The Courage of Compassion

Informationen zum Autor Robin Steinberg is the founder and CEO of The Bail Project, a national effort to combat mass incarceration by transforming the pretrial system in the United States. Over a 35-year career as a public defender, Robin represented thousands of low-income people in over-policed neighborhoods and founded three additional high-impact organizations: The Bronx Defenders, The Bronx Freedom Fund, and Still She Rises. Robin has also taught trial advocacy and other courses at Columbia University Law School and UCLA School of Law. Robin is a frequent commentator on criminal justice issues and has contributed opinion pieces to the New York Times , the Marshall Project , and USA Today . Camilo A. Ramirez is a Colombian literary translator and strategic communications professional. He currently serves as Chief Strategy Officer for The Bail Project. His translations include The Desert and Its Seed by Jorge Barón Biza, and Like a Fading Shadow , by Antonio Muños Molina, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. Klappentext "From the founder and CEO of The Bail Project, The Courage of Compassion unveils how we can reimagine justice through compassion. Steinberg shares her journey as a public defender, representing people at precisely that time in their lives--their own worst moment. She recounts the heart-wrenching stories of her clients and invites us to interrogate our fears and beliefs about justice and punishment. Lastly, Steinberg reveals moments when she questioned her own capacity for compassion, as well as her ability to fight for better, more humane justice from within a system that is riddled with holes and seemingly interminable problems"--Publisher marketing. Leseprobe Chapter 1: How Can You Defend "Those People"? Like every public defender, I have been asked this question countless times at parties, holiday meals, family gatherings, in the courtroom, and even on the street after a trial. People have also demanded an answer in hate mail, media interviews, and other less-than-friendly venues. My responses range from the flippant to the philosophical and purely political. The fundamental importance of the right to counsel. The primacy of the presumption of innocence. The need to check government power. Mass incarceration. Frankly, these answers are the autopilot reply for a career defender. And there is truth in them. But they do not fully explain why I chose to devote my life to defending people at the mercy of our criminal justice system, and to dedicate myself to changing it. In America, anyone accused of a crime that carries with it a possible sentence of incarceration is entitled to counsel. This right to an attorney is a critical safeguard to protect those most vulnerable when the government seeks to take away liberty. Public defenders breathe life into that concept. They are the only institutional actors in the criminal justice system with the sole and unequivocal responsibility of defending the accused, no matter what the charge. The guarantee of a public defender for the poor is essential to the proper functioning of an adversarial system of justice and has become even more critical given our seemingly insatiable appetite for jailing people, even before they've had a trial. Mass incarceration is a truly American phenomenon. While the term mass incarceration has finally made its way into popular culture, I'm not entirely sure most people understand how truly horrifying the scale of this problem is. America is home to less than 5 percent of the world's population, but about 25 percent of the world's incarcerated people live in America. Even by conservative estimates, at least five million people churn through our jails every year. That is larger than the combined population of Phoenix and Chicago, every year. It is no surprise, then, that nearly one...

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Robin Steinberg is the founder and CEO of The Bail Project, a national effort to combat mass incarceration by transforming the pretrial system in the United States. Over a 35-year career as a public defender, Robin represented thousands of low-income people in over-policed neighborhoods and founded three additional high-impact organizations: The Bronx Defenders, The Bronx Freedom Fund, and Still She Rises. Robin has also taught trial advocacy and other courses at Columbia University Law School and UCLA School of Law. Robin is a frequent commentator on criminal justice issues and has contributed opinion pieces to the New York Times, the Marshall Project, and USA Today.

Camilo A. Ramirez is a Colombian literary translator and strategic communications professional. He currently serves as Chief Strategy Officer for The Bail Project. His translations include The Desert and Its Seed by Jorge Barón Biza, and Like a Fading Shadow, by Antonio Muños Molina, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.

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How would you like to be judged for the rest of your life by the worst thing you've ever done?

We all think we are compassionate just like we all think we are honest. But true compassion is not innate. Compassion for others, especially those that we don't know or understand, must be learned. Our lack of compassion is perhaps most extreme in the exercise of criminal justice, where a person's entire life, worth, and character are judged through the myopic lens of a single act. But no one, says Steinberg, should be reduced to their worst moment.

The Courage of Compassion, is a powerful memoir from veteran public defender and founder of The Bail Project about how we can reimagine justice through compassion. Steinberg shares her journey as a public defender, representing people at precisely that time in their lives - their own worst moment. She recounts the heart-wrenching stories of her clients and invites us to interrogate our fears and beliefs about justice and punishment. Lastly, Steinberg reveals moments when she questioned her own capacity for compassion, as well as her ability to fight for better, more humane justice from within a system that is riddled holes and seemingly interminable problems.

A gritty tale about confronting injustice and challenging ourselves to rediscover our shared humanity, The Courage of Compassion is an invitation to join Steinberg as she explores what it will take to move beyond our current justice paradigm. The criminal justice system reflects a history and power structure, but it also mirrors how we come into society and show up for one another. As she writes, the quest to improve this system will only truly begin "when we can finally see in the faces of those ensnared and imprisoned in our legal system, ourselves. And when we can see our children, in their children."