Laura Kerber ’06 is a woman with a mission. The bumper sticker on the car in her driveway reads “Moon Diver.” She answers the door wearing a NASA Moon Diver polo shirt. A stack of NASA coasters rests on a table.

Even her marriage has a Moon Diver connection. Her husband of two years is a robotics engineer working on the Moon Diver mission rover. On one of their first dates, they assembled a large Saturn V rocket model using Legos. It’s on prominent display in their living room.

Kerber happily blurs the line between work and play. “It’s kind of like a hobby/job,” she says of her work as a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in La Cañada Flintridge, near Los Angeles. Her passion is planetary geology, especially explosive volcanism and extraterrestrial caves. She focuses her attention on Mercury, Mars and, for the past seven years, Earth’s Moon. “I’ve been known to go on vacation and then work on my job,” she admits, cheerfully. “But don’t tell anyone.”

At home, Laura Kerber ’06 keeps a Saturn V model rocket made of Legos.

The proposed Moon Diver mission that she leads as principal investigator began at a picnic table at JPL with a group of five researchers excited about the discovery of caves on the Moon. The Japanese lunar probe SELENE first spotted them in 2009, and the American Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter followed up with high-resolution images. No one has ever explored caves in another world. The scientists began to dream.

One of them, JPL engineer Issa Nesnas, had worked with geologists to develop a rover that could explore hard-to-navigate landscapes. It is basically two wheels with a thick axle in between and looks straight out of Star Wars. When Kerber heard about the vehicle, dubbed the Axel Extreme Terrain Rover, she had an idea. “If I had your robot, I wouldn’t necessarily explore the cave,” she told him. Geologists, unlike engineers, prefer sheer cliffs to flat ground. “I would explore the beautiful cross section of bedrock that’s exposed in the wall of the pit going into the cave.” To Nesnas, it sounded like an intriguing idea, and the two teamed up to write proposals.

Thus the Moon Diver mission concept was born, through research and imagination. The cave it would explore is in the Sea of Tranquility, the same region of the Moon where Apollo 11 landed in 1969. It is in the Moon’s mare, an area we see as dark swirls on the lunar surface, named with the Italian word for “sea.” The mare (pronounced “mah-ray”), primarily made up of volcanic rock called basalt, was formed by lava flows billions of years ago when the Moon was young.

The near-vertical walls of the cave expose intact strata of the Moon’s secondary crust, which can tell geologists “what was going on ‘inside’ the Moon while the primary crust was forming on the surface,” Kerber says. “Looking at volcanic deposits from deep inside planets using petrology is one of the main ways that we understand the inside structure of planets,” she explains. “The Moon is special because its primary and secondary crusts are both still preserved at the surface, unlike anywhere else in the solar system.” The Moon is bombarded by meteorites, but since it lacks an atmosphere, its surface has not been weathered by wind or water, nor altered, as Earth has been, by the constant motion of tectonic plates. (She likes to tell what she calls a “NASA joke”: “Someone tried to open a restaurant on the moon, but it failed because it just didn’t have any atmosphere.”)

The opening to the lunar pit the Moon Diver mission would explore is roughly 100 meters wide, a little more than the length of a football field, and scientists believe the pit is also around 100 meters deep. Courtesy of NASA/GSFC/ASU.

Tethered to its lander by a cable that supplies power and communications and could extend 300 meters, the Axel vehicle would rappel down the cave wall gathering data as it descended to the floor. Instruments deployed from the rover’s wheel wells would analyze key aspects of the geological record: an X-ray spectrometer for elemental chemistry, a reflectance spectrometer for mineralogy and a camera system to measure the layers of rock.

By 2018, Kerber and Nesnas had persuaded JPL to fund development of the Moon Diver proposal for NASA’s Discovery competition. The space agency funds projects at various cost levels, from flagship class—such as the recent Mars rover Perseverance and the upcoming Europa Clipper voyage—to lower-cost, competitively chosen missions such as Discovery with specific scientific goals for solar system exploration. Kerber and Nesnas directed a team that at one time included as many as 40 people, but the Moon Diver proposal didn’t make the final four in the 2019 funding round.

They ultimately lost out to two missions to explore Venus, “which we thought was fair,” Kerber says, without any apparent hint of jealousy. “Venus is an underappreciated planet. We’ve got to show it some love.”

Not being selected in the most recent funding cycle motivated Kerber and her team to re-evaluate the mission proposal from start to finish. One major area of concern was data analysis. Were they aiming to collect the right data? And would the analytical methods provide sufficiently accurate results to resolve the scientific questions they set out to answer?

Geology Professor Nicole Moore

One way to find out was to test the methodology on similar basalt flows on Earth. To do that, Kerber reached out to Eric Grosfils, a professor in the geology department at Pomona who was her advisor during her college years. Grosfils, however, is primarily a physics-based volcanologist; Moon Diver needed a geology partner who was chemistry-focused. Grosfils referred Kerber to Nicole Moore, visiting assistant professor of geology. “It was just incredibly serendipitous, because I have studied basalts my entire research career,” says Moore. “First, basalt on a stratovolcano in the Cascades—Mount Baker—for my master’s. And then I studied the Columbia River Flood Basalt for my Ph.D.

“These [Earth] flood basalts are a really good analog for what the Moon basalts might look like,” Moore says. And then she punctures a myth that NASA, in an April Fools’ post, said dates back nearly half a millennium. The Moon, she says, is not made of cheese. “The man on the Moon is basalt.”

In July 2022, JPL’s Laura Kerber ’06, bottom right, took a team of researchers to Washington to test the Axel rover model on basalts that might be similar to those found on the Moon. Nate Wire ’23 at top row, middle, with Pomona Geology Professor Nicole Moore on the top row, third from right.

In mid-July 2022, Kerber, Moore and a team that included Nate Wire ’23, a Moon Diver summer intern, spent a week testing a model of the Axel rover along with various instruments on massive basalt flows in the state of Washington. A major goal was to determine how accurately the instruments proposed for use on the rover in the lunar environment could determine the precise composition of the rocks it encountered.

Researchers examine flood basalts on site in the state of Washington. Photo by Nate Wire ’23

If the team knew the actual chemistry of the rocks found through highly accurate analytical methods on Earth, says Moore, it could then compare that with results from a handheld device similar to what would be used on the Moon. “We need that precision,” Moore explains. “That was basically the concern of the group that didn’t fund the proposal [right] off the bat. ‘Is this really going to work?’ We’re still actively evaluating the data we got from the field this summer.”

Kerber understands there are no guarantees in the space business. She and her team are working hard to refine the Moon Diver mission proposal for future opportunities. It’s “kind of on this weird journey,” she says. “It might not end up looking like the endeavor that we proposed in 2019. It could morph into something different. It could be something that astronauts could help with in the Artemis program,” she says, referring to NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the Moon. “Or,” she says, “we could repackage it into something a lot smaller. We could fly or hop into the cave.”

Space exploration “is a business of hopes and dreams,” Kerber says. “You have to really love the process, because nothing is guaranteed to happen. You can work a lot on a project and it might never fly.”

So Kerber relishes the journey. “I’ve been having the time of my life working on this project,” she remarks. “Somebody pays me to think about the Moon in a crazy amount of detail. It is such a delight to me. I love working with the team. It’s so fun to work with some of the world’s smartest engineers and roboticists and other scientists that are equally obsessed as I am.”

Given the chance, Kerber would fly to the Moon in a heartbeat. She has applied to become an astronaut twice. One of her colleagues is currently in the astronaut corps. “She’s in space right now,” Kerber says. “She’s poised at the right moment where she could be the first person to return to the Moon. It’s so exciting.”

Laura Kerber ’06, who earned a doctorate in geological sciences at Brown, inspects a specimen in her collection at home.

Kerber is not so sure she’d jump at the chance to go on a Mars mission. “It takes a lot longer to get to Mars, and it’s very, very hard on your body,” she explains. And, with a new baby, she says, “I love the life that I have on Earth.” But the Moon? That would be an easier decision. “Four days away. Go there, have a good time, come back,” she says. If only she had the chance.

Kerber knows her mission may be a long time in the making. “My goal is a long, 50-year goal,” she says. “If I put this out into the universe long enough that somebody will explore a lunar pit, even if it’s not me, then I’ll be delighted to see what the results are. I think that’s an achievable goal.”

The JPL motto is “Dare mighty things.” It fits well, Kerber says, with a quote she loves. “I don’t know where it’s from, but it says, ‘A ship in harbor is safe. But that’s not what ships are built for.’”

“Are you doing something bold and brave?” she is asked. “I try,” she replies. “I fail a lot. I don’t stop trying. Don’t worry so much about all the things that you have to have in place before you start succeeding. Just try and do something hard, and then all those things will take care of themselves.”

In those unreal first moments, Zach Landman ’08 wasn’t thinking about college days or his old friends, or the ways in which their worlds were about to intersect. He had no idea of the conspiracy of generosity that would soon envelop his family and help take it to a place of hope that at that instant was unimaginable.

All that Landman was thinking about, just then, were the words he and his wife, Geri, were hearing from their infant daughter Lucy’s neurologist last April.

Rare genetic disorder.

Untreatable seizures.

Never walk. Never talk.

“At the time, Lucy was literally sitting on our laps, this cute, babbling, smiley baby who looks perfectly normal,” Landman says. “The neurologist said, ‘There are maybe 50 kids in the world with this disorder, and it will advance, and the truth is that there is no cure, and from what I can see there is no one anywhere who is working on a treatment.’”

Infant Lucy Landman undergoes a brain scan, one of numerous tests performed at Stanford’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital in March 2022.

It was, in those moments, incomprehensible. What followed was a week of soul-searching and tears, as Zach, 36, and Geri, 38, tried to understand by what bizarre turn they had “lost the genetic lottery,” as Landman put it, as dual carriers of a gene mutation so unknown it was only discovered in the last decade. “We’re talking one in billions,” Landman says. “We could have won Powerball several times over before we’d both be carriers for this disorder.”

The diagnosis seemed catastrophic. But Lucy Landman, a blue-eyed doll who was then just shy of her first birthday, got remarkably lucky in at least one specific sense: She is the daughter of Zach and Geri.

Both are doctors, Zach specializing in pain medicine, Geri a pediatrician. It was Geri’s keen sense of baby well-being that tripped the alarms that something was not right with their daughter, with Lucy sometimes unable to remain sitting up, sometimes not making eye contact, sometimes refusing solid food.

Zach Landman ’08, a physician who specializes in pain medicine, spends hours in his home office on research and correspondence related to Lucy’s condition. Photo by Kree Photography

It was Zach’s and Geri’s determination to press experts for answers that led to Lucy’s stay at Stanford’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital last March and to full workups, an expedited MRI, a spinal tap, an electroencephalogram, a nerve conduction study. When none of those revealed anything unusual, the pediatric neurologist on service, who also happened to be a geneticist—and Geri’s resident when Geri was at UC San Francisco—moved to the next level and ordered genetic testing.

It led to the chilling diagnosis. But it also led to what came next. A community of help was on its way.

The PGAP3 gene disorder in humans is not particularly well understood, in part because it is so rarely diagnosed. Since no cure exists, it isn’t commonly tested for. What is known is that when the gene fails to function properly, the body does not have enough functional glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI) anchored proteins, which are pivotal for both speech and motor development in young children.

“I hadn’t heard of this disorder before,” says Kathrin Meyer, Ph.D., a research scientist and principal investigator at the Center for Gene Therapy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, who is working with the Landmans on what could be a cure for Lucy and others like her. “There are very, very few case reports.”

Using lab methods like those seen above, scientists in San Francisco have grown yeasts modified with the PGAP3 disorder in order to test repurposed medicines.

With Zach and Geri both carriers, neither of Lucy’s PGAP3 genes functions properly. Lucy’s parents noticed some of the effects of that as early as four months into Lucy’s life, when the child, their third daughter, showed a tendency to be “floppier” than other children—to sit up straight less often and for shorter periods. But Lucy initially was considered simply to be a later-developing infant with regard to her motor skills. It wasn’t until a family trip to Panama, when she caught a cold that appeared to affect her deeply, that things began to quickly escalate.

“When Lucy started to get really sick in the early spring, refusing food and really lethargic, I started sounding the alarm,” Geri says. “At one point, we were told that they’d scheduled an MRI for her in July. I was like, ‘No, no, no. I don’t think you understand the urgency here.’”

Both Geri and her husband understood, though. With genetic disorders that affect speech and movement, time is always the enemy, because the effects progress so steadily and can become difficult or impossible to reverse. The Landmans’ goals were suddenly both dramatic and incredibly streamlined: They needed near-immediate intervention to slow Lucy’s deterioration of skills, and they needed, essentially, a longer-term miracle—a moonshot, as they put it—in the form of an actual cure.

They attacked on all fronts, rounding up expert help from their long lists of personal and professional medical connections: at Harvard, Stanford, Vanderbilt, the Mayo Clinic. Zach, who coincidentally wrote his thesis at Pomona on the application of tailored pharmaceuticals to genetic disorders, began cold-calling experts around the world. Geri, a graduate of Williams College and the UCSF School of Medicine (where she and Zach met), read textbooks on the science behind gene disorders and their treatments.

Kathrin Meyer, in Ohio, was the first to suggest that gene therapy, a process through which healthy PGAP3 genes would be introduced to Lucy’s body to do the work of the faulty ones, might actually work. The Landmans had contacted Meyer because of the deep expertise she and Nationwide Children’s Hospital have in the field, and Meyer explained some of the basics. Lucy’s case was a possibility, in part because a similar therapy Meyer helped develop had worked on a single-gene neurodegenerative disease called spinal muscular atrophy, so a part of a template already existed.

Meyer needed to get Lucy’s cells under a microscope, and although Stanford officials offered to perform a punch biopsy “basically for free,” Zach says, there was significant legalese standing between that act and actually getting the results to Meyer’s team. It would take time to resolve—months, perhaps. The clock was ticking.

“So I took a red-eye flight that night from San Francisco to Atlanta to Columbus, with Lucy on my lap, while Geri stayed at home with the two kids (Audrey, now 8, and Edna, 6),” Zach says. “We Ubered to Nationwide Children’s, met Kat, they found a neurologist to do the biopsy at lunchtime, back to the airport, and then flew home. It was 23 hours of straight travel, but they got the tissue.”

What Meyer needed to know, among other things, was whether Lucy’s PGAP3 gene was relatively long or short. This mattered because the method of transmission to the brain is a virus, and it can accommodate only so large a gene.

“Think of it like a vehicle. This (therapy) is like putting a second car in the garage,” Meyer said from Scotland, where she was attending a medical conference. “If the other car is broken, you can use this one instead.”

The result was affirmative—the transmission method could work. “You won’t believe this,” Geri told Zach after speaking with Meyer, “but this is possible. And she’s happy to get started on it right away.”

In short order, the Landmans realized a couple of truths. First, though gene therapy is inherently uncertain, it was at least a potential cure for Lucy, although it would take 18 months or more to get to a fast-track FDA clinical trial. Second, a couple of other treatments, including the repurposing of existing drugs and a ketogenic diet, might put the development of Lucy’s disorder on a slower track, buying time for that therapy to be created.

And third, this all would cost money. More than they had. Millions.

Zach and Geri immediately started calling pharmaceutical giants, asking if one of them might consider funding the research and trials. The answer came back almost as directly: PGAP3 was so rare that there was no way to make an investment in the gene therapy pay for itself over time.

Geri Landman, a pediatrician, carefully manages her youngest daughter’s diet and supplements. Photo by Kree Photography

After a frustrating week of negative feedback, it was a fellow Pomona grad who helped the Landmans see the road ahead. One of Zach’s cold calls had gone to Emil Kakkis ’82, a physician-scientist who is the founder and CEO of the pharmaceutical company Ultragenyx, which helps produce gene therapies for disorders more common than PGAP3. Kakkis, who knows Meyer professionally, spent an hour with Zach and Geri, laying out the likely scenarios and encouraging them to stay rooted in the present.

“Rather than worry about solving every last variable, which is daunting, the best advice is to keep your head down and get to the next step,” Kakkis says. “If you get a gene therapy created, you will find out what it does and then work from there. It’s an iterative process.”

Says Geri, “Emil just took our hands and slowed us down. He said, ‘You just need to look at tomorrow, and then the next day. Gene therapy is a good therapy. You are working with good people.’ It was a healthy dose of reality.”

Still, the financials of the process were overwhelming; the cost just to get to the point of an FDA trial might top $2 million. It became obvious to the Landmans, who already had sold their Bay Area home and scraped up all their savings, that absent a Big Pharma investment, they’d need to set up a nonprofit in order to solicit funds to help Lucy.

In the midst of their emotional and logistical chaos, Zach and Geri wanted to achieve something greater, too.

“We didn’t want to do it for just PGAP3,” Zach says. “Our mission statement was that we want no parent to get a diagnosis for their child and go to bed thinking there’s nothing they can do, which is what happened to us. It shouldn’t be just two doctors with Silicon Valley connections with the ability to get this done.”

The result: Moonshots for Unicorns, a foundation with a website that not only explains Lucy’s story but notes that single-gene disorders number roughly 10,000 and affect 1% of the population. The cost of developing treatments and strategies for any one of them can run to $5 million. Donations to the site not only help defray costs in Lucy’s case but also fund the Landmans’ creation of a pop-up laboratory in San Francisco that is capable of rapidly testing up to 6,000 existing, FDA-approved drugs to see if any of them can be repurposed—that is, used “off label”—to delay or ward off the effects of PGAP3 or other rare genetic disorders.

Zach and Geri Landman with Lucy, the youngest of their three daughters. Photo by Kree Photography

Simply put, the rarest diseases don’t often get treated or cured because such small numbers of children or adults suffer from them. “But at the same time, you only have one child,” Kakkis says. An organization like Moonshots may one day give that child a chance.

“They’re doing this in such a structured way that it will become a model for others to follow,” says Robert Pepple ’08, who has known Zach since their first day of Pomona-Pitzer football practice together in 2004, the beginning of a longstanding close friendship. “They don’t realize that yet, and I haven’t mentioned it because I don’t want to distract from what they’re doing. But I’m sure of it.

“It’s terrible that this happened to anyone, but there are no two more competent people on Earth to handle the situation,” Pepple says. “They are the most brilliant, motivated human beings in this world. If anybody can figure it out, it’s them.”

It was Pepple to whom Zach turned when it came to organization: How does one even begin setting up a nonprofit? An attorney in the Los Angeles office of the global firm Nixon Peabody who’d been a partner “for all of about five minutes,” Pepple says he told Zach to give him a day, then immediately asked his partners to get on board with setting up Moonshots as a 501(c)(3). “They prioritized it,” Pepple says, and within a day the framework was together.

Pepple didn’t stop there. He quickly reached out to a web designer, who agreed to put together the Moonshots landing site and build out its detailed, expressive pages, all pro bono. The Landmans consistently add updates, scientific information and breathtaking, sometimes heartbreaking, photos and videos.

When another college football teammate of Zach’s, Bobby Montalvo PZ ’10, saw a Facebook post about Lucy’s story on Zach’s page, his first thought was, “They need video.” Montalvo, who owns a production company in the L.A. area, was about to travel to the Bay Area for an assignment. He messaged the Landmans, arranged a sit-down with Lucy, Geri and three cameras, and produced a video that began resonating with visitors to both the website, and now, several social media accounts that update friends and family and seek donations to the cause.

“I had never asked anyone for money or been in a startup mode. Geri and I never even had an Instagram account, you know?” Zach says. “Rob was key. Bobby was key. It’s hard to even explain how much they’ve done.”

Almost a year into their journey, it’s clear that both Zach and Geri still sometimes awaken in a state of shock over the turn their family’s life has taken. When someone mentions to Geri how impressive it is that she doesn’t appear overwhelmed by all they’ve had to do, she quickly cuts him off. “I am completely overwhelmed by this,” Lucy’s mother replies. “I like talking about the science of it sometimes, because it uses the academic side of my brain, not the side that wonders, ‘Who would Lucy have been if she were not missing this one gene?’”

They celebrate the progress when it comes. The Jackson Laboratory, an industry leader in building mouse models for testing specific types of rare disease treatments, offered to do all the model testing and FDA submission on Lucy’s case for free. The keto diet, one often used to treat epilepsy, showed enough promise for the family to consider it for Lucy.

Their fundraising efforts had amassed $495,522 by late fall, in the midst of a “$1.3M by 2023” drive bolstered by nearly 30,000 Instagram followers. Meyer’s gene therapy work continues. And one week after the pop-up lab identified four drugs that might be repurposed to help slow the effects of PGAP3 disorder, Lucy last October took her first steps, something her parents were told would likely never happen.

At each of those points, the Landmans were surrounded by, as Montalvo put it, good people. Geri’s best friend from Williams, Megan McCann, a Wharton MBA, put other business aside to consult and become president of Moonshots. Montalvo sits on the board. Pepple has essentially become a constant—a lifeline of knowledge and action whenever it’s needed.

Kakkis, the most veteran of the alumni in the group, sounds unsurprised. “(Pomona) is a small school with lots of good people who care about others,” he says. “It’s more the selection of who is there and the culture of who we are than any networking scheme or clubby-type thing.”

Lucy’s prospects, of course, are uncertain—the nature of a moonshot, Zach says. But her life has already transformed the rest of the Landmans, as well as those who are serving them in the fight. Says Zach, “It spans generations.” It continues still.

Jessica Boatright ’98 will always remember when she first met Laila Bernstein ’04. The year was 2009. Both women had a passion to end homelessness in Massachusetts. That led them to jobs combating the problem, working at opposite ends of the fourth floor of the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development.

“This super-smart intern showed up out of nowhere,” recalls Boatright, known as Jessie Berman in her Pomona days. Boatright was the liaison between the state’s public housing office and the newly created Interagency Council on Housing and Homelessness. Bernstein was a new presence on the council. Something about her rocked the more senior Boatright back on her heels. “She seemed young, but I was slightly intimidated by her intelligence,” she recalls.

When the two women look back at it, their first encounter sparks laughter. “I was just, like, a pipsqueak intern,” says Bernstein. “And you were a special assistant!” At the time, Boatright worked in the division responsible for the Commonwealth’s portfolio of some 50,000 state-owned public housing units and 26,000 rental vouchers.

Today, their lives are entwined. “We share two complementary parallel paths, going through huge life events and challenging work situations together,” says Boatright. Now close friends, the two former public policy analysis majors have supported each other through childbirth, child-rearing and parents’ health crises.

There’s one more thing. They now work in the same place—in the Boston Mayor’s Office of Housing (one row and six cubicles apart, to be precise). They lead sister divisions that function in tandem to forward Mayor Michelle Wu’s commitment to ensure all Bostonians have access to safe, affordable housing.

Bernstein is deputy director of the Supportive Housing Division, which is responsible for the city’s housing strategies to end homelessness. The team manages more than $50 million in annual funding, collects and analyzes data on people experiencing homelessness in Boston, creates and leads strategic plans, and drives system design and policy change.

Boatright is deputy director in the Neighborhood Housing Development department. Her team of underwriters, project managers, architects and construction experts hammers out plans with developers and community stakeholders to create more than 1,000 units of new or preserved housing units each year.

Together with their teams, they have helped Boston make substantial progress in combating homelessness, a seemingly intractable problem in many cities across the country and particularly on the West Coast. In the past two years, Boston’s unhoused population has decreased by 28%, according to the city’s 2022 point-in-time count, a federally required measure. By contrast, homelessness has surged in such cities as Sacramento, California, and Portland, Oregon. And in Los Angeles, a city with a budget that now designates $1 billion a year to address the problem, there has been a stubborn 2% increase in homelessness since 2020.

Boatright says Wu, the Boston mayor, is “laser focused” on the struggle of people without housing, and the city recently dedicated an additional $20 million in American Rescue Plan funds to create supportive housing.

Boatright and Bernstein help spearhead projects like the one at 3368 Washington Street, which is replacing a one-story office building with the largest ground-up construction of a permanent supportive housing project in the city’s history. (Unlike subsidized housing, supportive housing in Massachusetts is more specifically targeted to people exiting homelessness, with preference going to those with disabilities who have been experiencing homelessness the longest. It comes with intensive services to help support and stabilize them. No one is screened out due to criminal history, bad credit or other barriers people experiencing homelessness often face.)

Located near five-story buildings in the affluent Jamaica Plain neighborhood, the $100 million redevelopment project will create 202 low-income housing units with 140 of those earmarked for people who are exiting homelessness. The Pine Street Inn, the location’s previous occupant—a nonprofit that has provided food, shelter and other services to people in need since 1969—is a development partner and will be the service provider and have offices there alongside housing for both formerly homeless households and families with low and moderate incomes.

Officials celebrate a partnership to renovate a historic building on 140 Clarendon Street.

“Deals don’t always come together like this one, but this one combined a unique site with a strong development team,” says Boatright. “It’s a great location for people to live, period, including people exiting homelessness. It’s located on a transit thoroughfare with easy access to both public amenities and a commercial corridor serving a broad diversity of consumers.”

140 Clarendon Street to provide affordable and supportive housing alongside cultural institutions.

In addition to new construction, other projects to add affordable and supportive housing have included the preservation and rehabilitation of architecturally significant landmarks, among them 48 Boylston Street, an 1875 building near Boston Common that once housed the Boston Young Men’s Christian Union, and 140 Clarendon Street in well-to-do Back Bay. The current tenants at the Clarendon location—the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, the city’s oldest professional theatre company, and the YW Boston, formerly the YWCA—welcomed the project and will stay in their historic homes.

Many more are in the pipeline.

“We’re building a plane as we’re flying it on a number of supportive housing opportunities,” says Boatright. “The problem is huge, but I think there’s a ton of promise to deliver a huge number of these units in the next few years.”

Bernstein sighs when she considers what she, Boatright and Boston are up against. “Even when we’ve helped 100 people stabilize in housing, 100 more fall into homelessness in Boston,” she says. “That part’s really hard, to not be able to address all of the root causes at once.”

When asked why ending homelessness is her life’s work, Bernstein seems surprised. “Who doesn’t want to be working on ending homelessness?” she replies. “It’s a privilege to be in a role working on something that’s so clearly needed and responding to a complex set of systemic failures with a solution.”

Boatright’s zeal to make a difference comes from a slightly different place. The daughter of activist parents, she says she is motivated by values of justice and fairness. “It feels very visceral. Social justice work has to be at the center of what I do every day,” she insists.

Bernstein calls her friend “a boundary spanner” and a “mission-driven person.” Boatright admits she relishes the intricacy of the work. “The draw for me is the opportunity to realize a neighborhood’s needs, wants and dreams through the built environment. The challenge is to make this happen with the alphabet soup of public and private programs that fund and regulate the projects. It’s an insane brain workout. The complexity of the problem is another hook that keeps me in it. It’s not easy, not boring, and never routine.”

Bernstein loves seeing buildings being repurposed or built to house people experiencing homelessness. “You can feel tangibly the results of this complicated and at times frustrating, arduous process,” she says. “Permanent supportive housing transforms lives for people in our community. It’s hard to imagine a more compelling job.”

The pace of work is furious for both women. They spend workdays switching gears between nonstop meetings, sometimes on the hour, sometimes on the half-hour. “There is a deluge of demands on our schedules,” says Boatright.

They live for the personal time they carve out of their schedules every Friday at 10 a.m. That’s when Boatright says they do their “weekly debrief sessions,” a euphemism for stress-relieving fresh-air strolls. Free from office hubbub, the two division heads follow a loop trail that connects Pappas Way to Waterfront Path #1, “an awesome walk,” they say, which passes through a mix of carefully landscaped lawns and industrial buildings along a Boston seaport canal.

“It’s what keeps us able to come back on Monday,” says Bernstein.

These ritual walks, they say, create an almost sacred interlude. They were especially important during COVID. “We were able to keep up those walks as a really safe and important space for protecting and nurturing each other during an incredibly hard time to work in government,” says Boatright.

Their conversations embrace everything in their lives. They have been there through their parents’ health crises. “Laila’s mom was diagnosed with the same cancer my mom had before she passed away. We’re lucky three of our parents are alive and very engaged in our lives,” says Boatright.

When Bernstein had her first child, Boatright, whose two children were older, helped with meals and “1,000 tips and words of encouragement,” says Bernstein. “Jessica modeled how you can believe in yourself as a professional and be a dedicated, caring parent. I don’t know if I would have made it through becoming a new parent and working at a job like this without her wisdom and her support.”

Bernstein reflects on the similarities between being a parent and a manager. “You have to work hard to understand someone else’s perspective. People see right through you—whether they’re 2 or 50.”

Bernstein pauses to consider what it takes to be a good manager. Her description also fits their friendship: “You have to be your genuine self while also providing the guidance and support for someone who needs to keep moving forward.”

When someone asks me, “So, what do you do for a living?” I have to make a decision. I am triple board-certified in pediatrics, pediatric emergency medicine and adolescent medicine. Do I add “abortion provider” to my list of jobs, or leave it out?

I base my answer on how it might affect me, my family and my patients. Will my family be harassed? Will they be safe? Am I abandoning my patients if I don’t talk about an essential health care procedure that many physicians refuse to perform themselves or to refer for?

I’ve come to believe that talking about my abortion work normalizes it as part of health care and puts a face on a group of medical professionals who are often demonized. Creating that human connection makes this work safer for all of us as providers and patients. But it saddens me that I still ask myself: What are the risks and benefits of talking about abortion? Unfortunately, this won’t change until we stop politicizing health care and start advocating for abortion alongside other social justice causes such as racial equity, fair wages, transgender rights, Indigenous people’s rights and even climate change advocacy, with the understanding that they are all interconnected.

It has been a lifelong journey for me to get to the point where, despite the fear, discomfort and unknown, I (usually) advocate for and talk about abortion.

My interest in reproductive health care started at Pomona with a job I found through the Career Development Office. Despite being a Japanese American teenager who had never discussed sex growing up, I was hired to teach comprehensive sexual education at area high schools. This made me somewhat of an Asian Dr. Ruth, and I became a distributor of condoms and advice regarding birth control, safe sex and consent, not only for high school students but for my fellow Sagehens too. It turns out comprehensive sex ed is something most adolescents desire regardless of ZIP code, family income or education.

The next year, I taught career development classes to pregnant and parenting high school students in Redlands, California, and accompanied pregnant teens to Lamaze classes. I shared in their shock as we watched a video on how babies are born. I also learned to provide pregnancy options counseling through a summer job. And when a friend called me to tell me about her unplanned pregnancy, I was able to support her, without judgment, in her decision-making process. She went on to raise two amazing daughters with the support of her family, friends, church and university.

My interest in social justice grew while I was at Pomona, but it was rooted in experiences I had growing up as one of the few Asian kids at my public school in Arizona. I watched as my non-English speaking parents worked hard to create a life for me and my brother. My father taught karate and built a community in a place where people of Japanese descent had been forcibly relocated during World War II only two decades earlier. Like my father, I experienced racist comments from teachers and students alike. But I also made lifelong friends who showed me inclusivity and friendship. Those experiences led me to help start a refugee youth council in high school to support Hmong classmates who had been evacuated and relocated at the end of the Vietnam War.

In 1992, my parents dropped me off at Pomona. I majored in Asian studies figuring that because I was pre-med, college would be the last opportunity to study liberal arts. Professors Sam Yamashita, Lynne Miyake and Kyoko Kurita, in addition to countless others, taught me how to think critically and build arguments with solid foundations based on reason, compassion and truth. Pomona nurtured students’ intellectual curiosity, developed problem-solving skills and gave us confidence that we could tackle difficult issues.

After college, my work and medical training took me across the country, from California and Arizona to New York, Boston and Atlanta. I’ve been exposed to the harsh reality of health care in the United States: The quality and extent of health care that people can access is almost entirely dependent on their ZIP code, income and identities.

I moved to San Francisco after graduating for an internship at the UC San Francisco AIDS Health Project, where I provided HIV testing services at needle exchanges, street fairs and health clinics. I also worked at San Francisco Women Against Rape, where I advocated for rape survivors in local emergency departments and answered hotline calls late into the night. The trainings I received for these jobs were led by activists within those marginalized communities who understood and fought against bias, stigma and discrimination. Those experiences solidified my conviction that abortion access is about justice and equity, and is an essential aspect of women’s health.

During medical school at the University of Arizona, I discovered that the reason abortion services were not available to pregnant people at the University Medical Center was because a state legislator put an abortion ban into the same 1974 law that funded an expansion of the football stadium. Football was the reason patients were forced to go elsewhere for essential health care. It was also the reason I was forced to go to independent abortion clinics in Seattle and Tucson for abortion training during my fourth-year elective rotations.

I also traveled to Ecuador, where abortion is largely illegal, to participate in an elective in women’s health. I had to tell a rape survivor that I couldn’t help her with abortion care for this pregnancy—but if she wanted, she could take a rhythm method bead necklace to ensure she wouldn’t get pregnant in the future. She was raped. (In 2021, Ecuador decriminalized abortion in cases of rape. It also is allowed when a patient’s life is in danger.)

As a resident in pediatrics at a New York City hospital, I came to realize even more how systemic racism disproportionately affects children. In the Bronx, the creation of the Cross Bronx Expressway led to increased exposure to pollution, displacement of communities and degradation of neighborhoods—all interconnected and leading to increased rates of asthma and asthma-related complications. In addition to my pediatrics training, I received further abortion training. There were patients whose birth control failed them, who could not afford another child and still provide for their family, or who wanted to complete their education.

Abortion laws by state: Most Restrictive: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia; Very Restrictive: Arizona, Georgia
Restrictive: Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah, Wisconsin; Some restrictions/protections: Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Nevada, Rhode Island, Virginia, Wyoming; Protective: Alaska, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Washington; Very Protective: California, Vermont; Most Protective: Oregon. Source: Guttmacher Institute (December 2022), states.guttmacher.org/policies

I went on to do two fellowships in Boston, where racial disparities I saw in the city were amplified for the adolescents I cared for. There was a 14-year-old whose pregnancy was diagnosed while she was being prepped for unrelated surgery. I helped her tell her mother. She gave birth several weeks later. There was also a young woman who had obtained medication abortion pills from a family member in another country. Research shows that medication abortion pills are generally safe and do not require physician involvement. But occasionally patients require a procedure to stop dangerous vaginal bleeding, as she did. In some states, ambiguous laws make uterine evacuation illegal unless the patient’s life is “at risk”—a term that puts physicians and hospitals in the difficult position of delaying care as lawyers are consulted and committees are convened to determine whether a patient is close enough to dying to receive a procedure that physicians are trained to perform.

Later, when I moved to Atlanta as a new mother, I developed close friendships with Black moms. As my daughter became friends with their children, it hit home how hard it must be to raise a Black child in America knowing the injustices they face. I also worked at a local abortion clinic. One patient, a religious woman who worried about the stigma of abortion, drove eight hours from Ohio. Another who previously had postpartum complications cried in relief as her abortion gave her confidence she would survive to raise the children she already had.

My work as an abortion provider—especially in the South, where health disparities along racial and income lines are more pronounced—has made it clear that for people with resources, abortion is usually accessible. But for those with limited means, abortion is difficult if not impossible to access. The people I know who fight for reproductive freedom at organizations supporting women of color—groups including SisterSong and Indigenous Women Rising—say it’s clear to them that abortion restrictions and bans worsen maternal mortality and health disparities. Academic research supports that.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, those disparities have become starker.

In Arizona, where I had returned to be closer to family and work as a pediatric emergency medicine physician and abortion provider, abortion services ceased temporarily as lawyers argued for greater clarification of state laws. Abortion access in Arizona, as in other abortion-restrictive states, has been in turmoil since. Patients’ lives have been at the mercy of legislators, lawyers and judges, the majority of whom are not physicians. Some clinics in Arizona kept their doors closed due to the uncertainty of abortion legality, reopening in October when the Arizona Court of Appeals put a hold on the reinstatement of an 1864 law that criminalized abortion when Arizona was still a territory, not a state. This back and forth and lack of legal clarity has been confusing and stressful for patients, sometimes with life-threatening consequences. Pregnant patients have been affected, of course. But so have patients who need access to medications like methotrexate, which is used for the treatment of both ectopic pregnancies and autoimmune illnesses: Some have been denied potentially life-saving medication due to concern that it would be used to induce an abortion.

The turmoil has made many providers reluctant to perform abortion services out of fear of criminal penalties. The recruitment of medical students and physician trainees across the country also has been affected, with some seeking to train and practice in states where medicine is science-driven, not politically driven.

As I continue to work with and listen to people who have been advocating for decades with Black, brown and Indigenous organizations, I’ve come to realize that fighting for abortion rights is not the same as fighting for reproductive justice.

Reproductive justice is the right to have children, to not have children, and to raise the children you have in safe, sustainable communities. This means abortion access and access to clean water. This means bodily autonomy and not facing drought-induced heat strokes and natural disasters. We cannot have one without the other.

It is devastating to know that at any moment, every single day, patients in this country are being turned away from the medical care they want and need, and turned away from the futures they imagine for themselves and their families. These restrictions are impacting the way that health care providers like me approach conversations about more than abortion care. They also affect the ways we approach miscarriage management, birth control, ectopic pregnancy treatment, infertility care, cancer care and so much more due to concerns about losing one’s license, livelihood—and with potential criminal penalties in some states—even one’s freedom.

While all of the air has been knocked out of me as I raise a young girl in a state where legislators and the courts have control over our bodies, I move forward with a bit of hope, a small glimmer knowing that we—the collective we—will not stop until we build a better future for each other, that no matter who we are, where we live, who we love or how much money we make, we can live a life of dignity, respect and self-determination.

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.