A couple of summers ago, I was invited to speak to the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference, a gathering of federal judges from the Western states, about the state of criminal justice and the campaign to reform it. I thought I had learned some lessons as editor of The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization focused on our troubled system of crime and punishment, but I’m not a lawyer. As if addressing a ballroom full of judges was not intimidating enough, I was scheduled to speak after Bryan Stevenson, the charismatic lawyer and champion of social justice. Anyone who saw his 2016 talk to a packed Bridges Auditorium at Pomona will know this is like having your cello recital follow Yo Yo Ma. I complained to my audience that this was a clear violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. I think that’s the only laugh I got. With a bit of updating, however, the lessons stand up pretty well.

IN NOVEMBER 2016, a kind of fatalistic gloom settled over the advocates of reforming the criminal justice system. With a chest-beating president, a show-no-mercy attorney general and a Congress that has become even more polarized than it was in President Obama’s time, reform advocates said any serious fixes to the federal system were unlikely. So reformers consoled themselves by looking to the states.

After all, most of law enforcement, most of criminal jurisprudence and most incarceration takes place at the state or local level. My assignment today is to survey reform efforts at the state level and draw some tentative lessons from their experience.

“Reform” is one of those ambiguous words that mean different things to different people. For our purposes, I think of reform as something that aims to REDUCE the numbers of Americans who are removed from society and deprived of their freedom, and to do it WITHOUT making us less safe. In 1972, when I was near the beginning of my newspaper life a little north of here at The Oregonian, 93 out of 100,000 Americans were in state or federal prisons. By 2008 the incarceration rate had grown nearly six-fold, from 93 to 536, and it has hovered in that vicinity ever since. That’s not counting the hundreds of thousands held in county jails on any given day—or those confined in the juvenile justice system or immigrant detention. We are world leaders in locking people up.

Every year about 650,000 of those prisoners are released back into the world. We know that most of them will be unemployed a year later and that two-thirds of them will be rearrested within three years. As a strategy for keeping us safe, mass incarceration has not been a roaring success.

AP Photo/Ben Margot

LESSON #1 from the experience of the states is this: It is possible to reduce incarceration and crime at the same time. Between 2010 and 2015, 31 states reduced both crime and imprisonment. In the 10 states with the largest declines in imprisonment, the crime rate fell an average of more than 14 percent.

New York City, where I live, has slashed the crime rate while, simultaneously, sharply reducing arrests, incarceration—in particular the jailing of juveniles—and misdemeanor summonses. Stop-and-frisk is no longer routine. The city is a safer place and seems to have found the virtues of a lighter touch: New Yorkers who do not accumulate arrest records and jail time are more likely to stay employed, in families and out of trouble.

This does not mean that reducing incarceration necessarily leads to a drop in crime. Correlation is not causality. The question of why the crime rate declined is a subject of heated debate among social scientists. One of my colleagues at The Marshall Project wrote a piece we called “Ten Not Entirely Crazy Theories Explaining the Great Crime Decline.” One thesis our writer examined is that after Roe v. Wade the legalization of abortion meant fewer unwanted children who were more likely to become delinquents. Other researchers have surmised that removing lead from paint and fuel has made for a less criminogenic environment. Another theory credits technology: Anti-theft devices in cars and the spread of online banking made it harder for criminals to profit. Yet another theory is that the baby boomers just aged out of crime, which tends to be a young person’s game. Most experts give some credit to  w  the increased deployment and improved equipping of police. And, of course, some of the decline is a result of the fact that more bad guys were locked up, though that is a very expensive way to keep communities safe.

Whatever the factors responsible for the relatively low crime rate, the evidence from the states is that reducing incarceration is compatible with reducing crime. Obviously, a lot depends on HOW you reduce prison populations, which is where the states have much to teach us.

LESSON #2: The embrace of criminal justice reforms is bipartisan. This is one of those rare issues in our polarized country where activists on the left and right have found a patch of common ground.

On the left, criminal justice has become an obligatory plank in the platforms of virtually every candidate to be the Democratic presidential nominee. On the right, we have fiscal conservatives who see our prisons as wasteful, liber­tarians who see our handling of crime as another manifestation of oppressive big government, evangelical conservatives who see aspects of the system as inhumane.

There are of course issues where left and right still part company. Controlling the proliferation of guns remains a political third rail. The left wants to talk about race, and the right mostly does not. But on issues like pre-trial diversion, indigent defense, sentencing, parole, rehabilitation, solitary confinement, voting rights for the formerly incarcerated and bail and asset forfeiture, you found the Koch brothers arm-in-arm with the ACLU. In 2018, the First Step Act, a package of modest fixes to mandatory sentencing and prison conditions, passed Congress with huge bipartisan majorities. The iniquities and unintended consequences of American punishment have so captured public concern that even President Donald Trump voices an occasional platitude about “giving our fellow citizens a chance at redemption.” Trump signed the First Step Act into law, though his administration has shown little enthusiasm for enacting it.

Conservatives rightly boast that red states have often led the way, starting with Texas during the governorship of Rick Perry. In the past decade, that state has closed four prisons, reduced its incarceration rate by 20 percent and invested $240 million in alternatives such as drug treatment. The Texas experience is often cited as evidence that politicians can support so-called smart-on-crime reforms and live to tell about it.

The key to success in Texas was money. The state invested in alternatives, which meant judges had greater confidence that when they diverted someone to drug treatment, there would actually be drug treatment.

Two caveats regarding the Texas Story: First, Texas started out with one of the highest incarceration rates in the United States, so it had a long way to go; it is still the seventh most incarcerated state. Second, Texas accomplished its reductions by redirecting money, not by changing the legal infrastructure. Other conservative states—Georgia, South Carolina, Utah to name a few—have tackled the structure of criminal justice—reducing some felonies to misdemeanors, revising mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes laws, funding community-based alternatives to incarceration, expanding eligibility for parole and removing barriers to reentry.

The most recent convert is Louisiana, a state long known among criminal justice reformers as a contender in every race to the bottom. Louisiana passed a remarkably comprehensive legislative overhaul. That feat was a product of strong leadership, intense lobbying by reform groups across the political spectrum and a corrections system bursting at the seams.

AP Photo/David Goldman

LESSON #3: Probably the most effective way to reduce incarceration is not to lock people up in the first place—at least not so many, and not for so long. In the last decade, 23 states have relaxed their sentencing laws—something Congress has so far been unable to do for the federal system. But I want to note a few other front-end measures that have been employed by states to keep people out of prison.

One is less reliance on money bail. The people most likely to spend time in jail awaiting trial are not the worst offenders but the poorest offenders; and even a short stint in jail increases the odds that an offender will ultimately end up in prison. A number of jurisdictions have curtailed the use of cash bail—most notably New Jersey, which now requires judges to hold hearings shortly after arrest to determine whether a defendant can be safely released before trial. Since the new procedure began, the average daily jail population has dropped 19 percent. [A referendum to replace bail with risk assessments in California will be on the ballot in November 2020.]

A second measure aimed at reducing prison intake is raising the age at which juveniles are thrown into the adult system, which too often subjects them to predators and leads many to careers in crime. In the last few years, Louisiana, South Carolina, New York and North Carolina have raised the age to what is now the national norm—18. There’s been talk of Connecticut becoming the first state to raise the cap to 21. In March 2018, Gov. Dannel Malloy announced the opening of a special corrections unit for young adults as old as 25.

A third way to slow the traffic into prisons is to provide better—and earlier—indigent defense. And a fourth is to elect prosecutors who don’t regard maximum prison sentences as the main measure of job performance. In recent years several jurisdictions—including Chicago, St. Louis, Houston, Denver, Tampa and Orlando—have elected prosecutors who campaigned on reform platforms.

LESSON #4: Don’t neglect the back end. There is abundant evidence of the effectiveness of college and vocational programs behind bars, regular contacts with family, reentry and parole and probation programs that have the resources and the mandate to land their clients safely back in society. A RAND Corporation study in 2014 concluded that “inmates who participated in correctional education programs had 43 percent lower odds of recidivating”—a verb that makes my inner English major cringe, but suggests a pretty good return on investment.

LESSON #5: Be wary of reformers who suggest you can cut incarceration drastically by setting free low-level, nonviolent offenders—in particular, low-level drug offenders. More than half of those incarcerated in state prisons are there for violent crimes. Only 16 percent are in for drug crimes, not all of them nonviolent. Decriminalizing marijuana will reduce incarceration, but to have any hope of restoring the incarceration rates of the 1990s means reducing sentences and stepping up rehabilitation for people convicted of violent crimes. The reality is: The reduction of incarceration is likely to happen incrementally. After all, the state that has been downsizing its prison population longest and most aggressively—California—has cut a bit more than 25 percent, and no other state has come close.

AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

LESSON #6: Be wary of reformers who suggest that prison reform inevitably means a huge windfall for taxpayers—10 billions of dollars back in our pockets. That remains to be seen, for two reasons: First, the alternatives to prison aren’t free. To keep crime in check, money not spent on actually confining offenders has to be spent on mental health and addiction treatment, more hands-on probation and, ideally, education, job training and housing support. Moreover, some states have found that the beneficiaries of prison—the corrections staff, the contractors, the politicians, the unions—are ferocious defenders of corrections budgets.

Here’s another way of looking at the cost of mass incarceration, though. The most commonly cited estimate of how much it costs to maintain the country’s prisons and jails is $80 billion a year. If you throw in things like health and pension benefits for prison staff, the cost to governments is more like $90 billion. But a 2016 report by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis attempted to add up the “social costs” of criminal justice as we practice it, a toll that includes lost wages, the cost of visitation, the higher mortality rates of both former inmates and their infant children, child welfare payments, evictions and relocations, divorces, diminished property values and the increased criminality of children with incarcerated parents. The bottom line they came up with was one trillion dollars a year, nearly six percent of GDP.

AP Photo/ David Goldman

LESSON #7:  Metrics matter. It’s impossible to know what works and what doesn’t without reliable data, and reliable data is often in short supply. Our data guru at The Marshall Project, Tom Meigher, wrote a piece entitled “13 Important Questions About Criminal Justice We Can’t Answer”—can’t answer because the data is unreliable or unavailable. They include such questions as how many juvenile offenders graduate to become adult offenders, how many people have served time in prison or jail, how many people in America own guns and what percentage of inmates eligible for parole are actually granted release from prison. The Washington Post and the Guardian set out separately to count the number of civilians killed each year by police in the line of duty. The number they came up with was about 1,000. That is about double the official estimates from the Department of Justice—an astonishing margin of error.

As important as having good data is knowing what to do with it. That brings us to the debate underway in many states over the use of risk-assessment tools, basically tests aimed at helping make wise judgments at critical moments in the handling of the accused or convicted. Risk assessment tools are algorithms that examine a subject’s history to mitigate the chances of re-arrest. There are various tools for various applications: to help determine whether a defendant is a flight risk, how severe a sentence should be, whether an inmate is a fit candidate for parole and what kind of supervision an offender requires upon release. The left generally hates risk assessment, because the inputs may include factors like employment stability and past encounters with the law that weigh more heavily against communities of color. Advocates of risk assessment tests respond that a) they are getting better, both more accurate and less biased; b) they are meant to assist judges and parole boards, not preempt professional judgment; and c) properly used, risk assessment tools can assure people in the system get the support they need to stay out of prison.

I’m not a worshipper at the shrine of technology, but if I were in your robes, I think I’d rather have a sense of the odds.

LESSON #8: Many states are finding that incentives work better than mandates. A good example is an approach being used in about a dozen states. Take a defendant who is probably not a threat, who would do fine returned to the community under proper supervision. But the judge knows “proper supervision” is unlikely because the local probation system is threadbare. Suppose the state agrees that for every dollar it doesn’t have to spend locking people up, it will send 40 cents to the county to pay for more robust supervision? The state saves money, the county improves its oversight of former inmates, and the judge has greater assurance that the subject will be supervised.

And finally…

LESSON #9:  The states have wide latitude to experiment, and they are seizing it, but the federal government sets a tone, and you will hear complaints from several states that the new administration has had a chilling effect on state legislatures. When the attorney general instructs federal prosecutors to charge the maximum, as Jeff Sessions did early in the Trump administration, when his response to a national opioid epidemic is to yearn for a revival of a discredited 1980s anti-drug program, that sends a message to state legislators contemplating new approaches.

Moreover, federal programs, especially Medicaid, which was expanded to include former inmates under the Affordable Care Act, can be essential to getting released offenders up on their feet.

In other words: What happens in Washington doesn’t always stay in Washington.

Cristian Padilla Romero with his mother, Tania Romero, after her release from custody.

IT’S A FAMILIAR STORY. An undocumented immigrant is stopped for a routine traffic violation—a few miles above the speed limit or a burnt-out brake light—and winds up in a detention center awaiting deportation, turning a family’s lives upside down. Like the rest of us, Cristian Padilla Romero ’18 had heard it all before—read it in the papers, seen it on TV. This time, however, the news was personal. It came in a frantic call from his sister. And this time, it wasn’t some unfortunate stranger who was threatened with imminent removal. It was his mom.

It was news that Padilla Romero—now living his own American dream as a doctoral student in history at Yale University—had feared on some barely acknowledged level ever since he was old enough to understand the full import of his family’s immigration status, but still, it came as a shock.

When he got the call, he was in the midst of a road trip, driving from Chicago to Claremont with his girlfriend, who was returning to Pomona for the start of her senior year. They had spent the night in Oklahoma City and were planning to take their time, stopping again in Albuquerque, New Mexico, before pushing on to California. But once they got the news, they decided to drive straight through so that he could catch the first flight home to Georgia.

For Padilla Romero, that was the start of a desperate, six-month battle that would grow into a national campaign to prevent his mom’s deportation and to gain her release from custody—a fight against the odds that would be waged in the courts, on social media, through the press and behind the political scenes. A fight that would pull in an army of allies and see some surprising results.

A fight that isn’t over yet.

TANIA ROMERO CAME TO the U.S. from Honduras almost 20 years ago, joining her husband who was already here. Living in Georgia and Florida, she did whatever it took to keep her family going, sometimes holding down three jobs at a time—changing hotel beds, working in restaurant kitchens and laundromats, finishing drywall at construction sites, selling food out of her home. “She was always working like that,” her son recalls. “As a kid, you see the things your parents do for you, but you don’t get the gravity of it until maybe later. I always say my mom is the biggest reason why I’ve been able to get to where I am now.”

Padilla Romero’s own status is protected, at least for now, by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, better known as DACA, but that’s cold comfort given the fact that if she were actually deported, he would be unable to visit her. Or rather, if he did, he would probably be unable to return. And to make the prospect even more frightening, Ms. Romero is a recent stage-4 cancer survivor.

Diagnosed with oral cancer in 2016, she spent the better part of a year undergoing aggressive treatments, including chemo, radiation and a very tough surgery. “The surgery ended up being basically cut across her whole neck, almost 360 degrees,” Padilla Romero says. By summer of 2017 she was declared in remission, but two years later she remained in precarious health and under an oncologist’s ongoing care.

Then, on August 15, 2019, in Greene County, Georgia, she was stopped for speeding and arrested for driving without a driver’s license—a common predicament for undocumented immigrants, who are barred by Georgia law from obtaining a license. The family hired an attorney and quickly paid her bail. The local authorities, however, declined to release her, choosing instead to hand her over to ICE—Immigration and Customs Enforcement—through its controversial 287(g) program. ICE immediately transferred her to the Irwin County Detention Center, a privately run facility in Ocilla, Georgia.

Padilla Romero feels fortunate that his mom didn’t simply vanish into the system, as has happened to many other detainees. “I don’t remember if the attorney notified us or, when she got booked, she was able to give us a call,” he says. “At least, it’s not like we spent days without knowing where she was.”

Legally, the case was complicated by the fact that Ms. Romero had an outstanding deportation order from 2008. “But we didn’t know about that deportation order until 2018, when my mom was applying for asylum,” Padilla Romero explains. “So the first week or two weeks after she was detained, our attorney filed two things. First, a stay of removal, which was on humanitarian grounds, basically arguing that she should be released because she needed to see her oncologist. She had an appointment coming up in a few weeks. The attorney also filed a second one, which was a motion to reopen. That was a much more legalistic argument, saying, ‘This removal order in 2008 was unlawful because my client didn’t know she even had this hearing, and we have proof from the government itself through the Freedom of Information Act, showing that the notices were returned to sender, undeliverable.’”

Padilla Romero thought they had a strong case, but in October the motion to reopen was denied. He realized they might be running out of time. “My mother meets all the criteria for ICE discretion—that’s undeniable,” he says. “But after that motion to reopen was ruled against us, we knew that ICE could deport her at any moment. Once that happened, we knew there was pretty much nothing else to lose, and we had to go public.”

THOUGH HE’D BEEN WORRIED about the danger of retaliation if he went public, Padilla Romero had already been reaching out to friends at Pomona and Yale, and now they were eager to pitch in. Some organized a petition drive while others steered him to media and governmental contacts. Before he knew it, he was at the epicenter of a minor media whirlwind.

“My friends were the first ones to hop on and help,” he recalls. “I get more credit than I deserve. There were so many people involved in this. When you see a campaign, you never see the faces and the number of people that put their labor into it. All of my Pomona friends were really helpful in terms of their social media presence—they were all reaching out. Here at Yale, two of my peers were helping me in contacting different people. We were dealing with congressional help, media folks, immigration advocacy organizations, the Honduran embassy. There were so many people involved.”

Many of his supporters, he was amazed to discover, were people he’d never met. “One of my peers here told me that her 90-something-year-old grandmother was, like, calling ICE daily advocating for my mother,” he says.

The campaign got its first big break in The New York Times, which published a long article on Oct. 31, 2019, titled “She’s Fighting Cancer. Her Son Is Fighting Her Deportation.”

Then a Yale speaker series brought in a history scholar and journalist named Rachel Nolan, who heard the story and took an interest. “She was like, ‘Hey, you know, I can pitch this story to The New Yorker,’” he remembers. “And it ended up happening. The New Yorker story is, I think, still my favorite because of the personal touch in dealing with the human story. And after that it was just a whole bunch of different media requests.”

Meanwhile, he was making the rounds on Capitol Hill, speaking with staff members for Connecticut senators Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal, Georgia Congresswoman Lucy McBath and Connecticut Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro. “DeLauro was the person that, in my view, provided the strongest support,” he says.

Yale University stepped up as well, with support that ranged from Lynn Cooley, dean of the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, penning an op-ed for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, to Yale’s Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic (WIRAC) pouring resources into his mom’s case in court.

Padilla Romero also reached out to professional advocates in the field of immigration, including Hemly Ordonez, digital campaigns director at FWD.us, and Miriam Feldblum, the former dean of students at Pomona, now executive director of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration in Washington. Among other advice, both encouraged him to contact the Honduran consulate. Ordonez, he says, was particularly helpful in putting him in touch with officials there.

It’s a little-known fact that before ICE officials can expel an immigrant from the U.S., they must first obtain travel documents from the consulate of the receiving nation. That’s important for a couple of reasons, Feldblum explains. “When they go to ask for travel documents, you know that deportation could be imminent,” she says. “but it’s also the case that some consulates have been able to not comply.”

Padilla Romero now considers that to be some of the most invaluable advice he received. He recalls: “We told the consulate that, you know, my mother, she’s a cancer survivor, and with her situation, she shouldn’t be deported. She’s also awaiting resolutions. And they were like, ‘Oh, yeah, of course, there’s no way we would issue travel documents knowing that situation.’ That was really a great relief.”

That promise was soon to be tested, however.

“The consul general received a call from one of the ICE directors—I’m not sure who—but they were really upset at her for not issuing those papers at the consulate,” Padilla Romero says. “That prompted her to reach out to her bosses at the Honduran embassy in D.C., and they backed her and us up, saying, ‘Yeah, we can’t issue those papers.’”

All told, he says, ICE tried to deport his mom at least three times, and three times the Honduran consulate steadfastly declined to provide the necessary paperwork.

The most frightening of those episodes, Padilla Romero says, happened one night about midnight. “I got a call from one of my mother’s inmate friends there, and to this day we’re still surprised at how she managed to call. My understanding is that after certain hours you can’t even make calls. But she told me, ‘Hey, they took your mom. They took her by force.’”

Later on, he would learn the details. “They just put her in a van,” he says. “They didn’t even take any of her medication. It was a long drive, at least three hours. She wasn’t even given water until like 10 in the morning, according to her. She didn’t eat that whole day until they were on their way back, around 3 p.m. She had bruises on her arms from the physical abuse. It was a very scary day. According to the consul, ICE was hoping to get the travel documents at the last minute.”

The seriousness of that episode was underscored when Padilla Romero spoke with some of the people who receive deportees in Honduras. “They said her name was on the list,” he says. “They were expecting her that day.”

THROUGH IT ALL, PADILLA ROMERO was able to speak with his mom almost daily, updating her about the campaign, the petition, the media. “She always tried to put on a brave face and, like, ‘I’m okay—I’m doing fine,’” he says. “My mom has always been a very spiritual person, a religious person. Although her physical health may be in decline, her spirits have always been very high.”

On the legal side, two professors and several students from WIRAC were now working on the case, along with a lawyer in Atlanta who was working pro bono. “They filed a stay at the 11th Circuit, which wasn’t rejected—just dismissed due to jurisdictional grounds, which was really upsetting,” he recalls. “But then they submitted a stay at the Macon District Court, I think it was. They were making a habeas argument, saying that her whole detention was unlawful. And surprisingly, we got a hearing in Macon, Georgia, and the judge granted a temporary stay for, like, two weeks.”

On the heels of that small victory, the family learned that ICE was reconsidering granting Ms. Romero a temporary stay. Then, just before Thanksgiving, word came from inside the detention center that something was up. Padilla Romero got the news in another call from his sister. “I was at my apartment in Connecticut. My sister called saying that one of my mom’s inmate friends called her saying my mom was being released.”

Family members immediately set off for the detention center, four hours away. “I contacted the WIRAC team here and told them, and so they got in contact with the attorney in Atlanta who was doing the pro bono services,” Padilla Romero says. “He got confirmation that yes, she was being released and transported to Atlanta ICE headquarters. My family was almost halfway to the detention center, and they turned back to Atlanta, and that’s where she was released.”

Padilla Romero prefers not to discuss the conditions surrounding his mom’s release, other than to say that it’s framed as a six-month stay. He’s also refrained from claiming any sort of victory or even announcing his mom’s release through the national press. “In terms of national news, we asked The New York Times and other folks to not necessarily report on it, for reasons that I told them,” he says. “That’s how we’ve been working it ever since. I don’t want to do anything that’s going to hurt our chances.”

STATISTICS ARE HARD TO COME BY, but according to Feldblum, in cases such as Ms. Romero’s, any sort of reprieve—even the temporary kind—is rare. For Padilla Romero, the six months he’s been granted with his mom are precious, come what may. Beyond that, the legal challenges continue, and he tries not to think about what will happen if they ultimately lose.

“I can’t really think about that, you know?” he says. “We have our grandparents there, so she would be with our grandparents. The main thing is that we would have to do everything we can to find the medical resources she would need. That’s our main preoccupation. But my family hasn’t really come to terms with how we would deal with it. At the moment, none of us would be able to leave the country to visit her, and obviously she wouldn’t be able to come back.”

Along the way, he’s learned more about the legal system surrounding immigration that he ever wanted to know. “My mom’s case should be such a straightforward case. We have really good evidence. The whole removal order was just not done right. It tells me a lot about the way the legal system is so entrenched.”

On the other hand, he’s learned never to give up hope. “The ultimate reason why she wasn’t deported was the Honduran consulate not providing those papers. That’s what stopped her from getting on the plane. That alone, for example, shows that there’s always something that can be done. It requires a lot of coordination, a lot of effort and a lot of public support.”

Indeed, it’s the extraordinary outpouring of support from friends and strangers that keeps Padilla Romero hopeful in spite of a system that strikes him as heartless.

“I’ve learned a lot about cruelty,” he says, “but I’ve also learned a lot about kindness.”

Photos by Robert Durell

COURT STREET IN MARTINEZ, California, lives up to its name. On a gray morning in December, four imposing stone courthouses in a row loom out of the cold fog, steamy glass doors accepting the occasional be-suited prosecutor or latecomer for jury duty.

Inside one of those courthouses this morning, Emi Young ’13 is waiting in a dimly lit courtroom gallery for a restitution conference to begin. Young, who works as a deputy public defender for Contra Costa County, will be representing a client who pleaded guilty to possession of a stolen vehicle. As part of the conviction process, she is participating in discussions about how much money will be awarded to the victim to help with damages—discussions that are often, but not always, straightforward, since both sides need to agree that the restitution requested is sufficiently related to the crime. (“I had a vandalism case where the city requested compensation for all of the tagging or graffiti that they thought were similar from the preceding year,” Young notes.)

The beige-carpet-on-beige-wood courtroom is crowded with cases, and the judge moves swiftly through the docket. Normally the prosecutor would have conferred with the victim’s assigned restitution specialist by now, but this time that hasn’t happened. So, a few minutes before the conference begins, Young hands him her copy of the handwritten list, which totals $126,000. Along with the value of the stolen vehicle, the victim is requesting restitution for multiple other vehicles, several marine batteries and damage to a barn door—all seemingly unrelated to the crime for which her client was convicted.

“That… is a lot of money,” the prosecutor says, running his eyes down the list. When the judge has turned her attention to the case, she agrees, noting with raised eyebrows that the request would make for an “interesting” hearing. “What do you want to do, Ms. Young?” she asks. A pause, then Young and the prosecutor agree to delay the conference, giving more time to talk to all parties and perhaps find a solution.

“It’s frustrating that he didn’t have more time to look at the request before,” Young says as she walks through the fog back to her office a few blocks from the courthouse. Under normal circumstances, these things can take as little as 20 minutes—that is, when the prosecutor is prepared and when victims limit themselves to amounts directly related to the crime and provide adequate documentation.

It’s lucky, she notes, that her office had not yet closed the case file, leaving her client without representation. Then, the court might just have sent a letter instructing him to request a hearing or agree to pay the full amount—and many of her clients are transient, with no fixed addresses and unreliable mail service.

But such frustrations are an inherent part of a job with limited time, limited funding, limited attention. “I talk about the system I work in as the ‘criminal legal system,’” she says. “The term ‘criminal justice system’ is aspirational. It’s not the reality for many people.”

AT 28, YOUNG, WHO favors bold colored scarves, long sweaters and a silver hoop in her nose, is, well, young for her profession. She was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and her parents divorced in her early childhood. Growing up with a single, Japanese mother profoundly shaped her— especially in a school district that had been created by conservative white parents who were trying to skirt anti-segregation laws. “It felt like our family was very different,” she says. “I know my mom also really struggled sometimes.”

As part of continued efforts to support her family, Young’s mother went back to school to become a paralegal. She sometimes brought home articles about important Supreme Court cases and news from the legal system to share with her daughter, who at the time aspired to be a musician. It wasn’t until Young attended Pomona, graduating in 2013, that she changed her mind.

Her experience at Pomona was profoundly “consciousness raising,” she says. Conversations happening on campus helped her understand earlier experiences from her own life in a new light—her experience as a biracial person in a school district with segregationist roots, for example. And it was at Pomona that she first learned about what she calls the “disparate impacts of our legal system on certain communities.”

That nascent interest prompted Young to major in political science and philosophy; her Pomona education “helped me have a vocabulary for certain ways in which people are systemically disenfranchised,” she says. She volunteered for a semester at the Camp Afflerbaugh-Paige juvenile detention facility near campus, producing Othello with some of the students. While she was there, one of the teenaged boys disappeared for a week. When he returned, she was struck by how dramatically different he was: subdued where he had been animated, depressed where he had been bright and playful, cracking jokes.

It turned out that he had gotten in trouble and been kept in isolation for some time as a disciplinary measure. “This doesn’t seem fair or good for a person who we hope will turn out to be happy and productive,” she remembers thinking. “I feel like I can’t advocate on his behalf right now, but it’s something I’d like to be able to do someday.” In pursuit of that goal, she attended law school at Stanford and spent her first summer interning at the New York Civil Liberties Union—but was surprised to find herself unhappy with the experience, which felt too divorced from the people she hoped to help. “I realized I should be trying to come at it from a different angle,” she says.

Young is aware that public defender stereotypes paint a picture of a harried, overburdened lawyer who doesn’t fight for her clients, “interested in trying to plead you out as quickly as possible because we don’t have the time or resources to defend you adequately.” But Contra Costa’s public defenders maintain one of the highest trial rates in California, part of the reason she applied for a job here. Encouraging plea bargains “does not lend itself towards keeping the system accountable or ensuring accurate or fair results,” she says.

THE ROLE OF PUBLIC DEFENDER doesn’t come with much of a runway. Once she graduated from law school, Young clerked for several months at the Contra Costa Public Defenders Office—then began representing a full load of clients on misdemeanor charges soon after she passed the bar in January 2017. “When I got hired, I quite literally had three days’ transition to begin representing 110 clients, some of whom had trials set,” she remembers with a shudder and smile.

These days, she works instead with clients facing felony charges, which run the gamut from evading the police to gun possession to attempted murder—around 40 at a time and between 50 and 60 hours a week. It’s a more manageable load than she had in misdemeanors: the cases move slower because there’s more at stake, so there’s more time to work on them. That creates opportunities to occasionally play her violin; take a bread-making class; or go on walks with her mother (who moved to the Bay Area several years ago) and the family dog, Teeter.

Beyond the frantic pace, Young has slowly adjusted to a professional life that can demand a difficult balancing act between practicality and justice. Some clients with immigration concerns prioritize protecting that status, even beyond proving their innocence; some clients value the chance to have the proverbial “day in court” and tell a judge what happened over the safety of a plea bargain. There have been cases where she believed her clients were innocent but struggled with how to advise them, because their prior history put them at deep risk if they were to be convicted of a serious crime. And when her clients are kept in custody as they await trial, she must decide how to ask to schedule their hearings, keeping in mind that the longer she spends preparing their cases, the longer they’ll spend away from their families, friends, worlds.

“There’s an older philosophy that as attorney you’re the person who is educated and knows the law, and you should be the person responsible for making decisions about best outcomes,” she says. Instead, “our duty is to learn about and understand our client’s perspective.”

It’s also a professional life that melds stereotypical courtroom drama with the ordinary, obligatory mechanics of the justice system: jail visits, written motions, the series of hearings that precede a jury trial. The fabric of Young’s daily routine is threaded with the half-hour drives between courtrooms in various towns; the waits to get into jails; the police officers who are late to give testimony; the judges trying to sort out the daily docket. In the week that I shadowed her, she had three separate hearings delayed at the last minute. That week featured pockets of the pursuit of justice, yes—but they were glued together with pauses during which judges took bathroom breaks and bailiffs watched pet videos on the phones of district attorneys.

The stops, starts and delays can be “really frustrating,” she says, but they have had a surprising benefit: teaching her adaptability, honing her capacity to adjust and respond to new tasks at a moment’s notice. Before this work, “I was very good at planning for something, preparing a lot for something and doing it,” she says. “But the thing you learn with this job is that you can’t prepare for all the possibilities. You have to be okay with the unexpected sometimes.”

AFTER THE CANCELED RESTITUTION HEARING, Young settles in at her office to spend the rest of the day wading through the seas of mundane justice: drafting motions, reviewing new evidence, preparing for an upcoming trial. The room is small but friendly, featuring a coffee machine tucked into a corner and an assortment of button-down shirts hanging off the doorknob for clients to try on. The walls are decorated with photos of Teeter and a few pieces of art.

Beside a selection of client thank you notes hangs a Ta-Nahesi Coates quote on a note card that reads, in part: a society that “can only protect you with a club of criminal justice has failed at enforcing its good intention or has succeeded at something much darker.” It’s a reminder of the losses and disappointments: the young man who was prevented by his co-defendant from taking a probation plea deal and ended up in prison; the client whose immigration status she worked to protect during a DUI case but who ended up in ICE custody later, anyway.

Even victory, when it comes, has been bittersweet. Young remembers one client who was charged with elder abuse of his own mother. During the trial, it became clear that the mother’s mental state was deteriorating, especially as her reports of abuse were not corroborated by evidence; she died soon after the verdict. Although Young’s client was cleared of wrongdoing, she struggles to find vindication when thinking about how he must have felt—accused of a cruel and violent act, separated from a beloved parent during the last weeks of her life. “There’s nothing that the acquittal in and of itself can do to repair the damage,” she says, sighing.

A victory is “gratifying,” she adds, but “just because a case was ultimately dismissed, or was acquitted, it doesn’t mean the experience hasn’t taken a toll.” Even with positive outcomes, her clients still deal with negative impacts: the costs of bail, missed work and immigration risks.

Taking a moment to celebrate the work that’s done can be difficult when there’s always another seven things to do. Yes, today’s delayed restitution hearing was a small victory. In this case, she hadn’t been reassigned, so she was able to continue to represent her client in a quest for a fairer outcome. She’ll likely be able to renegotiate that request, saving him money and helping him start fresh.

Tomorrow will bring another hearing, another jail visit, another trial. More new clients will arrive, more new evidence will be unearthed, as the American penal organism churns on. But today, she added a little justice to that system. That has to be enough.