Hope for community corrections

In this month's Washington Monthly:

Jail Break - How smarter parole and probation can cut the nation’s incarceration rate

If we want to end the era of mass incarceration and replace it with a regime of less punishment and less crime, drug testing is only one of the ways to apply the central lesson of HOPE ("Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement"): that clearly communicated threats of swift, certain punishment really can change behavior, even when the punishment is modest. By thinking creatively, we could transform the entire range of community-based punishments into effective alternatives to incarceration. That would have a profound impact on offenders’ lives, on the number of people behind bars, and on the crime rate...

The book is When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment, by Mark Kleiman.

Via The Second Road, "where life intersects with recovery."

Methland = USA

Oelwein, Iowa, described in Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding, gets the Manhattan condescension treatment via New York Times book review:

The madness stalking tiny, defenseless Oelwein may eventually come for all of us...

Methamphetamine already has come for "us," Princeton boy. It's in Iowa and it's everywhere, even in places that matter to regular New York Times readers. Reding first picked up the trail in Idaho. From the Los Angeles Times review:

Journalist Nick Reding stumbled into Gooding, Idaho, in 1999, to report a magazine story about ranching... It was there that Reding first encountered crystal methamphetamine, and he didn't just see it in one place. It was everywhere... (A)s the meth epidemic exploded across small-town America... (a) book took root in his mind...

The book is excerpted here and here. Also reviewed in the Seattle Times and the Boston Globe. Remember, as the Washington Post review says:

(B)ig-city ignorance - fueled by the media - toward small-town decay is both dangerous and appalling.

Via Think Outside the Cage and The Real Costs of Prison Weblog

Happy birthday Wallace Stegner

The American writer Wallace Stegner was born one hundred years ago today."There was a time up there in Idaho when everything was wrong... Did you come down out of that into some restful 30° angle and live happily ever after?" - Angle of Repose (1971)

(Parenthetically, today's also our 14th wedding anniversary)

RIP David Foster Wallace

There will be droughts and days inundated
unveilings free from saturation
departures raised with no masquerading.
There will be teachers that die by their own hand
pundits that push headlong for atonement
friends and followers devoted to living.
There will be watchers that plot from in confines
and those committed to society's circles
unwary cogs with no cadence or virtue.
There will be right, there will be wrong.

Jay Farrar, "Medicine Hat"

Right at least to wait 'til the end of Suicide Prevention Week; wrong to leave the wife to cut down the body. Black humored genius, tormented bastard, rest in peace.

AK: "most of the people I contact aren't big readers"

One cool public defender investigator, from Oregonlive.com:

Alaska's mystery man

John Straley works as an investigator for the Alaska public defender's office, interviewing witnesses, gathering and analyzing evidence, finding experts. It's challenging work that introduces him to people who have no idea that he's written seven novels and is Alaska's state writer laureate...

I've read one of his, The Woman Who Married a Bear, an entertaining book, with great Southeast atmosphere.

"I'm so thin and frail / Don't care, want another rail"

Audio and book "exceprt" from Fresh Air and NPR:

Memoirs of Meth Addiction from a Father and a Son

Drug addiction doesn't just affect the addict, it changes the whole family. Journalist David Sheff and his son Nic join Fresh Air to talk about Nic's addiction to methamphetamine.

Both father and son have written memoirs about the experience. David Sheff's is Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Meth Addiction and Nic Sheff's is Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines.

Fictional p.d. to fictional client: "the only thing I'm suppressing is the urge to bitch-slap your head"

Urban Monarch seems to be enjoying "The King of Methlehem" by Tacoma author / prosecutor Mark Lindquist. Here's a p.d. - themed excerpt from Google Book Search:

One of the many advantages of being a prosecutor is that you do not have to visit clients in jail. Ted, a public defender for twenty-three years, feels he is serving a penance every time he enters what he calls the Grey Bar Hotel. He is known by other lawyers and some of his clients as "Cocktail Ted" because of his penchant for bourbon lunches that precede afternoon visits...

NPR: "new book profiles public defender 'elite'"

At NPR (motto: "we here at public radio couldn't be more pleased with ourselves"), Talk of the Nation's website has streaming audio and a nice long excerpt from "Defending the Damned":

Author Kevin Davis discusses his book, Defending the Damned: Inside Chicago's Cook County Public Defender's Office. Davis shadowed Chicago's elite murder task force, the public defenders who represent accused rapists and serial killers who have the deck — and often the evidence — stacked against them...

Assistant producer Sarah Handel at Blog of the Nation is soliciting your comments:

If you're a public defender, what's the best part of the job? What was your wildest case (that you can share, of course!)?

Prison expansion and inequality

Three books in our area of interest are covered in a recent New York Review of Books:

The American Prison Nightmare

Bruce Western makes a crucial point at the start of his important book, Punishment and Inequality in America: "If prisons affected no one except the criminals on the inside, they would matter less." But with more than two million Americans behind bars, the impact of mass incarceration is impossible to contain. Their fate affects the taxpayers who support them, the guards who guard them, the families they leave behind, and the communities to which they return...

Like Bruce Western, the authors of Confronting Confinement emphasize that few of the problems inside prisons truly stay confined. Ninety-five percent of those who go in also come back out. The problems that arise inside prisons, the authors write, go home "with prisoners after they are released and with corrections officers at the end of each day's shift..."

Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, who understand the vastness of the jailers' reach, follow the story out of the cell and into the voting booth. Locked Out examines how the disenfranchisement of felons shapes American democracy — hardly a hypothetical matter in an age of split electorates and hanging chads...

Professor Feige gets more notoriety

David Feige's book, "Indefensible: One Lawyer's Journey into the Inferno of American Justice," gets some fresh praise over at Concurring Opinions.

The outrage of J. Skelly Wright

I've spent some time reading A "Capacity for Outrage": The Judicial Odyssey of J. Skelly Wright by Arthur Selwyn Miller, without having to shell out $100 for the privilege.

Thanks to the goodness of Inter-Library Loan, my local library tracked down a copy at my old law school. It's the same copy I checked out over twenty years ago, once I was exposed to the judge in Contracts (remember the quantum meruit case?). The book doesn't seem to have circulated much in the intervening years, which is a pity. Perhaps if Judge Wright were better known today, passages like this wouldn't sound so, well, quaint:

(B)ecause of the Skelly Wrights on our courts, (the American people) repose with confident security, with a knowledge that under the laws of this country there is a limit that oppression cannot transgress, that no governmental entity or individual can punish them without being reviewed by a judgment of a duly constituted court impartially applying the laws of our land.

He was a rare judicial individual:

Judge Wright can be labeled a judicial activist and a judicial realist. He knows that judges inevitably have a certain power in our system and he uses the power to try to help people who need help in our unjust society... I would say that his judicial career has been a paradigm of the way judges should be aware of those excluded from society's benefits.

We may not see his likes again.

He's a rebel

Interesting insights into the indefensible Feige, one from the realm of law, one from left field.

From Law and More: You Gotta Lawyer For You

David Feige put together a book about loving what you do, even if that passion doesn't make sense to others or earn a king's ransom... (T)he legal system, as fascinating as it is, is just a prop for Feige to give his take on everything...

But Feige does learn something. It happens early in his career. He is craving atta boys from everyone be they clients or superiors. The hard-bitten Paula Deutsch, the rare public defender who doesn't burn out, gives it to him between the eyes. "You gotta lawyer for you," she tells the kid. And that probably is the theme of the book...

From Jane Genova Speechwriter - Ghostwriter: Our Defiant Streak - Marketing It For Big Bucks

David Feige, former Public Defender in the Bronx, has joined the growing number of us... who are able to market our defiant streak for success, on our terms. He tells us all about it in his recent book "Indefensible..."

But, of course, we have to position and package our defiant streak so that the pockets which can pay for it will buy it. Face it, the business media (WIRED, FORBES, FORTUNE) can champion the New Barbarians but the business-media folks aren't the gatekeepers we gotta reassure to let us in...

"Branding"? For public defender types (even if they're honorary p.d.'s)? What a world (and what are these 'big bucks' of which you speak?).

Bonus link goes to "Commodify Your Dissent" by Tom Frank.

Indefensible: a love story

Chaque notaire porte en soi les débris d'un poète
(Inside each lawyer are the ruins of a poet - Flaubert)

Disclaimer: this is not a review of "Indefensible: One Lawyer's Journey into the Inferno of American Justice" by David Feige. This is a reaction to "Indefensible : One Lawyer's Journey into the Inferno of American Justice" by David Feige.

Do I like it? Yes. Is it good for the public defenders? Yes.

For me, Indefensible is like an episode of Sliders (the first two seasons, before it sucked), where I've jumped into a world which looks a bit familiar, but is filled with unfamiliar traps and peril, characters and comedy. It's cinematic in its forward propulsion and discursive digressions as we follow our Dante into the fire. I wouldn't be shocked to turn on HBO one night and see Indefensible in place of Deadwood and The Wire.

Feige takes us through a day of courthouse triage, where it seems that he's always running, always late, and always juggling which client or which docket will get the least of his limited attention. Who's assigning this caseload anyhow? Three murder clients at one time, and felony clients, and misdemeanor clients too, all waiting in different courtrooms to be tended to. I love vertical representation as much as the next p.d., but here I'm left with a picture of a lawyer who flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions. Feige is truthful about the doubt and guilt that come from all this hustling, in a nasty system which essentially is structured to make it impossible to render effective counsel to all the people all of the time.

Feige's home base is (or was) the Bronx Defenders, who deserve the praise for their expansive client-centered approach to indigent defense. It's enjoyable and highly entertaining to watch good colleagues doing a good job, and Feige seems good at this job. He ends up as the star of Indefensible, in the fine cinematic tradition of the tough guy with a soft spot, who says, "Some times you just gotta break the rules," as he jumps the metal detector queue on his way to slipping his jailed buddy a pack of contraband cigarettes.

(I would do anything for love(but I won't do that) - Loaf)

So inevitably I start comparing my lazy ass to the heroics of the Bronx Defenders:

* Maybe I should intentionally break the jail rules and risk getting banned from jail visiting in order to establish how sympatico I am with my client? (did that in Ada County with a legal pad, felt manipulated and still got hit with an IAC from the guy; someone in Twin Falls County did it, and we all paid for it with a big new sheet of plexiglas)

* Maybe I should swear at the judge? (oh, sorely have wanted to on occasion - had a colleague who every Monday afternoon had to say "m*therf*cker m*therf*cker m*therf*cker" just before leaving to avoid it popping out of his mouth in court)

* Maybe I should feel guilty for not giving all my clients my cellphone number? (some have it - I only got a cellphone for the first time last year)

* Maybe I should address my clients as "Darling"? (uh, that goes against all my northern European uptightitude, no matter where you stand on the line-drawing issue)

After the twelveth "Darling" or so, it hits me: Indefensible is a romance. Feige seems to have truly loved his clients. Of course, deep affection can bring with it some romanticizing and some gauzy soft focus for those beloved, some idealization of their flaws, some minimization of their nasty habits and some cold fury for their oppressors. Still, who reads a romance for balance? In a world of non-stop Law and Order reruns, it's enjoyable to tune in to Indefensible.

Like New Year's Eve, sort of

Oh boy, the minutes are ticking down...

It's now June 3, 2006, the street date for David Feige's big book.


HAPPY INDEFENSIBLE DAY!

Check out the reports from the Indefensible Street Team.

Update: Celebration sweeps the nation, as readers shout, "Yippie!"

WA: indefensible, King County style

From the Seattle Times, filed under "Arts and Entertainment":
Attorney's new book takes you to Ridgway's murder trial

Nearly five years ago, police and prosecutors decided they had accumulated enough evidence to arrest Gary L. Ridgway in the Green River killings...

Somebody would need to defend Ridgway. It would be an ugly assignment, because if indeed Ridgway were the Green River Killer, that meant he had murdered 48 women minimum, probably 71 — and maybe even more, starting in the early 1980s.

(Mark) Prothero worked as a public defender... If Ridgway ended up in the public-defender system, Prothero figured he might serve as the lead lawyer, given his expertise analyzing DNA evidence and his designation as one of just a few certified to handle death-penalty cases.

Prothero received a call from his supervisor, telling him it appeared the public defender's office would represent Ridgway. Talk to Ridgway as quickly as possible, the supervisor said. So Prothero did...

Mark Prothero will give a talk on "Defending Gary: Unraveling the Mind of the Green River Killer" at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St., Seattle; free).

"Indefensible": a buyer's guide

So you've heard all about this new book about defenders called "Indefensible", and based on the excellent reviews it's getting, you've decided to make the purchase.

Good for you! But when you get to the store, what's this? Two "Indefensibles"? How do you know which "Indefensible" to buy? Here's a side-by-side comparison:

⇐ Indefensible: One Lawyer's Journey into the Inferno of American Justice

Defenders: Indefensible ⇒

⇐ "This tragicomic exposé is a roller-coaster ride through the world of justice in the South Bronx... By a combination of skill and stealth, Feige negotiates the best deal he can get for his clients..."

"Wong possessed by Nightmare! Dormammu and Umar in unholy alliance! The Hulk and the Sub-Mariner at each other's throats! The Silver Surfer... uh... surfing. Can Doctor Strange reunite the Defenders and save "Reality As We Know It? Only the Ancient One knows for sure!" ⇒

⇐ "A young lawyer's outrageous and heartbreaking long day's journey into night court. If M*A*S*H took place in the Bronx instead of Korea and was about lawyers and judges, not doctors and officers, it would look a lot like INDEFENSIBLE..."

"Bonding and family atmosphere are usually the norm for superhero teams – even when they bicker or argue they normally make up by the end. The Defenders really isn’t like that here, with a disparate group of heroes, many of whom don’t get on and have no problem about showing that..." ⇒

⇐ "Feige, a Court TV talking head and former Trial Chief of the Bronx Defenders, knows his way around that New York borough's notorious criminal courthouse. There he represented the frequently handcuffed, never cuff-linked."

"The Defenders are the group that if they seem like they don't like one another, they don't! The Defenders hate one another. They've been thrown together and despise it. There's no love lost between these guys." ⇒

Okay, it's still not exactly clear which is which; the "Indefensible" on the left is written by our colleague David Feige, and it's the real deal. However, its one shortcoming, compared to the "Indefensible" on the right, is that Feige (⇐) does not reach out to the cross-over market by working in a cameo for noted attorney She-Hulk (⇒) .

Book minute

This month's Washington State Bar magazine has a review of Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse, by Steve Bogira, entitled, "March of the Plea Bargains". The book is now out in paperback.

David Feige's review is here.

There are radio interviews with Steve Bogira here and here.

Cop shop talk, p.d. PTSD

Even if I don't always like cops, I like a good cop story, and if the teller is New York Irish like my mother-in-law, so much the better.

Friday I'm driving home on Pacific Ave. in the commuter pick-up, listening to Fresh Air on KPLU, and the guest is Edward Conlon, author of the memoir Blue Blood, which begins with his first days on the street as an NYPD and goes back three generations.

If you like this sort of thing, you can listen to him here.

After a few blocks, Conlon gets to "just about the most terrible thing that I've seen" and I pull over:

"There was this old woman who was on a bed. She was emaciated. There was what you recognize as a DOA smell. A couple of the paramedics were crying... They were lifting her off that plastic sheet and then she started to moan. There were maggots all over her. Maggots only eat dead tissue, so she was dying bit by bit. The really terrible thing was that she didn't live alone."

There was this old woman in Twin Falls, Idaho. She was dying bit by bit. There were maggots. Her son who shared the house with her was charged with felony abandonment of a vulnerable adult. The brilliant young associate to whom I assigned the appellate brief quit, and later blogged about how the case horrified him, and was part of the reason that he left criminal law.

I was trial counsel. We waived the jury and lost anyway. He went to prison. She died. The Idaho Court of Appeals opinion is here (PDF file).

Who knows how our jobs corrode us, or the ways we might pay for the roles we play. In the morning, I'm going to hug my wife and kid and go with them to Mass.

Touched by the book meme stick

Should've lain low.

Creek Running North just stuck me with the gom jabbar! As we used to say in the desert, "Fear is the mind-killer", so I'll take the test:

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

Since "Angle of Repose" appears to be taken, I'll choose "The Golden Gate" by Vikram Seth, for its tenderness and meter; I imagine that it would be pleasurable to memorize and to recite.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Oh sure. The semi-fictional stand-in for Pam Houston in "Cowboys are My Weakness" leaps to mind. For purely fictional, in the past Brunnhilde, Portia and Tasha Yar have been there for me too.

The last book you bought is?

"Diamondfield Jack: A Study in Frontier Justice," by David Grover, for $1.00 at the Lacey library booksale

What are you currently reading?

Insight Guide to The Netherlands by ?
Made Possible By ... The Death of Public Broadcasting by James Ledbetter
Independent People by Haldor Laxness
NY Review of Books (in the bathroom)

Five books you would take to a deserted island:

(I'm going for sheer quantity of printed words here)

The Collected Works of Wallace Stegner (compiled especially for this trip)
An anthology of Slavic literature (likewise - it's my fantasy)
The Riverside Shakespeare
The Bible
The Army Survival Manual or the equivalent

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

Bliss, because he's smart and off-beat, and he has a track record of answering these things

East Ethnia, because I'll learn something

Yeoman, because he's thoughtful and I'm curious

Bob Dylan for the defense

My first year out of school, I worked with a kind and funny lawyer, a venerable long-haired Legal Aid lifer. I think he started me on the habit of trying to find song lyrics to suit every legal occasion. He was a specialist in both Bob Dylan and landlord-tenant, so there were many moments when he'd break out with, "Honey how come you don't move?"

The latest New York Review of Books has a fine essay about Bob Dylan by Luc Sante, inspired by Dylan's new memoir, Chronicles, Volume One, which I'm rushing off to put on reserve at the Lacey library. I was pleased to see this blawg's guiding aphorism get a mention:

The ability to hatch an epigram—the way "To live outside the law you must be honest" emerges right in the middle of "Absolutely Sweet Marie," between two lines twisted from Blind Lemon Jefferson's "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" and the refrain—is a function of that unconscious frame of mind, that willed trance state, that educated lurching, not of the wish to construct an epigram.

Well, it makes more sense in context.

There is so much raw material for the taking to build a Dylan-based jurisprudence. The man has spent years thinking about the law. He also loves our clients, guilty or not. I thrive on this stuff:

"What time is it?" said the judge to Joey when they met
"Five to ten," said Joey. The judge says, "That's exactly what you get."

In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain't pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught 'em
And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom

Outstanding. Fifty bucks to the next person who weaves Dylan lyrics into closing argument (payable on receipt of transcript).

You can dip in anywhere, it's all on point. Hell, in Europe, they're using Bob Dylan to teach legal English.

Many, many lawyers have favorite eight-tracks running through their heads while they're lawyering. Back in Twin, Paulie favored "I'm going back to Cali, Cali, Cali / I'm going back to Cali.. (hmm, I don't think so)," especially for extraditions, while Casey's theme song for his clients was Neil Young's imponderable "Why Do I Keep F***ing Up?" Back East, some state Supreme Court justices get CLE's for listening to Springsteen. For me, the most resonant on-the-job listening has been provided by Bob Dylan.