slippery slopes

I can feel my views about this work changing. Throughout my education, and even more intensely when I actually started practising, I saw myself as responding to a call to assist in restorations, in resolutions, in creating positive shared outcomes on behalf of people facing difficult situations, and hard choices. People charged with crimes need help, and I definitely want to help them. Only when I started I figured that co-operating with the various authorities in their lives, the cops, the crown, the courts, the children's aid societies, was a good means of working towards that rare and delicate place where help is not a battlefield, where all interests intersect and become one. I encouraged openness, admissions, full disclosure, I talked about healing; I did all this because I believed that these so-called mature, honest ways of behaving would earn my clients some measure of respect and understanding in the system. I did this on the assumption that justice professionals care about truth, and more so, care about untangling, however partially, the knots in people's lives that create crime. It increasingly seems though, that I thought wrong. While certain players within these powerful organisations definitely care about helping heal people's brokenness, the institutions themselves don't foster the necessary creative, compassionate orientation. Worse, the justice structures I'm encountering don't even seem to honour the hard work of truth-telling, let alone the restoration of right relations between individuals. In an overloaded system that's obsessed with process shy about substance, I'm learning that so often the best I can do for vulnerable clients (and, truly, accused persons before the courts are some of society's most pitiable souls), is to protect them somewhat from the ravages of the state's un-nuanced punitiveness. Cops in this town routinely toss every conceivable charge on the paper, and then conduct investigations tapered solely towards proving their case. Crowns, for the most part, seem intent on either covering their ass by being 'reasonably' conservative, or just plain bloody-minded, convinced of a person's guilt (and thus badness) the moment the police package lands on their desks (which, sadly, is usually three minutes before they're authoritatively speaking to it in court). With such a steely array of state-sharpened swords set against my client, it's perhaps no wonder that I'm falling more and more into the common defence orientation as unyielding shield wielder. My clients may not morally benefit from this unfortunate reality, but at least they'll be slightly less likely to be tossed in jail, which as far as I can tell does far more harm than good to their innate humanity.