Honoring Laurie Garduque with 2025 Excellence in Justice System Innovation and Improvement Award

June 2025

JMI is proud to announce the 2025 Award of Excellence in Justice System Innovation and Improvement recipient—Laurie Garduque. In recognition of her decades-long commitment to improving criminal and juvenile justice, JMI’s President Elaine Borakove presented the Award of Excellence to Laurie at the final Safety+Justice Challenge Conference this spring. Laurie’s focus on improving the justice field has been far-reaching and extraordinarily impactful for local communities and their residents in engaging and ensuring fair and equitable treatment of justice-impacted individuals.

Over the past three decades, Laurie’s leadership in the field of juvenile and criminal justice system improvement at the MacArthur Foundation has helped support JMI and countless other organizations, along with state, county, and local justice system stakeholders in making bold changes to the administration of justice. As the framer of the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety + Justice Challenge (SJC), Laurie’s vision helped shine a spotlight on the overuse and misuse of jails and racial disparities in the system. Under her guidance, SJC sites network-wide have safely reduced their jail populations by 20% with no increases in crime. These reductions stem from the more than $250 million of support granted to jurisdictions to develop and implement innovative and evidence-based jail population reduction strategies that span the entire justice system continuum.

Laurie also spearheaded the Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice, which was used by the U.S. Supreme Court in abolishing the juvenile death penalty and ending life without parole for juveniles. The Research Network’s impact also extended to MacArthur’s Models for Change initiative, which advocated for juvenile justice policy and practice reform, and was the impetus for raising the age at which juveniles could be transferred to adult court.

Early this year, Laurie announced her retirement from MacArthur as the 10-year Safety+Justice Challenge comes to its conclusion. Laurie has been the powerhouse behind MacArthur’s work; while she will be missed, she leaves behind a powerful legacy and has paved the way for future changemakers in the justice field.