The Case for Holistic Defense

The Constitution guarantees counsel to people charged with crimes who cannot afford a lawyer. But an arrest rarely touches only the criminal case. It can threaten a family's public housing, trigger a child welfare investigation, cost someone a job held for years, jeopardize immigration status, or end eligibility for student aid, often before there is any conviction. What would it look like if public defense addressed all of it?

In this TalksOnLaw interview, Joel Cohen sits down with Robin Steinberg, the pioneer of "holistic defense," founder of The Bronx Defenders and Still She Rises, and founder of The Bail Project, to explain the model and why she believes it works. Steinberg discusses bail and pretrial detention in more depth in her companion interview, The Problem with Bail.

"An Arrest Is Never Just an Arrest"

That principle has guided The Bronx Defenders since Steinberg founded it with eight lawyers in the South Bronx in 1997. Holistic defense is an interdisciplinary model of public defense. It treats the criminal case as one part of a client's life and defends against the collateral consequences that an arrest sets in motion in other systems. A strong result in criminal court means little, she says, if the client goes home to an eviction notice, a family court case, or a deportation proceeding.

Learning from Clients

Steinberg recalls a client arrested on a minor drug misdemeanor who immediately faced a public housing proceeding, a child welfare investigation, and the loss of a city job she had held with distinction for more than ten years. As a young public defender, Steinberg focused obsessively on the criminal case. Her clients taught her that they often cared more about something else: "Who cares about this drug charge? I want to keep my kids." She also makes a point of calling them clients and people, not "criminal defendants." When The Bronx Defenders asked the community what it needed from its public defenders, it learned about consequences no one had trained them to see. "Once we learn that," she says, "you can't unlearn that."

How It Differs from Traditional Public Defense

The traditional model focuses almost exclusively on the criminal charge. That work remains vital, and Steinberg does not criticize those who do it. Holistic defense surrounds the criminal lawyer with a team of civil, family, housing, and immigration lawyers, social workers, and advocates under one roof. The criminal lawyer still tries the case. The others handle the other systems, which Steinberg argues actually reduces the burden on the public defender.

The Core Pillars

Steinberg identifies three pillars. The first is seamless access to the services clients need, identified through an early assessment and adapted to each place. Immigration expertise was essential in the Bronx, while a tribal defender office needed experts in driver's license revocation. The second is constant communication among advocates, because the systems talk to each other: a plea that looks good in criminal court can put a client at risk of deportation or of losing their children across the street in family court. The third is a deep connection to the client community, through community organizing, outreach, and "know your rights" work, so that clients, not lawyers, define what is needed.

From Individual Cases to Systemic Change

Listening to clients also revealed systemic problems. In the Bronx, cases lingered for years, forcing people to leave jobs and find childcare for court dates every few weeks. The Bronx Defenders documented the harm and filed a class action challenging the delays. Steinberg explains that holistic defenders are trained to ask the right questions, not to become social workers. It is the kind of all-around counsel wealthy defendants already expect, and she notes that it is what well-paid private defense lawyers do when they handle a client's divorce, custody, or estate issues. The same work showed that inability to pay even $500 bail was driving people into jail. That led to the Bronx Freedom Fund and later The Bail Project.

Answering the Critics

Public defenders at first objected that this was not their job. Steinberg says the results persuaded many: better case outcomes, less time in jail, and better life outcomes for clients. Asked whether attention to other issues dilutes zealous criminal defense, she replies that good lawyers can "walk and chew gum at the same time." On cost, she says The Bronx Defenders' cost per case tracked that of traditional offices. Preventing an eviction or a foster care placement costs taxpayers far less than a shelter bed or a child's time in foster care. She also points out that Gideon v. Wainwright guarantees counsel only in criminal cases, leaving people without lawyers in the housing, immigration, and benefits systems where arrests do the most damage.

Still She Rises: Defending Mothers in Tulsa

Steinberg brought the model to Tulsa, Oklahoma, with Still She Rises, the nation's first public defender office dedicated to women, specifically mothers. Women have been the fastest-growing population in American jails and prisons, and Oklahoma incarcerated women at roughly twice the national rate. The office is in North Tulsa, the historically Black community devastated by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. It sits in a largely abandoned shopping mall rather than beside the courthouse, and about 80 percent of its clients are Black mothers. After a year-long listening tour, the team found child welfare consequences at the center of nearly every case, mothers sometimes punished more harshly than fathers charged alongside them, and court fines and fees that followed women for decades. Donor-funded payments of fines, and bail as low as $100, often meant the difference between jail and going home to a child.

What to Know Now

The evidence for the model has grown. A large RAND-affiliated study, published in the Harvard Law Review in 2019, compared Bronx cases assigned essentially at random between The Bronx Defenders and a traditional defender office. It found that holistic representation did not change conviction rates but reduced the likelihood of a custodial sentence by about 16 percent and expected sentence length by about 24 percent, which the authors estimated saved more than a million days of incarceration over a decade. Holistic and interdisciplinary models have since spread to many public defender offices, and The Bronx Defenders now represents about 20,000 people a year across criminal, family, civil, and immigration matters. Some of the gaps in the right to counsel that Steinberg described have narrowed. New York City became the first U.S. city to guarantee lawyers to tenants facing eviction, and a number of cities and states have followed. Advising on immigration consequences has taken on added urgency as immigration enforcement has intensified.

The debates Steinberg engaged remain active. New York overhauled its bail, discovery, and speedy-trial laws in 2019, and legislators have since revised them several times amid disputes over their effect on public safety and court backlogs. The Supreme Court held in Timbs v. Indiana (2019) that the Excessive Fines Clause applies to the states, and a number of states have scaled back court debt practices such as suspending driver's licenses for unpaid fines. Oklahoma remains among the states with the highest rates of women's imprisonment. Supporters see holistic defense as a cost-effective way to reduce incarceration and family separation. Skeptics question whether its results can be replicated where public defense is chronically underfunded. The Bail Project, which Steinberg founded and led until 2023, reports having posted bail for tens of thousands of people across the country. Charitable bail funds now face new pressure: an August 2025 executive order directs federal agencies to suspend or terminate funding to jurisdictions that have largely eliminated cash bail, and several states, including Georgia, have restricted charitable bail funds.