Why we do this work
Our mission is to ensure individuals have a right to effective counsel when facing the loss of their basic human needs in the civil legal system. We work nationally to accomplish this by:
Envisioning, supporting, and advocating for the right to counsel:
- Supporting, connecting, and coordinating federal, state, and local efforts to a) enact, litigate, implement, and evaluate right to counsel programs; and b) engage in social science research projects that demonstrate the impact of counsel;
- Identifying and supporting a variety of funding sources for the right to counsel;
- Growing and diversifying our participant and partner base so as to help grow the larger national movement;
- Responding to dangers to the movement while facilitating work to plan its future.
Educating about the right to counsel:
- Tracking and reporting on right to counsel litigation, legislation, education, and social science research efforts around the country;
- Maintaining a comprehensive right to counsel research repository and status map;
- Planning and/or presenting at convenings, educational sessions, and public events, and speaking with the media, in order to raise awareness/understanding of, and enthusiasm for, the right to counsel.
Our vision
We envision a world where all 50 states and the District of Columbia adopt and effectively implement an enforceable right to high-quality, fully funded, client-directed counsel for people in civil cases who are facing the loss of their basic human needs, thus moving towards reversing systemic disempowerment and unfairness, restoring faith in the system, and advancing equal justice.
Why?
We engage in this work because the right to full representation by an attorney is an evidence-based approach that promotes actual systems change. It enables people to enforce their rights and protect their basic human needs while helping to effectuate the laws that have been passed to protect people. It helps to redistribute power. It works towards restoring confidence in the justice system. It advances race equity by providing one form of relief to Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities disproportionately harmed by, and entangled in, a civil justice system rooted in systemic racism. And it rejects the scarcity-based operations of legal services while advancing long-term fiscal responsibility.
“Hundreds of years of racialized decision-making affect everything about how our systems operate. And those systems are held in place by deeply engrained and often unconscious mindsets among the general public and the stakeholders we need to join us. We must understand, name, and begin to systematically dismantle those mindsets if we are to win a right to counsel and other system changes on the road to justice.”
Building Support for a Civil Right to Counsel by Anchoring Your Case in Racial Justice: A Playbook for Justice Seekers Everywhere (TheCaseMade, 2024).
Our commitment to race equity
In 2020, we at the NCCRC stood with Black individuals and communities protesting the murders of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Manuel Ellis, and countless others, as well as police brutality more broadly. Disproportionate police violence against Black people presents a constant threat to the health, safety, and dignity of families and communities. The racism behind it is a disease far harder to treat and cure than COVID-19. We applauded the protests bringing longstanding issues of inequality, such as police violence, front and center nationwide so that their truth can no longer be denied. This country must finally confront its ugly history of structural racism and root it out in all of its institutions, whether law enforcement, housing markets, courts, or elsewhere.
It must also be recognized that the experience of Black people securing, living in, and losing housing is similarly marred by racial inequality intertwined with police violence:
- The eviction process is a farce: in some cities, evictions are disposed of with as little as 30 seconds of court time. Black tenants, who are evicted at many times the rate of white tenants, suffer the most from this lack of due process, as well as from the massive representational disparity: fewer than 5% of tenants have access to counsel compared to over 80% of landlords. The net impact is that housing courts have become little more than a mill that churn through Black communities, dispossessing them of one of their most basic human needs.
- The end of the eviction process involves a form of violent police action when sheriffs forcibly remove tenants from their homes and put everything they own on the street.
- The problems Black families face in finding and retaining affordable, safe housing stem in part from decades of de facto and de jure housing discrimination combined with structural racism in the workplace and discriminatory law enforcement policies that have caused job and housing loss. This history in part explains why Black people are disproportionately forced to rely on public housing, which has long suffered from aggressive and abusive policing.
- Black people form a disproportionate portion of the homeless population. The history between the homeless community and the police is filled with harassment and arrests that wreck the lives of many homeless individuals and families. Furthermore, homelessness imperils many other basic human needs, such as health, education, child custody, and employment.
- COVID-19 attacked Black communities at an alarmingly disproportionate rate in part because of health and income issues caused by housing insecurity and put far more Black families into the eviction mill.
While our organization fights for fundamental fairness in the courts and has worked to make race equity and inclusion in housing a part of our internal and external focus, we still have much more to do to center Black communities in reform efforts and not merely assist them. Furthermore, all social justice organizations such as ours must work to listen to, lift up, and amplify Black voices speaking out on racism.
Finally, it is critical that all people recognize their responsibility to call out racism in all its forms, and that society has a responsibility to go beyond simply being not racist in order to become anti-racist. As the struggle for racial equality continues, we pledge to strive for greater understanding, listening, and acting.
