Michela Bowman is a Vice President at Impact Justice and currently the Co-Director of the National Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) Resource Center (PRC). Michela’s work on PREA began as a consultant to the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission (NPREC) responsible for managing their PREA standards development process. She was later the liaison between NPREC and the Department of Justice (DOJ) when the DOJ undertook the process of reviewing NPREC’s draft standards for final promulgation as a federal regulation. Michela has worked for two decades with a wide array of stakeholders to ensure that adult and juvenile corrections are focused on preventing, detecting, and responding to sexual abuse in their facilities. As part of her work, she oversaw the development of the DOJ PREA audit, the only national, federally supported audit of all state and local prisons, jails, community confinement and juvenile facilities.
Earlier in her career, Michela served as counsel to the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons and before that advocated for incarcerated people with HIV/AIDS and those with hepatitis C (HCV), the start of a longstanding commitment to medical and mental healthcare in confinement and to public health more broadly. Michela has provided extensive training and technical assistance to agencies seeking to create sexually safe facilities, and her expertise includes protections for vulnerable populations and leveraging public health principles in sexual abuse prevention.
Michela has a master’s degree in Law and Society from New York University, and a law degree from NYU School of Law.
