What is Holistic Defense
Holistic defense combines aggressive legal advocacy with a broader recognition that for most poor people arrested and charged with a crime, the criminal case is not the only issue with which they struggle. The key insight of holistic defense is that to be truly effective advocates for our clients, we as defenders must broaden the scope of our work to include both the collateral consequences of criminal justice involvement as well as the underlying issues, both legal and non-legal, that have played a part in driving our clients into the criminal justice system in the first place.
As public defenders we are first-hand witnesses to the revolving door that is the criminal justice system and we experience daily the futility of equating a successful legal defense with the achievement of justice. As a result of our formalistic legal training and the narrow roles we are assigned in the spectacle of our criminal justice system, we feel unprepared, unsupported and, as a consequence, thoroughly unable to address the underlying issues in the lives of our clients. While we know that the practice of effective, high-caliber lawyering is necessary if we are ever to secure justice for our clients, our experience teaches us that zealous lawyering alone is insufficient to achieve the vision of justice that motivates so many of us to do this work.
Thus the question becomes whether it is possible to re-imagine the scope of our work in order to become true and lasting agents for change and transformation in the lives of our clients. Holistic defense is a response to this challenge, offering a path out of the depressing thicket in which most traditional public defenders find themselves sooner or later.
Practicing holistic defense also leads to better legal outcomes for our clients. Simply put, case dispositions are better where defense lawyers who have a more comprehensive understanding of their clients. Similarly, clients who are in the process of addressing some of their underlying life issues generally fare better either when plea-bargaining or at trial. Case outcomes are also better (and defense counsel more likely to render effective assistance of counsel) when clients are fully informed of the collateral consequences of their criminal case and therefore are in a better position to make a truly informed choice about how to proceed. Clients of holistic defenders tend to come away from their experience with increased confidence in their representation in the criminal justice system. Finally, by stabilizing lives the practice of holistic defense reduces the likelihood of future criminal justice contact.
Realizing this vision means working to create public defender offices that not only have in-house civil advocates but also social workers and others who all work as equal members of the defense team. Of course, holistic defense is not an either/or proposition and, in fact, will most often be practiced along a spectrum. That is, some offices might be more or less holistic in different ways. Additionally, the specifics of the practice must be tailored to meet the particular needs of communities in which an office is located.
