The special prosecutors hired to investigate the Big Dig celing collapse death are being paid $30,000 per week by the state of Massachusetts. To date, only one company has been charged with manslaughter in the death and that carries a maximum penalty of a $1000 fine.
I get paid less than $40,000 per year by the state of Massachusetts to defend the indigent full-time. There is something seriously, seriously wrong here.
During a commercial break in last night’s Patriots game, my friend clicked over to the NC State/Villanova basketball game on ESPN. And the announcer said at that very moment:
“So what you’re saying is, if you were a lawyer, you wouldn’t put a public defender on him!”
Ouch.
Last Saturday night, my friends convinced me to actually go out, notwithstanding my money woes (they have a great way of offering to buy rounds and then never giving me a chance to buy the next one). And our destination was the hottest new spot in Boston, where all the pro athletes and townie celebrities hang out - jail. Well, sort of. In reality, it is the “Liberty Hotel,” a luxury four-star hotel on Charles St. But it is the renovated site of the infamous Charles Street Jail. The jail was built in the mid-nineteenth century and served as the one-time “home” for the likes of Sacco and Venzetti and John Michael Curley. Perhaps most famously, in 1973, inmates sued the sheriff and others, claiming that pretrial detainees were being held in unconstitutional conditions. And the federal court agreed, holding:
“As a facility for the pretrial detention of presumptively innocent citizens, Charles Street Jail unnecessarily and unreasonably infringes upon their most basic liberties, among them the rights to reasonable freedom of motion, personal cleanliness, and personal privacy. The court finds and rules that the quality of incarceration at Charles Street is ‘punishment’ of such a nature and degree that it cannot be justified by the state’s interest in holding defendants for trial, and therefore it violates the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
The court ordered that a new jail be built by 1976, but (after a lot more litigation), the Charles St Jail didn’t actually close until 1990, after seventeen more years worth of suffering for its inmates. And now, perversely, it’s the city’s hottest night spot and most luxurious hotel.
The weirdest part about it is that it isn’t just a hotel with trendy bars. The restaurant is called “Clink” and the bar is “Alibi.” And remnants of the building’s past remain:
These are the ghosts, the half-perceived evidence of the old cells, which you can make out as puzzling patterns on the floor or the walls. There are teasing traces of old brick and metal, handsome exposed wood truss work that holds up the dome, a few remaining cell bars….Too often they yell at you that you’re, hey, in what used to be a jail. Restaurant tables cuddle up to bricks and bars. Interiors are blatant and often hideous. (Interior furnishings and finishes were designed by Champalimaud & Associates, of New York.) Knock-your-eye-out, boldly patterned murals, carpets, and furnishings leap at you from otherwise gloomy surfaces. Huge murals of silhouetted trees are supposed to make you think of freedom outdoors. A floor mosaic by artist Coral Bourgeois might seem delightful somewhere else, but because it consists entirely of cartoony icons of prison life, it strikes you as yet another in-your-face commercial for the jailness of the Liberty.
The drink menu is even filled with cocktails named after “people who tend to get you in trouble.”
I guarantee you that the Saturday night line to get in would not be over an hour at 11:30pm if this was just a new hotel. The intrigue lies in this “Ooh, I’m going to jail!” kitsch. And I find it both fascinating and somewhat repulsive, as I obviously spend a lot of time in real jails and know not only how unpleasant they are, but also that such a gimmick is rather disrespectful to all those people who were locked up there under horrible conditions and how many people continue to be so in facilities elsewhere.
Whether I will be able to appreciate the place in actuality remains to be seen - we refused to wait in line for so long on a cold night. So perhaps on an evening when it is not so in-demand, I will be able to report back on drinking in a luxury jail.
A federal judge in Boston this week handed down what seems to be an unprecedented sentence - he ordered that three men, who had just plead guilty to distribution of cocaine, be banned from the city for twelve years after they complete their prison sentences.
“We have never seen this happen before,” [U.S. Attorney Michael] Sullivan said. “The judge was persuaded to separate them from the people they influence.”
I must admit that I am flummoxed by this ruling. Will they be charged with trespassing if they come back to Boston? Based on my rudimentary understanding of the Tenth Amendment and Article 4, I suppose it is constitutional, as it does not restrict interstate travel, but I’m guessing this is not one of the things that the defendants were anticipating when going through a plea colloquy.
I have put off writing this post for a long time because I was unsure whether to reveal my current turmoil to the world or just power through it. And then I realized that the few but proud readers of this site may be the best ones to help me cope, as I know that I am not the only public defender to feel this way. So here goes…
I am having a crisis of faith. I fear that I am losing my passion, that I am succumbing to the daily pressures, that I am reaching the dreaded burn-out. And I am intensely ashamed of that, because there was rarely a soul that drank the Kool-Aid as deeply as I did. It has barely been a year as a public defender - a mere year! - and I am finding that my patience is waning, that my long nights are getting shorter and shorter, with fewer and fewer things getting checked off that to-do list. And I hate to say it, but a great deal of it is the money issue.
Now, of course I came into this job knowing that I was going to be making crap for money. I was embracing my idealism and eschewing the ease with which my friends were putting down payments on downtown condos. I was doing it for the love, not the money. And all that would still be well and good, except that I am not only living below the means of my friends, I am actually not even able to make ends meet. I am sinking deeper into credit card debt, because my rent constitutes 50% of my pay and the rest simply does not cover food, gas, utilities, and the occasional need for a new suit or a cocktail (nevermind my loan payments). Just last week, I had to replace all four tires on my car because I had worn them to dangerous levels and I have absolutely no idea where that $500 is going to come from. It went on the plastic and that is going to overwhelm me. The theory of living like a righteous warrior fighting the good fight is a lot easier than facing the reality of ever-mounting debt of all kinds. It honestly keeps me up at night.
So I figure that I have three choices - a) keep at it, hoping for a raise or a bonus at the whim of the legislature, while still racking up more and more debt; b) pick up a second job slinging coffee or scanning book purchases and sacrifice the precious few hours I have with my family, boyfriend, or slumber as it is; or c) quit and find something that pays better. Several of you may suggest d) moving closer to work to cut down on expenses, but that would mean having to sacrifice my entire relationship with the man I am going to marry, so I cannot go there. Other than that being thrown out, I honestly do not know what to do. I really, really do not.
The daily grind of difficult clients, overwhelming case loads, frustrating prosecutors, and the rest would be eased enormously by the money issue. In the end, my crisis of faith is not so much about the job, but about the living. I just don’t know if I can do it.
