Heather Tubman-Carbone, Ph.D., is a criminologist who specializes in translating research and policy into practice. As Senior Policy Advisor for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), Dr. Tubman-Carbone oversees its justice reform efforts, including the Justice Reinvestment Initiative and Justice Counts, which take data-driven approaches to create more fair, effective, and efficient state justice systems. In addition, she manages Second Chance Act programs to build corrections and community supervision agencies’ capacity to reduce recidivism and support desistance from criminal behavior.
Prior to joining BJA, Dr. Tubman-Carbone managed a corrections portfolio at the Council of State Governments Justice Center where she oversaw technical assistance provided to state and local corrections agencies to design and implement concrete, research-based strategies to reduce recidivism. She also worked on projects to measure the impact of those initiatives and to disseminate the strategies to practitioners and policymakers in the field.
Earlier in her career, Dr. Tubman-Carbone worked at Westat as a research associate designing and managing surveys of community corrections populations and supervision agencies nationwide. She also worked at the Prisoner Reentry Institute at John Jay College where she managed a research portfolio that included young adult reentry and prison education programs and co-authored practical toolkits about barriers to reentry.
She has conducted reentry-related research on the impact of gender-specific parole supervision programs, sex offender supervision policies, and distance-learning programs that begin in prison and allow adults to continue participation as they transition back into their communities. Following up on that research, she co-authored toolkits about barriers to reentry and wrote about the reentry and transformation process for professional journals.
Dr. Tubman-Carbone earned her Bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice from Northeastern University, her Master’s in Criminal Justice from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and her Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice.