Robert Saleem Holbrook (he/him) is the Executive Director of the Abolitionist Law Center. Saleem is a former “juvenile lifer” who served 27 years in Pennsylvania’s adult state prisons (including a total of 10 years in solitary confinement) after being sentenced to life without parole for an offense he was involved with as a 16-year-old child. He was released in 2018 after The Supreme Court ruled that mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles are unconstitutional.

While incarcerated Saleem studied liberation movements and was mentored by older political and politicized prisoners. He began to write extensively on prison abuse, social injustice, state violence, and juveniles charged and sentenced as adults, and saw his work published in Truthout, The Appeal, San Francisco Bay View, and Solitary Watch.

Saleem started organizing against the criminal punishment system while still inside, including co-founding the Human Rights Coalition, a group of people in prison and their loved ones outside, formed to advocate for themselves against the abuses they were experiencing. He also connected with the attorneys who in 2013 founded ALC, and in 2014 became their second client in Holbrook v. Jellen, a case challenging the Department of Corrections’ censorship of his mail and writings about prison abuses and human rights violations.

Following his release in 2018, Saleem immediately joined the ALC staff, launching its organizing arm in his native Philadelphia, and helping to lead its efforts to end death by incarceration (life without parole sentences) and solitary confinement. In 2020 he became ALC’s executive director, and under his leadership ALC expanded its scope of work by launching Straight Ahead in 2021, to add legislative, lobbying, and electoral activity to the fight against the carceral state.

In 2022 Saleem was named to the Public Safety Advisory Committee of incoming PA Governor Shapiro’s transition team. In 2023 he traveled to Geneva with a delegation of former lifers and family members, and testified in front of the UN’s Human Rights Commission. As a result, the UNHRC issued a formal recommendation that the U.S. should pursue alternatives to detention, the cash bail system, and mandatory minimum sentencing; end the use of solitary confinement; and institute a nationwide moratorium on death by incarceration and executions.

Today Saleem sits on the Board of the ACLU-PA, and is a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Carey Law School. He received The Philadelphia Citizen’s inaugural A. Leon Higginbotham Social Justice Champion of the Year Award in 2024; has presented at countless conferences, panels, and convenings around the country; and frequently collaborates with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Civil Rights Corps, Color of Change, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the National Unlock The Box Campaign to End Solitary Confinement, and many other organizations involved in the movement to end mass incarceration and protect the rights and wellbeing of people in prison.