brutality against inmates. In 2016 she founded the Alliance of Families for Justice, an American organization that advocates for those with family members in prison. As a lawyer she has represented Marilyn Buck and Sundiata Acoli in court.

In 2018 she was honored with the Spirit of John Brown Freedom Award.

As an author she has written opinion pieces for the New York Daily News, The Hill, Democracy Now!, and the New York Times.

References

  1. "The League - Jill Soffiyah Elijah Alumni Spotlight". theleagueonline.org.
  2. ^ Karlin, Rick (20 February 2012). "Capital Profile: J. Soffiyah Elijah". Times Union.
  3. "Soffiyah Elijah". The Center for the Humanities.
  4. Esquivel, Adolfo Perez (September 2008). Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners. PM Press. ISBN 978-1-60486-149-5.
  5. McMahon, Lisa. "Niagara University's Transformative Visions Presidential Series Discusses Criminal Justice, Policing, and Prisons". news.niagara.edu.
  6. Tatusian, Alex (15 November 2019). "Happy Birthday to The Marshall Project". The Marshall Project.
  7. "Finalist: Tom Robbins of The Marshall Project and Michael Schwirtz and Michael Winerip of The New York Times". www.pulitzer.org.
  8. "New Yorker of the Week: Soffiyah Elijah". www.ny1.com.
  9. Gorce, Tammy La (23 April 2021). "How a Leader in Criminal Justice Reform Spends Her Sundays". The New York Times.
  10. Sullivan, Bobby (4 December 2018). Revolutionary Threads: Rastafari, Social Justice, and Cooperative Economics. Akashic Books. ISBN 978-1-61775-697-9.
  11. Virtanen, Michael (April 30, 2018). "John Brown celebration at the farmstead". Adirondack Explorer: 1.
  12. Elijah, Soffiyah (11 October 2019). "'No new jails' means same old jails". nydailynews.com.
  13. Charles, J. B. (14 May 2017). "Honoring mothers on both sides of the bars on Mother's Day". TheHill.
  14. "Opinion | The Horror at the Attica Prison". The New York Times. 3 March 2015.
  15. "New York Ordered to Vaccinate Incarcerated People; Will Gov. Sign Bill Curbing Solitary Confinement?". Democracy Now!.
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