St. Thomas Law Review
First Page
781
Document Type
Article
Abstract
What is becoming known as Therapeutic Jurisprudence or client-centered representation is new to most line-lawyers or leaders of traditional public defense programs. However, many of these practices have been incorporated into the daily practices within defender offices for decades. Strategies that secure better bonds or sentences lead many public defense programs to seek early entry into the jails and to verify client information. Efforts to learn about "beds" for their clients that were unknown to swamped probation programs have lead offices and individual defenders to actively participate and create alternative treatment programs. Overworked offices hire less expensive sentencing specialists or have their investigators develop "plans" for their clients at sentencing. We will discuss one office that has been doing just this for some time and has a track record on the more traditional statistics used by policy makers to measure what they believe is the test of whether a program is working. We look at data gathered by the Michigan Department of Corrections, which tracks how many defendants are sent to prison, how many receive jail sentences, and from those who would have gone to prison, how many failed on probation. Before looking more closely at this data, it is important to consider briefly a few components of defender programs that engage in problem-solving lawyering and embrace the fundamentals of Therapeutic Jurisprudence.
Recommended Citation
Cait Clarke & James Neuhard,
Making the Case: Therapeutic Jurisprudence and Problem-Solving Practices Positively Impact Clients, Justice Systems and Communities They Serve,
17
St. Thomas L. Rev.
781
(2005).
Available at:
https://scholarship.stu.edu/stlr/vol17/iss3/15