This year marks my 19th year as a public defender, and my second as managing director at Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem (NDS), a community-based office that has served the community more than 30 years. Over nearly two decades, I’ve worked in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Harlem,in family and criminal defense. In my current role, I advocate consistently for one thing above almost all else: that the people doing this work get paid what it’s worth.
I know what’s at stake because for most of my career, I was a staff-level defender raising a family on this salary and living with every tradeoff that comes with it.
I almost didn’t make it to this role.
When my husband started graduate school and we found out we were expecting our daughter, now 12, we built our lives around a public defender salary because we believed in this work. For years, we made it work, but that math gets harder over time, not easier.
By the time I applied for this position two and a half years ago, the question was no longer abstract: Could I keep doing this, or did I need to find something that provided for my family’s needs? I got lucky — I secured this role before I had to answer that question the hard way, but I know what that luck means. There are hundreds of public defenders at NDS and only one managing director. Advancement cannot be the only answer to sustainability. Public defenders should not have to wait for a promotion to afford their lives.
My story is one of many like it. For years, NDS and offices like ours have received flat funding — contracts that don’t rise to meet increasing costs of living. In practice, that means the organization absorbs a cut every year, and so do the people in it.
Staff are leaving because they’re at a breaking point; many of them built their lives around this work and held on as long as they could. They’re leaving because a salary that was already modest has been losing ground, year after year, in real terms.
Some work second jobs to compensate. Others have left for cities with comparable costs and higher salaries, or for the private sector, where they can earn twice as much without doing that math every month.
At 45, I still carry one of those personal-cost-calculations: We could not afford to give our daughter a sibling.
The work is relentless in ways that don’t show up in a job description. Many of us carry the weight of our clients’ hardest moments with the weight of our own financial (dis)stress. That combination doesn’t break people all at once. It wears them down slowly, until one day, the math stops working and they leave. When that happens, clients also pay a price.
Public defenders are not only advocates for the people sitting next to them in court. They are the reason the rights written into our Constitution mean anything at all. The Sixth Amendment guarantee of counsel, the Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful search, the presumption of innocence — these rights do not enforce themselves.
Someone must stand up and demand those rights, case by case, client by client, every single day. When that person is too burned out to fight, or has finally done the math and left for a job that pays better, those rights don’t disappear on paper. They just stop being real.
The people doing this work are carrying something that belongs to all of us, at great personal cost most of us will never see. I made a decision about the size of my family because of what this work pays, but a city that requires that type of decision of its defenders because it refuses to fund them adequately isn’t just underpaying for the work it depends on — it’s taking for granted, and risking, the very people our constitutional rights depend on.
We are asking the city to fund this work so public defender offices like ours can raise salaries meaningfully. The city will decide this year, as it does every year, what it values. That decision will show up in a budget line. It will show up in how many defenders leave, and how many clients lose the person who knew them and their case.
It will show up in whether the constitutional promise of a fair defense remains real or becomes, slowly and quietly, optional.
Piyali Basak is the managing director of Neighborhood Defender Services of Harlem. For almost two decades, she has zealously defended the rights of those affected by policing systems.
