-: My name is Stefen Short, I'm a staff attorney
with the Prisoners' Rights Project of the Legal Aid Society.
We're an organization that files class-action cases
for people in state custody
and people in New York City custody.
Most of our class-actions are
about conditions of confinement in the jails,
anything from access to proper necessities of life,
whether it's food, drinking water,
access to services in the prisons, commissary,
programs, things of that nature.
We also file use-of-force cases against the city,
and we file use-of-force cases in the state system.
Essentially, we exist to create
prisons and jails that are humane
and prisons and jails that rehabilitate
rather than simply punish.
So we have our advocacy, our individual advocacy clients.
They will either call us through our hotline
or write us about a particular rights violation
they're experiencing on the inside.
Often times, we will advocate directly
through the facility for that client,
so we can write to a superintendent,
we can write to a person such as a deputy superintendent
who may be in charge of getting that person
the programming and services they need.
I often will write to the central office
for the Department of Corrections
to address issues such as
failures to accommodate a disability
or failures to accommodate a mental health need.
So there are a variety
of different individual advocacy channels that we use.
One of the really great things
about being a civil rights lawyer
is that all of us are involved
in all of our cases from inception, right?
We interact with the client at the front end,
we read the first letter, we take the first call,
we work with our paralegal staff
and our other attorney staff to write the advocacy letter.
We very often visit the client
and speak with the client, get to know the client.
And of course we're involved in writing the complaint,
if it's a litigation, and filing the complaint,
and arguing if there's an argument.
I'm involved in a case on the city side
called Handberry versus Thompson,
which is probably one of the most important education cases
in the correctional, against the correctional, institution,
probably in the history of the country.
It was filed in 1996 by this office.
As a direct result of that case,
about 90% of the people on Rikers Island
who are eligible for education
are being educated right now.
Prior to the filing of that case,
only 40% of the people eligible
on the island were being educated.
I'm involved in some other brutality-related issues,
ensuring that our clients are not subjected
to long periods in solitary confinement.
It really runs the gamut.
There are a lot of human rights violations
occurring in our prisons,
and we try to involve ourselves
in remedying as much of those as possible
and you know, my day is different every single day
for that reason.