Punishment Isn’t Safety: A Public Defender’s Vision for Justice

WATKINS: Welcome to New Thinking from the Center for Justice Innovation. I’m Matt Watkins.

Emily Galvin Almanza says, for the most part, the criminal legal system has only one setting: punishment. But punishment isn’t safety. It isn’t even accountability.

Galvin Almanza makes that case in her new book, The Price of Mercy: Unfair Trials, a Violent System, and a Public Defender’s Search for Justice in America.

But the book isn’t just about problems. It’s also about solutions.

Indeed, part of what makes Galvin Almanza so interesting is her energy—how hopeful she can sound.

She’s also someone who thinks a lot about how to make the message of solutions stick. There’s lots of evidence for what could fix the criminal legal system, but how do you get people to hear it?

Emily Galvin Almanza is a former long-time public defender. She is now the co-founder and executive director of Partners for Justice, or PFJ. It’s a nonprofit working to empower public defenders, and their clients, nationwide.

Here’s my conversation with Emily Galvin Almanza.

WATKINS: Well, congratulations on the book, first of all.

GALVIN ALMANZA: Thank you.

WATKINS: I actually thought maybe we could start the conversation, which is where you start the book, which is this run-in—potentially quite a serious run-in—that you had with the criminal legal system, when you were 16 years old.

GALVIN ALMANZA: Yeah, let’s dive right in with some delinquency!

It was a really grim time for me. My family life had fallen apart, and it had been just a really cursed year in many ways, beyond what was happening at home. There had been an accident that had resulted in a flood destroying our house. And so, I was living with fewer parents than I used to be living, in a strange place.

All of these different fractures in my life at that time had led me into a series of increasingly bad choices—substance use and encounters of my own with violence, where I was not the perpetrator.

But the result was, I ended up standing in front of a judge in Boston, and not knowing how lucky I was. Obviously, I walked into the criminal legal system with a lot of privilege, right? The privilege of whiteness and education.

Those were not commonalities with most of the other kids who were standing in that courtroom with me. But what we did share was that a lot of us, including me, didn’t really know what was going to happen next, and didn’t understand a lot of what was being said around us in this language of the courts, and were really scared, and covering it up really well, of course, because as a teenager in court, you’re going to act totally full of bravado.

But I got really lucky, because I had this judge, Judge Leslie Harris, who is one of the few Black jurists on the bench in Boston at that time. I didn’t obviously know this at… I think I was only 15 when I walked in, actually.

WATKINS: Wow.

GALVIN ALMANZA: He had made it his mission to look at every child who came before him and see their potential. Because most judges are looking for threat in certain ways, right? They’re always worried about getting splashed across the front page of the paper because they let someone out, and that person did a terrible thing, and now it’s their fault.

But Judge Harris was looking not for threat, but for potential. And so, for me, one thing I had going for me at that time, was that I had a college acceptance letter in hand. I would absolutely have lost my acceptance had I been convicted of anything, and he knew this.

So he called me up to the bench, and he said… I’ll never forget standing there. He called me up, standing at the side of the bench, and the bench was like way above my head, and I’m looking up at this guy.

WATKINS: Of course.

GALVIN ALMANZA: He said to me, “What are you doing? Why are you here? You have this letter. What’s going on with you?” I have no recollection of what I said, because I was terrified and a teenager. I’m sure it wasn’t very smart. But he said, “I am going to give you a chance. I am going to dismiss this case and expunge the record, so that you can go to college. And I don’t ever want to hear from you again, unless you’ve done something good with your life.” And he let me go.

Because of him, I got to go on to college, and I got to graduate, and I got to spend a few years figuring out what I wanted with my life. And then I got to end up in law school, and end up in a great criminal law class, where I totally didn’t question why I connected inherently with the material. I was just like, “Wow, I really like this class. I’m not going to think too much about why it really resonates with me.”

Because of him, I got to drive down to LA County and get my first summer job at the LA County Public Defender. So, I wrote about him a lot in the book, because the life experience that brought him to being that way on the bench is something we need a lot more of.

WATKINS: Right—so atypical.

GALVIN ALMANZA: Exactly. Not just in terms of race, but in terms of life experience, and in terms of what he had endured in his own childhood, and what the people he had grown up with had done.

Years later, after I had started being a public defender, and I had defended at that point probably over a thousand people, I wrote him this letter to say, “I did something good with my life, and I want you to know about it, and thank you.”

I didn’t hear back from him for a really long time, and I thought, “Who am I? Why would I expect to hear back? How audacious of me.” But it turned out that he was going through a really hard time at that moment, because he had just lost one of the kids in his courtroom who had been murdered. He was in a crisis point where he was confronting this idea of, “If I can’t save every child, what am I doing here? What value am I adding on the bench?”

My letter reached him at a moment when he needed to be reminded of how much value he was bringing, I think, in a way. I mean, I think like all of my cases are like his grand-cases. It kept him on the bench for a few more years, he later told me. Which obviously, it was transformative for me to learn, as well.

WATKINS: I mean, you know so much more now about the effects any contact with the criminal legal system, let alone a conviction. Have you thought much about how your life might have unspooled differently if you hadn’t had contact with this atypical judge?

GALVIN ALMANZA: Completely. I mean, everything that led me towards success would have been taken. I was in a very self-destructive stage. If somebody had confirmed for me that my value actually was pretty low, and that I actually was…

I think a lot about the label delinquent. Because as a young person, I thought of myself as someone who was on a charted path towards total self-destruction: things weren’t going to work out for me, and it was just going to all end in a fireball somewhere. I was waiting for the court, and waiting for everything else to confirm that, so that then I could just go on and self-destruct as readily and rapidly as I had planned to.

And so, that word, that word delinquent, that word that we use to dehumanize and cast aspersions on kids, as I became more successful after that moment, I became more in love with the bad labels, in a way, because I felt like a great satisfaction in proving the adult world wrong, and shoving the labels they had used back in their face, in a way, if that makes sense?

WATKINS: Yeah, not completely. I mean, the system is very big on labels: young offender, inmate, felon.

GALVIN ALMANZA: So, I think a lot about the word delinquent. I think at my graduation I was thinking, “Here comes this delinquent across the stage. This is what I could do. Let me show you what I can do.” And that perspective followed me.

WATKINS: Right, to become a shit disturber as a public defender, sort of thing?

GALVIN ALMANZA: Well, but also to look at every kid, and think, “What can you do?”

WATKINS: Right, like the judge did with you.

GALVIN ALMANZA: Like the judge did with me! I’ve been proven right a lot of times, because there is so much genius trapped in this system. There are so many people I have represented who the system wanted to throw away, who have turned out to be phenomenal entrepreneurs, parents, innovators.

It’s, to me, that same act of throwing the label back in the faces of everybody who wanted to apply it.

WATKINS: So, you go on to be a public defender. I think I’ve heard you say you represented somewhere in the neighborhood of about 2000 clients.

GALVIN ALMANZA: I counted up once. Yeah. At one point I downloaded all of my cases from two different public defender’s offices that I’d worked at, and I was north of 2000 at that point.

WATKINS: So what do you learn doing that? I mean, what do you see that the average person doesn’t see? Clearly that’s a lot of what was the impetus behind writing this book.

GALVIN ALMANZA: A few things that really stand out: first of all, who our system is aimed at. Public defenders are defending about 80 percent of people who get arrested, because about 80 percent of people who are targeted by the system are so poor, that they qualify for a public defender. That is not how crime is actually distributed.

There’s huge amounts of crime that go un-pursued in this country, so that our country can hyper-police and hyper-criminalize even the most minor misconduct by poor people.

We’re talking about riding the train without paying, or selling bottled water without a license. I mean, really, really minor misconduct. And that’s the other thing that strikes you as a defender is, most people when they ask me about what I do, even if they phrase it in that terrible way of, “How can you defend those people?” What they mean is, they’re imagining that I have like two thousand Charlie Mansons, and I’m helping all of them get away with sneaky lawyer tricks.

In fact, I’m representing ordinary people who have done things that many, many, many people have done. The difference is that they are living in a hyper-policed neighborhood, where they’re a member of a group that attracts police attention, which is applied in an incredibly biased and non-strategic way. And so, they’re getting punished for things that anyone can imagine themselves doing.

The crime that keeps people up at night is not like one neighbor got mad at another neighbor and peed on his doormat. I am not lying in fear at night of the doormat pee-er. The crime that keeps most people up at night is, on the scale of the system, actually vanishingly rare.

WATKINS: Right.

GALVIN ALMANZA: When we think about what’s falling apart, I mean, again, starting from that framework of what’s in this system? Everything that happens thereafter is nightmarish, in part because the system is just clogged by throwing every social ill and civic issue that we have into the policing and punishment system, instead of allowing it to focus on the stuff that actually keeps people awake at night.

WATKINS: I was struck by this phrase you use about how mundane the injustice is. You’re not seeing these terrible crimes that people are very anxious about, as you say. It’s just the wheels churning, and the mundane injustice of it.

GALVIN ALMANZA: The mundane injustice is sort of a twofold thing. So, one, there’s the nature of the conduct that we see, and even stuff that is scary, like a guy with a machete. That sounds really scary. Until you realize, okay, it’s a teenager who shoved a machete in his jeans, and didn’t do anything with it, because other people he knows have guns and he’s scared of guns, and a machete is a big scary thing you can carry, as opposed to a pocketknife, which is not intimidating.

You break it down and you look at the root cause. And you’re like, “Oh. This is just humans doing human stuff. I get this. I can understand the root cause, and we could address the root cause of the fear and why is this kid feeling threatened and insecure in his life?”

But the other thing that’s the horror of mundane injustice, is that really bad things are done to people in a way that is channeled through enough bureaucratic practice, that it is conducted like business as usual. So for example, I’ll make up an example that is informed by my cases, but not spelling out the case, the facts of an actual case.

Let’s say you’ve got a new parent who’s on probation and they don’t show up to their meeting because they’ve got a new kid at home, and they’re doing everything right, and they’re bringing in income for the family, and they’re taking care of this kid, they found a place to live… And they missed these meetings.

WATKINS: Which is easy to do, when you have a new kid.

GALVIN ALMANZA: Easy to miss everything when you have a new kid! The system wants to teach that person a lesson by throwing them in jail, which takes them away from their kid, which eliminates the family income also, which puts the housing in jeopardy. It does so much harm, right? Not just to this person, but to their entire family unit.

And to watch it carried out with the tonal… with the sort of blasé tone of someone telling their spouse what groceries to pick up at the store. And that is crazymaking. You’re standing there watching someone’s life be split in half in front of them, and the person doing it is acting like they’re at the dry cleaner.

WATKINS: Right, and this is the reality of probation.

GALVIN ALMANZA: The Kafka-esque nature of what people are asked to do, it’s actually… So, in my day job with Partners for Justice, when we are sending people out to work inside public defender’s offices, and help public defender clients succeed, a huge chunk of our work is just helping people jump through the conflicting hoops and the logistical nightmares of doing what’s asked of them in the court system.

And when we do that, what we find is really extraordinary. We have around a 90 percent success rate in helping people comply with the criminal court demands. When we give people support, and then write down their story and how well they’re doing, and do some mitigation? We have found that just last year, in the cases where we did services mitigation, half of those cases got dismissed.

WATKINS: So where you have someone present to the judge, “Here are the circumstances of this person’s life.”

GALVIN ALMANZA: As simple as that, telling the story. “This is how a person came to be here, and also this is where they’re headed. This is what they’re working on. These are the opportunities in front of them. These are the achievements they’ve made recently. These are the people they take care of at home.” Because we forget that most of the time, judges are only seeing the human being as described in the four corners of a criminal complaint.

Between 2018 and 2024, last year, just doing that, services and storytelling, eliminated 9,000 years of incarceration. This is simple: we’re going to help people get what they need and we’re going to tell the story about it.

WATKINS: That sort of work that Partners for Justice is doing, that’s one of the inside-the-system solutions. And your book is, the whole second half of it is focused on solutions, and I want to talk about those, and it’s all very annotated and full of citations. You’ve got studies for everything. I mean, there’s no shortage of evidence that the system isn’t doing at least what it says it’s doing.

But my question before we start talking about those solutions is, because I know you think about this a lot, how do we get people to hear those solutions? People think of more punishment is more safety. That seems very intuitive.

How do we get the data, which you’re interested in, how do we get that data to stick, and to be heard?

GALVIN ALMANZA: Honestly, it’s the fundamental misconception on which this entire apparatus is built, right? Because if you look-

WATKINS: The punishment/safety…

GALVIN ALMANZA: The punishment system, yeah. If you look at this system that we’ve built writ large, and we say, “Is it working?” The 60 percent recidivism rate says, “No, it’s not working. We haven’t punished our way out of this.”

It’s funny, because people always assume that that punishment/safety relationship is intuitive to most people. And what’s weird is, it’s only intuitive to people on a macro scale about imagined people they don’t like.

If you ask somebody: your kid is misbehaving, do you punish your kid really harshly? And if they do it again, you punish them again even more harshly? Or do you figure out why they were misbehaving and try to address that?

Most people, 90 percent of people, are going to say, “Let’s figure out what’s going on. Let’s look at the root cause. Let’s go to the why. If my dog is biting people, beating the dog is not going to fix that. This is going to make the dog bite more people.”

So, the data on our criminal court system reflects, actually, a very intuitive reality, which is, when you’re using violence, isolation, lack of opportunity, trauma, to try to get people to thrive, it’s not happening! Exposure to incarceration is highly criminogenic, and that effect increases with greater exposure.

WATKINS: Criminogenic, we should say, like cigarettes are carcinogenic–

GALVIN ALMANZA: Yes.

WATKINS: –there is evidence that the criminal legal system is itself criminogenic, actually producing crime—coming up against the system generates future arrests.

GALVIN ALMANZA: There’s research in the book that I found so interesting, which is literally that exposure to two weeks of jail is worse than exposure to seven days, which is worse than exposure to three days. I mean, it’s literally like exposure to a carcinogen: the longer your exposure, the higher the likelihood that you will be arrested again in the future.

I believe that the answer here—which is figuring out accountability, rather than punishment: how do we hold people accountable for their conduct? How do we address the root causes of that conduct? And how do we shift the question from what’s the punishment, to how do we make sure this never happens again?

I am very confident that the vast majority of voters would much prefer a never-happens-again type of analysis.

It’s just not being given to them, because fear, and specifically fears about public safety, are highly useful to people who want to remain in power. And if you can get elected, or retain your position, because you’ve terrified people into thinking that they need harshness and control in order to create safety? There’s a self-interest driving this longstanding misconception.

WATKINS: Public defenders, for example, tend to focus in the way they communicate to the public a lot on the fairness issue, which they should, and the constitutional guarantee of representation.

Do you think public defenders could be more taking the battle to their opponents and be a little more aggressive pushing the public safety angle? Like, “Hey, the work that we’re doing is actually making us all more safe, as surprising as you might find that.”

GALVIN ALMANZA: Oh, my God, yes. Okay, so, this is a topic I love, because public defenders should be owning this conversation. If I as a public defender get somebody a disposition in their case that prevents them from going to prison for five years: one, I have prevented five years of exposure to a system that we know makes that person more likely to engage in harm in the future.

Two, I have returned 10 years of anticipated lifespan to them, because every year of incarceration shaves two years off a person’s expected lifespan. Three, let’s say that I’ve gotten them an outcome that is not a felony conviction. There was a recent study back in October that showed felony convictions are almost as bad as periods of incarceration, in terms of increasing likelihood of recidivism. That’s because a felony conviction can make many people unemployable in their chosen field.

So if I’ve prevented a felony conviction as a defender? I have done an economic mobility intervention. I have literally kept this person more likely to remain in the community, working, paying taxes, shopping at the corner store, driving our local economy. Defenders have this really interesting capacity to engage in protective services that impact safety, health, and economic mobility.

And then when you do what we do at PFJ, and you infuse them with the ability to directly find people housing, or directly do healthcare interventions that get people into treatment? They’re doubling or tripling their impact through direct affirmative interventions in that zone, making the public defender’s office like this locus of health, safety, and prosperity.

They are never getting credit for that! They’re never out there saying, “Hey, County Board of Supervisors, did you know that I am an engine of prosperity?”

WATKINS: That’s my question. I mean, how do we get that into the headlines the same way the rare person who’s out on pretrial release who commits something awful and horrifying, that gets in the headlines. How do we get all of these great interventions…

GALVIN ALMANZA: Well, we start by writing a book about it! We start by trying to put all of this information into the hands of ordinary people, and also into the hands of people who they listen to. So, lawmakers, journalists, filmmakers—the media writ large. The reason we’re always hearing these terrifying stories, is because if it bleeds, it leads, and people click on scary stories. Once again, fear is used to consolidate power.

Media outlets that publish really grizzly stuff can consolidate their own power and prosperity. I think one of the biggest challenges, communicatively, is that the truth about this system is slow and less dramatic. If you have a scary thing happen in the street, and you disappear that person involved right into a prison right away, the public feels like there was a stimulus and a response.

If you spend a year repairing housing in Philadelphia, you may have eliminated 50 of those similarly grizzly incidents that never come to pass. But you need the smart journalist who’s going to literally write the story of, “Here’s this beautiful family that ended up in this great home,” or, “Their home was repaired because of this intervention.” And, “Oh, by the way, here’s 50 teenagers that didn’t get shot in Philly because they did this program.”

I think that’s one of the worst failings of how our media forfeits the chance to cover this stuff.

Measure 110 in Portland—which, of course, did huge drug decriminalization and was criticized for not having had sufficient services to keep up with… If you decriminalize everything and you don’t have enough treatment in place, you’re going to have a bad time.

But the measure, even in its imperfect form, reduced the social cost of crime by about $800 million a year. And people, I think, are hungry for good stories, like good news stories. I’d love to see the clickbait-y headline that’s like, “This one weird trick saved us $800 million a year in the social cost of crime.”

I think as soon as you say a phrase like, “social cost of crime,” people stop listening! You have to stop at the $800 million. But there’s so many clickable, digestible, attractive pieces of good news that people are hungry for, in a moment when almost all of our news is bad.

WATKINS: But, I mean, of course, Measure 110 got largely rolled back, in part, people would say, because the proponents of it really lost… I mean, we can’t get into all the details, but, there was some bad timing of fentanyl arriving, but also the messaging war was lost pretty definitively, it seemed like.

GALVIN ALMANZA: The messaging war is hard. It’s hard, because when people look at a street where people are using drugs openly, they see crime and danger. What they should be seeing is a massive failure of public services to take care of people who obviously need more: need more care, need more support, need more housing, need better food, have needs.

Lock them away is an instantaneous solution for the person on the street. It is not a solution at all for the person involved. Jails and prisons don’t fix crime. They disappear it into designated spaces where you can concentrate the violence and horror inside a building.

And then release: 95 percent of people come home from prison! So, we don’t get to decide that people go away and never bother us again. Everybody comes home. We get to decide, did we take care of them and give them options so they come home well? Or, did we abandon them into something even worse, so that when they come home, they struggle worse?

And once again, the street that I’m looking at looks like a street I don’t want to walk down. That is a huge communicative challenge, because for your average voter, the disappearance of people from the street is satisfactory.

WATKINS: Turning to look at some of the solutions directly: One of them—as a former public defender, and now someone who works very much with public defenders—one solution is beefing up the power of public defenders.

I know one particular area that you think about a lot, and my organization’s been thinking about a lot and just put out a policy document about it, is making sure that people have a lawyer for their first appearance before a judge—their arraignment, as it’s called in some places, right after an arrest.

Now, many people think because of the Supreme Court Gideon decision in 1963, “Well, everybody’s guaranteed a lawyer all the time. It’s no problem.” I mean, I was a little shocked to learn that in half the states right now, there’s really no requirement that you be represented by a public defender at an arraignment.

Now, these are things that often, arraignments are 30 seconds, maybe they’re two minutes if you’re lucky, sometimes. But they’re hugely consequential.

GALVIN ALMANZA: When I first started out as a public defender, I started out in Santa Clara County, San Jose, which I loved. I loved being there. I loved the work. I loved the office. We were not in arraignments at that time. When I moved to Bronx Defenders-

WATKINS: Public defenders did not work in arraignments at all?

GALVIN ALMANZA: Arraignments were not staffed at that time.

WATKINS: Yeah.

GALVIN ALMANZA: Yeah.

WATKINS: So it’s just the person is arrested, and then they go before a judge who’s making decisions about bail and pretrial detention, and there’s a prosecutor, generally, but no defender.

GALVIN ALMANZA: First of all, I couldn’t tell you, because I wasn’t in those rooms! But by the time I showed up, my client was either in or out, and I could make motions to reconsider bail, motions to reduce bail.

WATKINS: But they’re already detained at that point.

GALVIN ALMANZA: They’re already detained! I was meeting my clients already detained.

When I went to Bronx Defenders, and I got to go into the New York arraignment system, which is… I have a lot of stuff I don’t like about public defense in New York. I don’t like New York speedy trial laws, and I didn’t like New York discovery laws at the time. I had a lot of sort of California snootiness of like, “How come I can’t just pull my time waiver and have my trial immediately?”

But the arraignment system is amazing, because everybody, for the most part, is getting in front of a judge with a lawyer within 24 hours of arrest! And what’s so great about that, is that that time between arrest and seeing a judge, and that time before the first meaningful court date, is obviously time when everything can go wrong.

You don’t know who’s got your daughter. You can’t necessarily reach anyone at work to tell them that you’re not going to be there, or why you’re not going to be there. You might lose your job. If you don’t have the job, how are you going to pay your rent? How are you going to keep your apartment?

If you don’t have your apartment, how are you going to prevent a CPS intervention that impacts your ability to be with your kids? But also, most people don’t know this: most jails won’t give people their medications that they’re already on. They take this position that they have to re-diagnose and re-prescribe everybody.

So you’ve got somebody… People have died in jails from lack of organ transplant anti-rejection medications. People have de-compensated because of a lack of mental health medications. Obviously, getting in front of a judge with a lawyer within 24 hours, is a really, really useful thing.

And having lawyers who are trained to really argue, to really think beyond the rote factors of, “This person’s lived here for a while and the crime’s not that bad,” and really get into, “Who is this person? Are they someone who’s so trusted by their boss that they hold the keys to the store, and they open and close the store? Well, you can trust that person to come back to court.”

When my original home county of Santa Clara County started doing that, and got lawyers into arraignments at that stage? Literally, counsel at first appearance resulted in 79 percent less time in jail.

WATKINS: Wow.

GALVIN ALMANZA: Huge drops in jail time, which, of course, we have to note for people who don’t care about humans, but only care about money, that’s a really big savings to the jurisdiction. But other huge benefits as well: more people at home, keeping jobs, staying with their family, fewer kids traumatized by a parental absence, more people avoiding the healthcare impact of having been incarcerated.

Also, when I came to the Bronx Defenders, it really became clear to me through my training there, that how much that arraignment moment was the most important moment in the case. You’re setting up everything that happens thereafter.

WATKINS: And it’s a moment where so often people are, it’s seen as inconsequential, and they’re unrepresented.

GALVIN ALMANZA: Exactly.

WATKINS: But of course, it’s all there.

GALVIN ALMANZA: It’s all there! And if you’re fighting your case from inside a jail cell, you’re less likely to withstand what I call the grind of the pretrial process. We live in a country where more than 90 percent of cases end in a guilty plea, and that is not because police and prosecutors get it right 90 percent of the time. It’s because most people can’t withstand the incredible grinding process of coming back to court again and again and again and again and again.

For people who are withstanding jail—and isolated, and living in a place where they may be experiencing violence every day, and rotten food and bad medicine, and no access to their family? Who wouldn’t plead guilty just to go home under those circumstances?

Which is why, when Santa Clara County started staffing arraignments, when they had lawyers at that first appearance, those clients were 27 percent less likely to be convicted at all. So, a third fewer people were getting criminal convictions, and a third more likely to get a full dismissal of their charges.

WATKINS: To look at another solution that you advocate in the book—and again, it’s one that Center for Justice Innovation, where I work, is also really invested in—which is restorative justice. We know that restorative justice is a solution that has been picked up by a lot of jurisdictions, in fact.

But it tends to be seen as something that’s only appropriate for maybe younger people, or charges that don’t involve violence, less serious charges. I think you’re advocating that that’s really a missed opportunity.

GALVIN ALMANZA: Restorative justice programs are phenomenal. They’re an incredible way, for those who don’t know, to create real accountability, to put the survivor of crime in a position where they can have a meaningful encounter with the person who is responsible for that crime, and have that person take responsibility and make amends, and make those amends meaningful, because they’re guided by what the survivor actually wants.

WATKINS: The last episode, actually, we recorded of this podcast in this room, was with the parents of a young man who had been murdered—I mean, the victim of a one-punch manslaughter. They had entered a restorative justice process, and he was part of the interview, was with the then young person who had committed that act. They had all found an enormous amount of healing, as a result of it.

GALVIN ALMANZA: See, when you talk to survivors of crime who have been through the normal criminal court system, the vast majority of them are dissatisfied. And it might be because 90 percent of the forms of support they’re offered require their full participation in a criminal process they might disagree with.

But the vast majority of them are not getting therapy, support, financial resources they might need for recovery. The point is, processes that create an opportunity for someone to get what they’re actually hoping for—which is real accountability and real recompense—are much more meaningful than rote punishment solutions that leave everyone harmed and dissatisfied.

But it’s not just RJ that we need to increase access to: diversion programs, treatment courts, specialty courts. These specialty courts that look like drug court, homelessness court, mental health court, sexual violence court. There’s sex trafficking, human trafficking court. There’s like a million different kinds of specialty courts that deal with very specific problems that have root causes that can be addressed.

And generally, you’re absolutely right: the people who are going into those opportunities and getting off-ramps, are the people who are perceived as most palatable by prosecutors. So they tend to be…

WATKINS: Lowest risk, first-time arrests…

GALVIN ALMANZA: Lowest risk, with their first arrest. If you’ve got somebody who felt like their first arrest was like one pill of ecstasy in their pocket at a rave in a warehouse somewhere in Brooklyn, I don’t think that person is in the struggle that much. Maybe they are. But probably that person would have been headed towards a dismissal, anyway: first arrest, small-time thing.

The person who might need, for example, a treatment court—and again, in the book, I have a really complicated perspective on treatment courts. They’re not all great; they’re not all terrible. But let’s just say, in terms of being given an opportunity to not go through the regular punishment system: the person who has been arrested 65 times, because they have been struggling with severe protracted substance use disorder for decades, and now really, really wants inpatient treatment, which they have never gotten to do before, because they could never afford it.

WATKINS: Well, and it’s so hard to get, right?

GALVIN ALMANZA: It’s hard to get a bed.

WATKINS: Half the people who want treatment can’t get it, I think.

GALVIN ALMANZA: Yes! It’s hard to get into. It’s also expensive, and you might not have the right insurance. There’s a lot of barriers that keep people from being able to do inpatient treatment. When you have a person who is saying, “I am 65 years old, and I don’t want my life to look like this anymore. Can you please, please give me this opportunity?”

WATKINS: Well, I mean, also we could learn the lessons of harm reduction more generally, right, and treat substance use as the public health problem that I think it is, rather than a criminal legal problem, right? So much of the system’s resources are taken up with drug and drug-related activities.

GALVIN ALMANZA: This is absolutely true. A huge quantity of what’s in the system should not be here at all. As a defender, I spent a lot of my time on cases that were absolutely public health matters—it was just behavior. People whose behavior had been modified by substance use, or by a mental health condition that was addressable, that would not be impacted by the threat of punishment.

If a person has a health condition, they can’t decide to be well. It’s not a matter of them being stubborn about it. It’s a health matter, and we need to deal with that in a medical way. But the same thing also is true of crimes of desperation and poverty.

If your kid is sick, and to get the medicine that you cannot otherwise afford for that kid, you cannot afford it on your minimum wage job. But if you sell drugs, you can absolutely afford that medicine for your kid, what are you going to choose? I mean, desperation and poverty is also an addressable underlying cause of misconduct.

I think we also need to deal with the degree to which cycles of trauma are driving people’s behavior. Honestly, adverse childhood events that we are currently causing in the criminal legal system, become later a driving factor in that child’s behavior as an adult. So, if we were to look at this from a logical perspective, we would be doing almost none of this with a criminal punishment apparatus, and most of it with social work and medical resources.

WATKINS: Right. And then I feel like we’re back at our like, well, how does one win the battle for public opinion and messaging here? I mean, we’re sitting in New York City, where it costs in the neighborhood of half a million dollars to put someone on Rikers for one year. So, the fiscal argument doesn’t seem to be working. I mean, at that point, that doesn’t seem… There’s nothing rational or logical about that decision.

GALVIN ALMANZA: Yeah, I wonder how much people are actually reasonably comparing the costs. I mean, I think one of the things that is so propulsive, in terms of getting the public to make better decisions about what systems they want, are the amazing results we see in social work-first response teams.

The fact that there are these teams where they’re almost never having to call for police backup, they are routing hundreds or thousands of people into forms of treatment those people actually need, as opposed to the punishment system. And more importantly, they’re giving people a way to call for help, without feeling like you might cost someone their life.

So, to my mind, these pilots and their stellar results, and these pilots and the experience that they give community members who have the option of what type of first response to engage? I think that over time, those are going to win over people in a way that the Rikers solution just can’t, because it’s expensive and dysfunctional.

WATKINS: And then it’s notable that the new mayor here has said, well, we’re going to have this new public safety approach that you’re talking about, of sending out non-police responders.

GALVIN ALMANZA: I want to send him a copy of the book, so he knows how right he is! I have like a hundred pages of data for him that are backing up that choice.

We always talk about this like we’re losing as a sort of criminal legal transformation movement, but we’re not!

WATKINS: You say in the intro of the book—the first half is the problems, the second half is the solutions—but you say in the intro, that you describe what you’re doing as a critique that is an act of love.

I was struck by that word, “love.” I’m wondering what it is exactly that you love? Because clearly, it helped to motivate the writing of this book.

GALVIN ALMANZA: I really love that we, in this ludicrous country, put the hands of 12 community members into the act of defining truth. That’s wild.

WATKINS: When it makes it to a trial, and we have a jury.

GALVIN ALMANZA: Right. That’s a wild thing to do! I love that we tried… I say tried, because we’re in this moment right now where, what judges are choosing to do is really different in the moment than it has been in a while. But we did for a long time have a system in which many jurists lent so much of their intellectual force to trying to bend a system closer to fairness.

I love that we have chosen to both accuse and defend the people that stand accused in this country. I mean, there are beautiful things floating in this hellscape! I also think that it’s an act of love to try to realize the dream of what America could be.

It’s an act of determination. We don’t have to fall prey to the worst aspects of our history. We can build something better, and we don’t have to be stuck in the moment that we’re in. Especially in my field, because my field is, because it is relegated to the states, that does make it totally chaotic, in many ways, but it also makes it super subject to local control and local change.

The acts of an individual citizen matter so much more in this subject matter than they do in subject matter that is only federally regulated, because you’re one of hundreds of millions of people in the national context. But in your town, you may be one of 30,000 people who can fundamentally change the way justice is delivered or not delivered.

And so, I think that critique is an act of commitment to this idea that we who live in this country, can build beautiful things in our backyard, and we don’t have to wait for people in Washington to build anything beautiful for us.

WATKINS: Well, I really want to thank you for your determination, for your hopefulness, for the rigor with which you’ve approached putting together this really impressive book.

GALVIN ALMANZA: Thank you.

WATKINS: And obviously, the book is an extension of the work that you’re already doing, and thank you very much for that work. And just thank you so much for this conversation, and for making the time today.

GALVIN ALMANZA: Thanks for having me.

WATKINS: That was my conversation with Emily Galvin Almanza. Emily is the author of the forthcoming book, The Price of Mercy: Unfair Trials, a Violent System, and a Public Defender’s Search for Justice in America. She is also the co-founder and executive director of Partners for Justice.

For more info about Emily and about this episode, visit our website at innovatingjustice.org/new-thinking.

For their help with this episode, my thanks to Catriona Ting Morton and the entire communications team here at the Center; and to my colleagues, Lisa Vavonese and Julian Adler.

Today’s episode was produced and edited by me. It was recorded by David Herman at Brooklyn’s Good Studio. Samiha Amin Meah is our director of design; Emma Dayton is our V-P of outreach; and our theme music is by Michael Aharon at quivernyc.com.

This has been New Thinking from the Center for Justice Innovation. I’m Matt Watkins. Thanks for listening.