Dr. Heather Tubman-Carbone is an Associate Deputy Director at the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) where she leads the Corrections, Reentry, and Justice Reform team. Heather oversees administration of corrections programs to make jails and prisons safer and more effective for people who reside and work there; reentry programs that use comprehensive strategies to reduce recidivism and related outcomes; and justice reform efforts that take a data-drive approach to making more fair, effective, and efficient justice systems. She was previously a Senior Policy Advisor at BJA where she managed data- and consensus-driven efforts to justice reform and improve reentry, including the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, Justice Counts, and the Second Chance Act.
Prior to joining BJA, Heather 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, Heather 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.