Human Rights Lawyer Plots Future
June 15, 2007
Human Rights Lawyer Plots Future
Meredith Hobbs, New York Lawyer
ATLANTA -- Lisa L. Kung joined the Southern Center for Human Rights in
Atlanta as a staff attorney in 1999 because it was the only public interest
law firm in the South filing lawsuits for poor people caught up in the
criminal justice system.
"The criminal justice system in the South is a different beast. The rate of
incarceration is off the charts compared to the rest of the country," she
said.
The South's higher incarceration rate is driven by race, she said. More
African-Americans are locked up there than in other parts of the country. In
Georgia, African-Americans make up 61 percent of the state prison
population, though they comprise only 30 percent of the state's population,
according to the Georgia Department of Corrections.
The center's mission is "to challenge the misuse of the criminal justice
system to target and control poor people of color," said Kung, 37, who
became the Southern Center's director last year after its longtime leader,
Stephen B. Bright, stepped aside to devote himself to full-time lawyering
there.
It does that by representing indigent prisoners facing the death penalty and
suing to improve prison conditions and indigent defense. Most of its work is
in Georgia and Alabama.
Before coming to the Southern Center, Kung said, "I had some theoretical
understanding of the criminal justice system, but I don't think I
appreciated how deeply it has come to permeate our society.
"Until you dip your toe in it, you don't realize how directly the criminal
justice system is used to target poor people and people of color. When here,
in Georgia, African-American men have a one in four chance of seeing time
inside the prison system and a one in two chance of being under correctional
control of some sort in their lifetime, it's hard to claim you're a free
country," she said.
The South's prison system after the Civil War was built on the convict lease
system and use of the death penalty, Kung said: "The convict lease system
was created to control newly free African-Americans. That's the legacy we're
working off of."
In 1868, Georgia made its first convict lease, sending 100 African-American
prisoners from the Milledgeville state penitentiary to work on the Georgia
and Alabama Railroad for a year at $25 apiece. Sixteen of them died.
Undeterred, the state leased out all 393 of the penitentiary'
next year, and the practice soon became an important source of revenue. The
conditions for the leased-out prisoners were brutal; laborers on the
railroads' chain gangs generally did not live for more than two years.
That past is still with us, Kung said. Her firm just filed suit against the
Macon Diversion Center in Georgia, which last fall started leasing inmates
to Crider Poultry in Stillmore, an hour and a half away from Macon, after
the plant's cheap Latino labor force was deported for immigration
violations. The center is representing a former female inmate who says she
was refused medical care after she was injured at the plant while working
12-hour shifts lifting cases of chicken. "The people being forced to work
these jobs are almost all impoverished people of color," said Kung.
The Southern Center exerts a disproportionate influence for a small public
interest law firm whose nine lawyers' combined salary is less than that of
the average partner at a big Atlanta firm. Because the center receives no
government money, it's one of the rare public interest groups that can bring
class actions against prisons and jails. In 1996, Congress banned class
actions by any legal aid group receiving federal money.
Its 2004 class action against the Fulton County Jail for overcrowding, lack
of medical care and abysmal conditions prompted a federal judge, Marvin H.
Shoob, to bring in an outside monitor. After a critical quarterly report two
weeks ago, Shoob threatened to call in the U.S. Attorneys Office or the FBI
to investigate the jail's management and to put the jail in receivership if
conditions did not improve.
Other Southern Center class actions have stopped the Clinch County Jail in
south Georgia from charging prisoners for room and board, then keeping them
imprisoned until they paid up, and it forced the Limestone Correctional
Facility in Alabama to markedly improve its care of HIV-positive prisoners.
Southern Center suits also helped launch Georgia's first statewide public
defender system in 2005.
The center was founded in 1976 after the reinstatement of the death penalty.
When Bright joined as director in 1982, death penalty representation
consumed almost all of his time, but as the center has grown, its practice
has broadened.
Kung joined in 1999 to fight substandard prison and jail conditions, not to
represent those on death row. Her first job after graduating from Emory
University in 1991 was as a program assistant at AM radio station WGST, just
as it was morphing from a news station into talk radio. After helping to
launch Sean Hannity's career, she decided that radio was not the best way to
fight for social justice. She briefly considered medicine, but saw law as a
better avenue to systemic change. "I went to law school because I had a debt
to society to repay after making coffee for Sean Hannity," she joked.
After graduating from New York University Law School in 1997, Kung spent a
year as a fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice, which works with criminal
justice agencies, but decided that change from within was not for her. After
a year's fellowship at the Georgia Law Center for the Homeless, she joined
the Southern Center.
Kung said the rapid growth of the American prison system over the past 30
years prompted the center's expansion into systemic challenges. "The
criminal justice system has been exploding in size and power," she said.
Since the center's launch in 1976, the number of people in prison has
increased eightfold, giving the United States the distinction of the highest
incarceration rate in the world.
Under Kung's leadership, the center has continued to take on more systemic
work. Last year it challenged the constitutionality of Georgia's new sex
offender law banning convicted offenders from living within 1,000 feet of
public places and investigated New Orlean's nonfunctioning indigent defense
program in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. "There were people who'd been in
jail for 18 months on public drunkenness charges who'd never seen an
attorney. The system had completely collapsed," Kung said. After the release
of the center's report, the city's entrenched indigent defense board was
replaced.
Are there cases the center cannot take on because of lack of resources?
"Yes, of course," she said. "You can throw a dart against a map of Georgia
and Alabama, and there's work to be done. The challenge right now is
figuring out, strategically, which parts of the system need to be challenged
so there aren't so many people in prison."
To do that, the center needs money. Its primary funding comes from attorney
fees and contributions from other lawyers. It also receives a grant from the
Soros Foundation. Kung believes plenty of nonlawyers would support it if
asked. "We have to get better at asking," she said.
The American Lawyer named Kung one of its 50 top litigators under 40 in
January, but she prefers to remain behind the scenes. The center was
scheduled to throw its second Atlanta fund-raiser last week -- but Kung's
name was nowhere to be found on the invitation among those of a swarm of
friends, benefactors and host committee members.
"As executive director, you're the public face of the center. How can you
represent it and raise money when you're not even on the invitation?" I
asked her.
"That's just plain director," she corrected me. "And it's with a small 'd.'"
It's Bright whom people identify with the Southern Center, she said, which
seemed to suit her just fine. Although blunt and articulate by nature, she
is reticent when speaking about herself.
Kung spends most of her time managing the center and fund raising, but she
still handles cases. She has just joined Bright on the Fulton Jail suit and
continues to represent the inmates of the Tutwiler Prison for Women in
Wetumpka, Ala., which has been under a court-ordered monitor since 2002,
when the Southern Center sued it for overcrowded conditions and deficient
medical care.
Since Kung joined the center, its staff has turned over almost entirely. Its
lawyers and investigators, who are in their 20s and 30s, generally stay for
only three to five years, she said. As people get older and start families
they can't keep up the demanding travel schedule. She estimated that the
center's lawyers and investigators put about 350,000 miles on its rapidly
aging five-car fleet last year, a lot of it down back roads to remote
prisons and jails in South Georgia and Alabama, with the odd foray into
Louisiana and Mississippi. The center welcomes any vehicle donations, she
added: "Our dream car is a hybrid, but we'd be happy to get a low-mileage
Honda."
Why is Kung still at the Southern Center?
"The job's not done," she said.
She thought about leaving a few years ago when her partner at the time
received a tenure track job in Los Angeles -- but discovered that she could
not leave the center or her clients, particularly the women prisoners at
Tutwiler.
"A cold statistic on the page can't tell you the story of what happens to a
woman's family when she's sent to prison for drug possession," she said of
her experience representing the women.
What would she be doing if she were not at the Southern Center?
She was silent for a long moment. "I can't imagine doing anything else," she
said.
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Source : New York Lawyer
http://www.nylawyer
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