Nancy La Vigne is vice president for justice policy at the Urban Institute. Before being appointed vice president, La Vigne was a senior research associate at Urban. She was also founding director of the Crime Mapping Research Center at the National Institute of Justice and special assistant to the assistant attorney general for the Office of Justice Programs within the U.S. Department of Justice. She has been research director for the Texas sentencing commission, research fellow at the Police Executive Research Forum and consultant to the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. La Vigne was executive director for the bipartisan Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections Reform and founding chair of the Crime and Justice Research Alliance. She also served on the board of directors for the Consortium of Social Science Associations. La Vigne holds a bachelor’s degree in government and economics from Smith College, a master’s from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and a doctorate in criminal justice from Rutgers University.