The Courage of Compassion: A Journey from Judgment to Connection - Hardcover

Steinberg, Robin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593084624 ISBN 13: 9780593084625

Verlag: Optimism Press, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

"Powerfully insightful reading." —Kirkus Reviews

How would you like to be judged for the rest of your life by the worst thing you’ve ever done?

We all think we are compassionate just like we all think we are honest.  But true compassion is not innate. Compassion for others, especially those that we don’t know or understand, must be learned. Our lack of compassion is perhaps most extreme in the exercise of criminal justice, where a person’s entire life, worth, and character are judged through the myopic lens of a single act. But no one, says Robin Steinberg, should be reduced to their worst moment. 

From the founder and CEO of The Bail Project, The Courage of Compassion unveils how we can reimagine justice through compassion. Steinberg shares her journey as a public defender, representing people at precisely that time in their lives — their own worst moment. She recounts the heart-wrenching stories of her clients and invites us to interrogate our fears and beliefs about justice and punishment. Lastly, Steinberg reveals moments when she questioned her own capacity for compassion, as well as her ability to fight for better, more humane justice from within a system that is riddled with holes and seemingly interminable problems. 

A gritty tale about confronting injustice and challenging ourselves to rediscover our shared humanity, The Courage of Compassion is an invitation to join Steinberg as she explores what it will take to move beyond our current justice paradigm. The criminal justice system reflects a history and power structure, but it also mirrors how we come into society and show up for one another. As she writes, the quest to improve this system will only truly begin “when we can finally see in the faces of those ensnared and imprisoned in our legal system, ourselves. And when we can see our children, in their children.”

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robin Steinberg is the founder and CEO of The Bail Project, a national effort to combat mass incarceration by transforming the pretrial system in the United States. Over a 35-year career as a public defender, Robin represented thousands of low-income people in over-policed neighborhoods and founded three additional high-impact organizations: The Bronx Defenders, The Bronx Freedom Fund, and Still She Rises. Robin has also taught trial advocacy and other courses at Columbia University Law School and UCLA School of Law. Robin is a frequent commentator on criminal justice issues and has contributed opinion pieces to the New York Times, the Marshall Project, and USA Today.

Camilo A. Ramirez is a Colombian literary translator and strategic communications professional. He currently serves as Chief Strategy Officer for The Bail Project. His translations include The Desert and Its Seed by Jorge Barón Biza, and Like a Fading Shadow, by Antonio Muños Molina, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.

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Chapter 1: How Can You Defend "Those People"?


Like every public defender, I have been asked this question countless times at parties, holiday meals, family gatherings, in the courtroom, and even on the street after a trial. People have also demanded an answer in hate mail, media interviews, and other less-than-friendly venues. My responses range from the flippant to the philosophical and purely political. The fundamental importance of the right to counsel. The primacy of the presumption of innocence. The need to check government power. Mass incarceration. Frankly, these answers are the autopilot reply for a career defender. And there is truth in them. But they do not fully explain why I chose to devote my life to defending people at the mercy of our criminal justice system, and to dedicate myself to changing it.

In America, anyone accused of a crime that carries with it a possible sentence of incarceration is entitled to counsel. This right to an attorney is a critical safeguard to protect those most vulnerable when the government seeks to take away liberty. Public defenders breathe life into that concept. They are the only institutional actors in the criminal justice system with the sole and unequivocal responsibility of defending the accused, no matter what the charge.

The guarantee of a public defender for the poor is essential to the proper functioning of an adversarial system of justice and has become even more critical given our seemingly insatiable appetite for jailing people, even before they've had a trial.

Mass incarceration is a truly American phenomenon. While the term mass incarceration has finally made its way into popular culture, I'm not entirely sure most people understand how truly horrifying the scale of this problem is.

America is home to less than 5 percent of the world's population, but about 25 percent of the world's incarcerated people live in America. Even by conservative estimates, at least five million people churn through our jails every year. That is larger than the combined population of Phoenix and Chicago, every year. It is no surprise, then, that nearly one in two adults in the United States has had a family member incarcerated, and as many as one in three has some type of criminal record. What's more, nearly two thirds of people in jail on any given night are not even serving sentences. They are behind bars awaiting trial, mainly because they cannot afford cash bail. Our criminal justice system has become so massive, it is the largest employer in our nation . . . right after Walmart. In fact, we run as many prisons, jails, and other correctional facilities as we do hospitals.

These alarming figures make us the most incarcerated nation on earth, yet we are no safer than countries with far fewer jails and prisons relative to their populations. But that's not all. Mass incarceration intersects with and compounds another crisis in our country: systemic racism. I'm talking not about individual acts of racial bias, conscious or unconscious, but about the way in which our history has shaped policies, institutions, and social practices to produce disparate outcomes in nearly every aspect of Black Americans' lives, from health and education to criminal justice and economic opportunity. When it comes to our criminal justice system, this problem is evident at every stage of the process. Black Americans are not only more likely to be stopped by the police, searched, and subjected to excessive use of force; they are also more likely to be detained before trial, overcharged, and harshly sentenced.

While I wish I could say it was purely my shock at our incarceration rates, or even the purity of the idea of a right to counsel, that drew me into public defense, there was also another influence: a group of women.

The year was 1980 and I was a law student at New York University School of Law. I had signed up for a law clinic called the Women's Prison Project, where law students worked under a supervising attorney to represent women on a variety of issues, including health care, child custody, and parole matters. The fact that the clinic served women in a maximum-security prison was largely incidental to me. I simply wanted to advocate for women wherever they were, and this was the only clinical offering that focused on women. Little did I know at the time that it would change my life.

Over the course of a year, I traveled to and from Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, oddly located in one of the most bucolic and affluent towns in New York, not far from Martha Stewart's 153-acre farmhouse estate. Each visit drew me closer to the women I interviewed for the project and the deeply personal stories they told me about their lives and their families.

They were nearly all Black women. They spoke about trying to overcome crushing poverty. They spoke about their children and their hopes and dreams for a better future. They spoke about feeling helpless in the face of a system that was merciless. Some swore by their innocence. Others explained there was more to their story than the crime they had committed. They also spoke about not feeling heard or understood by the very lawyers sworn to defend them. This surprised me. They explained their public defenders didn't spend enough time with them, listen carefully, or care much about them. Few could even name their attorney or the specific crime they were convicted of, but each could tell me exactly how many days, months, and years they had left to serve away from their children.

At night, in my tiny East Village apartment, I went over my notes from those visits and thought about each of them. It was on one of those nights that I decided to become a public defender. It was a simple realization. Other more patient souls could devote themselves to civil rights lawsuits, class action litigation, and policy reform. I, for one, could not think of anything but how to keep these women from being sent to these prisons in the first place. I wanted to stand by their side in those courtrooms, defend them, and push back against the system that would take them from their children, families, and communities. Listening to the women at Bedford Hills made me wonder: Who were these public defenders, and why did they fail these women so miserably? To find out, I joined my law school's criminal defense clinic.

On the morning of my very first court appearance, I changed clothes three times before leaving the house, settling on a gray suit, white blouse, and black pumps. Back then, for a woman, looking professional meant wearing the closest thing to a man's suit that you could find. I had a new black briefcase to carry my files, a spare pair of pantyhose, and my wallet with my identification. As I headed down the stairs of the subway station on Fourteenth Street to meet my clinical professor, I was filled with anticipation. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I'm pretty sure my twentysomething-year-old self imagined she would be walking into movie-like, marble-columned courtrooms, where judges dispensed justice based on law and evidence and lawyers fiercely debated the merits of a case. As I would soon learn, nothing could have been further from the truth.

I will never forget the horror I felt when I set foot in Manhattan criminal court. The so-called war on drugs was in full swing, police departments were expanding, mandatory minimum sentences were all the rage, and the public made it clear that anyone who appeared "soft on crime" would pay the electoral price.

A corrections bus pulled up next to the building. One by one, people chained together stepped down and were led through a small door on the side of the courthouse, where they disappeared from sight.

Inside, the hallways were packed with families and children, most of them Black and Latino, waiting anxiously for the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Optimism Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593084624
• ISBN 13: 9780593084625
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar