Bio
Andrea Woods is a former Staff Attorney with the ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project. She focuses on bail and pretrial justice, seeking to end wealth-based pretrial detention, dramatically reduce our nation’s use of jails, and eliminate the exploitation of people who have been arrested. She has brought challenges to post-arrest systems of incarceration due to inability to pay money bail, inadequate access to public defenders, for-profit pretrial GPS conditions, overbroad systems of pretrial detention, the right of public access to court proceedings, and the extortionate practice of bounty hunting. She also engages in policy advocacy in dozens of states, including on the dangers of pretrial risk assessments. Her work has been featured in the Guardian, the Appeal, CNBC, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dallas Morning News, and numerous other local news outlets Andrea has worked in public defender offices, the anti-death penalty movement, and with the Innocence Project Northwest as a law student. She was a William H. Gates Public Service Law Scholar at the University of Washington, graduating in 2014. Prior to joining the ACLU, Andrea clerked for the Hon. John C. Coughenour of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.
Featured work
![Bail Bonds](https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2019/09/web19-bailbonds2-1160x768-400x266.jpg)
Apr 17, 2019
Armed Bounty Hunters Raided Our Clients’ Home to Prevent Private Companies From Losing $1,670
![Gavel with money](https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2019/09/040119-sj-pretrialreportwebimage-400x266.jpg)
Apr 2, 2019
America’s Pretrial System Is Broken. Here’s Our Vision to Fix It.
![Paul Manafort](https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2019/09/web19-paylmanafort-1160x768-400x266.jpg)
Mar 29, 2019
How a Federal Judge Missed the Mark in Explaining Paul Manafort’s Sentence
![Neon bail bonds sign outside building](https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2019/09/web18-bail-bonds-1160x768-400x266.jpg)
Mar 12, 2018
No Money to Make Bail or Pay for a Lawyer? Too Bad, Say Officials in Glynn County, Georgia
![Image of man behind bars of dollar sign](https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2019/09/dollar_sign_jail-400x266.jpg)
Apr 25, 2017
We’re Living in a Surveillance Society, So Why Do We Need Bail?