Jay Jenkins, J.D.

Jay Jenkins
Harris County Project Attorney

Jay Jenkins is the Harris County Project Attorney at the Texas Center for Justice and Equity. Since joining TCJE in 2014, he has promoted broad youth and adult justice reforms in Houston and the surrounding areas. Jay received his Juris Doctor from Northwestern University School of Law, graduating magna cum laude in 2009. While at Northwestern, he worked at the Bluhm Legal Clinic’s Children and Family Justice Center, focusing on a number of youth justice issues. In his third year, Jay was the lone law student at the newly formed Juvenile Post-Dispositional Clinic, where he promoted policy reform throughout Chicago while also advocating on behalf of juvenile clients. Jay was admitted to practice law in the State of Illinois and worked as a civil litigator in the private sector for three years. At TCJE, Jay has researched and pursued reforms related to over-policing and prosecution, while also reimagining the local bail system and supporting indigent defense, and he was instrumental in the development of a first-of-its-kind data dashboard that visualizes more than one million criminal case outcomes in Harris, Dallas, Bexar, and Travis Counties. Jay additionally serves as co-founder and President of the Convict Leasing and Labor Project, which launched in 2018 to expose the history of the convict leasing system and its connection to modern prison slavery.

To contact Jay, please email JJenkins@TexasCJE.org.