I'm a public defender with a hundred and eighty open cases and I want to describe what that number actually does.

Eight years in this office. I have a master's-level salary and law school debt that will outlive the debt itself.

A hundred and eighty cases means this: on a good week I give each client about forty minutes. Total. For the entire life of their case. That includes reading the file, the phone calls, the plea negotiation, and standing next to them in court.

Forty minutes for a decision that reshapes someone's decade.

Here is how it actually goes, because the number is abstract and the day isn't. I meet a client for the first time in a holding area twenty minutes before arraignment. I have read the charging document, which I printed that morning. He asks me what's going to happen and I tell him the realistic range.

He asks how long I've had his case and I say "since this morning," because lying would be worse. He asks if I think he should take the deal.

And I say what I say, and nine times out of ten he takes it, because he's been in a cell for six weeks and the deal gets him out Friday and trial is five months away and he'd sit for all five.

He is not pleading because he's guilty. He's pleading because he wants to sleep in a bed. I am the person who explains that math to him in a kind voice.

The one I think about: 2022. Kid, nineteen, a possession charge with a bad search. There was a motion there. I could see it in the first ten minutes. A real motion that a real lawyer with time would have filed and probably won.

I had a trial that week in a different case, and a sentencing, and I never wrote it. He took eighteen months probation and a conviction that is now on every job application he will ever fill out.

He thanked me. He shook my hand in the hallway and thanked me.

I am not going to pretend I don't know what I am. I am the thing that lets the system say everyone had a lawyer.

And I'm still here, which is its own confession. Eight years. I tell myself that if I leave, my hundred and eighty go to someone with two hundred, and that's true, and it's also exactly the sentence that keeps me from ever leaving.

I'd like to hear from people who did this job and got out — where did you go, and did the guilt follow you or did it stay in the building? And from anyone still in it past ten years: what did you give up to stay, and was it worth what you think it was worth?