FACULTY SPOTLIGHT | Regina Austin

Fewer Stays, Fewer Days: The Bronx Defenders and How Holistic Defense Reduces Mass Incarceration

Regina Austin
William A Schnader Professor of Law
CEE Affiliate

We are excited to share this video made in Regina Austin's course "Documentaries and the Law" in Spring 2020.  In 2019, the Harvard Law Review published a quantitative study by researchers from the RAND Corporation and Penn Law’s Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice entitled “The Effects of Holistic Defense on Criminal Justice Outcomes.” They compared with the traditional model of public defense with the holistic model practiced by the Bronx Defenders (BxD).

​Located in the South Bronx and staffed by criminal and civil lawyers, non-attorney advocates, social workers, and investigators, BxD practices an interdisciplinary form of lawyering that addresses the full range of issues low-income clients experience in connection with criminal charges. The researchers found that BxD’s holistic defense model reduced the number of clients serving custodial sentences by 16% and the length of custodial stays by 24% or 9.5 days without increasing recidivism or compromising public safety. Thus, the model has significant implications for reducing the harms of mass incarceration and the inefficient expenditure of tax dollars on corrections. The video “Fewer Stays, Fewer Days” goes behind the numbers to explain what holistic defense is, how it reduces unnecessary incarceration, and what other public defense organizations can do to achieve similar results.

Regina Austin, CEE Affiliate and William A. Schnader Professor of Law, is the director for the multimodal course titled "Documentaries and the Law". The course trains lawyers to understand both the law and the creative process, as documentary films increasingly influence what people know and think about law. 

​Given that documentary filmmaking provides opportunities to mount visual legal arguments that are relatively affordable, accessible, and reliable, the course seeks to instill students with an understanding of the rudiments of nonfiction film storytelling. Austin’s scholarship focuses on the impact of law on cultural conflicts arising from race, gender, and class inequality, with much of it revolving around the critical analysis of ethnographies and law-genre documentary films and photography. The Penn Program on Documentaries & the Law hosts screenings of law-genre documentaries, maintains a national archive of clemency videos as a resource for capital defense attorneys, and produces mitigation videos on behalf of young, first-time defendants in cooperation with the Defender Association of Philadelphia. The videos produced in this course are available on Youtube.

Come Spring, Austin will also be instructing a new course: "Critical Multimodal Qualitative Research Across the Professions". Stay tuned for more information about this interdisciplinary multimodal course.