Leonard Noisette talks about failure from both sides of the fence, having transitioned from running a public defender organization to now helping allocate funding to non-profits at the Open Society Institute.
Do you think addressing failure is a challenge unique to criminal justice or public defense?
I’m not sure if admitting failure is uniquely difficult in criminal justice. Some of it comes down to ego and self-preservation. But I suppose public defense has its own vulnerabilities because of its lack of financial independence. I worry that the difficulty to admit failure just means that we continue to lower the bar. Back when I was at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, our primary goal was to have small caseloads of 35 to 40. Starting out as a team leader there, I pushed relentlessly for this because I thought it was central to the type of defense we offered. But after enough pushback from the city, 35 became 50, then 60. Then when I became the director of NDS, I experienced that same slippage – not because evidence suggested that 60 was preferable or even feasible, but because the external pressures demanded that we take on more and more cases.
What were the obstacles to sticking to the original metrics of success?
Part of the problem is that we found it difficult to acknowledge that we had more cases than we could handle. If only there was an evidence-based standard that said: given this defense model, each attorney can handle x number of a particular type of case. Then we would know when we reached our limit. But there wasn’t such a standard and still isn’t. Another problem was that we found it difficult to match what we were doing with what we said we were doing. Everyone at NDS believed in the holistic defense model, and that’s what we espoused publically, but day-to-day, we were falling short of that. We had to make compromises – like deciding to place a full-time attorney doing just arraignments – in order to churn out the high volume we needed to.
Is the problem about agreeing on the metrics of success or what success looks like in the first place?
Both. There’s an ongoing struggle to agree on what the metrics of success should be. For example, NDS used to focus on trying to increase pre-trial release rates – both because we believed it was good for our clients and because the city had said they prioritized that for financial reasons. But in practice, it turned out to be bad for our clients. No matter how much information we prepared for the bail application, the judges still tended to set bail for an amount that was not feasible for our clients to pay. So at the end of the day, our clients were still in on bail, and we hadn’t succeeded by the city’s metrics either. In hindsight, there were other approaches we could have taken. We could have argued for judges to use one of the many bail alternatives. Instead of thinking more strategically, I think we just threw up our hands when the first attempt didn’t work. But an even bigger problem is even defining ‘success’ in the first place. How do you get everyone to agree on what “quality representation” looks like? I know there’s a group in North Carolina trying to do it, using metrics like pre-trial release, days of incarceration, and treatment success.
Now as a funder, how do you define failure and success for the organizations you fund?
I think my perspective as a provider has been useful in this regard. I understand the pressures, especially when the goals are so huge. It makes it hard to gauge incremental progress. As for addressing failure, I think service providers can and should be honest with their funders about things that aren’t going well. Of course, that honesty requires a trusting relationship between the provider and the funder, which can take time. I like to think that we develop those relationships here; I’ve also heard, however, that organizations aren’t as honest as we funders think they are.