Thomas Harvey, the executive director of legal advocacy organization ArchCity Defenders, is leaving the organization he helped found at the end of this year. Harvey sat down with The St. Louis American for a conversation about the past and future of ArchCity and its mission to fight what he calls “the criminalization of poverty.”
Harvey and two other attorneys founded ArchCity Defenders after graduating from law school to advocate for homeless people in St. Louis who were facing fines and imprisonment because they were unable to pay traffic tickets and court fees.
“We started with folks who were experiencing homelessness, and they would tell us whatever legal problems they had,” Harvey said. “Everybody had a municipal court case and they had a warrant from that case, and they were telling us that they had been locked up for what seemed like an outrageous number of days to me – 50, 60 days.”
With an attorney in their corner, ArchCity’s clients were able to easily clear their arrest warrants. But their fines continued to pile up, and Harvey realized that for every person they were helping, there were a hundred more they couldn’t help.
On the advice of one of their board members, ArchCity’s founders set off on a road trip to consult what Harvey calls the “Fortune 500 of Poverty Law” – the Southern Poverty Law Center, Southern Center for Human Rights, Georgia Justice Project, Alabama Appleseed – about what they could do differently.
“Every one of those folks, we’d tell them about what was going on in the municipal courts,” Harvey said. “I think it was the Southern Poverty Law Center who said, ‘That’s worse than we’ve ever seen in Alabama, that’s worse than Mississippi, that’s worse than Georgia.’ Southern Center for Human Rights said, ‘If you wanted to make people poor and keep them poor, this is the system you would come up with, right?’ We just realized there was no way the three of us volunteering and a couple of other people was ever gonna make a dent in that.”
With limited resources, ArchCity Defenders set out to expand what they could offer to their clients. They started with a court-watching program that statistically validated what their clients had been saying, and later established teams to challenge abusive practices in court.
Since then, they have filed a number of lawsuits aiming “to end cash bail, debtors’ prisons, and the criminalization of poverty,” resulting in reforms across the St. Louis area. They have also filed several suits against police brutality.
In the Los Angeles area, where he is moving to join his wife, Sheridan Wigginton, Harvey will maintain his focus on laws that disproportionately affect impoverished Americans, tackling a national effort to raise funds for cash bail. He also still has high hopes for the future of ArchCity Defenders.
“We are definitely not meeting the demand right now,” Harvey said. “We are turning people away. We turn people away every day for direct services – people who are evicted, folks who are in jail currently, and we also don’t have the resources for the impact litigation we want to bring about without continuing to develop the civil rights litigation team. That’s the crucial area.”
By focusing on lawsuits, Harvey hopes the organization will be able to change the St. Louis region enough that fewer people will need direct legal services. While ArchCity defenders will never have enough resources to help every person in poverty who needs legal representation, he said, they may have enough influence to change the laws that adversely affect them.
“I think the greatest strength of the organization is to be able to look at one individual case and say, ‘This is representative of a bigger systemic issue, this is how we might be able to plug into a media campaign, here’s how we might be able to support an ongoing political narrative’ – without endorsing a candidate or anything like that, just saying, we want to end the criminalization of poverty and race in St. Louis,” Harvey said.
The St. Louis area has made some progress towards that in the past few years, Harvey said, but not enough. He believes that since post-Ferguson reforms have taken effect, judges have been less eager to impose fines and prison time for violations resulting from a lack of money. Instead, they’re shifted to sentences of community service.
For Harvey, though, this is not an end to the problem. If a defendant is sentenced to community service for a crime based on inability to pay fines or fees, it does not solve the problem of their poverty. It merely requires them to find the time and resources to get to a community service job, and it does not change the fundamental problem: that they are being punished for their lack of funds.
“If there’s one thing we still want, it’s for judges and prosecutors to have an understanding of who is actually coming before them,” Harvey said. “And that disconnect between the judges’ and prosecutors’ race and class is so large that they can’t even conceptualize what that is.”
Harvey hopes ArchCity will be able to change that, along with other unfair legal issues that still plague St. Louis. These, he said, include crime-free housing ordinances that have the effect of discriminating against poor and black people, and the practice of police issuing “wanted” alerts to circumvent the judicial review of the warrant process.
Harvey’s successor at ArchCity Defenders, Blake Strode, hopes to address these issues. He said the dual focus on impact litigation and direct services Harvey has promoted is what makes ArchCity unique.
“Nationally there aren’t a lot of organizations that are able to do that or that are willing to do that and have that as their, sort of, organizational model,” Strode said. “So I think we’re very unique in that way, and that’s something that I am intent on preserving. I think that’s largely a function of Thomas’ leadership.”
Jessica Karins is an editorial intern from Webster University for the St. Louis American.
