January 16, 2019
Activities: Administration, Justice, Public Safety
Geography:
Demographics:
Annual ROI: 0.0%
Image source: BronxDefenders.org
Nonprofit and public agencies continue to lead the march toward prison reform in an era of increasing mass imprisonment, especially among poor and minority communities.
Many new programs practice and provide “holistic defense.” This is concept where each client gets a team of lawyers, social workers, and other advocates to help address the reasons a client ended up in court in the first place.
But because this type of defense is inherently much more expensive than what is normally afforded to these populations, it is a political challenge to draw more funding.
This type of intervention is naturally more expensive in the short term than traditional defense work, and though many other programs strive to be holistic, the Bronx Defenders acknowledge that their efforts benefit from their geography. Not every jurisdiction in America can afford—or has the political will to provide—this caliber of legal services to poor people. (Arkansas’s entire 2008 indigent defense budget was $200,000 less than Bronx Defenders’ 2015 grants.)
Many public defender’s offices claim to be “holistic,” as it’s become something of a buzzword, but few have the staffing and training to back it up. In rural areas, social workers, drug treatment providers, and mental health services are few and far between, let alone high-quality lawyers. Moreover, the kind of intensive, time-consuming attention to each case that the Bronx Defenders offer their clients isn’t acceptable to many judges outside New York City, where the priority is moving dockets along.
The reduced costs of incarceration and recidivism do more than pay for the increased cost of the program, but it’s a political task to make that argument effectively.
The criminal justice system as it stands is stacked firmly against communities of color. It would take a systemic overhaul to address the issues BD team members help clients navigate, like immigration and housing barriers, and that might mean restorative justice practices and the decriminalization of poverty. Until then, BD’s work doesn’t only help defendants stay out of jail and qualify for public aid; it forces the courts with which it interacts to recognize how criminal justice proceedings can dehumanize people.
The difficulty and expense involved with putting together a case in a holistic manner should itself demonstrate a need for deeper change. Unfortunately, the cost associated with the program is a barrier to scaling it. According to Oliver Laughland at the Guardian, “up-to-date figures are scant,” but from 2002 to 2008, according to a study from the American Bar Association, total “US Indigent Defense Spending” increased almost 35 percent, to about $5.3 billion. Despite this, public legal representation is chronically underfunded, and where government is responsible for the budget, shortfalls are sure to exist.
Court systems striving for efficiency under a crushing workload have led to a staggeringly high percentage of clients who plead guilty in order to get shorter sentences, and public attorneys who spend only minutes, if that, with each client.Nevertheless, holistic defense is spreading. The Legal Aid Society, New York’s other major public defender’s office, says that they are moving toward that model, though they didn’t have the advantage of being a nimble startup when the model came on the scene.
Read Full Story