Book Talk Examines How Participatory Defense in Criminal Cases Can Empower Communities

A panel of community activists who have flipped the script on criminal case outcomes through collective “participatory defense” activities spoke at the Law School Wednesday night, explaining how the burgeoning grassroots practice is allowing communities to support people facing criminal charges and one another. 

The event, held at the Subotnick Center and sponsored by the school’s Center for Criminal Justice, also celebrated the new book Protect Your People: How Ordinary Families Are Using Participatory Defense to Challenge Mass Incarceration (The New Press, August 2024), by panelist Raj Jayadev, a MacArthur “genius” fellow. Other panelists were local participatory defense organizers Heather Lewis, executive director of the Reuniting Family Bail Fund, and Justine "Taz" Moore, director of training at the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. Leading the conversation was Professor Jocelyn Simonson, author of the 2023 book Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People are Dismantling Mass Incarceration (The New Press). It was a Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend event, held ahead of the main festival day, Sunday, Sept. 29.  

Pioneered by Jayadev while he was working as a community organizer with Silicon Valley De-Bug in San Jose, Calif., the practice of participatory defense has expanded to about 50 cities. Organizers such as Lewis and Moore, who trained with Jayadev, have used a variety of tactics including court watching (showing up to support defendants at criminal court proceedings), creating social biographies for criminal defendants to tell their individual stories, raising bail money collectively, and helping defense attorneys utilize community experts to challenge misperceptions and false narratives at trial. Their work has helped those who are convicted receive reduced sentences, prevented young people from being charged as adults, helped the accused avoid pretrial detention, and influenced policy changes, such as ending cash bail for homeless individuals.  

Key to participatory defense, says Simonson, is that it is not advocacy on behalf of individual cases, but people uniting to help not just loved ones, but total strangers. “We went from fighting individual cases to really 10 steps down the line, where we’re challenging, or even dismantling, the entire system of mass incarceration,” Simonson said. 

Silicon Valley De-Bug initially focused on police accountability, but Jayadev realized that those making allegations of harm at the hands of the police also needed legal help. Furthermore, addressing individual incidents was not allowing the organization to corral the strength of the wider community.  

“We thought, what if we brought that community-organizing IQ that we knew in every other aspect of our lives and laid it on top of a court system that had been separated from the community?” he said, explaining this led to the launch of weekly community meetings. “We just said, instead of us individually running a justice for so-and-so campaign, let’s bring people together, and let’s do this collectively, and let’s see where we could go.” 

That message made its way to Montgomery County, Pa., after Heather Lewis, executive director of the Reuniting Family Bail Fund, learned about participatory defense from the group’s chief public defender who had seen Jayadev speak. Soon, Lewis was in Zoom training with Jayadev and human services professionals from across the country.  

“There were nine cities at that first national gathering,” Lewis said, adding that in Montgomery County, almost every criminal defendant is Black or brown and wearing shackles in a courtroom that resembles a slave auction. “And I told Raj, this is the modern-day civil rights movement. What other arena could you push back in, other than the criminal legal system, when families are being destroyed and children are being [taken into custody] and all the atrocities, and so we started there.” 

Moore, who was formerly incarcerated for 16 years in a federal prison, now trains other community workers through her role at the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. One of the most emotional parts of the work, for Moore and Lewis, is the impact of people appearing in court on behalf of defendants, some of whom may have been abandoned by their families.  

Although her family and friends were in the courtroom for her, Moore recalled her viewpoint was only of the judge, not those behind her.  
 
“He’s on the bench looking down on me and my attorney, and most of his eye contact is going to the prosecutor, not even acknowledging the fact that my lawyer is speaking or I’m there,” Moore recalled. “It’s a depressing feeling, it’s a scary feeling.… Now, sitting on the other side with participatory defense in a courtroom, I feel powerful and I’m sitting with a family, and I'm able to have other people stand up with me, with that family, because when they call that person that’s facing charges or facing a judge, 10 of us stand up. We let that judge and the prosecutor know that the person is not alone.” 

Moore has also helped provide unconventional expert witnesses for the defense, including a recovered crack cocaine user who was able to testify on behalf of a defendant that the amount of crack that person possessed was only sufficient for personal use, and not for distribution to others, which would result in a longer sentence.  

Making inroads with defense attorneys is important, and one of the reasons the panelists enjoy speaking at law schools, where they can address students who are interested in challenging the existing criminal justice and mass incarceration systems.  

Initially, defense attorneys thought of participatory defense “hubs” as akin to just an “angry mob,” but they have gradually come to see the power of working with the groups and the family members who are part of them, Jayadev said. Some ask that the hub members attend court, wearing t-shirts that state their hub affiliations for the prosecutor and the judge to see.  

“It signals things toward these actors, that this is not going to be business as usual, and there's a measure of accountability that’s in the air, and the smart public defenders know how to leverage that,” Jayadev said.