|
I think one of my frustrations... I'm learning how limited what someone can do in this position - how many limits there are in what someone can do, even if you're a prisoners' rights lawyer and you do this full-time, more than full-time. So that's one real frustration is just feeling like - I don't think I was entirely naïve, I don't think I thought that I would just walk in here and everything would be fixed - but I did think that it wouldn't be quite this hard to make progress at least on small things. But it does feel pretty hard. So that's frustrating.
And then I think the other piece that's been hard is that, as a practical matter, every client I see is someone who's just been beaten up and is basically a victim of a violent crime. So I visit people on a regular basis who have black eyes and bruises and the occasional broken bone and who are understandably scared, sometimes angry - although no one has ever directed that towards me - but understandably angry at the circumstances they find themselves in, and who have so few resources available to them to do anything at all about it... So sometimes what I take away from that is just that it's very sad. It's just a terribly sad situation.
That's partly the challenge for me as a new lawyer - not new to the criminal justice system and not new to working in prisons - but new to being in this role is figuring out a way to keep doing this kind of work without becoming overwhelmed by just how very sad it is.
|
