Budget cutbacks, huge caseloads and most recently the pressures placed on the justice system by COVID-19 are taking a heavy psychological toll on public defenders, according to a new study, The Stress of Injustice: Public Defenders and the Frontline of American Inequality (article available here).
The “occupational stress” suffered by those tasked to fulfill constitutional guarantees of the right to counsel regardless of the ability to pay is a too-often neglected consequence of the inequities of the justice system, the study argued. The study authors called it the “stress of injustice.” “Working within these structural constraints makes public defenders highly vulnerable to chronic stress and can have profound implications for their ability to safeguard the rights of poor defendants.”
Using semi-structured interviews, this study investigated occupational stress in a sample of 87 public defenders across the United States. It shows how the intense and varied chronic stressors experienced at work originate in the stress of injustice: the social and psychological demands of working in a punitive system with laws and practices that target and punish those who are the most disadvantaged.
The findings are centered around three shifts in American criminal justice that manifest in the stress of injustice: penal excess, divestment in indigent defense, and the criminalization of mental illness. Working within these structural constraints makes public defenders highly vulnerable to chronic stress and can have profound implications for their ability to safeguard the rights of poor defendants.