Diane Smith Howard, J.D.

Diane Smith Howard, J.D.

Diane Smith Howard is a senior Staff Attorney with the National Disabiltiy Rights Network (NDRN). Her work focuses on conditions for youth in the juvenile justice system. Specifically, she works on encouraging diversion from the juvenile justice system and increasing school engagement and community re-entry for youth leaving the juvenile justice system. Her projects include ending the "School to Prison Pipeline." Diane provides training and technical assistance to the Network on Juvenile Justice issues, including the development of trainings and materials, responding to individual P&A requests for technical assistance, facilitating the Juvenile Justice listserv and managing the Juvenile Justice webpages on the TASC and NDRN websites. Diane has practiced juvenile law almost exclusively for the past seventeen years. She worked for NDRN for six years before joining our Maine affiliate, the Maine Disability Rights Center (DRC), where she was an attorney on the Children's and Juvenile Justice Teams. Diane returned to NDRN in March 2012.