Garrett Coleman '25
Managing Editor
Andrew Allard '25
Executive Editor
On February 2, the eighth annual Shaping Justice Conference took place at UVA Law. This year’s event was titled (De)Criminalizing Poverty and featured keynote speaker Alec Karakatsanis, author and founder of Civil Rights Corps. The event was organized by Professor Annie Kim ’99, Noa Jett ’25, Rohini Kurup ’25, and Evan Carcerano ’24. Describing the program, Jett said, “Since it started eight years ago, the purpose of the conference has been to inspire law students and lawyers to promote justice through public service. This year, we brought together practitioners, organizers, and academics to discuss the criminalization of poverty in hopes of fostering conversations around the issue and potential solutions.”
Karakatsanis took to the lectern with his sleeves rolled up, the first indication that he wanted a more informal setting for his speech. He began with a few preliminary notes, the first of which was that he wanted to reserve significant time for questions and to encourage active audience participation during the address. And second, he wanted to make clear that his perspective is born out of his experience representing disadvantaged clients. Karakatsanis did not try to leave the impression that he had the answer to every problem facing the judicial system or the progressive legal community.
The framework for Karakatsanis’s address was built around a few stories from his career. The first was set in the local jail of Clanton, Alabama, where a mother was being detained for shoplifting. Upon realizing that she would be unable to contact her children, who did not know what had happened to her, Christie began to cry. After she was unable to calm down, jail officials took her to a corner of the hallway that was not covered by the cameras, restrained her, and tased her into unconsciousness. The next day, when Karakatsanis was able to meet with her, he took photographs of the sores that covered her body. Afterwards, Christie eagerly became a party to one of Karakatsanis’s many bail system challenges, as all of this had happened before she had even been convicted of a crime.
Karakatsanis then shared some of the history of the money bail system in the U.S. and its failed reforms. Led by Robert F. Kennedy ’51 while he was the United States Attorney General, the Federal Bail Reform Act made its way into law. But Karakatsanis diminished the progressive law’s impact, since the percentage of federal pretrial detainees has increased by roughly 300 percent since then. This is what Karakatsanis called the “new labels” problem. Before the Act, money bail was the norm. After it became law, he reasoned, the same judicial system remained but under different language. Judges now keep the accused in detention because they are either “dangerous” or a “flight risk,” in spite of the Act’s ultimate purpose.
That story went to the heart of Karakatsanis’s address. He argued that Band-Aid solutions applied to entrenched systems are destined to fail, no matter the progressive intent of the legislators and activists. And those Band-Aid solutions are what we learn in law school. Applied in the context of what he called the “punishment bureaucracy,” they are hollow. Even those lawyers who are reform-minded are stuck on a carousel that fails to substantively move the ball.
Karakatsanis left the audience with a few suggestions. First, he wants progressive lawyers to address the punishment bureaucracy head on, so that when these lawyers win in their immediate cases, they are also working on the “constellation” of social changes that are needed to make the win worthwhile. As he put it, “you can’t win on the bail issue in a silo.” Second, to actually implement that, he hopes that some progressive lawyers will leave public defender roles for private practice that works cooperatively. That means getting access to the tens of billions of dollars available to court-appointed private attorneys, who are no longer beholden to the political interests that currently plague public defenders. Along with that, he wants these lawyers to become a “human FOIA,” regularly speaking with journalists and compiling anecdotes of bad judges, crooked cops, and private medical care abuses in the penal system. This “entrepreneurial focus” is his solution to combat the entrenched systems that he has encountered throughout his career. It is also the way that he fights the feeling of complicity, which was raised by several students in their questions. That is, how can students who fundamentally disagree with the penal system help individual clients without legitimizing that system? Working as a private criminal defense lawyer in his cooperative setting, or as a traditional public defender with an eye toward exposing systemic injustices, is his solution.
The story that encapsulated his address came from another of his jail visits, though he did not specify where. As he said was common across the U.S., children of the detainees were not permitted to visit their parents. Karakatsanis claimed that this was motivated by the increased call revenue that the jails would receive from parents trying to reach their children. So, in response, the families of detainees would gather below a large window in the facility and would write messages and draw pictures with chalk on the sidewalk. By the time Karakatsanis was leaving, he saw the sheriff stripping the road of its messages. And this, Karakatsanis said, was the progressive sheriff who campaigned on humane reforms to the penal system. While he did not explicitly say so, I think this was a pretty clear example of the entrenched “punishment bureaucracy” Karakatsanis described and its inevitable consequences.
Karakatsanis’s work shows that combating systemic injustice requires creative solutions. Fortunately for Karakatsanis, he is in good company. As Professor Kelly Orians tells it, her students in the Decarceration and Community Reentry Clinic are helping families to disrupt the intergenerational cycle of poverty and incarceration. While much of the work that students in Professor Orians’s clinic do is traditional legal advocacy, such as helping former prisoners with criminal expungement and restoration of rights, students also apply their skills in creative ways. In collaboration with the Darden School and Resilience Education’s Prison Reentry Education Program, law students will soon begin teaching business law classes to prisoners at Virginia correctional facilities. Armed with entrepreneurial skills, once formerly incarcerated individuals are out, there’s a community of resilient professionals and partner organizations that provide low-interest capital to help launch and scale new businesses. “This is really some of my favorite work. This is the work that keeps me going, that feeds my optimism,” Orians explained.
Nearby in Richmond, Mayor Levar Stoney’s administration has been experimenting with a creative idea—guaranteed income. The Richmond Resilience Initiative, launched in 2020, has provided guaranteed monthly income—between $250 and $500—to low-income Richmond residents who are employed but don’t qualify for federal aid. “I’ll admit it, initially I did not buy the idea and the concept,” said Mayor Stoney. But he became convinced of the idea’s potential after seeing the 2020 pandemic stimulus save lives. As Mayor Stoney explained, “People were leveling up. Instead of working two jobs, now I can study and get a certification, so I can get more money in the current job that I have . . . You may think that $500 a month is small change, but for us, it makes a big difference in our lives.”
And Law School alumna Mary Mergler ’07 is using her skills as an advocate to eliminate fees in the criminal justice system. Mergler is the National Advocacy & Campaigns Deputy Director at the Fines & Fees Justice Center (FFJC), an advocacy and research organization focused on eliminating fees in the criminal justice system and ensuring that fines are imposed equitably. Its current national initiatives include ending debt-based driver’s license suspensions and eliminating fees imposed over the course of the criminal justice process, such as phone call fees while in prison. Mayor Stoney added that after the Youngkin administration restored the previous practice of requiring individuals convicted of a felony to apply to the governor to have their rights restored, these prison fees can prevent Virginians from voting.
Although fines and fees have expanded since 2008 as a means of funding the criminal justice system, Mergler expressed optimism about the progress her organization has made. “The issues that FFJC works on are issues where we have been able to find a lot of consensus and bipartisan support . . . There is a lot of opportunity for success on these issues.”
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