Licensed Clinical Providers
Life After Justice is a national Chicago-based nonprofit founded and led by people who were wrongfully convicted and incarcerated, including Co-Founders Jarrett Adams and Antione Day and Board Chair Terrill Swift. LAJ exists to fill a gap the field left open: people who come home after a wrongful conviction usually can't use standard reentry services, which are built for people who committed the offenses they were convicted of. LAJ's Holistic Mental Health and Wellness Empowerment Pilot, launched in October 2022, provides trauma-informed psychotherapy, resource coaching, and family support to exonerees, with the goal of building a replicable model of care for the trauma of wrongful incarceration. This position is funded through an ICJIA R3 grant that expands the pilot to serve 25 people living in Chicago's Western R3 census tracts, communities hit hard by wrongful convictions tied to the Jon Burge and Ronald Watts cases and by decades of disinvestment.
Why Work For Us?
Life After Justice was founded by Jarrett Adams and Antione Day — not from theory, but from what they lived and what they returned home to.
When they were released, there was no system waiting to help them rebuild. No roadmap. No support. Just the weight of everything that had been taken — and the expectation to start over with nothing.
They know the gaps because they lived them — and, in many ways, still do.
Life After Justice was built in response to that absence. Not to complement existing systems, but to fill what was never there. To create the support, advocacy, and community they needed — and refused to accept did not exist.
Today, that vision is carried forward by a board of leaders who have collectively spent 93 years wrongfully incarcerated for crimes they did not commit. Nearly a century of stolen time that now shapes every decision we make.
We advance this work through data-driven strategic litigation, holistic mental health support, and research rooted in lived experience — because freedom must mean more than survival.
Jarrett Adams was wrongfully convicted at 17 and spent nearly a decade incarcerated before his exoneration. He went on to earn his law degree and now represents others in the same systems that once failed him.
Antione Day, a social justice leader and exoneree, brings lived experience and community leadership to this work — ensuring it remains grounded in the realities people face long after release.
Together, they built Life After Justice as it is meant to be: a gap-filler, a builder, and a community shaped by those who have lived through what the system too often ignores.
Because wrongful incarceration does not end when the prison doors open. Its harm follows people home — through trauma, lost time, and systems that still fail to repair what they broke. We exist to change that.
Licensed Clinical Providers
Term line: September 1, 2026 through August 31, 2027, within a program designed to run up to 36 months.
Engagement type: Independent Contractor
Location: Chicago, IL, with sessions delivered in person, in community-based settings, or via telehealth as clinically appropriate.
Compensation: $100 per session hour
About The Engagement:
Life After Justice is contracting a panel of approximately eight licensed clinical providers to deliver trauma-informed psychotherapy to 25 participants, all survivors of wrongful conviction or their loved ones, living in Chicago's Western R3 census tracts. Each participant receives weekly individual therapy for up to a year. Providers work within LAJ's survivor-informed model of care, developed and refined since 2022, with clinical coordination from the program team.
Scope of Services:
- Deliver routine , one-hour individual psychotherapy sessions to assigned participants.
- Complete clinical intake assessments for assigned participants.
- Maintain clinical documentation consistent with professional standards and program requirements, including session logs supporting the program's reporting obligations.
- Participate in periodic case coordination with the Program Manager and program leadership, within the bounds of clinical confidentiality.
- Apply trauma-informed practices suited to the distinct experience of wrongful incarceration.
- Optional, under a separately scoped agreement: serve as a retreat clinician for the program's two-day Immersive Clinical Wellness Retreat.
Requirements:
- Professional liability insurance consistent with LAJ's contracting requirements.
- Experience providing trauma-focused therapy; training in modalities such as EMDR, CPT, TF-CBT, or somatic approaches is valued.
- Experience with justice-impacted, formerly incarcerated, or exonerated clients strongly preferred.
- Capacity to take on assigned participants for weekly sessions for the duration of the engagement.
- Willingness to complete LAJ's provider onboarding, covering the program model and documentation requirements.
Who you are
- You're drawn to work at the edge of the field. There is no established treatment manual for the trauma of wrongful incarceration. You read that as the opportunity, not the obstacle.
- You understand that coming home from a wrongful conviction is not the same as reentry, or you want to learn why. The systems built for reentry weren't built for them. The people you'll serve carry the trauma of incarceration plus the injury of innocence, and you're ready to meet both.
- You're passionate about reentry and believe it deserves innovation, care built around what this population actually needs rather than what existing systems happen to offer.
- You want to grow. This engagement will deepen your clinical knowledge of institutional betrayal trauma, identity disruption, and survivor-led care in ways few settings can.
- You want your sessions to count twice: once for the person in front of you, and again for the replicable, statewide model of care your work will help build.
- You treat lived experience as expertise. You're comfortable working alongside peer support staff and an organization founded and led by exonerees, and you bring humility to a population that has every reason to be careful about who it trusts.
Providers will be selected through LAJ's competitive procurement process consistent with ICJIA requirements.
$100 per session
This program is funded by the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority through the Restore, Reinvest and Renew (R3) Program.