Jon Wool, who spent 12 years in New Orleans working to improve the criminal-justice system, died Dec. 18 at New York University’s hospice center in Brooklyn. He was 67.
He died of brain cancer, said Melody Chang, who worked with Wool in New Orleans on a program to reduce jail population.
That was one of the initiatives of the Vera Institute of Justice, a Brooklyn-based organization dedicated to criminal-justice reform. In 2008, Wool became the founding director of the institute’s New Orleans office, which the City Council hired in an attempt to restructure New Orleans’ ’s criminal-justice system in the wake of Hurricane Katrina…