This past summer, I had the opportunity to work at Still She Rises, Tulsa — a non-profit that provides legal services to indigent mothers. Oklahoma incarcerates a higher percentage of its women than almost any other state. Most of those women are mothers, leading to generational consequences as children bear the impact of growing up with a parent in prison. Criminal charges also disrupt our clients’ lives in undermining their ability to find employment, cutting off access to safe and secure housing, and creating economic repercussions that will follow them for most of their lives. SSR offers client-centered, innovative, and holistic legal representation addressing individual goals while also targeting systemic issues impacting the community. 

This summer, we’ve seen a very obvious example of how the United States judiciary wreaks violence on people of color, women, and those in poverty. Most injustice isn’t as visible. During my internship, I was able to see the way America falls short of “justice for all” every day. 

Even before prosecutors had the opportunity to bring criminal charges for an abortion, Oklahoma’s criminal court system was already stretched so thin and disparately weaponized against marginalized people. Our clients experience excessive punishment for offenses that often don’t rise to what society thinks of as “criminal conduct.”

Increased references to the thousands of children in foster care after Dobbs don’t recognize that so many of those children — my clients’ children — are unjustly stripped from their families. More than 1 in 10 black children will be forcibly separated from their parents and placed into foster care by the time they turn 18. The family policing system punishes poverty, benign drug use, and mental health concerns. The government is constantly making moral judgements about who should be a mother and yet they will still force many of these same women into giving birth.  

In June, the Supreme Court undermined tribal sovereignty for indigenous people across the country and in Oklahoma. This fall, they will hear a case challenging the constitutionality of Indian Child Welfare Act. ICWA is a rare control on the broadly unchecked power of children protective services, though often its protections are limited. To lose them would leave the many Native women we work with vulnerable to a discriminatory system.   

This system is incredibly difficult to navigate and understand — something I was very acutely aware of when trying to explain to a client that whether she would be able to get justice for the unlawful eviction she experienced during COVID was a matter statutory interpretation that the state’s highest court would decide. These challenges are felt more deeply and are harder to overcome by those with fewer financial resources; a client of mine has active warrants for arrest solely due to her inability to pay a $22,000 fine relating to criminal charges from two decades ago. 

In the course of my time at SSR, I was often struck by how much our legal representation could mean to a client, even when we were less successful than we would have liked. In a system that refuses to treat these women with dignity, having an advocate who is on their side is everything. That shouldn’t be dependent on how much is in their bank account.