Shirley LaVarco (she/her)

Shirley LaVarco is an attorney at Civil Rights Corps. Her work at CRC is currently focused on wealth-based detention and police-perpetrated violence.

Shirley is a graduate of New York University School of Law, where she was an AnBryce Scholar and an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow. Through law school clinics and internships, she has worked with the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project and Criminal Law Reform Project, the Legal Aid Society’s Criminal Defense Practice and Special Litigation Unit, the Office of the Appellate Defender, and the National Center for Law and Economic Justice. She has also volunteered with the Parole Preparation Project and worked as a paralegal with the Innocence Project’s Strategic Litigation Unit.

“I was first drawn to this work because of my own experiences with poverty, housing instability, and parental incarceration. I have since been inspired by those organizing for anti-carceral, transformative justice approaches to interpersonal and state violence. I joined CRC because I want to be part of the movement to defund and dismantle the carceral system and invest in the types of social infrastructure that actually allow people to heal and thrive in their homes and communities. That is the world I want to live in and help build.”