Meet The Start-Up Founder Connecting Arrestees To Free Legal Support

Founded by Jelani Anglin, good call is a technology hybrid that underwrites mass incarceration in the United States by providing early access to legal support. Currently, only 1% of people have access to a lawyer when arrested, but Good Call’s free hotline service can connect arrested people to free lawyers and even inform family members of the situation. Here, Jelani tells Ashoka’s Simon Stumpf why early contact with a lawyer is important, and discusses how technology can help dismantle the prison-industrial complex.

Simon Stumpf: Jelani, get back to the beginning of your work. What are other people not seeing?

Jelani Anglin: I was arrested when I was 16. My friends and I – all of us young black men – were told they were too loud on the train. Now we are connected. What do we all have in common? We all wish we had connected with an attorney earlier in the process. We wish we had some support from our lawyers and knew what to do before we were interrogated. Because people don’t get the right advice, they don’t get a fair chance in our legal system, and sometimes their entire lives are taken away.

Stumpf: You described Good Call’s proposal as an “early legal intervention.” How does the arrest process work and why is early intervention so important?

Anglin: When you are arrested, you are taken to the precinct, stripped of your belongings, and given the chance to call, but only to the numbers you can remember in your head. You don’t have a cell phone, do you? So this often results in no support. People are interrogated by the police and coerced into signing statements. Good Call gives people instant access to a lawyer when they first arrive at the precinct. That attorney can exercise the client’s Sixth Amendment right of defense and stop the interrogation process until an attorney is present, giving people a chance to present a better defense.

Stumpf: What technology have you built to facilitate that intervention?

Anglin: It starts with a hotline number that family members and arrested parties can call directly. A hotline operator will notify you of the arrest and connect you with the person being charged with an attorney who can stop the interrogation process. This also allows us to send the client’s information to the attorney who is in the arraignment shift.

If a lawyer only sees a client on the arraignment shift, it takes about five minutes to come up with a defense. You can spend more time advocating for

Another important part of our technology is our emergency contact database. People can save their emergency contacts in advance in case they get arrested. On the same phone call with their lawyer, they can actually send a text message to their loved one through their lawyer, informing them of the arrest.

Stumpf: how is that working? Is the number of users increasing?

Anglin: We currently receive hundreds of calls a month, but would love to do more. We’re a shitty organization and want to grow our outreach team. We see a lot of word of mouth and organic growth. This year we have put up billboards all over New York City. Each billboard with a hotline number received approximately 70,000 impressions per week. And I’m not saying everyone who reads that number will get arrested in the future, but just letting people know that this resource is out there. That’s the narrative variation we’re trying to create.

Stumpf: Are you seeing political change in favor of your work?

Anglin: Yes, we are starting to understand that we need more support. For example, a study done by the California Policy Lab found that if people had access to legal representation, their chances of being released with their own approval increased by more than 50%. So we have not yet reached our target, but we are seeing changes across the country on the policy front. Three states have passed laws mandating early access to counseling. Fifteen more states have recently advocated for it.

Stumpf: As a “shit” organization, how do you scale your solution to reach more places?

Anglin: For the past six years, we’ve been doing this as a non-profit organization. We were lucky enough to raise over $4 million in donations and grants. However, as a result of our research and development, we are confident that we will be able to scale more quickly as a hybrid nonprofit/profit organization. People who are close to the problem are the ones who are closest to the solution, so you can hire people who are officially incarcerated. Raising money from impact investors for profit, hiring more engineers, building more technology really allows us to grow and provide different kinds of support.

For example, we are starting to get calls from the border over immigration issues. Why not use our technology in other situations close to arrest? There are ACS issues, immigration issues, housing issues that can lead to arrest. Marginalized people in these areas also lack support. So we can use our technology to put power in their hands.

Stumpf: How will things change in 5 or 10 years?

Anglin: We have plans to build an app that will help people better navigate the system. No. There are more innovations on the side of imprisoning humanity than on helping people escape.

Stumpf: Jelani, a strong point of your contribution here is that you point out where the system seems designed to make people fail. And you spoke of the need to not only wait for incarceration on this scale to collapse under its own weight, but also to push for policy change.

Anglin: Sadly, it won’t cave in under its own weight. It is a for-profit system and a booming business in capitalist countries. More than 12 million people are imprisoned each year, and half a million people are currently in prison without being convicted. Taxpayers pay over $14 billion each year to imprison these individuals. Near-slavery prison labor drives our economy.

This system feeds the poor. Your best defense is simply being wealthy and having lawyers readily available. So if you want your system to slow down and eventually stop, start with the precinct.

This interview was summarized by Ashoka.