Defence lawyers play an important part in shaping narratives and emerging practices in lower criminal courts. Working with marginalized accused who experience homelessness, racism, mental health issues and barriers to accessing supports, lawyers collaborate with non-legal stakeholders to validate and guide diversion and ‘therapeutic justice’ or rehabilitative interventions. Increasingly, defence lawyers also make arguments that take into account social and systemic factors – and that reply on social science evidence and expertise. My research documents how criminal lawyers manage their practice and make legal arguments about the importance of social context and structural factors (e.g. colonial legacy, anti-black racism, lack of housing and substance use supports). Analyzing 80 semi structured interviews - with duty counsel, legal aid, and private lawyers - I map and analyze when and how they use structural factors and sociological evidence and arguments to challenge or shape conditions of release, court processes and case outcomes. I show that these arguments are especially important to study at the front end of the criminal justice system, where people are regulated and pre-punished via bail, as well as at sentencing, where more nuanced discussion of the social can be supported by contextualizing evidence. With this paper I expand understandings of social control and punishment and of managerial, therapeutic and rights-based justice models.