Would you miss your son’s sixteenth birthday? For my friend Iris this was almost his reality! He was facing imprisonment for 10 years due to the lack of proper representation. For Iris it wasn’t just about 10 years. It was about being present for his youngest son’s life from age six to sixteen. If Restoring Justice had not stepped in and provided fair representation to him, he would have lost his boys and ten years of his life in prison merely for being poor. The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution promises our right to a defense attorney if we are accused of a crime. It promises that we will not be left voiceless. 

Proverbs 31 calls us to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves…to defend the rights of the poor and needy. In representing the poor, the Constitution and the Bible say the same thing. America’s Founding Fathers saw this principle so vital that 40% of our Bill of Rights protect people who are accused of crimes.

So, what’s the problem?

Right now, in America, we have over 415,000 people who are poor, presumed innocent, and detained pretrial that are given an overloaded court-appointed attorney. These overloaded attorneys cannot possibly provide fair representation because they have too many clients, all of whom are trapped merely for being poor. 

This reality creates a cultural problem in our indigent defense system known as the “meet ‘em and plead ‘em” system that leads to costly injustices like over-incarceration and the innocent pleading guilty. 

Remember my friend Iris. He sat in jail without a visit from his overloaded court-appointed attorney for 2 months. He was accused of wielding a gun that was locked in his safe the entire time. While he sat in jail, CPS threatened to take his six boys away from him, and his plea offer was ten years in prison. We replaced that overloaded court-appointed attorney and quickly revealed the truth. With fair, client-centered representation from Restoring Justice, Iris’s case was dropped – from 10 years to zero. He was free to go home to care for his boys.

Our work is done through four pillars of service: replacing overloaded court-appointed attorneys with client-centered attorneys, social services that connects each person to life-essential resources, counseling to dive deeper and address prior trauma to allow for spiritual freedom, and volunteer connections to give vital relational support for our clients through their journey. We have been testing our innovative model in Harris County to see if client-centered work can lead to systemic change. And it works. 

Not only do we help our individual clients by saving them an average of 4.33 years of incarceration, but we’ve also accomplished our main policy goal. In July of last year, Harris County approved a measure that will stop the practice of overloaded court-appointed attorneys county-wide in response to our campaign.

This solution will also save the economy billions of dollars. Take our first 30 clients, we spent about $50,000, and we saved the economy $42.5 million in incarceration costs. If applied across the state of Texas, our economy could save $149 billion per year. 

Our organization is now evolving to go beyond policy change and focus on indigent defense culture change. Right now, there is no pipeline for passionate law school graduates who want to commit to this work. With your help, we hope to implement a service model by recruiting underutilized new attorneys from law schools for a limited-term fellowship. We will support these promising attorneys to apply our love-focused values to give people who are poor fair representation so that we can all honor our Constitutional and Biblical callings.

But we need your help. We’re looking for partners to build and raise $1,300,000 this year and $2,200,000 next year to fund our office and launch the first fellowship program before expanding to other markets. If you help us, we could be a lot closer to ending mass incarceration in the next 10 years and beyond!!