Arienne Jones

Ari Jones is the Senior Program Manager for Justice and Equity at the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions (AFCS). Before joining the AFCS, Ari served as Senior Policy Advisor at the Cook County (Illinois) State’s Attorney’s Office (CCSAO), where she worked on a variety of justice-related issues intended to help remedy some of the ills of mass incarceration. These included revamping the CCSAO’s clemency policies to be more holistic, resulting in a 25 percent decline in the number of objections to clemency issued by the office; authoring a law that allowed people with felony prostitution convictions to have those records expunged; and writing Illinois’ prosecutor-initiated resentencing law, which gives prosecutors the discretion to ask judges to resentence incarcerated persons when prosecutors no longer believe that a sentence serves the interests of justice. Prior to her role at the CCSAO, Ari was an attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Florida; a federal judicial law clerk in her home state of Alabama; and a housing discrimination investigator in Louisiana. Ari was also a Fulbright Scholar to Spain.

Ari earned her Bachelor’s degree in History, with honors, from Spelman College and her law degree from Tulane University Law School. She holds Bar memberships in Alabama, Illinois, and Florida.