Too often, a ride is the difference between freedom and incarceration
As a public defender, one of the hardest things to witness is the regularity with which the lives of ordinary people are thrown into upheaval by the criminal court system.
The legal system is superb at stealing people’s time and threatening their well-being.
Every minute of every day, American courts resolve about 40 felonies and one hundred misdemeanors, as 18 million cases churn through our state court system, usually lasting over six to nine months. The majority of arrested people are low-income individuals facing misdemeanor charges, which means that, for the average person in this system, they’re spending the better part of a year attending to a low-level legal matter: taking time off they can’t afford to take, paying for child care they can’t afford and, crucially, finding some way to get not only to court, but to all the places the court orders a person to go.
We rarely talk about transportation as one of the most under-addressed contributors to mass incarceration. But we should.
In my work around the nation with public defenders and their clients, one of the primary challenges we face in helping people succeed is solving the problem of how to get from home to court, court to home, home to programs, programs to probation and more. The number of obligations that are placed on individuals in this system is often extreme—people on probation, for example, may have to comply with as many as 20 different conditions per day.
While a wealthy person may be able to afford treatment and therapy that flexes around their schedule, poor people who find themselves engaging in court-ordered programs are much more likely to find a one-size-fits-all approach.
Courts regularly assume that people can make it to the places they are supposed to go. But that belief is often a fallacy. Many people don’t have working cars but live in car-centric cities, and some people who do have cars can’t afford the gas to make it to an appointment.
For folks relying on public transit, too many of our cities have constructed systems where the city’s sprawl is so large that it may take several hours just to cross town. And the cost of public transit is not negligible – I have had far too many clients arrested for being on the bus or train without having paid the fare, while trying to make it to an appointment that a judge said they must attend or risk incarceration.
Recently, we solved this problem for some of our clients in California, Texas and Louisiana, when Uber stepped up to offer free rides to public defender clients who needed to get to court or urgent appointments. These free rides can be life-changing: in just a matter of months, we had several clients able to make it to court on time and avoid getting arrested for their absences, keeping families together and sparing people jail time. We’ve had sick clients use these rides to get to medical care, and disabled clients use these rides to make it to appointments they couldn’t reach on their own.
In the brouhaha over what will happen in the pending Proposition 22 litigation, which may result in the reclassification of Uber drivers as employees rather than contractors, it is tempting to worry about what happens next. After all, these free rides to court and vital appointments have, at times, quite literally saved people's lives, and protected families from the separation of having their loved one jailed.
But worrying about what happens next obscures a more pressing matter: as much as our clients have benefited from Uber's willingness to step up and help people in crisis, it's neither fair nor wise to rely entirely on such charitable efforts.
We need long-term solutions to fix the holes in our mass transit system.
The problem of how to help people access resources and meet their obligations is solvable: fair fares that enable more low-income families to access public transit would be a starting point, as would free transit passes or dedicated transit services for people who are ordered to appear in any legal matter. Programs to seek the direct feedback of low-income transit users – perhaps focusing on those with the most complex transit needs – would be another crucial step to informing potential solutions.
Having companies like Uber step up has been a game-changer and a path we wish more major companies would follow. But near-term solutions should not stymie progress toward the larger change millions of people desperately need.
Emily Galvin-Almanza is a former California public defender and co-founder of Partners for Justice, a national nonprofit working to transform public defense across the country. She can be reached at galvin@partnersforjustice.org.
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Too often, a ride is the difference between freedom and incarceration
