Internship Description
Reed Cantrell, ’25BC; Godsy Philip, ’24BC; and Hannah Lin, ’23CC, interned with The Remedy Project, a nonprofit that unites formerly incarcerated advocate mentors and university students to write administrative remedies, the only official recourse available to people incarcerated in the US federal prison system. Reed wrote complex appeals to the Bureau of Prisons, communicated with incarcerated clients to address their cases, and revamped the organization’s case and mail management systems. Reed also participated in administrative strategy meetings and helped the organization grow sustainably. Godsy helped restructure the case management system to create a more robust case intake process. Hannah worked with the core administrative and case management team to develop improved strategies for case tracking and volunteer coordination. She also managed the client communication team, in contact with almost 400 clients daily, and improved the workflow between student volunteers and mentors. Hannah also wrote remedies regularly on behalf of clients nationwide.
With The Remedy Project, I worked with client communication and case management. I assisted with client communication through the email system used by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, called Corrlinks. The organization was undergoing a lot of restructuring and it was functioning in a smaller capacity as we were not taking on any new clients. Therefore, email communication looked different from the type of communication that we did when the organization was functioning at full capacity. I also handled case management in the office space. I worked to manage and organize the mail that was coming into the office from clients. The organization was taking a step back in taking on new cases because it was managing a backlog. We needed to address cases that had gotten lost somewhere in the intake and outtake process. I was helping in the office to clear some of this backlog, and also worked with my mentor to learn about and get trained on the administrative remedy writing process.
As a double major in philosophy and human rights, I was able to utilize the skills I learned in both of these majors in the work I did this summer. The main set of skills that I learned in philosophy includes argumentation. The foundational quality of the administrative remedy is the element of argumentation. In working on an administrative remedy, we try to make a case for our client and present evidence that shows that they are innocent of the charge/s that are against them. I used the skills I developed in my philosophy classes in which we learned about the development of an argument and argument analysis, including the structure of an argument and the emphasis on clarity and concision. Also, as a human rights major, I learn about the fundamental rights that are available to all in the international human rights framework. A lot of the abuses and violations that occur within the prison system go against the rights that are guaranteed to all people within the human rights framework. This knowledge helped inform the work that I did this summer.
The organization faced quite a few challenges this summer because of the organizational restructuring it was undergoing. By the beginning of the summer, The Remedy Project had taken a step back from taking on new cases and extending its services to new clients. Primarily, there had been a backlog of cases that had piled up as a result of the amount of help that was requested and the lack of support and expertise that was needed to address all of the clients and their requests. While there were many student volunteers available to help with preparing and filing cases, there were not enough knowledgeable mentors with experience with the prison system and the administrative remedy process who could help guide the work. The contribution of formerly incarcerated members is integral to the work that the organization does because they have the knowledge and expertise of the system that is necessary to effectively fight its injustices. The organization experienced the loss of a formerly incarcerated mentor before the beginning of the summer, which further contributed to the backlog of cases. Over the summer, there were issues with communication and transparency about some of the internal issues that the organization was dealing with, which made it more difficult to stay organized regarding the work that was expected of me.
Throughout my experience working with The Remedy Project, I learned a lot about the difficulty of managing a nonprofit, especially at its beginning stages. There are many moving parts when an organization is transitioning in the beginning which are difficult to manage, especially without proper resources and support. Because there was a lack of oversight within the organization due to a lack of experienced mentors and leaders, a lot of the issues we were facing failed to be addressed in a timely manner. The organization had to recognize the need to take a step back at a time when it was expanding. While the organization had goals of expanding its reach throughout the country, it had to refocus its attention on the most pressing matters. While that was a hard reality to face, it was important that the organization made the decision to reduce scale at the time that it did because it may have experienced greater hardship in the future had it not made that decision.