Daniel Karpowitz

Adjunct Professor (SPP) and Undersecretary for Criminal Justice Policy & Planning, CT Office of Policy and Management

School of Public Policy

Daniel Karpowitz is the Undersecretary for Criminal Justice Policy, the highest ranking criminal justice official in Connecticut. Before being appointed by Governor Ned Lamont, Daniel served for four years as a Special Advisor to Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, where he was the State’s first Interagency Lead for Criminal Justice & Education and oversaw a budget of 22 million dollars and led a series of decarceral initiatives ranging from an historical expansion of public university access across the prison system to sentencing reform grounded in the policies of justice reinvestment.

From 2001 to 2019, Daniel was the founding Director of Policy and Academics at the Bard Prison Initiative. He helped launch BPI’s first-ever college semester, and grew BPI from a single maximum security basement classroom in 2001, to an innovative network of radically inclusive higher education degree programs at over a dozen universities (including Yale, Notre Dame, and Northwestern). This work, expanded nationally and internationally through the Open Society Institute, was the subject of the six hour PBS documentary College Behind Bars produced by Ken Burns.

A Soros Justice Fellow, a Fulbright Fellow in law and society (South Asia), and twice a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Daniel initiated the second Bush Administration’s support for the restoration of Pell rights to Americans in prison and advised the Obama Administration on the implementation of “2nd Chance Pell”, which set the stage for President Trump’s full restoration of Pell rights in 2020. Under the auspices of Fr. Tom Curran, S.J., he serves as a founding Commissioner of the Jesuit Prison Education Initiative. Earlier in his career he worked on alternatives to juvenile incarceration in the offices of Philadelphia District Attorney Lynn Abraham, on residential red-lining with the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, on illegal 19th and 20th century race-based insurance underwriting, and on the groundbreaking project on justice mapping and “million dollar blocks” in New York City.

Daniel has been a visiting professor at the Department of Rhetoric at Berkeley, and at Bard was Senior Lecturer in Law & the Humanities for nearly twenty years where he also served on the faculties of Political Science and Human Rights and as a Senior Research Fellow at the Levy Economics Institute. He is currently a visiting professor at the School of Public Policy at UConn and leads partnerships between Connecticut, the University of Bergen, and the Kriminalomsorgen within Norway’s Ministry of Justice. He is the author of the full-length play Quinta del Sordo, produced at the Interact Theater in Philadelphia, the essay “The Paradox of Punishment” published in The Journal of Law, Society and Politics and the book Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration (Rutgers, 2017).