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.

bailing leaks

What I want to remember (and tell others): Ms. B, wheezing and wheeling her oxygen cart out of the courtroom, disbelieving what just happened to her son. Looking to me for an explanation i can only hastily deliver, like a menu with nothing good to offer. "Don't they care that he didn't go to jail for five years?" she asks, the frustration acute as it is impotent. "Don't they care he's turned his life around, and then they go and send him back there?" No, Ms. B, there's not a santa claus. Not for young men with criminal pasts. This is bail court in Hamilton, maybe most cities in this slick-surfaced system. Where all the procedure in the world can't protect someone mixed up in the shitty situation of being charged with a crime, and having a record, and being too poor or poorly-connected to post cash. Even if the case is flimsy. Even if he's doing what he can, working, caring for a dying mom. And, in the sickly-lit cellblock below the courthouse after his bail has been denied, my client pleads that he can't spend the summer in jail waiting for a trial. Even if the charge is bogus, he wants to plead. This is how the auto-miscarriages of justice begin, the failures far more common, far less trumpeted than wrongful convictions in high-profile trials. Once a justice of the peace figures a guy is probably guilty, and will probably breach the conditions of his release, the game's almost always over. Cards dealt from a stacked deck. This might not bother most people, but it makes me mad as hell. Because in the eddied hours between when a fella is arrested and when he's brought up for bail, there's no chance to mount a defence, not one in any way comparable to that which the police are able to mustre. This wouldn't be so bad if the cops did full and unbiased investigations, but, unfortunately, they don't. They shoot for convictions. They turn grey into black. So, in the space of a few vertigoed days, someone can go from being free, to being accused of a crime (but, of course, still legally innocent), to being held in a detention centre with Nothing on offer, a holding pen for men facing the brutal choice of accepting the case against them, or waiting and waiting for the trial that is their right. Getting 20 minutes of fresh air a day. Losing their apartments, their possessions, their relationships. Bail is so important, and is far too often denied. Just another aspect of why for too many people, for too many times when it really matters, justice doesn't.

The tender scent of failure

so it's a muggy sunday eve in western hamilton, and, because a man may be stepped over in a doorway, there's another bloody war going on, the lilacs are blooming, and justice is a dirty word, i've decided to start another blog. This is only some of why.