Sometimes its our smallest decisions that end up shaping our futures. Three years ago, I was slinging landscaping stone in California feeling, to put it mildly, unfulfilled. Since, as it turns out, there isn’t a high demand for pebbles made of jade in Southern California, I found myself with a great deal of downtime. I filled this downtime in a variety of ways. I played online scrabble with my co-worker. I napped in the sun on our outdoor patio ( I never said I was a good employee).  I g-chatted with my friends back in my home state of Michigan. During one particularly rainy week, I found myself perusing the The Innocence Project website to pass time. For those of you not familiar with the project (and who are too lazy to click on the link), its a litigation organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals who are currently in prison. I spent hours reading the stories of people who had been bullied, failed by our criminal justice system and as a result had lost their freedom and, essentially, their life.  I was inspired by the work the Innocence Project undertook to correct current and prevent future injustice.  I wondered how I could get involved in such a pursuit.

Fast forwarding three years, that one small decision to click on a webpage led to a series of rather large decisions. I put an end to the beach and my landscaping pebble days, moved to New York City and completed a paralegal program through NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Education.  I found a job as a paralegal on a project that provides free legal aid to domestic violence victims and enrolled in the Silver School’s MSW program. In short, I landed myself in a position to further the mission of the Innocence project, correcting and preventing injustice imposed on our country’s most vulnerable populations.

During a recent trip to the Kings County Supreme Court house in my capacity as a paralegal, I rode the elevator from the 10th floor down to 1st with some court employees. As we reached our destination ( I swear I could not even have scripted this if I wanted), one employee said to another who was pushing a file cart, “We really need to get a new wheel for that.”  I looked down to see that the file cart had only three wheels. “It fell off,” he replied. Boy, was he right; The wheel has, so to speak, fallen off of our court system.  Residents in the Bronx are being robbed of due process. The prison system is being used to house our country’s seriously mentally ill. Domestic violence victims have been evicted for calling the police “too many” times on their abuser. Just to name a few….

It is my goal, over the course of next year, to draw some attention to these issues, to the interaction of the populations we most commonly work with and the court system. I’m striving to create discussion around the role of social workers in this area. I want to use this blog to advocate for social justice in our justice system; in effect, propelling my small decision to click on the Innocence Project website years ago into a force for change. And, by doing this, who knows,  maybe, inspire  some others into making “small” decisions of their own.