America leads the world in locking away its citizens. With only 5 percent of the global population, the United States accounts for a quarter of its incarcerated population, and the toll does not fall upon us equally.
Our prison population is almost exclusively poor and disproportionately of color. The disparate impact of our administration of justice is arguably the greatest civil and human rights issue confronting our nation. Thus, it is encouraging that there is growing bipartisan interest in addressing mass incarceration and that some philanthropies are lining up their support.
But mass incarceration is a symptom of a larger problem: Our collective acceptance of a narrative that portrays poor people, particularly those of color, as less than human and therefore deserving of a lesser standard of justice than the rest of us. Additionally, the focus of criminal justice reform has been on achieving easily quantifiable results. As we set our sights on reducing the prison population, the answers seem obvious: arrest fewer people and reduce the terms of imprisonment.
While reducing the prison population is a laudable goal, if we do not transform our assumptions about the poor and how they deserve to be treated, equal justice will remain elusive. As long as we continue to “otherize” minority populations, we will continue to over-arrest and over-punish them. And while we may shrink the number of people in prison, our prisons will still be solely reserved for the poor.
Public defenders, who speak for more than 80 percent of people in the criminal justice system, provide a ready-made army to transform the attitudes that drive injustice and to begin reforming our racist, classist justice system from the inside. If we are to realize meaningful reform, more quality public defenders are necessary to make sure that the voices of those seen as expendable are heard, and that criminal justice decisions are made with the humanity of those impacted at front of mind.
While many progressive thinkers understand the importance of public defenders, progressive philanthropists’ funding choices indicate they have yet to appreciate how these advocates can drive systemic reform.
A keyword search for “public defender” in Foundation Center’s grants database shows just $5.75 million was invested in such grants over the last 12 years. More unsettling, over 90 percent of those dollars came from just four major funders.
The philanthropic sector has a choice: It can do nothing and risk a strategy change by a single funder eviscerating the organizations working for a robust public defender movement. Or, it can move more money to organizations supporting the work of public defenders. A single additional major funder investing in public defender organizations would dramatically increase – perhaps by as much as 50 percent – the resources available to those groups.
As the founder of Gideon’s Promise, an organization building an army of defenders to change a criminal justice narrative that sees poor people as less human and unworthy of equal protection, I envision a movement of public defenders that challenges the assumptions that drive our collective views about race, class and criminality, and thereby transforms justice in America. Through policy fixes we can attempt to alter how police, prosecutors and judges mete out justice. But many of these professionals have internalized a “tough-on-crime” mindset inconsistent with the values underlying these reforms, making the status quo that much more persistent. An army of public defenders is the best way to ensure that violations are brought to light in the short run and, more significantly, to begin the process of changing the value systems that drive injustice in the long run.
Building such a movement is at the heart of what we do at Gideon’s Promise. We provide training and support to an ever-growing number of public defender offices joining this movement and to new lawyers fighting to raise expectations about just outcomes for low-income populations. We work with public defender leaders to build more client-centered offices and to advocate for reform in their communities. We partner with law schools across the country to build a pipeline of committed future defenders to join the effort to reform criminal justice in some of the most challenging environments.
But in order for organizations like Gideon’s Promise to recruit talented, passionate professionals to staff this new public defender army, foundations need to be part of the collective effort – especially foundations that already consider criminal justice reform a priority. Progressive foundations have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in criminal justice reform in the last decade, and their investments are only growing. A movement of knowledgeable, committed lawyers serving as public defenders, helping protect the most vulnerable members of our society, is critical to the success of any of these efforts. They are the key to reform when we understand these lawyers as not only indispensable to protecting individual rights, but as a powerful vehicle to transform systemic assumptions that drive injustice. That is why it’s crucial for foundations to begin devoting more resources to building the public defender infrastructure.
Jonathan Rapping, a 2014 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellow, is founder and President of Gideon’s Promise, Inc. – a 501c3 nonprofit transforming the criminal justice system by building a movement of public defenders who provide equal justice for marginalized communities. Follow @JRapping and @Gideons_Promise on Twitter.
Image by Mike Steele, adapted under Creative Commons license.
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