Hannah Riley Fernandez is a writer, communications expert, and organizer. She has spent more than a decade working at the intersection of media and the criminal legal system — as Director of Programming at the Center for Just Journalism, Communications Director at the Southern Center for Human Rights, in communications at the Innocence Project, and as a writer whose work has appeared in The Nation, Slate, NBC News, Teen Vogue, The Appeal, Inquest, and elsewhere. Her writing focuses on the harms of policing and incarceration and the journalism that covers them. She holds a bachelor's degree in Psychology and a master's degree in Criminology, which is a useful combination for someone who spends a lot of time thinking about why systems cause harm and why people keep defending them. She has lived in New York City, Boston, Cambridge, UK, Hangzhou, China, and Atlanta, and is now in Burlington, Vermont.