Lisa Capers is the Program Director for the Operations and Resource Management Division at the National PREA Resource Center. She came to Impact Justice in 2017 and is based in Florida. Prior to joining Impact Justice, Lisa was an attorney in private practice where she handled juvenile defense cases, conducted Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) audits, and provided correctional consulting services. In April of 2016, Lisa retired from the Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD) in Austin, Texas after nearly 25 years’ service in the Texas juvenile justice system. She began her career as an Assistant County Attorney prosecuting juvenile delinquency and child abuse cases.
At TJJD, Lisa was the Senior Director of Training and Organizational Development where she managed the Juvenile Justice Training Academy and the PREA Compliance Division. Before the creation of TJJD, she served as Deputy Executive Director and General Counsel for the predecessor agency, the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission (TJPC), for 19 years. At TJPC, she was the architect of the web-based, statewide facility monitoring/auditing system known as COMETS (Compliance Monitoring, Enforcement, and Tracking System) which monitors the 95 county-operated juvenile facilities in Texas annually for compliance with minimum state confinement standards.
Lisa has worked on PREA implementation since 2006 when she oversaw development of new standards for juvenile facilities in Texas consistent with PREA principles before the actual promulgation of national PREA standards. Lisa has trained hundreds of juvenile justice practitioners on PREA and related constitutional conditions of confinement since 2007. In 2009, Lisa served as the Project Manager on the Building Capacity Project at TJPC, a partnership with the Project on Addressing Prison Rape at American University’s Washington College of Law that developed a comprehensive PREA training curriculum for juvenile facilities.
Lisa is a Department of Justice Certified PREA Auditor for adult and juvenile facilities. Lisa has a Bachelor of Science degree in business administration/finance, and she received her Doctor of Jurisprudence from the University of Texas School of Law at Austin in 1991.