The Courage of Compassion

How would you like to be judged for the rest of your life by the worst thing you’ve ever done?

We all think we are compassionate just like we all think we are honest. But true compassion is not innate. Compassion for others, especially those that we don’t know or understand, must be learned. Our lack of compassion is perhaps most extreme in the exercise of criminal justice, where a person’s entire life, worth, and character are judged through the myopic lens of a single act. But no one, says Robin Steinberg, should be reduced to their worst moment.

From the founder and CEO of The Bail Project, The Courage of Compassion unveils how we can reimagine justice through compassion. Steinberg shares her journey as a public defender, representing people at precisely that time in their lives — their own worst moment. She recounts the heart-wrenching stories of her clients and invites us to interrogate our fears and beliefs about justice and punishment. Lastly, Steinberg reveals moments when she questioned her own capacity for compassion, as well as her ability to fight for better, more humane justice from within a system that is riddled with holes and seemingly interminable problems.

Most people think of hospitality as something they do. Will thinks about service as an act of service—about how his actions make people feel. And he recognized that if he wanted his frontline teams to obsess about how they made their customers feel, he had to obsess about how he made his employees feel. The two cannot be separated: great service cannot exist without great leadership.

About Robin

Robin Steinberg is the founder and CEO of The Bail Project, an unprecedented national effort to combat mass incarceration by transforming the pretrial system in the US.

Over a 35-year career as a public defender, Robin represented thousands of low-income people in over-policed neighborhoods and founded three high-impact organizations: The Bronx Defenders, The Bronx Freedom Fund, and Still She Rises. Robin is a frequent commentator on criminal justice issues and has contributed opinion pieces to The New York Times, The Marshall Project, and USA Today. Her publications have appeared in leading law and policy journals, including NYU Review of Law & Social Change, Yale Law & Policy Review, and Harvard Journal of African-American Public Policy, and she has contributed book chapters to How Can You Represent Those People? (Palgrave 2013) and Decarcerating America (The New Press 2018). Robin is a Gilbert Foundation Senior Fellow of the Criminal Justice Program at UCLA School of Law.