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run its course.
    The logistics of the forensic rotation would be different from all the others, Scott explained. I would spend two full days a week at the court clinic, while the other interns would be at their various stations Monday through Friday and only in the mornings. It wasn’t clear to me how I was supposed to fill the other three mornings, and Scott would only vaguely say that I’d eventually have plenty to do.
    On the first day of my forensic rotation, I met Dr. Katherine Young, director of the Brooklyn court clinic and my rotation supervisor, not at the courthouse, but instead at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. Kings County and Bellevue were both city hospitals managed by the Health and Hospitals Corporation. Of the two, from what I understood, Kings County was considered the ugly stepchild and held in much lower esteem. In a largely Manhattan-centric city, it had the misfortune to be located at the outskirts of an outer borough, in a neighborhood beset by violent crime. (Army reservists training to be battlefield medics spent time in Kings County’s ER and ICU to become accustomed to the trauma wounds—from gunshots and stabbings—they would see once deployed.) Because Kings County no longer housed a forensic ward, prisoners charged with or convicted of crimes in Brooklyn who needed psychiatric hospitalization were sent to Bellevue, but the fitness-to-stand-trial evaluations of the Brooklyn accused were still conducted by the Kings County staff, and so we were in Manhattan on that July Thursday.
    Dr. Young was waiting for me in the enormous airy lobby. She was slim and bespectacled, with gray hair, and in her mid-forties. Immediately chatty, she told me that she’d beena professional opera singer before earning her doctorate at Penn State, where she’d become aware of the revolving door between jails and psychiatric hospitals. She decided to commit her life to helping the mentally ill get fair treatment in the justice system. We were at Bellevue that day, she explained, to evaluate three defendants, and we would meet their public defender and another of the forensic psychologists upstairs. As we emerged from a full elevator into the hallway of the locked prison ward, a uniformed guard motioned us to the side. In front of us, a dozen or so shackled black men in orange jumpsuits were being led backward out of a freight elevator. The sight of them was shocking—their shackles and their labored, tandem shuffling. Their jumpsuits were stamped “DOC,” for Department of Corrections, in bold letters. Another guard unlocked a metal gate and watched their awkward passing as the rest of us tried to look away.
    Dr. Young and I crossed the hallway and entered a waiting room with chairs and a mounted television. She introduced me to the lawyer, Jim Danziger, and the other psychologist, Dr. Pine. The two psychologists conversed happily. Dr. Pine was just back from a long vacation, and they had a lot to catch up on. Jim recognized my Michigan twang from some time he’d spent in Ohio, and he told me about those years. He was truly friendly and we chatted with some energy. Then a guard came and escorted us through the metal gate and another locked door into a small, windowless room with four chairs and a table.
    “First we’ll see Randall Corbin,” Dr. Young told me. “He declined to speak to us once before. He’s accused of trying to kill his wife. He keeps writing letters to her, threatening.”
    “He threatened me, too,” said Jim. “Tried to grab me from behind the bars of his cell.”
    The psychologists decided that Jim should stand near the door. Dr. Young, Dr. Pine, and I would take the chairs. “Do you feel safe?” I asked them. Never having met any, I assumed prisoners were dangerous.
    They both replied no, shrugging their shoulders, but neither of them moved. In the end it didn’t matter, because Mr. Corbin refused to see us. On the basis of this decision, which they believed reflected paranoia and