News & Commentary written by Margaret Winter

Margaret Winter is Associate Director of the ACLU National Prison Project. She has litigated prison and jail reform cases in federal trial and appellate courts around the nation and has argued and won a prisoner’s rights case in the U.S. Supreme Court. She has won ground-breaking remedial decrees in class action cases challenging conditions of confinement on death row, prolonged solitary confinement, treatment of youth sentenced as adult and of prisoners with serious mental illness, HIV-based discrimination, and failure to protect prisoners from rape and violence. She has testified as an expert before the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission; the National Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons; the Citizens’ Commission on Violence in the Los Angeles County Jails; and the California Senate and Assembly Public Safety Committees’ Joint Hearing on Segregation Policies in California’s Prisons. Her cases have been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and other national media.  She was a finalist for the Public Justice Trial Lawyer of the Year Award for 2013. She has served as an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center, teaching courses on prisoners’ rights litigation and policy.