Interview with Attorney Deborah Golden

This interview is conducted with Attorney Deborah Golden, Director of the DC Prisoners’ Project, a part of the Washington Lawyer’s Committee.  The project’s objective is to act as an advocate for prisoners to help to maintain their dignity, while ensuring that they receive humane treatment while incarcerated.  Mrs. Golden received her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School.  She has been working with the project since 2006.  She is also currently an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law School and was recently named one the nation’s best LGBT Lawyers Under the Age of 40 by the National LGBT Bar Association.

Michele: How did you first get interested in the field of law?

Deborah Golden: Generally, I think the field of law was something I was always interested in.  It was just something I was pretty sure I wanted to do from pretty early on in my undergraduate career, maybe even in high school.

Michele: How did you get involved with your current field, working as the Director of the DC Prisoners’ Project?

Deborah Golden: My first real introduction to prisoners’ rights was in my third year of law school, when I was a teaching assistant for an undergraduate class about women in prisons.  I originally took on that class for the benefits from Michigan University, which was a well paying part-time job.  That was my first introduction to the field.  Then, when I was applying to jobs after my fellowship, which was two years after law school, I was offered a position as the Director of the Women in Prison Project in the DC Prisoners’ Legal Services Project.

Michele: Could you provide an overview of the work your office is involved with?

Deborah Golden: The DC Prisoners’ Project, at the Washington Lawyer’s Committee, represents people who are incarcerated or otherwise have their freedom abridged under the authority of DC.  That means that we represent people who in jail, prison, parole, or probation, and in a variety of civil rights needs. 

Michele: What do you find to be the most interesting part of your work as the Director of the DC Prisoners’ Project?

Deborah Golden: What I like most about the work is the variety of what I do.  I get to look at really interesting, deep thinking questions and research.  I look at what it means to have an 8^th Amendment, and what does that say about us as a country and a society.  I also get to do individual advocacy on belief of real people and be involved with policy work.  And all of these interesting parts of my job go towards something I really believe in, the inherent dignity of each person.

Michele:  What would you say is the most challenging aspect of your work?

Deborah Golden: There’s always more need than we have resources for and often some of the most heart-tugging requests are things that the law can not answer or do anything for.  So we have to say no a lot, which is hard.

Michele: What would you say is one of the most interesting cases you have worked on?

Deborah Golden: Just now, I signed a memorandum of understanding that will move towards settlement.  It’s on behalf of women in the Virginia Department of Corrections, who are held at Owens Prison, which was supposedly designated for the sickest women in prison, and the healthcare was really quite abysmal.  After probably four or five years of working on that case, we are going to be able to make large systemic reforms to the way that healthcare is delivered and how the women are treated. 

Michele: So you were saying that there is a serious problem with the healthcare, why do you think the treatment is so inadequate?

Deborah Golden: It’s a lack of funding; it’s lack of awareness of the public health implications.  We like to think as a country that people go to prison and never come back, but 95% of the people who go to prison come back.  I think it has a lot to do with lack of transparency of the system, a lot of people really don’t know what happens in prison, and that’s very hard to find out.

Michele: What would say is one of the largest problems with today’s prison system?

Deborah Golden: It’s hard to say that there is one.  I think the biggest problem is that it exists in the way that it does today.  It’s huge.  It’s our largest social institution in this country.  It incarcerates 25% of the world’s prisoners, but the United States has about 5% of the world’s population.  It’s just mammoth and in a lot of ways unmanageable.  An analogy that an old boss of mine used to use that made a lot of sense to me relates to the idea that prison is so crowded that any little thing that goes wrong has huge consequences.  If you think about it, if someone gave you five blocks that you had to fit in a huge box you could just throw them in any which way and just carry the box.  But, if it were totally full you would have to make sure that each block was put in perfectly, and if any one were slightly out of place, you would not be able to carry the box because it would overflow.  That’s basically what it’s like in prison.  It’s so crowded and we’ve stretched our system beyond what we could ever hope to support.  Because of that we destroy a lot of lives in the process.   

Michele: What do you do when people do try to reenter society? Do you get involved with those people who were formerly incarcerated?

Deborah Golden: We do.  We represent people in cases involving unfair and illegal overreach by the parole commission.  We work with the other projects here collaboratively, including the employment and housing project. 

Michele: Although unrelated to your work on prisons, what advice would you give to students considering law school?

Deborah Golden: Don’t worry too much about taking classes to prepare for law school.  Take classes that you think are interesting and teach you how to think and give you a window to something you’ve never thought about.   

I would like to give a special thanks to Deborah Golden for taking the time for this interview.

If you would like to learn more about the work of the DC Prisoners’ Project, follow this link to the website: http://www.washlaw.org/index.php/projects/dc-prisoners-rights