Marc Mauer, Executive Director
The Sentencing Project

Marc Mauer is one of the country's leading experts on sentencing policy, race and the criminal justice system. He has directed programs on criminal justice policy reform for 30 years, and is the author of some of the most widely-cited reports and publications in the field, including Young Black Men and the Criminal Justice System, and Americans Behind Bars, a series comparing international rates of incarceration. His 1995 report on racial disparity and the criminal justice system led the New York Times to editorialize that the report “should set off alarm bells from the White House to city halls – and help reverse the notion that we can incarcerate our way out of fundamental social problems.”

Race to Incarcerate, Mauer's groundbreaking book on how sentencing policies led to the explosive expansion of the U.S. prison population, was a semifinalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 1999, and revised in 2006. Mauer is also the co-editor of Invisible Punishment, a 2002 collection of essays by prominent criminal justice experts on the social cost of imprisonment.

Brent McMillan, National Political Director
Green Party of the United States

Brent  McMillan serves as a national liaison with state Green Parties, officeholders and candidates, including outreach to potential presidential candidates. He tracks Green Party elections and ballot access efforts, and identifies and solicits party contributors. He teaches outreach and fundraising techniques at regional campaign schools and provides party resources for local campaigns. McMillan also speaks on transportation, permaculture, and environmental justice.

McMillan has served as the GPUS Political Director since February 11, 2004. A former Republican, McMillan first became involved in the Green Party in 1991 with the Delaware County Greens in Muncie, Indiana and served as secretary for the first statewide gathering of Greens in 1992. In 1996 he co-founded the Green Party of Seattle and served on the first coordinating council. In 1998 he co-founded the Green Party of the 36th District and served as its Treasurer until 2004. In 2000 he co-founded the Green Party of Washington State and served as the first State Facilitator (Chair). In 2002 he was elected as one of two delegates to represent the state of Washington on the National Committee of the Green Party of the United States. In 2003 he was a candidate for the newly created Seattle Monorail Board. He finished third out of seven candidates and was endorsed by the Seattle Post Intelligencer and the Seattle Weekly. He received a BS and a BArch from Ball State University.

Charles D. Burks
Retired U.S. Marshall

Charles D. Burks was born in Monon, Indiana (White County) in 1923.  His parents were tenant farmers and the family moved to Logansport in 1930.  After graduating from high school in 1940, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and went to flight school to become a B-17 bomber pilot in Europe.  His plane was shot down over Belgium on April 22, 1944, and he was sent to a German prison camp near Nuremberg and told by his captors: “The war is over for you.”  He and two other pilots escaped in February 1945 and made their way to the American lines through German occupied territory. The first American soldier to greet them was from Peru, Indiana. After his discharge from the military, Burks returned to Indiana and joined the Logansport Police Dept.  Five years later, he took a civil service exam and became a U.S. Marshal.  In 1960, he was selected as one of 50 marshals in a Special Operations Group trained for the new policy of integrating America’s schools.  He was assigned to the New Orleans School District in October 1960, where he and three other marshals escorted Ruby Bridges to school during her first grade year. Every day, demonstrators gathered outside the school to taunt Ruby and the marshals who accompanied her. “They were yelling nigger lover and throwing things,” he said.  “It must have scared her to death, but she didn’t act like it.  She never showed any signs of being afraid.  She was a brave little girl.”  Burks said, “We knew it was a history-making event.  We were in the court when the order was issued for her to attend school there.”  After his role in the elementary school integration, Burks was posted to the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where, “. . .the police were worse than the rioters.”  Other postings followed at universities in Georgia and Alabama.   Betty, his wife of 62 years, worried every time he left, but Burks said his service in the South “. . .was the right thing to do.”