NAPD 2024 Women's Virtual Conference

This plenary session will delve into the unique challenges and opportunities facing women leaders in the field of public defense. With a focus on women who head state-wide public defender offices, the panelists will share their personal experiences, insights, and strategies for overcoming gender-specific obstacles. By bringing together a panel of accomplished women leaders in public defense, this session aims to provide valuable insights, inspire future generations of women attorneys, and foster a more inclusive and equitable legal profession.

Gail Brashear, Alyssa Knight, and Felicia Dixon are directly impacted women and will be speaking about the impact of prison on gender. The panel will be moderated by Attorney Anna Tolin, Gail's former boss.
The panel will feature a distinguished group of directly impacted women who have experienced firsthand the challenges of navigating the criminal justice system and the subsequent obstacles to employment and higher education.

Over the past forty years, the criminal legal system has become the primary response to gender-based violence in the United States.  One consequence of increased criminalization has been the rise in the number of victims of violence being punished by that system.  Criminalized survivors—people punished for actions related to their own victimization in some way--come into the criminal legal system as victims, as witnesses, and as defendants.  In this session, Professor Leigh Goodmark, the director of the Gender, Prison, and Trauma Clinic at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, will explore the experiences of criminalized survivors beginning with their encounters with the juvenile system and moving through arrest, prosecution, sentencing, and punishment by the adult system.  Professor Goodmark will conclude by offering suggestions for how to ensure that criminalized survivors receive the representation they need and deserve.

This session will explore that path away from survival mode to strategic wellness and open up questions to ask, “What would it look like if we weren’t merely automatically suppressing the impact of a client's or legal system's traumatic experiences every day?” and “What if the origin of our decisions to address our self-care needs were not on autopilot? “
This session allows participants to actively draft a preliminary plan and examine what strategic wellness and self care planning is.