After a person is convicted of a crime, one bright spot of our criminal justice system is that a number of opportunities tend to emerge for him or her to make lifestyle changes. Counseling services, job training, and community resources become available thanks to the hard work and dedication of social workers, probation officers, and non-profit agencies.

But that still leaves a couple of unanswered questions:

First, why do we wait until after a person is convicted?

Second, why is the only point of access to many community resources through a probation officer?

Sumpter & Gonzalez may be the first private-practice law firm in the United States to have a full-time social work team on staff. They shouldn’t be the last. The Open Door Initiative is dedicated to incorporating social work into the criminal defense process from the first day a client enters an attorney’s office.

The problem for most people (lawyers and non-lawyers) is that there is no open source directory of what is available in the community. Even when a lawyer or social worker wants to steer a client in the right direction it often takes hours of telephone calls to find out what services are available. There is no community clearinghouse of information about what treatment programs work, which educational programs are worth the time, or which interventions are a waste of money.

So we started our own.

Over the course of the past several years, the social work team at Sumpter & Gonzalez has created a powerful internal Wiki detailing all the community resources in Central Texas. From adolescent drug treatment programs to counselors and therapists to community based mental health resources, we have endeavored to compile an exhaustive directory of service providers.

In 2009, Sumpter & Gonzalez, through the Open Door Initiative, will launch www.HolisticAdvocacy.com, an Open Source project in which every program that we find works becomes available to everyone else who wants to consider using it. Furthermore, it will allow non-profits and service providers to update their information so that HolisticAdvocacy.com can become a portal for social workers and probation officers to more efficiently meet the needs of their clients. We will also include our internal assessment screening tools and evaluations, our case and client assessment worksheets, and the instruments used to measure a client’s success.

The full-time social work staff of Sumpter & Gonzalez is available to discuss the Open Door Initiative’s goals to anyone who wants to learn more - from other attorneys, to other social workers, to people who’ve been involved in the system and want to know what resources are available to them. This is relatively uncharted territory, but we’re drawing a map. Right now, what we’ve learned is that judges and prosecutors tend to respect it when a person accused of a crime takes steps to correct his or her life before being ordered to do so - and that can help provide an opportunity to avoid convictions all together. We’ve also learned that a person is much more likely to succeed at their goals if they’re given the opportunity to identify their own problems and engage in the plan, instead of having those terms dictated by someone else.

If the goal of social work is to empower people to change their lives, there’s never a better time to start than right away.