Deputy Director of PEP

The UCLA Prison Education Program (PEP) and Center for Justice (CFJ) is a national leader in higher education in prisons driven by community-based leadership and research. The CFJ is committed to dismantling the conditions that sustain mass incarceration and creating new structures rooted in care, education, and justice. We seek a Deputy Director who brings institutional expertise, lived experience, and a deep understanding of carcerality and transformation. The ideal Deputy Director brings more than credentials-they bring lived insight, political clarity, and a global-local outlook and reach that connects the carceral classroom to freedom movements worldwide. Whether cultivating educational pathways in California prisons, or speaking on global panels and developing methods for dismantling punishment systems, the Executive Director must navigate between hyperlocal realities and transnational solidarities.

In conjucntion with Executive Director, the Deputy Director will join committed faculty, staff, students and community partner organizations working together to imagine and build a different world-one where all people, regardless of their criminal legal system history, have the opportunity to learn, lead, and thrive. The Executive Director (ED) will lead the Center for Justice (CFJ), which houses the UCLA Prison Education Program, an interdepartmental UCLA center based in Los Angeles serving incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and justice system-impacted students and community partners.