Our Team
Mary Price
Senior Counsel
Mary Price is Senior Counsel of FAMM (formerly Families Against Mandatory Minimums). Since joining FAMM in 2000 as General Counsel – a role she held for 25 years – she has advocated sentencing reform and second chances avenues such as retroactivity and compassionate release to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the federal Bureau of Prisons, Congress, and state legislatures and agencies.
Mary’s writing and research on federal and state compassionate release programs and practices aims to help everyone from incarcerated individuals to lawmakers understand, use, and reform them. Her work includes: Everywhere and Nowhere: Compassionate Release in the States, and Grading the States: The State Compassionate Release Report Card Project, as well as research memos and report cards on every state program, and a toolkit for policy makers and stakeholders who wish to improve their state’s release programs.
Mary is a founder of the federal Compassionate Release Clearinghouse. The Clearinghouse recruits, trains, and supports attorneys to provide pro bono representation to people in federal prison seeking reduction in sentence. She is currently overseeing a pilot compassionate release clearinghouse project in a select number of states nationwide to bring the Clearinghouse model to bear in places where programs exist but fail to reach the individuals they intend to serve.
Mary is a member of the American Law Institute. She serves on the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Sentencing Standards Task Force, is a member of the ABA’s Criminal Justice Section, and served on its Task Force on the Reform of Federal Sentencing for Economic Crimes. She is a member of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and served on its First Step Implementation Task Force. Mary is a member of the advisory board of the Second Look Network, a project of The Sentencing Project.
She received NACDL’s Champion of Justice Restoration of Rights Award in 2019 for her work on commutation and compassionate release and accepted the 2021 Alfred McKenzie Award from the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for FAMM’s work on the Compassionate Release Clearinghouse-COVID-19 Project.
Mary graduated cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a Public Interest Law Scholar and the Law Center’s first recipient of the Bettina Pruckmayr Human Rights Award. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Oregon.
Connect with Mary Price:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-price-famm/
News Clips:
Just Justice: The Cruel World of Compassionate Release with Mary Price, General Counsel of FAMM
Atavist Magazine: The Quality of Mercy
Reason: The Bureau of Prisons’ Casual Cruelty to Families of Those Who Die Behind Bars
Video:
How One Man’s Tragic Experience Has Helped So Many Get Compassionate Release