Search

Coffee at 26th & Cal (or the Cook County Jail)

probononetwork
Jul 8, 2014
3 min read

by Karen Boyd

The student speaker at my law school graduation spoke of the need for graduates to contribute pro bono hours throughout our careers. I listened to him and thought, “Good luck with that,” as I looked around and saw my classmates ready to head off to careers in Indianapolis and Chicago and smaller Indiana cities. I was going to Louisville to begin work in the corporate real estate section of a large Kentucky firm and, besides, I had loans to pay and a life to begin. Pro bono seemed to be left to other classmates who were still looking for work in the public sector or were jobless.

Life in Louisville was great until my husband got a job in Chicago and I found myself taking a new bar exam and looking for a new job and then found myself with a young son and still looking for a job. I wasn’t good at juggling work at a medium sized firm and more sons so I eventually left the legal world and focused on all of the volunteer efforts that I could manage. I did the normal PTC-stuff and spent several hours a week at the church-run food pantry where I learned many names and almost as many stories from people living nearby who just needed some help feeding their families. I did some hourly legal work and the occasional real estate closing and certainly maintained my license but I could not really continue to call myself a “lawyer” but mostly thought of myself as a very busy woman.

About six months ago a friend suggested that I contact someone that she had known when her son was in school in Oak Park, suggesting that I might like to hear about some of the pro bono legal work that her friend was involved in. That friend was Donna Peel, one of the organizers of the Pro Bono Network (“PBN”), who suggested that we meet for coffee. That coffee turned out instead to be my first trip to the jail at 26th and California. To say that this was a trip outside my western suburban world would understate my first impressions. We went through so many levels of security. I did not mind leaving my phone in the car but was surprised that I could not bring in even a small purse but instead only a small wallet with my license and my new jail ID. Kleenexes were fine but not paperclips. We passed through still more layers of security and were escorted up to our floor by yet another security officer whom Donna knew by first name. We went into a small room that housed the library and a bathroom for the guards and there we met our first client. That’s when it all became more like legal work and yet very familiar on a personal level.

I met with women who, upon incarceration and after taking their court-required parenting classes, needed some legal help to establish guardianships for their children and sometimes help getting contact visits with their children. I have gone back to the jail a few more times and have met an assortment of people, many with serious drug dependencies that caused me to wonder if they will ever be strong enough to be a full time parent to their children; I met a lovely young woman whom all the guards seem to adore and who went out of their way to ask that we do our best to help her—we learned subsequently that it will probably be a few years at least before she is reunited with her daughter but we at least helped her to legally name her mother as the child’s guardian. Every time I visited the jail, I met a person who was concerned about her children’s well being and needed advice and legal help and I then through follow up phone calls heard the stories of families who wanted to protect those children in some fashion. It seemed like the best sort of legal work: helping our client, the mother, but truly helping the children who missed their mother and may not be reunited for some time.

I have volunteered at other PBN sponsored clinics like the CDEL senior clinics where we write simple wills and powers of attorneys for clients. I have helped to start the process for individuals who have amassed major debt by charging groceries on their credit cards and then paid only the minimum payments at the end of the month. I hope to become involved in immigration work and maybe even help to launch an effort to help teenagers expunge their records so that they are eligible for college scholarships and federal loans. In truth, I like the jail work the best but feel really grateful to my friend for directing me to PBN. Every hour that I have spent volunteering has been time well spent.