Jonathan Rapping

Early life, family and education

Rapping grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At a young age, Rapping went to demonstrations and protests with his mother, Elayne Rapping, a community organizer, activist and professor in Pittsburgh. Rapping's mother was particularly involved in the anti-war and women’s movements. The experience of working with his activist mother taught Rapping about social justice, and trying to change things in the world that aren't fair or right. Friends of Rapping's family were even arrested and he admired the lawyers who worked to keep them out of jail. After witnessing social justice activism as a young person, Rapping aspired to be a criminal defense attorney at a young age.

Rapping attended Allderdice High School in Squirrel Hill, and graduated in 1984. After high school, Rapping attended the University of Chicago where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics cum laude. People close to Rapping convinced him that he would incur tremendous debt if he went to law school, so he worked as a research assistant with the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C. for two years, following in the footsteps of his father, Leonard Rapping, a well-known economist. Rapping earned a scholarship to attend the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University where he earned a Master of Public Administration in 1992. Rapping's sister, Alison Rapping has spent her career in the non-profit sector, and is widely considered a leader in that realm. Both siblings attribute their commitment to social justice to the influence of their parents.

Right after graduating from Princeton and still unfulfilled, Rapping decided to attend George Washington University School of Law in Washington, D.C. After his first year of law school at GWU, Rapping interned with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where he found his calling. He worked at PDS throughout law school.

While living in Washington, Rapping met and married his wife, Ilham Askia, who was teaching at an elementary school and then spent two years at a charter high school for court involved children. Askia was born in Buffalo, New York and every man in her family has been a victim of the criminal justice system. Askia's father went to Attica Correctional Facility when she was five years old. She helped raise her younger brother who ended up in prison. Askia became a teacher to break the school-to-prison pipeline, but soon questioned how much of a difference she could make on the front end. This led to her joining Rapping to start Gideon's Promise and, ultimately, to become the organization's Executive Director, where she advocates for attacking the pipeline on the back end.

Public defender

After law school, Rapping worked as a staff attorney for the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia (1995–2004), where he served his final three years as training director. From 2004-2006, Rapping was the training director for the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council.

From 2006-2007, he served as training chief for the New Orleans Office of the Public Defender. In recognition of his work in New Orleans to rebuild the public defender system post-Hurricane Katrina, he was a co-recipient of the Lincoln Leadership Award, given by Kentucky’s Department of Public Advocacy to honor leadership in national efforts to improve indigent defense.

Gideon's Promise

In 2007, Rapping created the Southern Public Defender Training Center, subsequently renamed Gideon's Promise, along with his wife, Ilham Askia. Named after the landmark 1963 Supreme Court case Gideon v. Wainwright, Gideon’s Promise teaches public defenders to work more effectively within the judicial system by providing coaching, training, and professional development as well as a supportive network of peers and mentors from around the country. Rapping received a grant to help start the center from George Soros' Open Society Foundations.

Since its founding, the organization has grown from a single training program for sixteen attorneys in two offices in Georgia and Louisiana, to a multi-tiered enterprise with over 300 participants in more than 35 offices across 15 mostly Southern states. An initial three-year “Core” program for new public defenders has since expanded into a comprehensive model that includes programs for graduates of the initial Core program as they continue their development, public defender leaders, trainers and supervisors, and law students. Further, the organization is unique in that it intervenes at the trial stage, rather than after conviction, where challenges to criminal injustice often take place.

In 2013, HBO Films produced a documentary called Gideon's Army, based in part on the Gideon's Promise program and highlighting participants in the program.

Gideon's Promise has won numerous awards including Emory University's 2014 Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Service Award, the Southern Center for Human Rights' 2013 Gideon's Promise Award, The National Association of Sentencing Advocates and Mitigation Specialists 2013 Sentencing Project Award, and the American College of Trail Lawyers' 2011 Emil Gumpert Award.

In 2014, Rapping became the Director of Strategic Planning and Organizational Development for the Maryland Office of the Public Defender. In 2014, Rapping earned a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Fellow."

Law professor

Since 2007, Rapping has also been an associate professor at Atlanta's John Marshall Law School. In 2015 he was promoted to full Professor. Rapping is also a visiting associate professor of law at Harvard Law School. In 2009, Rapping was selected as one of Harvard Law School’s Wasserstein Public Interest Fellows in recognition of his contribution to the public interest legal arena. In 2013, Rapping was the Public Interest Scholar in Residence at Touro Law School.

Writings & views

Rapping has been a leading voice in discussing how culture shapes our criminal justice system. He has written and talked extensively about the culture of criminal justice, has theorized how criminal justice reform can be accomplished through cultural transformation, and through his work with Gideon’s Promise, has applied his ideas to build a movement of public defenders to drive criminal justice reform. He is a thought leader in articulating the critical role public defenders must play in any comprehensive criminal justice reform strategy. His work in this area earned him a 2014 MacArthur “Genius” grant.

Rapping first applied organizational culture theory to indigent defense reform in his 2007 article, Directing the Winds of Change. In 2009, he laid out a vision for how to put this theory to practice in describing the work of the Southern Public Defender Training Center (the precursor to Gideon’s Promise) in You Can’t Build on Shaky Ground. He made the case that supporting public defenders in their quest to drive cultural transformation should be a priority of the United States federal government in National Crisis, National Neglect. And in 2012—applying his work to prosecutors in Who’s Guarding the Henhouse—he examined how prosecutors too have been shaped by the existing criminal justice culture and, as a result, help perpetuate injustice.

Believing that well-intentioned professionals are shaped by a criminal justice system that has become unmoored from is foundational values, Rapping’s vision involves supporting defenders as they struggle to resist the pressure to adapt to the status quo. This vision is best articulated in his article "Redefining Success as a Public Defender" and in a speech he delivered at Touro Law School.

He has examined how the American story of justice has evolved to a narrative that would be unrecognizable to our founding fathers in "Reviving the Hero Image of the Public Defender." He has analyzed how defenders can combat the pernicious role of race in driving this culture in "Implicitly Unjust." And in "Retuning Gideon’s Trumpet," he answers skeptics who believe public defenders are only important to individuals and play no role in driving systemic reform.

Rapping frequently addresses criminal justice issues of the day by promoting a narrative in which a movement of public defenders, serving as the voice for the vast majority of people in the criminal justice system, serve as the catalyst for reform. As the nation grappled with a seeming epidemic of police killings of young black men like Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, Rapping urged that we not see that issue as disconnected from “routine injustice” destroying poor communities of color every day. In "It's Not Just the Cops" and "From Ferguson to Staten Island: In Case Anyone Doubted the Public Needs Defending," he argues that public defenders are a necessary component to a comprehensive strategy to realize equal justice that is illusive throughout the criminal justice system. In "The Other Baltimore Story," he makes a similar argument as the nation focused its attention on the killing of Freddy Gray by reminding us of the routine injustice in Baltimore through the story of Ronald Hammond, and the response of public defenders.

In articles like "Continuing the March of Civil Rights Warriors in Selma," "One of the Most Important Civil and Human Rights Battles of Our Time," and "Redefining Success as a Public Defender," Rapping makes the case that criminal justice is the civil rights struggle of this generation and that public defenders are on the front lines of that battle.

He routinely tips his hat to the men and women who represent poor people accused of crimes, particularly in essays like "Reviving the Hero Image of the Public Defender By Changing the Story of Our Clients," "To All the Patriots Out There, and Especially Our Public Defenders," and "Gideon’s Orchestra: It’s Time For the Encore." And in pieces like "The Special Few" and "Who Will Heal the Public Defenders," he explains the emotional toll that makes this work so difficult.

Rapping’s 2015 TEDx Atlanta talk is a powerful articulation of the critical role of culture in shaping our criminal justice system and the importance of a public defender movement to transforming it.

Contributions to scholarly and professional journals

Other writings

Awards and recognition