The Last Line of Defense: Protecting the Constitutional Rights of Marginalized Groups by Combining Social Services and Legal Defense

Introduction

The New York City subway is a unique social setting where people of all backgrounds maintain a fragile social ecosystem by abiding by unspoken rules: Don’t make eye contact with other commuters; do let people off the train before getting on; don’t interact with the homeless person at the end of the car. (I often bend this last rule.) Perhaps, like me, you fumble with your wallet and give this person some cash, or fish a gift card out of the bottom of your purse, or hand them a snack you’d packed for the afternoon. Perhaps you wish you could do more for them beyond that single interaction, that our legal and social service institutions were better prepared to assist this person in the ways they need. These institutions can be improved, and the state’s reliance on incarceration with marginal gains in public safety is proof they should be. It is of utmost importance to pass public policy that facilitates the building of better, more sustainable lives for those who need them the most. Holistic defense will be able to improve the circumstances of marginalized communities through increased funding for and hiring of support staff in public defense offices to make defense teams more effective and compassionate. Holistic defense is extremely well positioned to both address the socioeconomic determinants of crime and to improve public safety.

The status quo of America’s criminal legal system is well documented to be unjust, racially inequitable, and an inefficient use of taxpayer dollars (USCCR 2019; Furst 2019). In criminal proceedings, government overreach and police abuse of power can result in constitutional violations, which are fielded by those who are most likely to be racially profiled, harassed, and arrested: the clients of public defenders (Ghandnoosh 2023). In the status quo, public defenders are unable to find the time, energy, and resources necessary to sufficiently contest every legal issue their clients face (Pace et al. 2023). As a result, indigent clients, by virtue of their race, class, or both, are effectively forced to live under a weaker set of constitutional rights than those offered by our Constitution, undermining their ability to maintain dignity in interactions with the criminal legal system.

The bipartisan political project of neoliberalism treats what it defines as crime as an individual failure rather than a product of institutional inequalities. Neoliberal theory posits a complete withdrawal of the government in markets, but in practice it manifests as the withdrawal of the government in public provisioning—in other words, things that are good for people. Neoliberal practice contradicts theory by insisting that the state maintains a heavy hand in preserving capital through state violence. Neoliberalism accordingly insists on the expansion of the police and carceral states to wield punitive measures against marginalized groups, especially young Black men (USCCR 2019). The recent efforts to criminalize other marginalized groups, including transgender people, undocumented immigrants, and women seeking abortions are direct offshoots of punitive policing and mass incarceration manufactured by neoliberal policies and orthodoxy (NCTE 2019; Foster-Frau 2025; Dellinger and Pell 2024). A recent, pressing example of the expansion of the American police state is the Trump administration’s investments in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) while defunding necessary social services like Medicaid and Medicare (OBBB 2025). It is important to note that actions taken by ICE fall under civil law, rather than criminal, but there remain parallels between the bolstering of punitive systems in both civil and criminal law rather than investment in welfare programs. This growth in the power of the police corresponds with the Trump administration’s chilling of democratic dissent, evidenced by punitive responses to pro-Palestine protests, headhunting of illegal immigrants—real and perceived—and military supervision imposed on major liberal cities (Ashar 2025; Kim 2025). While the weaponization of the criminal legal system has expanded its targets over the past decade, this maltreatment by the state is nothing new for our country’s poorest and most marginalized citizens. For them, being targeted by the police and accepting guilty pleas to avoid legal fees are par for the course when attempting to navigate the criminal legal system. It is a moral imperative to mitigate the resource allocation problems—which intentionally make it difficult for people to meet their needs and lead fulfilling lives—that fuel our current criminal legal system. To strengthen our threatened democracy and expand access to social citizenship, which has been denied to America’s most vulnerable populations since its founding, it is essential for us to reject this neoliberal paradigm and embrace holistic public defense.

Despite recent successful developments in the administration of public defense, the overall lack of resources and staff in public defender offices negatively affects client representation (Primus 2017; Donohue and Baldwin 2024). Around the country, police departments and prosecutors’ offices have much larger budgets and staff than public defense offices, resulting in a criminal legal system that disadvantages the clients of public defenders in a court of law. In 2021, state and local governments spent $135 billion on police and only $52 billion on courts; public defense received only a fraction of that amount (Urban Institute 2024). As a result of this prosecutorial bias, marginalized populations find themselves locked in a normalized feedback loop of incarceration, surveillance, and fines from the state. It follows that the quality of life of system-impacted people suffers; the Center for Budget Policy and Priorities estimated that the obstacles faced by male ex-offenders resulted in the US economy losing between $57 million and $62 million in output in 2008 (Schmitt and Warner 2010). At a macro level, the economic inefficiency of incarceration is apparent, with taxpayers paying an estimated $80.7 billion on correction costs each year (Furst 2019). America’s racialized systems of crime and policing disproportionately lower the standards of constitutional protections afforded to Black and brown communities and prevent them from being able to achieve the economic success and social citizenship necessary for a decent life (USCCR 2019). 

Holistic defense—the merging of social work and legal advocacy to address the underlying causes of crime—is a promising method of building an anti-racist, compassionate, and economically progressive public defense system. Holistic defense is a practice encompassing a multitude of progressive values including abolition, client- and community-centeredness, obligation to resist oppression, and racial justice (Southerland 2024). It has demonstrated success in a diverse range of jurisdictions, including the Bronx in New York City, San Francisco and Santa Barbara in California, Michigan, and Washington, DC (DeNike and Macallair 2024; Anderson, Buenaventura, and Heaton 2019). Holistic defense can reduce recidivism and increase the quality of life for our state’s poorest and most marginalized communities by reorienting public defense offices into interdisciplinary teams to fulfill its clients’ legal and direct needs simultaneously (Anderson, Buenaventura, and Heaton 2019). However, its long-term success depends on increased allocation of funds, resources, and trained employees. Holistic defense works best when diverse staff—such as social workers, navigators, investigators, and paralegals—are organized in defense teams that are able to focus on the myriad issues facing a client without compromising the integrity and quality of their individual work. 

Thus, well-supported holistic defense can work against the feedback loop of incarceration by contributing to increased client economic and social stability, deterrence from crime, and effectiveness of legal defense, overall improving public safety. Public defender clients, upon receiving support rather than punishment from the state, would be able to meet their basic needs and build stabler lives. The main determinants of crime—poverty, mental illness, and homelessness—would be alleviated by a strengthened social safety net and increased trust with the state. The adoption of holistic defense would give our criminal legal system a chance to build strong and safe communities, rather than destroy them by usurping people, resources, and dignity. To strengthen the delivery of public defense in New Jersey by following a holistic defense model, we must increase the hiring of support staff in the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender such that the ratio of attorneys to social workers is 8:1 and the ratios of attorneys-to-investigators and attorneys-to-paralegals are increased to 2:1 respectively. Additionally, there should be at least one navigator assigned to each county’s public defender office in New Jersey. 

Background

It is an open secret that mass incarceration and policing are racialized processes that do not reduce recidivism but decrease community-police trust, exacerbate the racial wealth gap, and destabilize families (Pettit and Gutierrez 2018; NIJ 2016; Kirk 2016; Grawert and Craigie 2020; Lee, Porter, and Comfort 2013). “Hard on crime” rhetoric has warped the criminal legal system so that it upholds the racial and class status quo. The progressive view of crime and policing pushes against these punitive measures and understands that crime is a byproduct of social and economic instability, which often takes the forms of unemployment, unaddressed trauma or mental health issues, drug addiction, and homelessness (Buonanno 2003). Holistic defense can radically change the outcomes of interactions with the criminal legal system by combining legal defense with social service support.

Public defense in its current form is only prepared to resolve legal issues, not the systemic problems that routinely harm their clients. By the time a public defender has gotten involved in a client’s case, homelessness, unemployment, mental illness, or other issues have already had deleterious effects. Given their resources and lack of staff, a public defender is limited to fighting the client’s charge in a court of law but can rarely do more to improve their client’s conditions and decrease the likelihood of recidivism. Sometimes the public defender is able to successfully fight the charge and prove their client’s innocence. In most cases, however, a guilty plea is the best possible deal for their client in spite of their innocence. In limiting public defense to the resolution of a legal issue, the underlying causes of crime remain unaddressed, and the greatest issues facing public safety continue unfettered.

Holistic defense, a model for serving an individual in their legal case and the socioeconomic circumstances that led to their case simultaneously, was developed by the Bronx Defenders, a public defense office in New York City, in the 1990s and has proved to be a promising strategy in maintaining public safety and improving the long-term outcomes of public defender clients (Steinberg 2013). Holistic representation of clients has been shown to decrease prison-sentence length and cause no increase in recidivism, saving taxpayers $160 million in inmate housing costs (Anderson, Buenaventura, and Heaton 2019). It has also yielded improvements for both the defense teams and clients, and in case outcomes (Ostrom and Bowman 2020). In holistic defense models, interdisciplinary teams of attorneys and support staff critically take into account a client’s circumstances to contextualize their case to actors in the criminal legal system. The different team members are able to provide wraparound advocacy to the client: For example, as the attorney fights for the client’s innocence, support staff provide for the client by connecting them to social services that will address basic needs that have been neglected. Clients are thus less likely to be harmed by the criminal legal system and less likely to interact with the criminal legal system in the future, as corrected deficiencies in their material and social conditions reduce recidivism. By bringing together attorneys, support staff, clients, and social service resource providers, holistic defense improves the functioning of public defense, clients’ long-term well-being, and public safety. Holistic defense reimagines the criminal legal system from an assignment of punishment to an examination of the social failures that have contributed to an individual’s drive to commit a crime. Therefore, to have effective holistic defense we need to overwrite the status quo, which treats the lack of access to social services as adjacent, but not inherent to, criminality. By illuminating the link between social services and criminal behavior in defense strategy and courtroom proceedings, holistic defense educates all players in the criminal legal system—from judges to police officers—providing a framework to reduce crime by improving access to and quality of necessary social services. 

Policy Analysis

New Jersey, a relatively progressive state, has the political momentum to implement a more just criminal legal system through holistic defense. The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey (ACLU-NJ) has advocated to decarcerate New Jersey and reduce the state’s reliance on private prisons (ACLU-NJ 2017). In June 2023, Governor Phil Murphy signed a bill that eliminated public defender service fees, making this essential arm of our criminal legal system accessible to the people least able to afford it. However, the national pattern of the overreliance on police to solve social problems follows in New Jersey: The municipal police department in the city of Elizabeth receives 5.7 times more funding than their health and human services department (Ubel 2021). Funding disparities are compounded by staffing and resource disparities: In New Jersey, regional public defense staff are outnumbered by prosecutor staff by ratios of 2:1 or higher (NJOPD n.d.). 

In spite of these inequities, the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender (NJOPD) has much greater resources and access to power than other public defense offices around the country. The NJOPD is one of America’s few statewide and state-funded public defense offices, has 700 attorneys and 600 support staff, and handles 60,000 felonies a year, which is around 75–80 percent of all felonies in the state (Kanzler 2026). Importantly, the NJOPD demonstrates a desire to reimagine public defense with holistic defense; in late 2023, criminal defense lawyer Jennifer Sellitti was nominated to be the state’s public defender by Governor Murphy and was confirmed by the state senate in early 2024 (DiFilippo 2024; State of New Jersey 2023). In March 2025, the NJOPD announced the implementation of a collaborative and holistic defense model, including improving ties with community social service providers and creating defense teams (NJOPD 2025). Former NJOPD attorney Jessica Spencer and current NJOPD Assistant Public Defender Prescott Loveland have described Sellitti’s leadership as proof that institutional willingness to implement holistic defense exists in New Jersey. The problem, however, lies in NJOPD’s lack of resources to effectively support holistic measures by hiring and training new and existing employees, attorneys, and support staff alike. Without an increase in the NJOPD’s budget by the state legislature, holistic defense remains a practice of values constrained by access to funds and resources, and will be less able to procure long-term tangible successes in the lives of clients and their public defenders.

Despite budget constraints, Sellitti has been able to make some inroads in implementing holistic defense and encouraging team-based defense, making a push to create specialized, statewide units that are staffed with low ratios of attorneys to social workers, investigators, and paralegals. Spencer told me that Sellitti envisioned a designated forensics unit with seven attorneys that would assist on relevant cases, but only had the budget for one attorney, demonstrating that the bold, progressive ideas to improve public defense are deflated by a lack of funds. Right now, these specialized units—including forensics, immigration, parole revocation, and mitigation specialists—are statewide units that parachute to county offices to help with relevant cases. However, as Loveland told me, regardless of how experienced and synergistic these teams are, a five-person unit cannot adequately support the needs of an entire state. Sellitti’s bold visions for holistic public defense in New Jersey require increased funds and staff to be effective and successful.

Sellitti has found greater success in a partnership with Partners for Justice (PFJ), a nonprofit that advances collaborative defense, a vision of holistic defense that aims to accommodate the variation of resources and challenges materially facing public defenders in jurisdictions around the country (PFJ n.d.c). PFJ trains and places client advocates, which are non-attorney positions that work directly with clients to provide wraparound services and assist with case navigation, with public defense offices around the country (PFJ n.d.a). By emphasizing the client’s agency in the procession of their case and nonlegal matters, client advocates humanize clients and strengthen community-public defender ties, improving the effectiveness of the entire team, client included (Galvin-Almanza 2024). I spoke to Dana Rafferty, manager of client advocates in the North Region (which includes New Jersey), who told me that client advocates handle a wide variety of nonlegal tasks, including getting clients access to inpatient and outpatient mental health and drug treatment; access to necessary documents for court proceedings and social service applications; navigating social service benefits like SNAP, Medicaid, and Medicare; testifying in court about the success a client is having in a treatment program; and addressing transportation and technology emergencies for court and other appearances. By addressing a range of client-centric navigational, administrative, and miscellaneous tasks, client advocates free up other specialized positions, such as social workers and investigators, who are invaluable to public defender cases but stretched thin in New Jersey. The offices that have client advocates demonstrate the radical possibilities of holistic public defense when it has the resources needed to ensure its success: Attorneys can focus on the client’s legal issues, support staff can focus on improving the client’s living circumstances, and clients feel respected and heard by the entire team.

Under Sellitti, seven client advocates began taking cases in February 2025 and have already assisted 500 clients. Client advocates have also been placed in three of New Jersey’s 21 county public defender offices: Hudson County in North Jersey, Monmouth County in Central Jersey, and Atlantic County in South Jersey (PFJ n.d.b; NJOPD 2024). Loveland told me that these three counties are pilot areas where, beyond the hiring of client advocates, the existing resources of their public defender offices are being oriented to holistic defense. For instance, their intake processes have been attuned to understand the breadth of nonlegal issues faced by clients, defense teams are being constructed with staff with diverse specializations and work backgrounds earlier in the intake process, and support staff are building long-term professional relationships with community organizations. Altogether, the hiring of client advocates and the adjustments they have enabled are helping build a criminal legal system that prioritizes aiding the client, not just resolving the crime that they are accused of. The permanent expansion of support staff would transform the legal outcomes and socioeconomic circumstances of clients.

Holistic defense provides better information to all involved parties, including the attorney and their client. This information is an investment that will accrue future benefits as clients, defense teams, and social service providers have repeated positive interactions. The increased hiring of support staff allows defense teams to become experts in their area’s resources, maximizing their leverage points in communities. Continual collaboration between regional organizations and public defense teams means that those defense teams become better referral sources and are better able to help alleviate the social determinants of crime experienced by clients. These investments will improve public defender offices’ preparedness to handle the most severe crimes. Complex cases, such as felonies, will not be eradicated through the improved functioning and effectiveness of a defense team, just as they have not been eradicated by punitive measures. Importantly, clients in the most complex cases tend to be those who have suffered from the greatest systemic failures in society. In these challenging circumstances, collaboration within and by defense teams allow them to best construct the client’s legal case while building off existing infrastructure to procure the client necessary social service assistance. Having a strong defense team benefits the client’s many needs (legal, health, employment, housing, etc.) and can have a great impact on those that need the most help and access to resources.

Policy Proposal

My policy solution reimagines public defender offices in New Jersey as a site for holistic defense by increasing funding and hiring of support staff to form well-resourced, interdisciplinary defense teams. Due to the reality of high caseloads and low resource parity with police departments and prosecutors, insisting upon the delivery of holistic defense without the proportional increase of resources and manpower is a moot point. The existing institutional willingness to adopt holistic defense must be complemented with increased funding to hire and train social workers, navigators, paralegals, and investigators to increase the ratios of support staff to attorneys. Specifically, the ratio of attorneys-to-social workers should be increased to 8:1 and the ratios of attorneys-to-paralegals and investigators should be increased to 2:1 respectively. At least one navigator should be placed in each of New Jersey’s 21 county public defender offices. 

Washington, DC’s Public Defense Services (PDS) is an excellent example of holistic defense being strengthened with diverse support staff (Brunner 2020). PDS’s Legal Services teams use a combination of litigation skills and speciality nonlegal practices to provide their clients with robust defense (PDS 2025). Their Legal Support Services consists of a diverse range of nonlegal professionals, including investigators, forensic social workers, professional counselors, a language specialist, a law librarian, legal assistants, and paralegals. By emphasizing the presence and importance of nonlegal support staff in case processing and client advocacy, PDS showcases what holistic defense can look like when it has the right people in the right places doing the right tasks, all toward the shared goal of defending their clients’ rights. Loveland told me that PDS has around a 7:1 attorney-to-social workers and navigators ratio and a 2:1 attorney-to-investigator ratio. According to Loveland, New Jersey is currently at around 25:1 attorneys-to-social workers and navigators ratio, minus the seven client advocates, demonstrating the vast differences between resources in an office where holistic defense is in its early stages versus an office where holistic defense has seen great successes. The supplemental, nonlegal work done by social workers, paralegals, investigators, and navigators has demonstrated value because attorneys and the broader public defense system receive better information, build better links to the communities they serve, and develop better preparedness for their most complex cases.

Each support staff role contributes to a different aspect of a client’s defense team. Below, I describe the unique duties of each role.

Investigator: The true resource disparity problem is not between public defenders and prosecutors, but between public defenders and police departments. Spencer explained that when prosecutors create a case they are basing it off of a police investigation. Thus, a strong defense works in opposition to a case created by the police. When police investigate a case, they interview witnesses, collect and analyze evidence, and conduct interrogations. In an ideal world, a criminal legal system that allows for strong and robust defense would allow the defense to do these exact same tasks. Without investigators in public defense offices, the entire legal case relies simply on the word of the police, who are capable of practicing unconstitutional policing by lying and illegally obtaining evidence to serve their own needs, disadvantaging the defense (Etienne and McAdams 2021; Hasbrouck 2021). To strengthen the effectiveness of public defense in a court of law, investigators are necessary in every single case taken on by a public defender. Having a 2:1 attorney-to-investigator ratio will enable each case to be cross-investigated by the defense while ensuring the verifiability and accuracy of facts on each side, crucial for the distribution of full and fair legal outcomes.

Paralegal: Paralegals deal with administrative tasks, including securing a client’s background records and updating clients on their case. Paralegals also conduct legal research used by the attorney to strengthen the client’s case. Thus, paralegals sit at an important junction between the client and the attorney. A 2:1 attorney-to-paralegal ratio will allow every legal issue to be adequately researched for the attorney and every nonlegal issue to be understood by the legal team and passed onto the appropriate support staff.

Social worker: Social workers are helpful in complex client scenarios and contextualize the client’s actions in relation to their unaddressed basic needs. Social workers create this narrative using client documentation, such as mental health screenings and family history evaluations. Importantly, social workers prepare sentence mitigation reports, which induce judges to better understand the circumstances of the client and to be more aware of social service resources in their jurisdiction. By explicitly discussing how a client would benefit from social services, social workers are essential to changing the paradigm of what constitutes acceptable and reasonable criminal punishment in courtroom proceedings (Matei, Hussemann, and Siegel 2021). Social workers also rally the defense team around a shared goal of treating the client in a way that is respectful and compassionate (Matei, Hussemann, and Siegel 2021). An 8:1 attorney-to-social worker ratio would enable social workers to be available in the complex cases where they are necessary and provide training to all attorneys and support staff on how defense teams should communicate with and address the needs of clients.

Navigator: Navigators, similar to client advocates, are universally needed because they work directly with clients to understand their unaddressed needs and connect them with relevant social services. Navigators are distinct from social workers in that they provide wraparound assistance for clients, including some social work tasks, while social workers are equipped to handle more specialized and complex client needs. Given that each public defender client tends to an issue that would be remedied by social services, navigators are needed with most, if not all, cases. Thus, having a navigator in every one of New Jersey’s 21 county public defender offices would provide the nonlegal support essential for effective holistic defense and maintaining ongoing collaborations with local social service providers.

Coordinated training among the attorneys and these support staff positions is necessary to ensure that holistic defense is administered in an efficient and cost-effective way. Loveland told me that everyone who works with clients—meaning everyone on the defense team—should be trained in mitigation, trauma response training, and client communication. The development of such a curriculum would ensure that the entire team has the same understanding of what a holistic, interdisciplinary, team-based approach to clients looks like. Additionally, attorneys should receive training in management and leadership of their defense teams. Such training would strengthen the combined skillset of the team in service of the client.

Conclusion

Public defense in America is a system that was created to fulfill a daunting promise: that all people, regardless of their ability to pay, should be guaranteed a robust legal defense. The fulfillment of this promise has become a pipe dream as the neoliberal defunding of social services in favor of punitive solutions has completely neglected public defender clients. As a result, public defender clients—disproportionately poor Black and brown people—receive a de facto set of weaker constitutional protections. In this status quo, these clients are continually deprived of economic and social opportunity in the name of justice.

Holistic defense is a solution to the institutional neglect of public defender offices and their clients. My policy proposal entails the hiring of additional support staff—investigators, paralegals, social workers, and navigators—to assist clients with their legal and nonlegal needs alongside an attorney as part of an interdisciplinary, holistic defense team. These support staff members would provide the attorney and the broader defense team with better information, better connections with regional social service resources, and better ability to handle the most complex cases. Holistic defense is people-centered policy that is directly shaped by the needs of each individual public defender client, maximizing its impact. As holistic defense is adopted and adapted to, the very structure of the criminal legal system will treat the client as someone entitled to respect and humanity, rather than as a series of legal issues that need to be resolved in court. The increased humanization of clients will contribute to an end to the cycles of racialized violence perpetuated by America’s prison system, provide a greater check on police abuse of power, and reorient the courts system so that indigent clients are truly innocent until proven guilty. Constitutional protections for the nation’s most marginalized groups will be strengthened at a time when they are threatened the most. 

In the short term, holistic defense will benefit marginalized communities by removing a significant source of destabilization, increase trust between clients and public defense teams, and provide more people with access to the social services that they need. In the long term, holistic defense will lift the bottom line of how the state understands and treats people who have been accused of committing a crime. By having greater legibility of the circumstances that create crime due to the work of support staff and centralization of the client, the state will turn away from ineffective punitive measures and invest in social services, reducing crime and increasing quality of life for the country’s most vulnerable populations. Thus, holistic defense is a way for current legal institutions, such as public defense, to be oriented to help build abolitionist futures where all people are given the resources to live rather than just survive (Southerland 2024; Salamon-Abrams 2022). As holistic defense grows more influential, it will begin to mitigate the root causes of crime, making punitive measures obsolete in terms of social cohesion and economic cost. While this is beyond the scope of this brief, I hope holistic defense will pave the way for full abolition, and that policing and prisons become redundant in a future where all people’s immediate needs are addressed in a way that is agency-affirming, thus allowing people to achieve their full personal potential. For now, however, I am content with advocating for holistic defense, a tried-and-true method that ensures clients receive justice both within and beyond the courtroom.