A new study by RAND and the University of Pennsylvania Law School finds that by adopting an innovative holistic approach to defending poor clients in criminal cases, jurisdictions can significantly reduce incarceration and save taxpayer dollars, without harming public safety.

The study, “The Effects of Holistic Defense on Criminal Justice Outcomes,” to be published in the Harvard Law Review, examined over half a million cases in the Bronx over a 10-year period involving poor criminal defendants who received court-appointed lawyers. The study was authored by James Anderson and Mary Buenaventura of RAND, and Paul Heaton, senior fellow and academic director of Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at Penn Law.

Dr. Heaton and his co-authors compared holistic representation–wherein an interdisciplinary team that includes a lawyer working alongside other advocates such as a social worker, housing advocate, investigator, etc., addresses the wider needs of the client enmeshed in the criminal justice system—to the more traditional public defense model focused around criminal attorneys and criminal case advocacy. They found that the holistic approach reduced the likelihood of a prison sentence by 16% and actual prison sentence length by 24%.

Over the decade covered by the study, holistic representation of clients prevented more than one million days of incarceration, saving New York taxpayers an estimated $165 million. In a follow-up spanning up to 10 years after case resolution, defendants who received holistic defense services were shown to commit no more crime than those incarcerated for longer periods.

The study is the first large-scale empirical evaluation of the impact of holistic representation on criminal justice outcomes. The authors studied two institutional providers, the Bronx Defenders and the Legal Aid Society of New York. The former operate under a holistic defense, while the latter has historically followed a more traditional model.

An analysis of over half a million cases revealed that holistic defense did not affect conviction rates, but did appreciably increase the use of non-incarceration sentencing alternatives. Impacts were particularly large in drug and larceny cases, where holistic representation reduced custodial sentences by 63% and 72%, respectively. In the latter years of the study, as the Legal Aid Society also embraced a more interdisciplinary approach, outcomes across the two organizations converged.