Dirty Work and Dirty Justice: How Stigma Encourages Public Defenders’ Reinterpretation of Work and Fairness

• In Event: 4422 - Section on Sociology of Law Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 02. Legal Actors and Practice

Abstract

This paper presents preliminary findings from an ethnographic study of public defenders in New York City’s criminal courts. Public defenders provide counsel to the majority of defendants facing felony charges in American courts. However, public defenders are a stigmatized professional group. They endure considerable distrust and perceived illegitimacy from their clients, other professionals, and the general public. In this paper, I explore how Hughes’ concept of “dirty work” may explain public defenders’ experiences and denigrated status within the legal system. I argue that public defenders accept a “spoiled identity” but redirect the source of the blame to the system in which they operate and conceptualize their own advocacy in moral terms. Nevertheless, in an overburdened criminal justice system, their moral advocacy is finite. Self-directed moralized work, then, constitutes idealized (rarely actualized) justice for public defenders amidst the everyday stigma defining their profession.

Author

• Gillian Slee, Princeton University