Jeremy Travis is a nationally recognized leader in the justice reform movement. Since 2017, Jeremy has been Executive Vice President of Criminal Justice at Arnold Ventures, leading a team that designs and implements evidence-based justice reform strategies. Now one of the nation’s largest funders of justice reform, Arnold Ventures works closely with its partners to strengthen police accountability, promote community safety, reduce unjust pretrial detention, advance effective prosecution and public defense, improve community supervision, develop models for more humane prisons, and remove barriers to reintegration for people with criminal records, with the overarching goal to advance racial equity.  

In 2018, in collaboration with Bruce Western, Jeremy co-founded the Square One Project, a multi-year initiative of the Justice Lab at Columbia University dedicated to “reimagining justice.”  Jeremy and Bruce are co-editors of Parsimony and Other Radical Ideas About Justice, a collection of essays resulting from the Square One Executive Session.  Publishers Weekly called the book “innovative, well-researched, and persuasive …a full-throated call for change.” 

Jeremy joined Arnold Ventures after serving for 13 years as president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Under his leadership, John Jay became a senior liberal arts college, raised graduation rates and secured record levels of financial support for John Jay students.  To advance the college’s profile as a national resource for justice reform, Jeremy worked with John Jay faculty to create research centers exploring critical topics such as community safety, prisoner reentry, the changing role of prosecutors, community violence interventions, emergency preparedness, terrorism, racial reckoning, cybercrime and criminal justice ethics.

Prior to John Jay, Jeremy was a senior fellow with the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute where he launched a national research program on prisoner reentry.  He served six years as director of the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) in the Clinton administration. During his tenure, NIJ quadrupled federal funding for criminal justice research.  Jeremy’s career also includes government service as Deputy Commissioner, Legal Matters at the New York City Police Department, Special Advisor to the Mayor of New York, Chief Counsel to the House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice and law clerk for Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she sat on the Court of Appeals.  Prior to law school, Jeremy worked for six years at the Vera Institute of Justice. He began his career as a paralegal at the Legal Aid Society.  He has authored or co-edited five books and dozens of articles, book chapters and opinion pieces.  He headed up the New York State Task Force on Transforming Juvenile Justice, which paved the way for the state’s historic Close to Home initiative resulting in historic downsizing of youth prisons. Jeremy also chaired the National Research Council’s consensus panel on mass incarceration and co-edited (with Bruce Western and Steve Redburn) the panel’s report, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences.  He earned his JD and MPA from New York University and his BA from Yale College.

On June 1, 2023, Jeremy will step down from his position at Arnold Ventures.  On  July 1, he  will join the Justice Lab at Columbia University as a Senior Fellow working on various research and writing projects while continuing to support the Square One Project.