CCJ Directory

Inimai Chettiar brings twenty years of legal, policy, and research expertise in criminal law and implementing transformative change at the federal and state level. Her advocacy was critical to securing sentencing reform in the First Step Act of 2018, passing the Fair Chance Act of 2019, providing federal funding to states and localities to reduce COVID-19 deaths in prisons, and implementing executive actions to increase access to second chances.

Chettiar is currently the President of A Better Balance, fighting for work-family justice for women and other workers. During her years in the fight to reform our justice system, Chettiar witnessed how mass incarceration fuels the intergenerational cycle of poverty, forcing loved ones of those incarcerated—disproportionately Black and brown women—to shoulder the impossible task of balancing low-wage work with childcare demands. Realizing the need to reform our workplaces is deeply intertwined with criminal justice, gender justice, and racial justice, Inimai leads A Better Balance with this intersectional framework.

Before ABB, Chettiar served as Deputy Director of the Justice Action Network, the country’s largest bipartisan organization dedicated to criminal justice reform. Prior to joining JAN, she was the Director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. She co-authored dozens of groundbreaking empirical studies on crime, incarceration, sentencing, and policy innovations. She helped shaped the criminal justice platforms of 2016 and 2020 Republican and Democratic presidential primary candidates and edited two books of essays by presidential hopefuls on the topic. Chettiar also launched Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, the first effort to organize police and prosecutors to join the justice reform movement.

Chettiar previously served as a counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, fellow at the Center for American Progress, fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, and a litigation associate at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP. She holds a B.A. cum laude from Georgetown University and a J.D. cum laude from the University of Chicago School of Law, where she was Comment Editor of The Law Review. Chettiar’s voice is regularly featured in The New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, MSNBC, CNN, and NPR, among other outlets.