UPDATE: This production has been cancelled due to recent advances with the COVID-19 Outbreak. Please see “Important Update About Pipeline” for more information.

Join us Saturday, March 22 at 4:30pm for a post-show conversation with Leon Smith. 

Leon Smith is the executive director of Citizens for Juvenile Justice, a statewide organization that advocates systemic reform for equitable youth justice. A 1995 graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio and a 1999 graduate of New England School of Law in Boston, Leon has worked as a trial attorney in the juvenile justice system for many years, starting in 2001 as a juvenile court public defender, before starting his own law practice devoted to juvenile and criminal court advocacy in the Massachusetts Juvenile, District and Superior courts. He then moved on to at the Vera Institute of Justice in New York City, working on youth-oriented local and national public policy issues.

Leon started the Racial Justice Project for the Connecticut-based Center for Children’s Advocacy. This project advocated reforms to reduce unnecessary and disproportionate school exclusion, improve services for Connecticut’s alternative school students to prevent drop-out and provided legal representation to youth of color subjected to harsh school discipline and unconstitutional targeting by law enforcement. He was also the lead facilitator and co-chair of Racial and Ethnic Disparities (RED) committees, which addresses disparities in the juvenile justice system in three Connecticut cities, and an appointed member of the Connecticut Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Criminal Justice System.