Premal Dharia grew up the child of Indian immigrants in Mingo County, West Virginia, a former coal mining town where her family's food, accents, and visible difference set them apart. A move to the Washington, D.C. suburbs in high school reframed everything: for the first time she saw how interconnected, resourced communities worked, and how disconnected her hometown had been by comparison. In this conversation with Meghan Skelton, she traces the line from that shift, through a jarring college internship investigating cases at the Neighborhood Defender Service in Harlem, to a nearly fifteen-year career as a public defender in three different places: the D.C. Public Defender Service, the federal public defender's office in Maryland, and the military commission at Guantanamo Bay.

Premal talks about what it meant to stand next to clients facing sentencing, the deliberate ways she worked to make judges and prosecutors see her clients as people rather than case files, and the surreal, disorienting experience of representing detainees at Guantanamo, where officers avoided using prisoners' names and instead used their ISN numbers. She describes why she eventually left criminal defense for civil impact litigation, challenging bail systems and the fines and fees that trap poor defendants in cycles of punishment, and why that work ultimately felt incomplete in a way criminal defense had not.

That search led her to found a project bridging public defenders and community organizers, work that became the Institute to End Mass Incarceration at Harvard Law School, where she is now executive director. She talks about the Institute's current focus on aging prison infrastructure as an opening for bigger questions about incarceration, and on model legislation to protect incarcerated people who report on conditions inside, inspired in part by the documentary The Alabama Solution. Asked what she would change about the criminal legal system if she could change only one thing, she answers without hesitation: punishment itself. She closes by reflecting on the privilege of being able to push back against that system, in small ways, every day.