Ashley Pettus is a criminal justice reform advocate and strategic grant-maker focused on juvenile and emerging adult sentencing reform, alternatives to incarceration, and narrative change.

While living in Houston, TX from 2017 to 2020, she worked as a court-appointed advocate for gang-involved youth in Harris County's 315th juvenile court. She chaired a community committee on disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline as part of the transition team for Fort Bend County District Attorney Brian Middleton and served on the board of the Lone Star Justice Alliance, a Texas-based nonprofit working to transform the state's juvenile and young adult justice system.

Since returning to Massachusetts in 2020, Ashley has supported organizations and initiatives across the country through both philanthropy and advocacy that challenge the laws, practices, and assumptions underpinning mass incarceration. In 2024, she began working with the Massachusetts Parole Preparation Partnership, helping unrepresented, parole-eligible individuals prepare for their hearings. That experience inspired her to pursue mitigation work, and she is currently training to become a mitigation specialist.

Before entering the criminal justice field, Ashley founded and ran the Global Hearth Works Foundation, a small foundation that provided grants and low-interest loans to early-stage businesses offering sustainable cooking fuels and technologies to low-income communities in East and Southern Africa. She also ran a pilot program for students with learning disabilities at the Carroll School in Lincoln, MA, and worked for many years as a freelance writer, including as a longtime feature writer for Harvard Magazine covering science and social science research.

Ashley's training as a cultural anthropologist and journalist has shaped her approach to criminal justice work and to everything else she has pursued. She is motivated by a deep curiosity about and compassion for people, a commitment to careful research, and a love of storytelling. She currently serves on the board of the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization dedicated to covering and investigating the US criminal justice system.

Ashley holds an AB with highest honors in Social Studies from Harvard College and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. She raised her three sons, now young adults, in Cambridge, MA, and grew up in New York City, where she will return as a part-time resident this fall.