Public Interest
Jun. 18, 2002
Boalt Graduate Gets Grant to Serve Berkeley's Poor
SAN FRANCISCO - Tirien Steinbach has been awarded a Post-Graduate Berkeley Law Foundation grant to work with the poor in Alameda County with the East Bay Community Law Center.
Steinbach will work in the center's employment and income-support unit and expand the work of the Suitcase Clinic Legal Services Project. The aim of the project is to provide actual legal services - not just referrals - to Berkeley's homeless and indigent.
"Having been born in Oakland and raised in Berkeley, I love being able to do this work in my community," Steinbach said in a recent interview. "It's not just that it feels good; it's very useful."
Steinbach, 31, expanded the Suitcase project when she joined the center in spring 2001. It began life 13 years ago as a roving medical clinic carried about in a suitcase by students at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health; Steinbach added legal services.
She and a few Boalt Hall students have spent the past year conducting an outreach campaign to identify the needs of Berkeley's poor. They concluded that the most pressing problem was the inability of indigent citizens to get legal representation for citations for minor infractions that don't carry a right to counsel, such as drinking or urinating in public, or sleeping in a car.
Often the people cited miss court dates or can't afford the fines levied against them, so a minor brush with the law ends up in a criminal record, a barrier to employment that perpetuates the cycle of poverty.
"Because of the way the system works, they end up carrying jail time and get really stuck because they have criminal records," Steinbach said. "San Francisco has Operation Clean Slate, but there's no representation for people in Alameda County who want to expunge their records."
To Steinbach, these seemingly small issues dictate the quality of life in her county.
"I see these issues as indicative of the criminalization of poverty, specifically in regard to people of color," she said. "They represent the things that happen to people in daily life that create an atmosphere of oppression."
Steinbach's decision to become a lawyer and do the work she does for the law center was motivated by her own experience with law enforcement in 1993, her last year as an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz.
Her sister, brother-in-law and a friend were arrested during a gathering at an off-campus house. According to Steinbach, the police entered the house without provocation and arrested her friend for not having identification. Steinbach's sister was arrested when she challenged officers' authority to make the first arrest. They were all released, and the department had to issue a written apology, Steinbach said.
Of the 20-odd people in the house, only three were black and two of them were arrested.
"It was clearly racist," she said. "As my sister was being carted off by the police, she yelled to me to call a lawyer. I realized it was a privilege that I actually knew a lawyer I could call. There are very few people who do."
Steinbach resolved to become an attorney but delayed entry into law school to explore her artistic side in New York City. She spent three unfulfilling years there as an art teacher and art director of music videos.
"I thought I might regret it if I went straight to law school and didn't follow my creative pursuits," she said. "It was very fun and interesting, but it felt, to me, completely frivolous."
Steinbach returned to the Bay Area to attend Boalt Hall. As a student, she was co-president of the Berkeley Law Foundation Student Steering Committee and vice-president of recruitment for Law Students of African Descent. She graduated in 1999 and spent a two-year fellowship researching death penalty cases at the California Appellate Project.
She says she's thrilled that the Suitcase Clinic gives Boalt students a new way to get involved in their community.
"People walk down the street and see people being harassed every day. They can't deal with it and they just keep walking," Steinbach said. "For many of these students, it's the first time they see that there's something else you can do besides just walking by, and they're getting the skills to learn how to help in a systematic way."
Steinbach will spend the next few months gathering the necessary resources to begin direct representation of clients. This fall she plans to begin counseling people who want to make affirmative complaints against the police, and she hopes to train people how to represent themselves when they are cited for infractions.
Her grant from the foundation - a Boalt Hall organization that sponsors public interest projects in disadvantaged communities - expires in a year, but Steinbach expects she will develop a long-lived clinic.
"I love the idea that Boalt will be involved in establishing a sustainable legal clinic," she said. "We can provide services and a sympathetic ear, and lead an effort to reframe social policy. We shouldn't be using laws to crack down on people who have to live in their cars."
Matthew King
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