Giving Compass' Take:

• Eli Hager shares the benefits found in a study of the holistic approach - addressing a life, rather than a single crime - to justice which produced better outcomes than traditional justice. 

• How can funders help to improve upon and spread this method? 

• Learn about the state of mass incarceration in 2018. 

On any given day in this nation’s courtrooms, there’s a parade of defendants struggling with homelessness, mental illness or drug addiction.

That is the fundamental insight of “holistic defense,” a form of legal representation pioneered in the Bronx two decades ago. Using this method, public defender’s offices not only help clients with their court cases but also try to address the life circumstances that led them to commit crimes in the first place.

And according to one of the first ever large-scale, empirical studies of holistic defenders’ effectiveness, helping people with their life problems often gets them out of jail, too.

The study compared outcomes in the Bronx between a prototypical holistic defender’s office and a more traditional one using court data from more than 587,000 cases spanning 2000 through 2007 and 2012 through 2014. The research, by the nonprofit RAND Corporation and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, found that defendants offered holistic services were about 16 percent less likely to get locked up. They were also expected to serve 24 percent shorter jail and prison sentences—without leading to any increase in crime.

In drug cases, those represented holistically saw their likelihood of serving time decrease by 25 percent; expected sentence lengths were reduced by 63 percent.

Over 10 years, defendants under the holistic model spent 1.1 million fewer days behind bars. About 4,500 people who otherwise would have gone to jail avoided it completely.

Read the full article about the benefits of addressing a life by Eli Hager at The Marshall Project.