-: I am also involved because I think that humane prisons
serve society, right?
90% of the people incarcerated in our systems
are going to come back to the community
and our question,
the question that we have to answer as a society is,
who do we want to come back to our community?
Do we want people who are more violent,
more prone to violence back in our communities?
Or do we want people who have been rehabilitated?
Do we want people who can be productive members
as we always say of society?
And there are a variety of other issues, right?
Dostoyevsky said you judge a society and its humanity
by entering its prisons
and I really do believe that it's a human rights issue here
and that's what we fight for in a day-to-day basis.
And due that, I think we stand to benefit all society
and that's a real force that pushes me to do what I do
on a day-to-day basis.
The hardest part and this was something that I realized
through college, through law school,
and then through my first maybe three years of practice,
realizing that as a civil rights lawyer,
you cannot fix everything
and you certainly can't fix as much as you think
you can fix.
The law on prisoner's rights,
that's the Eighth Amendment,
state law, what have you,
is not as protective as we would like it to be
of prisoner's rights.
It's not as robust as we would like it to be
so our litigation options
for addressing the rights of our clients
are not always strong.
Also, the potency of our advocacy letters
is not always the highest
and sometimes we get ignored
and that's due I think to the dehumanization of our clients
and due to a lot of deficiencies
in the corrections departments,
so we can't always fix everything that we want to.
And having a call with the mother of an incarcerated person
or the wife of an incarcerated person
and explaining what we can and cannot do
and explaining the results of our advocacy
can be very, very hard.