Meet Robin Steinberg, the Public Defender Who’s Showing All of Us How to Open Our Hearts and Minds a Little More

Robin Steinberg has spent the last 35 years working as a public defender, representing thousands of low-income people. She’s had a front-row seat to the intricacies of our criminal justice system and how it works, and she says it’s time to reimagine justice—and that this must start with each and every one of us.

“Reimagining justice starts when we see ourselves in the faces of those in our criminal justice system,” Steinberg told The Sunday Paper. “It starts when we allow ourselves to feel another’s pain as our own. It starts with compassion.”

We sat down with this Architect of Change to talk about her new book, The Courage of Compassion, and how all of us can open our hearts and minds a bit more when it comes to our criminal justice system—and each other.

A CONVERSATION WITH ROBIN STEINBERG

You write that “to be a great public defender, you must awaken your curiosity so that your mind is open to seeing the person standing next to you, in their entirety, as you fight for them. How can all of us do this in more of our personal interactions?

To be human is to be curious, and yet curiosity doesn’t always come to us naturally. We are quick to judge and even quicker to punish. Sometimes, the more we know—or the more we think we know—the less curious we become about each other. It’s an interesting paradox. If you’re not intentional, judgment slowly replaces curiosity, and before you know it, you have turned someone into nothing more than a caricature.

This can happen in personal relationships but also in society at large when we dismiss entire groups of people. Perhaps nowhere is this more extreme than in the criminal justice system, where individuals are often reduced to their own worst moment, along with their life’s worth and potential. We stop seeing them as human and only see criminal charges. We stop seeing the possibility of redemption and only see the need for punishment.

As a public defender, you don’t choose whom you represent. People who can’t afford an attorney are assigned to you, and it is your duty to protect their liberty, their rights, and their dignity. You can do that best when you recognize that the person you see has a life story, a context, and a future. For me, curiosity was an antidote to the machinery of the criminal justice system, where people often become little more than case numbers. As a public defender, I learned how to see past someone’s worst moment or act. In fact, that was the starting point for my relationship. The challenge was to push myself past judgment to try to understand how my client got to that moment and to recognize that there can always be a road back.

Leaning into that challenge extends far beyond the criminal justice system. It’s a way to engage in the world, a way to engage with our neighbors, friends, and family, particularly when we disagree. Whether that means sitting across the dinner table from an uncle whose political views you find abhorrent or trying to understand someone who hurt you, none of us want to be defined by our worst moment, thought, or thing we’ve said. And all of us are entitled to be understood more fully—with all the messiness and complexity that being human entails.

We need to be willing to not just hear each other out, but be curious about how that person came to do the thing they did or believe the thing they believe and then explore: What’s underneath it? Why do they think that way or act that way? What do we have in common?

We won’t always agree, and certainly we won’t always like what someone did, but if you approach the other person with an open heart and a curious mind, you will find that we share much more than what appears to divide us.

After years of fighting within the criminal justice system, you’ve realized that a big part of the problem lies within each one of us—our inability to recognize ourselves in “those people” and see our shared humanity is at the heart of our cruelty. Can you say more about this?

What I’ve come to realize is both simple and deeply complex. The systems we create reflect our values, and so if we want to change them, we need to look inward and do the hard work of developing compassion for one another. Creating better policies and laws is important, but if we don’t transform ourselves, we will be doomed to create the same harms in different forms.

When we reduce people to labels, call them names or define them by the worst thing they have ever done, we might feel better in the moment—but we lose our connection to each other. We lose the gift of mutual understanding. By failing to recognize our shared humanity, we create an abstract other and allow ourselves to do terrible and cruel things to them. That cruelty and inhumanity are a daily reality for those ensnared in the criminal justice system.

If we want to make our criminal justice system better, we need to hold ourselves accountable for how we treat each other—not just in our courts and jails, but in our everyday lives. At the end of the day, I have come to recognize that compassion can be more than just the foundation for how we live. It also has the potential to be a powerful political force for good.

You are the founder of The Bail Project, a non-profit that pays bail for people in need to restore the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. What do you wish more people would know about the importance of bail reform?

Bail reform is critical if we are to live up to the promise of equal justice under the law. That is because our current cash bail system creates a two-tiered system of justice based solely on the size of your bank account. It embeds racial disparities, undermines the presumption of innocence, and it does not make us any safer. If we believe in the words we etch into the marble entryway to courthouses across America – “Equal Justice for All” – then the cash bail system must change.

It's important to remember that cash bail was intended to be a form of release for someone accused, but not convicted, of a crime. The theory was if judges set bail in an amount the accused could pay, it would provide an incentive for the person to return to court. Because at the end of a case, the money comes back to you.

Over the years, cash bail has been set in amounts that most people cannot afford to pay. This has created a humanitarian crisis so large that today, most people in our 3,000 local jails across America are not there because they have been convicted of a crime. They are there because they do not have enough money to pay cash bail while they are waiting for their day in court, which can take weeks, months, or even years. What we know for sure is that spending even a few days in jail is a terrifying, traumatic, and destabilizing experience that can have far-reaching impacts beyond a legal case, like losing your livelihood, your home, or even custody of your children.

There has been a lot of misinformation and fear mongering about bail reform in the last few years. What do you want readers to know?

Opponents to bail reform point to rising crime rates and claim they are the product of bail reform. That is simply not true. There is no evidence of a causal relationship between limited bail reforms in a handful of jurisdictions and rising crime rates across the nation. What is clear is that the pandemic deeply destabilized our society, creating loss and uncertainty while gun sales skyrocketed and police-community relations continued to deteriorate. Talk about a perfect storm for increased crime rates.

When it comes to cash bail, what we have proven from our work at The Bail Project over the past five years is that a justice system that runs on money is unnecessary, unfair, and unjust. When we intervene by paying bail with donated charitable dollars, our clients return to over 92% of their court appearances, even though they have no financial interest in the bail money. Moreover, across our branches, anywhere from 20 to 70% of our clients see their cases dismissed entirely once they can defend themselves from a place of freedom. If bail had not been paid, over 90% of people would have pled guilty because it was the only way to go home sooner, even if they were innocent.

If we believe in equal justice, the presumption of innocence, and racial justice, or if we want to stop the ravages of decades of mass incarceration, bail reform is essential to creating a better pretrial system. It is that important.

How can we open our hearts and minds just a bit more when it comes to our criminal justice system—and each other?

It’s natural to close your heart and mind when you are afraid. The first thing we must grapple with are our fears—the rational and the irrational. When we hear the details of a scary crime, we get scared, and that fear overcomes our rationality. We can stop that cycle by replacing our fears with curiosity.

When you hear someone labeled a “criminal” or “defendant” or “perpetrator”, remember that behind that label is a human being. Rather than reacting, try to take a step back and ask if anyone should be defined by one act. Examine whether if it was someone you loved charged with a terrible thing, how would you want then to be described? How would you want them treated in the system? Get curious about what may have been the experiences, circumstances, and conditions that led that person to that moment or that action.

I often ask people to think about the worst thing they have ever done or are most ashamed of having done. And then I pose the question: Is that thing you did who you are as a human being? Would it be fair if I defined you that way forever? We have all done things that we wish we could take back, things that were wrong, maybe even criminal. None of us wants to be defined by our worst moment, and no one should be. But when fail to see the full person, the whole story of someone who finds themselves in the criminal justice system, we also destroy our ability to seek real justice.

Of course, people should be held accountable for the harm they do, but holding someone accountable and canceling them out of existence—whether it’s in the criminal justice system, social media platforms, or in our day-to-day conversations about each other—are two different things. Accountability may be the only way back to repairing harm, but it does not have to involve dehumanization.

There is always a way back and the possibility for redemption. No one should be denied that chance. But we can only see that when we open our hearts and minds and recognize ourselves in the “monsters” we allow to exist in our imagination.

Robin Steinberg is the founder 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, she represented thousands of low-income people, trained public defenders across the country and internationally, and founded several other innovative organizations including The Bronx Defenders in New York City and Still She Rises in Oklahoma.

Question from the Editor: Did you have preconceived notions about our criminal justice system or bail reform before reading this Q&A? Have the insights presented here changed your mind in any way, or opened the possibility of becoming more compassionate in your life?