Elizabeth Finne moved to the U.S. from the U.K. in 2008. As a Navy wife she has moved a fair few times, but has had two stints in Maryland. During the first, from 2008 till 2012, she met Maryjoel Davis when they were both involved in the MCIW College Degree Program, which exists today as the extremely successful Goucher Prison Education Partnership (GPEP).
The second stint began In 2019. Maryjoel invited Elizabeth to ‘come do the parole’ with me. Together they began thinking about how to scale the work of parole hearing preparation in Maryland. Elizabeth wrote a book entitled A Guide to Preparing for Parole Hearings in Maryland and was selected as one of OSI Baltimores’s 2020 community fellows. With fellow Navy wife Jacqueline Ahn and PREPARE’s Director of Advocacy, Anne Bocchini Kirsch, she has continued to endeavor to address two key questions – what does best practice in parole hearing preparation look like, and how would it scale?
In working on parole hearing preparation, Elizabeth has been humbled by the spirit, intellect, resilience and commitment of people on the inside who are striving to become better versions of themselves. As an outside program, PREPARE can offer structure and support to channel those efforts into compelling parole packets and strong reentry plans, but the journeys are theirs and theirs alone.
Elizabeth’s background is law and legal philosophy. She was a government lawyer in the UK working at the Home Office and later at the Ministry of Justice. She has an LLB from the University of Bristol, an M.Litt in Legal and Political Philosophy from the University of Stirling where her dissertation was on dignity and proportionality in punishment, and an LLM in Law and Government from American University’s Washington College of Law where she was taught by Congressman Jamie Raskin who serves on the advisory board of PREPARE.
