Legal and Penal Reformers

Reform advocates whose primary documented contribution is changing how the law or the penal and post-conviction system treats offenders and the wrongly convicted, from John Howard's eighteenth century prison-conditions surveys and Elizabeth Fry's and Robert Peel's reforms through Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld's founding of the Innocence Project and its DNA-based exoneration work. Belongs here: any person whose primary documented contribution is advocacy for changing penal conditions, sentencing practice or wrongful-conviction remedy, whether nineteenth century prison reform or modern post-conviction DNA testing; the modern DNA-exoneration advocates are placed here rather than under Forensic Science Pioneers because their documented contribution is the legal and institutional reform their forensic evidence enabled, not the underlying laboratory technique itself, which this atlas credits to Alec Jeffreys under Forensic Science Pioneers. Does not belong here: theorists studying the causes of crime rather than advocating penal or legal change, grouped under Criminological Theorists and Social Scientists, or officials operating the existing system rather than reforming it, grouped under Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Officials. This grouping is a browsing convenience organized around each person's primary documented professional role and is not a ranking or a complete account of a career.