Jhody Polk Jailhouse Lawyers Initiative

Jhody Polk, d’Alchemist, is the founder of the Jailhouse Lawyers Initiative (JLI) housed at the Bernstein Institute for Human Rights at NYU School of Law and she is the founder of the Legal Empowerment & Advocacy Hub (LEAH). Jhody is a 2024 Global Freedom Fellow and an inaugural 2024 Future Freedoms Fellow with the Center on Gender and Extreme Sentencing. Jhody is the recipient of the 2019 Peacebuilder of the Year Award, the 2020 Dr. Martin Luther King’s Jr. Legacy award and named a Soros Justice Fellow in 2018. She currently serves on the Board of Namati. Jhody is known for her work as a central Florida Organizer on Amendment 4 which restored the right to vote to over a million Floridians with felony convictions. She is the Legal Empowerment Fellow of the Global Justice Clinic at NYU Law School, the 2023 inaugural Pathways to Research and Advocacy Fellow with the Fortune Society and Center for Justice Innovation and the former Director of Community Justice at the River Phoenix Center for Peacebuilding. Jhody also served 3 years as the Director of the Alachua County Reentry Coalition in her hometown of Gainesville, Florida. During her incarceration Jhody gained her legal identity and became a teacher, translator and facilitator of the law as a jailhouse lawyer working in the prison law library. d’Alchemist describes herself as “Justice Living” not “justice impacted. She uses her work and life to accelerate SDG16 and to establish legal empowerment as a proactive tool of abolition in the US.