Jonathan Rapping

Gideon's Promise Jonathan Rapping

A blueprint for criminal justice reform that puts a new generation of public defenders front and center in the fight for legal equality Public defenders represent over eighty percent of those who interact with the court system, but even the most well-meaning are over-worked, under-funded, and incentivized to put the interests of judges and politicians above those of their clients in a culture that has led to an embarrassingly low standard of justice. Rather than arguing for a change in rules, Rapping proposes a radical cultural shift to a fiercely client-based ethos. Combining wisdom drawn from over a dozen years as a public defender and cutting-edge research in the fields of organizational and cultural psychology, Jonathan Rapping reveals the pervasive issues inherent in our current system of public defense, and lays the foundation for how model public defense programs should work to end mass incarceration.