Jessica Farris

Jess Farris is Senior Policy Counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.  She has been fighting the prison industrial complex since 2010 and has helped create national, statewide, and local policies aimed at promoting healing and health for all. Prior to her current role as Senior Policy Counsel, Jess served as the Criminal Justice Director of ACLU-SoCal.  Before her time at ACLU-SoCal, Jess worked for Innocence Matters, a nonprofit litigation practice built to prevent and correct wrongful convictions, where she investigated and co-authored the habeas corpus petition that freed an innocent man after nineteen years of wrongful imprisonment. Until recently, Jess served on Innocence Matters’ board for the maximum allowable term. 

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Jess was a Women’s Policy Institute Fellow, and she continues to focus a portion of her professional efforts on supporting femme policy makers and advocates in California. She is a member of the District Attorney Accountability Coalition and a steering committee member of Re-Imagine LA. 

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When Jess is not imagining and fighting for a world of healthy communities and well-funded community-based systems of care, she practices mindfulness meditation and teaches classes on social justice-related and panic-sensitive mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), as well as all-are-welcome general mindfulness.  She lives with her husband and two children in San Pedro, California.