Transdisciplinary Collaboration and Justice Regeneration: Public defense was key component

• In Event: Research in Indigent Defense: Reform Matters

Abstract

This project intervenes in the U.S. criminal justice crisis with a pilot study on the use of transdisciplinary collaboration among public defenders and other justice system officials with community organizers and academics from diverse disciplines to regenerate justice and promote mutual thriving. Our primary focus is addressing the disproportionate harm that crime and criminal legal systems inflict on people and communities who are economically disadvantaged, Black, Brown, Indigenous, or otherwise marginalized. However, examining the roles of race and socioeconomic status in allocating the carceral state’s harmful impacts reveals important points of connection with intersecting global crises involving ecological, political, economic, and public health systems. Thus, the crisis is a "wicked problem" requiring a transdisicplinary response to "generate new theoretical frameworks and concrete, directly applicable solutions” (Johnson et al., 2022). To be sustainable, however, those solutions must be generated through collaborative, participatory co-learning with people most directly affected by wicked problems but are too often viewed solely as research subjects (Id.). In this transdisciplinary collaborative pilot study, a diverse set of stakeholders engaged in a series of virtual workshops and an in-person conference to answer the question "How can we put criminal legal systems out of business?" and generate action plans to advance top-priority interventions. Insights included the need to regenerate justice by changing two sets of tightly interconnected policies, practices, and supportive ideologies. The first change involves reduced reliance on criminal legal systems as a default strategy for preventing and addressing harm. The second involves equal access to the material and social conditions that promote mutual thriving.

Authors

• Janet Moore, University of Cincinnati

• Cinnamon Pelly, C&A Consulting

• Ebony Ruhland, Rutgers University

• Farrah Jacquez, University of Cincinnati

• Max Londberg, University of Cincinnati

• Angela Chang, Hamilton County Ohio Public Defender