Effective Partnerships
for Family-Focused Reentry Services
Speaker Biographies
Lindsey Cramer is a research associate with the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where she
works on the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI), the Study of Community-Centered Responsible
Fatherhood Ex-Prisoner Reentry Pilot Strategies, and Mitigating the Impact of Parental Incarceration on
Children: Promising Practices from Arrest through Pre-Adjudication. As it relates to the JRI project,
Cramer coordinates technical assistance providers working with state and local jurisdictions
implementing a justice reinvestment model aimed at reducing the costs of corrections services and
reinvesting the savings in initiatives to improve public safety. She also supports the study of responsible
fatherhood reentry pilot strategies, which work with incarcerated parents to ensure they have a stable
transition into the community. Additionally, she helps identify promising practices for providing services
and programming to children whose parents are incarcerated. Before joining Urban, Cramer managed
social policy and workforce development projects pertaining to responsible fatherhood and healthy
marriage research. She led the evaluations of two responsible fatherhood programs implemented by the
Maryland Department of Human Resources, customized the data collection tool used by a nonprofit
organization to capture staff’s total time accountability, and developed attendance, benchmark, and
compliance reports for use by the nine Supporting Healthy Marriage implementation sites. Cramer
graduated from the College of Wooster with a BA in economics.
Jocelyn Fontaine is a senior research associate in the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute and is
an adjunct assistant professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. She is
committed to using rigorous social science methods to change policy and practice and contribute to the
public discourse on crime and the criminal justice system. Her research portfolio mostly focuses on
evaluating community-based crime reduction and reentry initiatives. Fontaine directs projects using
quantitative and qualitative research methodologies to explore the impact of community-based initiatives
on outcomes for the individual, family and social networks, and the community. She has extensive
experience developing survey instruments, facilitating focus groups, managing fieldwork in diverse
settings, conducting stakeholder interviews, interfacing with public officials and program administrators,
and translating evidence-based and promising practices into program implementation. Before joining
Urban, Fontaine worked on corrections issues under the Pew Charitable Trusts's Public Safety
Performance Project after working as a research assistant on violence and victimization issues in the
Office of Research and Evaluation at the National Institute of Justice (US Department of Justice) for
several years. Fontaine received her PhD in justice and public policy from the School of Public Affairs at
American University.
URBAN INSTITUTE

2100 M STREET NW, WASHINGTON, DC 20037

URBAN.ORG
Charisse Johnson has spent nearly 30 years as a social worker, supervisor, administrator, and policy
developer. She works in the Office of Family Assistance in the Administration for Children and Families
and is branch chief for the healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood discretionary grant program. She
joined the administration’s children’s bureau in 2010, where she was a program specialist in the Office on
Child Abuse and Neglect. Before joining the federal government, Johnson was the section chief for North
Carolina’s child welfare and child abuse prevention systems. In addition, she worked in the private sector
as the deputy director for Wayne Action Group for Economic Solvency Inc., a community action agency.
She oversaw Head Start, Early Head Start, Community Services Block Grant, an afterschool program, and
a child abuse prevention home visiting program. She is a graduate of East Carolina University in
Greenville, North Carolina, where she earned a BSW and MSW. She has served on several advisory
groups and state and national boards.
Janeen Buck Willison, a senior fellow in the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, has over 15
years of experience managing and directing multisite studies of youth and adult offender populations. Her
work includes evaluations for the federal government and private foundations focused on specialized
courts, prisoner reentry, juvenile justice reform, delinquency prevention, mental health interventions for
offenders, faith-based reentry programs, evidence-based practice, and systems change. She has expertise
in action research, evaluation assessment, program evaluation, policy analysis, performance
measurement, technical assistance, and qualitative and quantitative data analysis. Buck Willison was
project manager on the first national evaluation of teen courts, an intervention for juvenile offenders; and
the Opportunity to Succeed Program, the first multisite evaluation of prisoner reentry featuring an
experimental design. Currently, she is evaluating the performance and impact of jail reentry programs in
Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and is principal investigator (PI) for the evaluation of OJJDP’s FY2010
Second Chance Act Juvenile Offender Reentry Demonstration Projects. She coleads the process
evaluation for the FY2011 Second Chance Act Adult Offender Reentry Demonstration Projects and was
PI for the Evaluability Assessment of the FY2011 Second Chance Act Adult Offender Reentry
Demonstration Projects. She is also the evaluation director for the Transition from Jail to Community
initiative on 14 sites, co-PI for the National Institute of Correction’s Norval Morris workforce
transformation project, and a member of Urban’s Institutional Review Board. Buck Willison holds an MSJ
in law and society from American University.
URBAN INSTITUTE

2100 M STREET NW, WASHINGTON, DC 20037

URBAN.ORG