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October 2020 Issue [Memoir]

On Defense

Twenty-five years of fighting mass incarceration in court
Police officers in New York City, 1995 © Glasshouse Images/Alamy

Police officers in New York City, 1995 © Glasshouse Images/Alamy

[Memoir]

On Defense

Twenty-five years of fighting mass incarceration in court
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When I began working as a public defender in Manhattan, I was met mostly with pity. It was the mid-Nineties, and whatever was in the air, it wasn’t nuance. The city was in the process of reimagining the very concept of crime and, by extension, who should be subject to incarceration. Under orders from the mayor, the police took conduct that New Yorkers had grudgingly borne for years as symptoms of inequality—stop at a red light and someone emerges to clean your windshield in the hopes of a quarter, visit a fast-food restaurant and someone opens the door with…

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 is the legal director of New York County Defender Services and the author, most recently, of the novel Lost Empress.


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October 2020

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