Podcast Transcript: From Prosecutor to Prison Consultant — Criminal Justice Advocacy with Tara Lenich

Publication Information

• Publish Date: September 22, 2023
• Publication: National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL)
• Episode Title: From Prosecutor to Prison Consultant — Criminal Justice Advocacy with Tara Lenich
• Media Source: Apple Podcasts

Transcript

Courtney Worcester (NAWL): [00:00:11] Hello. Welcome back to the National Association of Women Lawyers podcast — Conversations to help you thrive in the legal profession. My name is Courtney Worcester and I am a partner in the Boston office of Holland Knight. I am thrilled to be hosting today’s podcast, which will explore a fascinating career path and a woman that provides services that many of us probably haven’t thought much about before. She is a mitigation specialist, a sentencing advocate, and a prison consultant. Today, I’m pleased to be joined by Tara Lenich, founder of Liberty Advisors, LLC. Welcome to the podcast, Tara. Thanks for being here with us today.

Tara Lenich: [00:00:50] Thanks so much for having me.

Courtney Worcester (NAWL): [00:00:52] So before we dive into what one does as a mitigation specialist, sentencing advocate and prison consultant, why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Tara Lenich: [00:01:04] Thanks, Courtney. I grew up in western Massachusetts and Wilton, Connecticut. I went to undergrad at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, attended law school at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. I was then a prosecutor for about a decade in New York City, where I tried a bunch of felony cases, as well as ran and supervised long-term investigations involving conspiracy and enterprise corruption, mostly dealing with gun traffickers and gang members. Right now, I live in Connecticut. I work all over the country and I spend almost half the year on Cape Cod.

Courtney Worcester (NAWL): [00:01:45] Excellent. So your life took a little bit of an unexpected turn, which in many ways was the impetus for the founding of your company. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about your journey.

Tara Lenich: [00:01:58] Absolutely. Well, I was at the DA’s office. I found myself in a state of drowning. I was completely overwhelmed. I felt very alone. And I made a series of bad choices. Those choices landed me on the other side of the law. And I experienced firsthand what it was like to be in a courtroom as a defendant and facing potential prison time. I pled guilty and faced a judge and was sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison. I did ten months at Danbury Prison Camp. I really had a chance to think and learn from my mistakes and move forward using the experience I had, both as a prosecutor and as a defendant, to help other people that are facing the criminal legal system.

Courtney Worcester (NAWL): [00:02:53] Now, as a prosecutor, obviously, you are more familiar with the legal system and even the prison system than most people who are exposed to it for the first time. But I’m sure that being on the other side of the bar, so to speak, is a very different experience. So what was sort of the most surprising to you when you went through that experience — being the defendant, not the prosecutor?

Tara Lenich: [00:03:24] Well, I think a couple of things. First, it was hard not to speak first. You know, when the judge referred to the prosecutors, it was very hard for me not to stand up and speak in the courtroom. But secondly, I don’t think as a prosecutor I understood the inner workings of the incarceration system. And I think I was most surprised to learn that the health care available is deplorable. It’s terrible. And it was so mind-boggling to me — how the BOP approaches health care just seems so backwards and inefficient. From the very first day when you enter, the dentist just counts your teeth, and they say, “We don’t provide antibiotics.” So basically, if you have a toothache, your tooth is getting pulled. That was the extent of dental care.

There was a woman who fell down a small flight of stairs, had a bone protruding from her leg, and they didn’t have anyone to transport her to the hospital for almost 12 hours. So she just had to stay there. It was awful — they gave her a wheelchair to sit in. I have so many examples. I get sinus infections, and I had two sinus infections back-to-back and they refused to give me more antibiotics unless I was willing to get a head MRI. And I’m like, wait — you’d rather spend the time and the money to send me out of the facility to go get an MRI than giving me amoxicillin? It just seemed so crazy. So I really think the lack of access to basic medical care was flabbergasting to me.

Courtney Worcester (NAWL): [00:05:10] That’s so interesting that you say that, because I guess I had a naive assumption that you’re in either a state or federal prison facility and there is medical care just being provided. Right? Like you’re there, you see doctors, they have prescriptions, things like that. It never dawned on me that it would be so challenging for such basic treatment.

Tara Lenich: [00:05:35] Right. I mean, I only saw a doctor the first day, and that was just because he was the medical person covering when I entered the facility. After that, I don’t think I ever saw a doctor. You see medical technicians, and they provide pills to you. If you have certain medications, you have to stand in pill line and be observed ingesting the medication — so you’re not pocketing it and bringing it back to your room. I had to do that, but I was getting allergy medicine. So even for Zyrtec or whatever you take, you have to stand in line and be observed taking it.

Courtney Worcester (NAWL): [00:06:13] That’s so crazy. I’m sure one of the other things that was maybe difficult to adjust to while you were at Danbury — you know, one of the benefits of being a lawyer is we kind of control our own universe, right? We control what we do to an extent, day to day. Where we go, what we do. It must have been very strange to suddenly be in a situation where you’re not dictating what you do from the moment you get up to the moment you go to sleep.

Tara Lenich: [00:06:48] Yeah, absolutely. You actually don’t dictate really anything because there’s a schedule provided for you, even if that’s a lack of schedule. When I first was there, I had no job. It took a while to get assigned a job, and that’s different depending on what facility you’re in. So I would sit outside and read magazines literally from like seven in the morning till four in the afternoon and do nothing. It was weird to me to go from such a frenetic pace of running these investigations where every moment counts to 12 hours of free time. I’m like, I don’t even know what to do with myself. And you’re right — you want to speak up and say, “We can make this better, we can fix this.” That’s part of legal training and just who I am. And you can’t do any of those things. You just have to learn to go along and get along and see the small places that you can make a difference.

Courtney Worcester (NAWL): [00:07:49] So while you were going through the legal process, while you were waiting to be sentenced or you were making decisions about what you were going to be doing — were there certain services that you decided to utilize to try and help you get through that process?

Tara Lenich: [00:08:07] I did. I hired — obviously, I had a great defense attorney. And I was also going through a civil case, so I also had a civil attorney. And I hired prison consultants who assured me that they would help either reduce my sentence or get me designated to a certain facility. They’d prepare me for what it was going to be like inside and help me get out early if that was possible.

In using those services, I really didn’t get the help or support that I needed. They weren’t able to reduce my sentence. Everyone assured me, “Oh, you’ll get probation.” My attorney was definitely clear — you could face jail time — but everyone else was like, “Oh, please, you’re never going to go to prison.” And then the judge sentenced me to a year and a day. So I was like, wait, what? Okay, so now I need to prepare for prison.

The companies that I hired basically provided me with printout sheets of the different facilities — Danbury and Alderson, West Virginia — because those are the two closest in the Northeast where I was from. And they said, “But you’ll never go to Danbury because it’ll be a safety issue, because you’re a prosecutor. Some of the people that you prosecuted could be there.” So even though that was 20 minutes from my parents’ house and very convenient for us, they said I should look at West Virginia, Florida, or Lexington, Kentucky.

They also said to me, “You have to provide us with your list of medications, if any, because we’ll check the formulary.” And I realized later, the formulary is available online, and I had only gotten sheets that were printed from the Bureau of Prisons website. That was disconcerting, to say the least.

Then they told me I was designated to Alderson, West Virginia. So I show up there and the guard at the door says, “No, your designation was changed three months ago. You have to be in Danbury tonight or a federal warrant will issue for your arrest.” I’m like, excuse me? That’s very far away. After a momentary panic attack, I was like, okay, what do I need to do? I called my attorneys, everybody involved in my case. I was like, someone needs to get to the judge and have this extended. And they did. I was able to then report to Danbury — where they said I would never go.

Little things for me — I didn’t realize that you can’t wear contacts in prison. I’m legally blind without my contacts, and in the facility, you can bring one pair of glasses in, and if they break, it could be up to two years before you get a new pair. So I elected to have eye surgery. That then delayed my sentencing. And the judge was, thank goodness, amenable to it. But if I had known ahead of time — I was waiting for sentencing for quite a long time — I could have definitely prepared and done that ahead of time.

So I think my advice for people would be: speak to the person that you’re thinking about hiring, and don’t assume just because of a prior position or job they had that they’re going to have any sort of inside knowledge or be able to manipulate the system, because that is not necessarily the case.

Courtney Worcester (NAWL): [00:11:52] Well, and it sounds like for you, at least, knowing about what I would consider the practicalities of how things work — what do you mean, I can’t have contacts? — that sort of nitty-gritty day-to-day stuff. Having someone walk you through that or identify potential issues would have been incredibly helpful as you were preparing to report.

Tara Lenich: [00:12:18] Exactly. Instead of learning on the eve of reporting. It would be nice to know ahead of time. For me, especially, knowledge is power. If I know what I’m going to face, I can wrap my brain around it and push through it. But it’s the fear of the unknown that is so terrifying. And if I can provide people with “this is what to expect, start preparing this now, you have plenty of time” — cases take a long time to get through the system — and you can do these things in this way and take some control over your life. Like you said, we’re used to having control. One of the big things that I advocate is taking back some control in the little places that you can.

Courtney Worcester (NAWL): [00:13:05] And you mentioned you ended up serving ten months in Danbury. And I think you’ve talked to us a little bit about what that was like. But I think many of us, even in the legal profession, get a lot of our information on the prison system from television. Whether it’s Oz or Orange Is the New Black, that’s what we have in our head when we think of what a prison looks like. What was surprising to you? You show up, you report, you probably have in your head what it’s going to be like. Was it more mundane than you thought? Was it scarier? What were those first few days and weeks like?

Tara Lenich: [00:13:48] I mean, I was terrified, don’t get me wrong, especially as a prosecutor going into prison, and it was near where I had prosecuted. So I was like, what am I going to tell people? What do I say I do? Because the first thing you’re going to get asked is 10 million questions about yourself, right? Because you’re the new person.

I will say, even though it’s called a camp, it was nothing like camp. It was dirty, it was cramped, and sometimes policies just made no sense, which made me bananas. Yet I will say there were positive and rewarding experiences that I had there that I didn’t think I would have had going in.

I’m definitely a people person, so I thought I would be fine going in and talking to people and making friends. And I did meet some incredible women — lifelong friends, two of whom work in this business with me. I didn’t realize how much free time you would have, or at least that we did at that facility. So I read over a hundred books. I learned how to play mahjong. I learned how to crochet. I had a series of different jobs. I worked in the prison library in the beginning, and then that was just extremely boring because it’s very small. Then I started tutoring women to get their GED, and I really enjoyed that. I actually co-taught a mock trial class where we had a federal judge come and sit as the judge for the trial, which was really pretty cool. And I worked in construction, so I know how to set a toilet now and I can paint and put up drywall and make cement. All things I never thought I would do. But it was good to do some physical labor, get outside. I met a whole different group of women, so I really enjoyed that.

I will say the sanitary conditions are what you would expect — they’re terrible. But you find a way through. And I really think a big takeaway was that women in prison really do help each other. You cannot survive it by yourself. You need to rely on other people there, and they need to be able to rely on you, whether it’s teaching you the informal rules or telling you how to make your bed in the winter so you can put on more than the two allotted blankets, or you have family trauma or drama at home. It’s everything from mundane daily things to the big emotional life things that you’re going through with these other women. And it’s an incredible support system.

Courtney Worcester (NAWL): [00:16:35] That’s amazing. I didn’t think about the opportunities you would have to make really good friends and to be supportive of them, and then them also being supportive of you. I sort of thought of it, especially with you being a former prosecutor, that you might be kind of on an island by yourself — very isolated and on your own. But it sounds like the experience wasn’t like that.

Tara Lenich: [00:17:01] Yeah, well, to be clear, I only said I was a prosecutor to the first person I met. And she was like, “Okay, never say that again.”

Courtney Worcester (NAWL): [00:17:08] Rule number one.

Tara Lenich: [00:17:10] You are an attorney. Make up some kind of law. So after that, I wasn’t like, “Hi, I was a prosecutor,” because a bunch of things could happen. First of all, I might have prosecuted someone that was there or been involved in their prosecution, or my office was involved in their prosecution, which would not necessarily be an immediate safety concern, but there would definitely have been concerns. Secondly, then everybody is like, “Can you look at my case? Can you look at my case?” And you would feel bad not doing it. So even though I told everyone that I was an attorney, you still help people and look at their cases — not for legal stuff because you can’t, but for writing and grammar and syntax and things like that. So yeah, that was definitely my first rule: don’t say that.

Courtney Worcester (NAWL): [00:18:07] Good first-day rule. So at what point did you start thinking about forming your own company while you were at Danbury?

Tara Lenich: [00:18:17] Well, actually, while I was waiting to be sentenced, I knew I was not going to be able to practice law again. So I started taking online classes for small business management and accounting. I didn’t necessarily know exactly what I wanted to do. I had lots of thoughts. I was like, “Oh, I could be a dog trainer because I love dogs.” And then once I was sentenced to prison and went to the wrong prison, I was like, wait a minute, I can do this better. I know the system from both sides. This is a way that I can use all this experience and training and knowledge to really help people.

I started talking with women in Danbury about whether they had hired prison consultants, what their experiences were like, and if they hadn’t hired them, what they would want from one. How could they have benefited? How could their families have benefited?

As I thought through this at Danbury, I really wanted to include families, because so often the client is taken care of by their attorneys and any forensic experts that are hired. But the families are often left traumatized and don’t have a basis of knowledge. I really thought they could use a sit-down to explain and prepare for each step. This is what the arrest is going to be like, if you have a heads up and you’re allowed to self-surrender. This is what sentencing could be like — the prosecutor is going to get up and say really bad stuff about your loved one, and you just have to keep in mind that you know them. The judge is probably going to say things that you don’t want to hear. I can walk them through all of that, having been so familiar with the courtroom as a prosecutor, but also knowing what it feels like as a defendant sitting in that courtroom.

Courtney Worcester (NAWL): [00:20:10] I think that’s a really good point. When we talk about the different services that your company provides, my first reaction in reading some of those descriptions was, well, this is what your defense attorney is supposed to do, right? But I think especially to your point of helping families and putting more emotional context around what’s happening and understanding the whole process and really being there as a sounding board — a lot of attorneys are handling multiple cases, multiple clients. They have time to provide services to the clients, but answering questions of mom and sister and dad or children, that gets harder for them to do. So I’m sure the families that you work with are grateful to have input from you and to really be able to call and say, “Wait, we do not understand — what does this mean? What’s going to happen next?”

Tara Lenich: [00:21:17] Right. We can help manage expectations, too. Don’t go in there assuming this is all going to be fine and everything agreed to is going to be what happens in court — that just never turns out that way. And so I can provide them with my firsthand knowledge. But there are ways to prepare. If you’re going to have to run the media gauntlet, you want to know that ahead of time. I had to do that. There was press parked outside my parents’ house, my apartment in New York City, for days. And I was in and out of the courtroom — every single time there was a throng of media.

There are simple things like that where I can say, “Okay, this case has a certain notoriety — you’re going to face the media. Let’s talk about how we can get through it.” Because it’s not just the client — they have to focus on getting to the courtroom, listening to their attorneys, going through the legal strategies. But the family is often left alone. And that’s not for lack of a defense attorney. It’s just there’s only so much they can do. They’re dealing with the legal complexities and their strategy. And so we really provide more of a support role — for the clients, telling them what it’s going to be like from firsthand knowledge in a courtroom. The attorney is going to go through all the legal stuff with them, and then we go through the non-legal.

Courtney Worcester (NAWL): [00:22:47] So your company, Liberty Advisors LLC, provides three distinct yet seemingly very related services. Let’s talk a little bit about each one. The first service that you provide is being a mitigation specialist. What does that mean?

Tara Lenich: [00:23:05] As mitigation specialists, you can either be hired by defense attorneys or appointed by the court, depending on what type of case it is. You conduct exhaustive social history investigations where you interview the clients and any collateral witnesses such as families, teachers, neighbors, care providers, employers, coworkers. And you really highlight the circumstances and factors of why this person’s case merits special consideration. We provide those reports to the defense counsel so that they can help support and persuade probation or the prosecutors or the court to consider these additional factors that they may not have considered. The defense attorneys can use it in bail applications, plea requests, or when it comes time for sentencing. We have the time and the skills to gather all of this, sometimes very voluminous information, which frees up defense attorneys to focus on the critical legal matters.

Courtney Worcester (NAWL): [00:24:18] And you also provide assistance as a sentencing advocate. What kind of work does that entail?

Tara Lenich: [00:24:26] Well, it’s very similar. And you’re right — all these services do overlap. That’s why when I started, I was just doing prison consulting. And a defense attorney actually said to me, “Well, wait a minute, you should get certified as a mitigation specialist and sentencing advocate.” So I did, because they all overlap and really weave together and complement each other. If you can start working on all of them at the same time, it generally is more helpful.

Specifically as a sentencing advocate, we design individualized sentencing reports, videos, or other materials that help defense attorneys tell their client’s full story and understand any factors or extraneous information that may have influenced how the client arrived in their current predicament. We look beyond this one moment in time and really try to show the client as a whole person and everything that their life has entailed.

Courtney Worcester (NAWL): [00:25:28] And then finally, you also provide prison consulting services. What do you do in connection with that?

Tara Lenich: [00:25:35] As prison consultants, we’re really providing practical, firsthand knowledge and preparing clients for what to expect at each stage — whether it’s arrest, plea, trial, sentencing, going to prison, what the first few days are going to be like, what it’s going to be like throughout their time there, and also reentry planning. As soon as you’re going in, we start working on that plan.

The aim is really to reduce anxiety and provide client care through knowledge and preparation. We also coordinate character reference letters. My feeling is, even if the defense attorney doesn’t want to use all of the letters that we collect, it’s really important for the client to see that all of these people see them in a way that isn’t just this one moment. They might remember a good thing that they did or somewhere that they volunteered or just a special moment that they shared. The client can then look back on that and say, “Oh, I forgot about that.” It’s really nice to hear positive words when you’re going through one of the most trying times in your life.

We meet with clients and their families to walk them through what to expect. We tell them how they can prepare — both the client and the family. We discuss potential designations of different types of prisons and what those may entail. We describe what life will be like on the inside in an effort to make it easier. We discuss visitation — how you’re going to be able to communicate with your loved ones throughout your time there. What’s the food going to be like? What will you have access to? What do you do about your restitution and your fines? And in this service, we really are freeing the defense team up at critical junctures and providing a second layer of support for the non-legal matters.

Courtney Worcester (NAWL): [00:27:37] Do you also provide support services for folks when they’ve been released from prison, so that their reentry is smoother or so they can prepare for what’s going to happen the day they get out?

Tara Lenich: [00:27:53] Yeah. We like to communicate with them while they’re in prison and work on a reentry plan throughout the time that they’re in there, because the BOP will look at what their reentry plan is in allowing them to be released early. They’re going to want to verify that you have a place to go home to. They’re going to want to verify that you’re at least looking for a job or that you’ve gained skills that will enable you to get a job. When you’re released to a halfway house, they’re going to look at the same types of things. Where are you going to go when you’re released from here? Probation is going to look at those matters.

I think starting that plan while you’re in prison is crucial. It doesn’t mean it can’t change or evolve — things happen and you’ve been away from society, so it needs to evolve sometimes, and that’s fine. We just continue to work on it so that when you get out, it’s not “Okay, now what?” You’ve at least thought of different pathways that you can explore. I think it’s a more positive way to look at it instead of another time of you being like, “Wait, now what?” A halfway house is not home. So prepare for what that’s going to be like and how that’s going to affect you.

Courtney Worcester (NAWL): [00:29:06] Based upon your own personal experience and the interactions that you’ve had with your clients and helping them go through this process, what do you think is the most important advice for someone who is about to be sentenced or who is about to report to prison?

Tara Lenich: [00:29:26] I would first say hire a prison consultant to walk you through it. But if you can’t, I would say see all of your doctors, get your medical history up to date, and take some deep breaths. You’re going to get through this. And when you’re going to prison, just be as humble and decent a person as you would want to be — treat people how you would want to be treated. It’s really that simple. There are some basic things that you should do to prepare, and that’s getting yourself healthy mentally, physically, and emotionally as well as you can. And going in with at least a semi-positive attitude.

Courtney Worcester (NAWL): [00:30:10] Before we close today, is there anything else that you’d like to share with our listeners?

Tara Lenich: [00:30:15] Just that we’re here when you need us. You can reach me on the web. Our company is Liberty Advisors LLC — it’s www.libertyadvisorsllc.com. Or you can email me personally at [email protected].

Courtney Worcester (NAWL): [00:30:33] Thank you so much, Tara, for sharing your journey with us today and for really helping explain to us a segment of the legal world that I think many of us don’t know as much about as we should.

Tara Lenich: [00:30:48] Thank you so much, Courtney. It was great. Thank you so much for having me.

Courtney Worcester (NAWL): [00:30:52] Of course.