Justice for all

A couple of Fridays a month, I like to feature non-profits and changemakers on my blog to raise awareness of the great work they do, provide a dose of inspiration, and show that positive change is possible. Catch up on my other Feature Friday posts here.

This Friday, I would like to feature an incredible non-profit organization, the Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR). From their website:

The Southern Center for Human Rights provides legal representation to people facing the death penalty, challenges human rights violations in prisons and jails, seeks through litigation and advocacy to improve legal representation for poor people accused of crimes, and advocates for criminal justice system reforms on behalf of those affected by the system in the Southern United States.

Considering my passion for criminal justice reform and the improvement of access to justice for the poor and marginalized, it’s clear that I think the SCHR is a great and much-needed organization. SCHR uses litigation to improve the criminal justice system, particularly when it comes to the application of the death penalty, unfair and inhumane prison and jail conditions, the right to competent legal counsel, debtors’ prisons (where people are imprisoned because of inability to pay fines), and fear-based policies spurred by policymakers who emphasize the need for public safety.

As you may know if you read this blog regularly, my particular passion centers around the right to high-quality legal counsel for all people, even the poor and marginalized. So it’s no surprise that one project of the SCHR, the Southern Public Defender Training Center (SPDTC), especially impressed me. The SPDTC trains newly minted public defenders throughout the south through a three-year training curriculum. Having worked with international organizations committed to improving access to justice by using a methodology of training public defenders in developing countries, I feel that this model can be incredibly effective in improving and expanding the quality of legal counsel available to the poor.

Check out the organization and it’s various projects, and I’m sure you’ll be impressed by their commitment to equal justice and criminal justice reform throughout the American South as well! The SCHR is a prime example of how litigation can be used to advocate for the rights of disadvantaged populations, and proves an effective model for non-profit law firms throughout the country.

I’ve recently been reading more about “holistic advocacy,” and I think it’s an incredibly important theme for public defenders and others in the indigent defense community around the world to think about (not that I have much expertise on this topic…but here’s my two cents anyway!).

Here’s an excellent quote from Robin Steinberg, Executive Director of the Bronx Defenders, which perfectly describes the concept of holistic advocacy:

At the core of “holistic advocacy” is the understanding that clients come into the criminal justice system with a host of social, economic, political and legal problems. Being an effective, compassionate and zealous advocate means taking on the responsibility of addressing those issues that are driving clients into the criminal justice system. Holistic advocacy contemplates creating a legal “home” for clients where they can access legal representation in criminal, immigration, housing and family court, as well as benefits advocacy and civil rights. Additionally, clients can work with social workers and parent advocates in securing social service intervention and support when needed. Finally, holistic advocacy means being a part of the client community and collaborating with Bronx community partners to find ways to address the broader systemic problems that lead to the over incarceration and arrest of our clients. Holistic advocacy has proven to lead to better case outcomes and more positive life outcomes for clients and their families and should be incorporated into the practices of all public defenders if we are to have any positive impact on the lives of our individual clients and the communities they love.

It seems to me that the model of holistic defense and advocacy is essentially about providing legal aid to an individual that addresses all aspects of their lives, and also acknowledges the deeply interrelated nature of the various problems that indigent defendants often face. Many of those who have criminal records have greater difficulty re-entering into society; they are discriminated against when searching for a job. They are denied public housing, evicted, and thrown onto the street. They can be deported, even if they are legal permanent residents. They can have their children taken away from them by the child welfare system. This interdisciplinary approach acknowledges all these consequences and addresses them as a whole, rather than simply resolving one symptom of the individual’s suffering.

Moreover, holistic advocacy also understands that the roots of an individual’s criminal activity may be deeper than what is seen at first glance. Many individuals are entangled in the criminal justice system because of broader social forces that plunge them into poverty. Mental illnesses, drug use, poverty, homelessness, lack of education, lack of job opportunities, poor family life, abuse and neglect are all reasons that underlie eventual criminal behavior. Many individuals who are arrested and convicted of a crime have had difficulty in one or more of these areas, and thus turn to criminal activity. Using an interdisciplinary model to advocate on behalf of clients means a lawyer takes into account all these forces, all these roots while defending someone, and works to address and solve these underlying causes of the problem in the process. This ensures that the roots of an individual’s criminal behavior is addressed, thus reducing the risk of recidivism.

The Bronx Defenders is obviously an organization that works to actively implement the holistic defense model in their daily work. They recognize that “an arrest is not just an arrest,” but often can have far reaching consequences for an individual, his or her family, and the broader community. Their goal is not just to win in court, but to ensure that their clients are better off in the long-run.

Another organization called Youth Represent, which I have also featured here in the past, also implements the holistic advocacy method by providing indigent defendants with lawyers who are well versed in both criminal and civil legal procedures in order to help clients best solve not only their criminal problems, but also the numerous civil issues that they may have to grapple with as a result of their convictions - such as reentry, housing, employment, education, and immigration issues. The non-profit focuses primarily on youth, but their model is applicable to all populations.

Finally, Neighborhood Defender Services, another public defender agency based in Harlem, also employs this holistic defense model quite effectively. Here’s a quote directly from their website, which I also think encapsulates the model:

A core aspect of our holistic approach to public defense is a commitment to search for the underlying issues that bring our clients into contact with the criminal justice system, and providing comprehensive social service support to avoid or minimize future problems. Furthermore, when our clients face collateral consequences with their employment, schooling, or in family, housing, or immigration court, NDS strives to help our clients resolve those issues, either through direct representation or referrals to appropriate service providers.

Ultimately, we need more organizations and individuals to use the holistic advocacy method in not only defending clients in court and ensuring a good outcome, but also helping clients solve a range of criminal and civil problems that are often deeply interrelated. This type of interdisciplinary advocacy, it seems to me, offers great hope for social change for poor and marginalized communities, and I only hope that it becomes more broadly utilized in the near future.

I just found an excellent and heartwrenching article about Haiti’s incarcerated minors, and more broadly the life-threatening prison conditions in Haitian prisons as well as the lack of legal infrastructure. As in so many other developing countries, innocent individuals are often wrongfully convicted and thrown in jail, only to languish in the face of inadequate legal aid and disease-ridden prison conditions. Here are a few notable quotes from the article:

Suze was arrested in May near the central plateau town of Mirebalais in the Haitian countryside. She was taken to the Pétionville Civil Prison in the capital, the country’s only penitentiary for women. She shares a 40 square foot cell with two thin mattresses and a hammock with a group of 15 girls, ages 11 to 17. The cell’s maximum capacity is four people according to Haiti’s National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH), which has denounced the prison’s conditions.

According to Marie-Yolaine Mathieu, the prison’s motherly but strict warden, “Nobody explained to Suze what was happening or how long she will be here.” Adding that it will likely take months for the girl to appear before a judge, Mathieu said she doesn’t know the details of the incident. She is overwhelmed by her job, tired, and skeptical of the justice system.

Like most inmates in Haitian jails, Suze’s detention is “preventive” and based on little evidence, Mathieu explains. Human Rights Watch reported in 2009 that more than 76 percent of Haitian inmates are pretrial detainees, a number bound to increase following the judiciary chaos caused by the earthquake.

“They just send people to prison and forget them here,” says Mathieu. Many inmates have spent years waiting to be tried for crimes for which the maximum sentence would be a few months. “The girls keep asking me, when will we be tried? How long will we be here?”

In an interview, Haiti’s chief prosecutor Auguste Aristidas, said the conditions of minors in jails are “intolerable.” He has been pushing the Ministry of Justice to intervene. He is also fighting illegal arrests and extended pretrial detentions. He added that he is reviewing each prisoner’s case, pointing to that of a 14-year-old boy who was recently rearrested after escaping in January. The boy had been held for months for stealing a gallon of cheap rum.

Aristidas said adequate resources to deal with juveniles are lacking at both the judicial and the penitentiary level. “Minors should not be tried by common tribunals but by tribunals for children.” When children are arrested, Aristidas added, basic rights such as food and sanitation should be assured. “We must create an environment where reeducation can really be effective,” he said.

Another good passage:

The situation is worse at the National Penitentiary in downtown Port-au-Prince, where 43 boys ages 13 to 17 share a “dirty, wet, and foul smelling cell,” according to the RNDDH. These young inmates are part of the 214 minors who escaped the Delmas Civil Prison for juveniles, destroyed by the earthquake. The National Penitentiary was also damaged and 1,211 prisoners – many of them rearrested after they escaped in January – now share six cells.

Marie Yolene Gilles, an advocate with the RNDDH, regularly lobbies with prison authorities to improve living conditions for underage inmates. Gilles criticizes the government for failing to protect incarcerated minors.

A hundred mattresses, still wrapped in plastic, line the walls of the office of the National Penitentiary director. A gift from Haitian-American singer Wyclef Jean, the mattresses have been sitting there for days. They are waiting for authorization from the director to bring some of the mattresses to the boys’ cells.

“Even if they do they won’t be able to fit them in those cells,” said Gilles, adding that inmates take turns sleeping because there is not enough room for all of them to lie down at the same time.

“There is no real will to change the situation,” Gilles later says, standing in the National Penitentiary’s steamy kitchen, checking with the cooks for the daily menu. Inmates are served two meals a day but have to rely on their families for drinking water or more varied nutrition. “Until I went on public radio to talk about it, all they got was rice, every day,” Gilles says.

A 2009 news article from Human Rights Watch reports that Haiti’s prison system is extremely overcrowded, with 8204 inmates held in a facility with a maximum capacity of 2448! Moreover, in two cities - Gonaïves and Petit Goâve - there are no prison or jail facilities, and as a result the police stations have been informally converted into detention centers. 274 individuals are detained at the Gonaïves, while the maximum capacity of the station is only 75. Prison conditions are harsh and unsanitary. There is insufficient room for all prisoners to sleep and stand at the same time. Prisoners are malnourished and must rely on food and water from family to survive. The spread of diseases like malaria and tuberculosis is common, but prisoners have little access to medical care. Torture is also widespread: the Institute of Justice and Democracy in Haiti reports that 40% of prisoners in three detention centers reported that they were tortured or abused (beaten with pistols, bottles, or sticks) by officers and government officials.

As you can see, the situation is heartbreaking, especially when it comes to juveniles who have committed minor crimes like petty theft and are essentially being punished with a death sentence - to die of disease and malnutrition in an overcrowded jail. Young people don’t deserve such harsh punishment - they need to be rehabilitated into society. For many young offenders, there is hope for reform … that is, until, they enter the prison system and become hardened, tortured, lifetime offenders with no other options; with no education, literacy or job training, what hope do they have to become productive members of society? Prison conditions like this are ineffective at best and life-threatening at worst. I’m very glad that this issue has been brought to light; more people need to be talking about unjust prison conditions in developing countries. Despite the gravity of the problem, there is little international attention to this issue. Articles like this in mainstream media are certainly the first step. I’d highly encourage you to read the entire article here. You can also read more about Haiti’s criminal justice system at Human Rights Watch.

Here are some excerpts from an incredible podcast/interview with Michelle Alexander on Political Affairs. Michelle Alexander is a professor at Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law, and previously held a position as the Director of Stanford Law School’s Civil Rights Clinic. She also worked as the Director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU of Northern California. She’s come out with a new book about race and mass incarceration. Check out the following quotations:

Today there are more African Americans under correctional control, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the Civil War began. There are more African Americans disenfranchised today than in 1870, the year the 15th Amendment was ratified explicitly prohibiting laws that deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

In major American cities today, cities like Chicago, the majority of working age African American men have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to public education, and food stamps. So many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind are suddenly legal again once you’ve been branded a felon. So really quite belatedly I came to see that despite all the fanfare over the election of Barack Obama and our so-called color blind society, we have not ended racial caste in America – we’ve merely redesigned it…

Here’s another powerful excerpt:

Then, of course, there is the stigma as well. In many respects the stigma of being branded a criminal or a felon is as severe and damaging as the stigma of race during the Jim Crow era. Many people branded felons try to pass. During the Jim Crow area, light-skinned Blacks would try to pass as white to avoid the shame and stigma associated with race and all the forms of discrimination associated with race. Today people branded felons try to pass, not just by lying to employers or housing officials, or failing to check the box on loan applications, but by lying to their friends, family members and co-workers, trying to hide their criminal status because of the shame and stigma of having to admit, “Yeah, I did time, I was in prison for 5 years.” So this shame and stigma has created a real silence even in the communities hardest hit by mass incarceration, one that makes political action, collective political action to resist this new system of control, extremely difficult if not impossible.

And finally:

The problem isn’t seeing race, it’s failing to care as much for people of another race as we care for our own, and that, I believe, that failure to care, the indifference to the experience of people of other races, is what lies at the foundation of every caste system that has ever existed in the United States or anywhere else in the world. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke frequently about this, particularly near the end of his life, where he would remind audiences that slavery and Jim Crow were not systems supported primarily by racial hostility or open bigotry. Rather those systems emerged and endured because of so much indifference, so much indifference by most to the plight of people who were perceived as different, perceived as being fundamentally different than themselves. Colorblindness really is our enemy, and that we as a nation would be much better off if we openly talked about race, openly acknowledged race, and really strove to care more for people of other races.

I would highly encourage anyone interested in the topic of race and criminal justice to read the entire interview, which you will find here at Political Affairs. Her interview is so eloquent and well-worded that I really have nothing to add (from my paltry knowledge of the justice system!). Also be sure to check out the website highlighting her new book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” It looks like it will be a fascinating and compelling read.

This Friday, I’d like to feature the Equal Justice Initiative, an important non-profit headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama, and which works to reform the criminal justice system and defend those on death row. The organization’s about page states that EJI “provides legal representation to indigent defendants and prisoners who have been denied fair and just treatment in the legal system.” EJI also litigates “on behalf of condemned prisoners, juvenile offenders, people wrongly convicted or charged with violent crimes, poor people denied effective representation,” and other members of marginalized and disenfranchised communities in the U.S. EJI uses the tools of litigation, policy reform, and advocacy to transform the justice system into a more fair one.

The organization’s mission and vision is clearly inspiring, but perhaps what sets it apart even further is the incredible passion and unwavering dedication of the organization’s founder, Bryan Stevenson. After reading this compelling and well-written profile - “Bryan Stevenson’s Death Defying Acts” - in the NYU Law School Magazine, I was amazed by his deep commitment to serving some of the most abused and impoverished populations within the U.S. - and that too, in the South, where attitudes towards prisoners and criminal defense work can be even more hostile and demoralizing.

Bryan Stevenson graduated from Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in 1985, and he could have had any job in the world. If he so desired, he could have become partner at any one of the nation’s top corporate law firms and made millions. Instead, he chose to work as a death penalty lawyer for a southern human rights organization, deciding upon a career with long hours and low pay. And maybe even few truly rewarding moments. According to the article,

Stevenson stresses how important near-poverty became to him. “Nobody got paid any money, or at least very little,” he says, “and that struck me as the ultimate measure of something genuine.” In contrast to the fancy corporate law firms that charmed so many of his Harvard classmates, he says, “it became clear to me that these death-penalty folks were real. They were serious.”

Later on, when the board of the Capital Representation Center in Montgomery offered him a salary of $50,000 - he refused it. Instead, he only accepted a salary of $18,000. His commitment was so deep that capital representation was not simply a job for him - it was a calling. What a refreshing viewpoint this is, particularly looking at the materialistic and consumer-driven state of our society and education today.

Since founding the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson has become a professor at NYU Law and received numerous awards and honorary degrees celebrating his accomplishments. Still, he doesn’t rest, because he knows that there is much work yet to be done in reforming our racially-biased and unjust criminal “justice” system. I’ll leave you with this quote by Stevenson, which I think epitomizes the underlying belief that drives the work of every public defender and death penalty lawyer:

Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done…if you tell a lie, you’re not just a liar. And if you take something that doesn’t belong to you, you’re not just a thief. Even if you kill somebody, you’re not just a killer. And so I think that there’s an obligation to defend the basic human dignity of every human being.