Alex Clavering
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What made you decide to get on TikTok, and when did you start to get a large following?
I got on TikTok at the same time a lot of people got on, at the beginning of 2020 when everyone was at home and not really going anywhere and glued to our phones. I had a little bit of a Twitter following, and I finally caved and made a TikTok account — and I was immediately hooked.
It took a little bit of time to grow the following. It's blown up a lot more in the last six to eight months, and it gets easier to attract more people the bigger your following gets.
You have more than 700,000 followers. Do you still think, "Wow, how did this happen?"
I actually try not to think about it too much because it's too weird, and I don't want it to impact how I do things or talk about things online, but it's definitely surprising.
I was making things for either educational purposes or just for fun, and certain things either resonated with people or they just found it funny, so things went viral, and it's all downhill from there. And now my life is markedly worse because I have people bothering me all the time on the internet.
What about your videos do you think resonated with people?
I talk a lot about legal issues and the criminal system, but besides the legal piece, a lot of the stuff I talk about is isolation and loneliness that a lot of people are feeling and experiencing underneath late-stage capitalism. And those themes also do tie into a criminal system and our legal frameworks.
It's a lot of jokes and silliness, and some of it is educational, but that probably resonates with people most. Even if people's situations are not quite as dire as some of the situations that I might be referring to in terms of people dealing with the criminal system, in general people are having a tough time, so they understand it.
What inspired you to go into law, and did you always know you wanted to be a public defender?
I went into the legal profession for the same reason that everybody does, or a lot of people do, and that is hoping to make the world better — and also being mildly psychotic.
I didn't know what I wanted to do when I got into law school. I just cared a lot about my impact, and I felt like I wasn't really finding a place where I felt comfortable or I liked what my impact was. I did a clinic with the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, and it was probably the best experience I had in law school.
My second summer I was at a BigLaw firm, and I thought I was going to do securities litigation, which feels like a million years ago now. My first summer I was with the [U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission], so I was in a very different headspace, but I was just finding things that didn't work for me.
And then with public defense, it made sense, or in the very least, working with clients in direct legal services made sense to me and I felt good about it. I really do love what I do. I wish we got paid more, and I wish the system wasn't horrible, but I like the job and I like trying to help people navigate these impossible situations and the systems that are constantly crushing people.
So how did you go from summering at a BigLaw firm and the SEC to working with Neighborhood Defender Services? Those seem like very different paths for lawyers.
The parts weren't really fitting for me. There was a very clear path, and I saw what that path was and I didn't like it, which was basically: Work at a firm and do this kind of stuff and maybe land a government-type job and do X, Y and Z, and do pretty well for myself financially, but not in itself super-great. It didn't feel like the right fit for me, and I was desperately searching for whatever that was.
The first experience I had was with the Center for Popular Democracy; I worked on policy work on their mass incarceration project. The lawyers there were, as far as lawyers go, pretty radical. And I saw that there were different ways to do lawyering. So I started to move in that direction, and it made a lot of sense.
But I'll never forget walking into career services in the middle of my BigLaw summer and being like, "Hey, I actually think I want to be a public defender," and they looked at me like I'd hit my head or something.
You tweeted recently that the starting salary for public defenders is just $55,000 a year. Do you think that limits the number of people who become public defenders?
I think it's true of public interest legal work generally that the salaries are a barrier to entry. Obviously, in the very least, [public defenders] should be making the same money as the prosecutors — there should be pay parity.
And that's true in certain parts of New York, but it's not true everywhere in New York. It certainly has an impact, but I think it's less emblematic of one field of law that is not getting paid enough; it's more that we don't pay public servants enough money.
So what do you think is a misconception people may have about your job, or the criminal justice system in general?
The first thing I would say for anyone interested is to direct them to the writings of people like Mariame Kaba, whose new book is "We Do This 'Til We Free Us," which is a collection of her essays, obviously Angela Davis, "Are Prisons Obsolete?," Derecka Purnell — there's a lot of great people in the space who I've learned a tremendous amount from and are worth reading.
It's good to have an open mind because we are all so deeply propagandized in the United States to take these systems for granted. We've re-created the prisons in our own mind by not being able to imagine a different kind of world, a world where it doesn't look like this. Where the United States, which is a country with 4% of the world's population, doesn't imprison 25% of the world's prisoners.
The misconception is that we can't do it differently, and I think we can. And I mean beyond reform, because there's this idea, and I think this is [Michel] Foucault: Reform is in itself an institution because we get addicted to the idea of reform, which legitimizes these institutions which in their own right are wrong and immoral.
So we need to think bigger and have open hearts and minds about how to change the legal systems and frameworks we have in the United States for the better.
People make mistakes, and a mistake doesn't define you. The worst thing you've ever done doesn't define who you are because life is long and complicated and people change and can redeem themselves.
People have the tendency to imagine when they read things in a newspaper or see things on the news, which is oftentimes very clickbait-y or thrilling — they don't realize that there's a story there, there are human beings involved, there are families, communities. It's beyond a good headline.
Over the holidays, you asked your fans on TikTok to send items for those newly released from custody. What was the estimated total value of those items, and what inspired you to do that?
So value-wise, I don't know, but we had a ton of stuff; it was incredible. We were getting about 300 packages a day for two weeks. I had to shut it down because we literally didn't have room for it. We made them into bags for people for reentry purposes, or when clients are homeless or having issues like that, so we have all these things that we didn't have before.
It's probably the best part about having people following me, being able to do stuff like that. The next thing is going to be related to transportation, because there isn't great public transportation out in Suffolk County, and we want to try and help people get to court.
But that was also how everyone in my office found out that I have this TikTok following, which was kind of embarrassing.
But you got a bunch of supplies.
Yes, yeah. So it was worth my embarrassment.
So what were some of the items you were having people send?
There were a lot of clothing items. Some of them were items for people in jail, for commissary purposes, sweatshirts and sweatpants, shoes, toiletries, tents, blankets — basically everything you could need if you were getting out of jail.
How do you walk the line of having a serious job but maybe not taking yourself so seriously online?
I try to be night-and-day with it. Something people always ask is, "Does anyone ever recognize you in court?" And I always laugh, because no. TikTok is one of those things where you can have a million people following you, but still 99% of people have no idea who you are and don't care. Especially in a place like New York. I just keep it separate.
I take my job very, very seriously, and I think people would be surprised to see how serious I am in court. Well, hopefully they wouldn't be surprised. But I take my job very seriously when I'm in there, but obviously when I walk out the door, I frequently record videos sitting in my car in the parking lot.
So the ducks in the park, are those just for anyone? Can I take one home, or what's the deal there?
My general life advice that is not legal advice, is that you're probably better off leaving the ducks alone. But I do like that. It's so strange ... it's just the strangest thing. I don't know how this happened. Every day I get multiple notifications — if there's any video of a duck anywhere on TikTok, I'm tagged in that video 100 times.
So your notifications must be blowing up all day.
Yes, for very, very stupid reasons. I feel kind of bad because I used to be more attentive. Lots of people would ask questions, like law students or people who want to go to law school. But it's just like a lot of memes and people being like, "Oh, can I steal this duck from a park?" Or, "Oh, I killed a man in an Applebee's parking lot in the 1980s," or something.
We certainly hope the Applebee's thing is a joke.
Yes, I'm pretty sure the person who originally posted that was 19, so I'm not worried about it.
Has anyone approached you actually trying to retain you through TikTok?
Yes, unfortunately that has happened many times. People do it as a joke, to be funny, but people have done it seriously several times. They've sent me emails. They've sent me real requests that I've had to be like, uh, no. Please seek representation. I can't represent you.
Anything else you'd like to tell me or the world?
Hmm, abolish prisons.
--Editing by Philip Shea.