Leonard Engel

Leonard W. Engel, Esq.
Managing Associate for Policy
email: lengel[@]crjustice.org
tel: (617) 482-2520 ext. 129

Len Engel is the Managing Associate for Policy at the Crime and Justice Institute at CRJ. He has been working on criminal and juvenile justice policy for more than 20 years. Since joining CJI Mr. Engel’s focus has been on policy analysis and development in the criminal justice system. He recently managed and completed several major projects including criminal justice reforms in South Carolina in 2009, and Arkansas in 2010, as part of Pew’s Public Safety Performance Project which resulted in landmark legislation in both states. Mr. Engel is currently leading CJI’s participation in a similar Pew effort in Georgia.

Mr. Engel has spent the past several years examining the Massachusetts offender reentry system. This has led to a series of publications including an argument and roadmap for systemic reentry reform titled Promoting Public Safety through Successful Community Transition, an assessment of the corrections system’s preparation efforts called Preparing Massachusetts Offenders for Employment: A three county review of current practice and a briefing book introducing key juvenile and criminal justice issues to the 2006 candidates for MA Governor. In 2005 and 2007, Mr. Engel published two reports on the criminal offender record system in Massachusetts, CORI: Balancing Individual Rights and Public Access and CORI: Opening Doors of Opportunity, which led to the passage of a bill reforming the criminal records system during the 2010 legislative session. In the past year, his reports analyzing corrections budgets and public safety outcomes called Priorities and Public Safety: Reentry and the Rising Costs of our Corrections System and Priorities and Public Safety II: Adopting Effective Probation Practices, led to a series of Boston Globe articles and a subsequent independent investigation resulting in the dismissal of the leadership of the Probation Department and an overhaul of the department.

Prior to joining CJI, Mr. Engel was a policy director in the Massachusetts State Senate and previously an ombudsman under contract with the Connecticut Department of Corrections and a practicing lawyer.