Lisa Capers is a program director for the Audit Quality and Integrity (AQI) Division at the National PREA Resource Center and she is based in Austin, Texas. Lisa has spent her career advocating for the safety of youth in juvenile justice facilities. 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 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 lead architect of the web-based, statewide facility monitoring and auditing system known as COMETS (Compliance Monitoring, Enforcement, and Tracking System) which is used to monitor the 95 county-operated juvenile facilities in Texas annually for compliance with minimum standards for confinement.
Lisa has worked on implementation of PREA 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 requirements governing facility operations 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 and finance and she received her doctor of jurisprudence from the University of Texas School of Law at Austin.