When we talk about being in the room where it happens, we don’t usually mean a small, plexiglass-split cage. But during my years as a public defender, that little box, with dirty white walls and bad sound quality, was always the most important room I could be in.

It’s the room where my client would tell me things that perhaps no one else knew. He might tell me that being held in jail would cost him not only his job, but also his marriage, where things were already rocky. She might say she was on her first three days of sobriety after a bad bender, and that getting sent to Rikers, where drugs are everywhere, could knock her off the path to recovery. Or he might worry that he’d be deported because of this arrest, and sent back into the grips of a violent gang he’d refused to join as a child.

As defenders, it’s our job to put our heart on the line and stand beside our clients as they share their most frightening struggles. The debate around criminal justice reform often operates in abstractions based on data, studies, and broader crime trends. This sort of analysis is an important part of the conversation, but without the personal stories defenders witness on a daily basis, the system is blind to the humanity before it.

This is why public defenders, often overlooked by policymakers, are so essential to conversations about reform. Recently, Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County Public Defender Dean Beer and his chief deputy Keisha Hudson were fired after filing a brief detailing some of these deeply moving human stories.

They recounted a teenage mother with a clean record who was unable to nurse her newborn because she was denied access to a breast pump while in jail, all because she couldn’t afford to pay bail; and an impoverished elderly woman who was held on bail for stealing a bottle of wine; and a mentally ill indigent man who was arrested for shoplifting and locked because didn’t have $250 to buy his freedom.

After sharing those firsthand experiences of their clients, Beer and Hudson were intimidated and ultimately fired in retaliation. And they aren’t alone being punished for speaking these uncomfortable truths, as we’ve seen similar terminat ions of public defenders across the country.

I spent the better part of a decade defending the public in both California and the Bronx. I believed so deeply in the power of public defense not only as a criminal court resource, but as a locus for community-rooted services, that I left the courtroom to start an organization devoted to empowering public defenders and helping them achieve better results for their communities. It has since become clear to me that detailed accounts of how the criminal justice system impacts our clients can transform outcomes, and can have the same vital impact on larger national questions about what criminal justice reform must look like, and why.

Public defenders are entrusted with these stories because there are only ever two people in the room where it happens: us, and our clients. Our clients are often silenced on the topic of pretrial confinement because they have open cases, meaning they are not at liberty to discuss how they might be damaged by incarceration, or how they might benefit from having their liberty restored.

It falls to us, then, to figure out how to make sure the public and policy-makers are informed about what’s actually happening behind closed doors, while still keeping our clients safe.

Policy advocacy, for a defender, can be tricky--critics are quick to dismiss a push for systemic reform as a mere continuation of our defense of our clients. But this is a short-sighted interpretation of our role (we are as bound by the ethical duties to behave with honesty, candor and integrity as any other member of the bar).

The truth is that it is because of this ethical duty to protect our clients that we are often the only ones privy to the real, hard-hitting truths our clients live with every day. Prosecutors, reporters, judges, probation officers, and lawmakers may never know what’s really going on with the people at the center of these reform conversations unless they listen to public defenders first. They will never see first-hand how someone’s life can be derailed by pretrial confinement.

What happened in Montgomery County was an abandonment of justice. Expecting our courts and lawmakers to consider the stories of impacted people is the bare minimum of what we should demand in a fair system and society. Seeing those same officials use the power of their office to punish public defenders for offering the truth -- in a formal, measured, and appropriate way, no less -- is a shame that will mark the county for years to come.

On Thursday, more than 100 people rallied in support of Beer and Hudson outside the commissioners’ court in Norristown, Pennsylvania. Inside, nearly 50 members of the community gave passionate testimony in favor of reinstating them. Still, the commissioners declined to take immediate action, and haven’t clarified what the next steps will be.

The only way for the county and state to regain a semblance of fair leadership is to give these brave defenders their jobs back, and listen to the people in the room where it happens.

Emily Galvin is co-founder and Executive Director of Partners for Justice.