In May 2007, Ireland’s National Crime Council published a report recommending the establishment of community courts in Ireland. The report, “Problem Solving Justice: The Case for Community Courts in Ireland,” includes 20 recommendations, including that a community court should be established in Dublin and that, if successful, the model should be extended to other areas of the country.

According to Padraic White, Chairman of the National Crime Council, “community courts take a problem-solving approach to low-level offenders, using a range of health and social services while some defendants may be required to undertake community work in the neighbourhood to make some reparation for their offending in that neighbourhood.”  

Judge Michael Reilly, the Council member who chaired the subgroup responsible for the report, said that the introduction of community courts—with their wide array of problem-solving options—would contribute to breaking the cycle of re-offending. The proposed community court for inner-city Dublin would deal with low-level offenses such as drunk and disorderly conduct, assault, criminal damage, graffiti and petty theft. It would link offenders with services meant to deal with the underlying issues that led to their crime, and allow offenders to pay back the neighborhood through community service.

According to the report, the concept of community courts was first brought to the National Crime Council’s attention by Tom Coffey, the Chief Executive Officer of the Dublin City Business Association, after staff from the Center for Court Innovation made a presentation to the group. In September 2006 a delegation visited the Midtown Community Court, Red Hook Community Justice Center, and Philadelphia Community Court as part of a fact finding mission to the U.S.

To read the report in full, click here.

In March 2007, the Scottish government announced its plans to open the country's first community justice centre and community court in Glasgow. The center, which is expected to be up and running in 2009, will be based on the Red Hook Community Justice Center and Midtown Community Court in New York and the North Liverpool Community Justice Centre in England, but be adapted to suit the needs of the Scottish criminal justice system and local community.

The center aims to improve justice services, speed up court processes and strengthen the court's relationship with the local community. It will be led by a single judge who will regularly engage the community in discussions about local crime issues and how offenders can pay back the community swiftly and visibly through community service. Typical sentences will involve a package of measures designed to make offenders pay back the community for their crimes and tackle the underlying problems that led to their offending, with support such as access to housing, drug treatment, employment and mental health services. In one example, an offender might be required to perform community service as well as attend a drug rehabilitation course and receive help to address debt problems. "Smart options, not soft options," as Justice Minister Cathy Jamieson put it, "the kind of approaches which I have already seen delivering real results for people in New York."

While some community courts only deal with cases once the accused has pled guilty, the Glasgow court will deal with as many local cases as possible whether the accused pleads guilty or not. Currently, local government leaders are working to identify suitable sites, consulting the community on the location as community involvement will be vital to its success.

"Crime in Scotland is falling," says Jamieson. "However, we also know that persistent offenders—even where small in number—can drag a whole community down. The community justice centre, through its unique problem-solving approach, will help us take a further step towards tackling that."

 

In an effort to assess the impact of the Justice Center on defendant perceptions of fairness, the Center for Court Innovation conducted a survey of nearly 400 misdemeanor defendants, who had their cases handled at either the Justice Center or a traditional, centralized criminal court.

While South Africa is one of the most prosperous African countries, it also faces high crime rates. In response, the government has embarked on an ambitious, country-wide community justice program. Seventeen (soon to be 18) community courts are currently in operation around the country. Community policing strategies are being employed throughout the national police force. And, in 2006, the National Prosecuting Authority launched a community prosecution pilot program in each of the country’s nine provinces, in areas that together account for some of the highest crime levels in South Africa.

 

 

 

The nine sites were selected for their high crime rates or persistent levels of minor crime, as well as for their potential for social and economic development. If the model works at these diverse sites—two urban, six peri-urban (township), and one rural—it will work nearly anywhere in the country, justice officials believe. The approach is targeted and aggressive: prosecutors have been sent into each community to begin working on reducing and preventing local crime at the community level, and each site is being rigorously evaluated through data collection, questionnaires, workshop discussions, site observations, photographic documentation, and formal and informal interviews.

“This is a very exciting initiative as we explore the role of the prosecutor in crime prevention and community justice,” says Shamila Batohi, Director of Public Prosecutions for KwaZulu-Natal province and the senior prosecutor responsible for coordinating the project. “We face enormous challenges in our beautiful country, but we are optimistic that the community prosecution initiative will help us move closer to the achievement of the National Prosecuting Authority’s vision: ‘Justice in our society so that people can live in freedom and security.’”

According to researcher Richard Griggs of Independent Projects Trust, successes to date have been palpable. In Windsor East, for example—an urban area troubled by drug sales, organized crime, and transient populations—a joint operation between the community prosecutor and local police resulted in the arrests of 15 drug syndicate members. A number of illegal immigrants, whose presence in the community had led to a noticeable increase in criminal activity, have been arrested and deported. The arrests of dozens of other offenders have helped clean up Windsor: drug dealers who were previously visible have retreated from the streets, and it is no longer common for landlords to rent to illegal immigrants or for businesses to hire them. Community prosecution efforts have helped drive brothels out of the area, while negotiations with businesses and community members have brought the crime-ridden King’s Pub area, notorious for drug activity and wild behavior, under control.

In another, very different example, community prosecutors have had some early success in the rural North West Kudumani, where cattle theft had been a significant problem. A major clamp-down on rustling in 2006 led to a significant reduction in cattle theft, which is now negligible in the area (previously up to 40 cases had been reported per day ). The community is no longer engaged in vigilantism, and proper facilities—including fenced grazing camps, branding, and veterinary services, all of which prevent cattle theft—are being developed. With the arrest of police members who were participating in livestock theft, police-community relations have improved.

The community prosecution project is still being piloted and monitored. Any early findings discussed here are tentative observations pending the full evaluation that will be undertaken from mid-June 2007 and released by September.

Due to these initial successes and the government’s commitment to reducing crime, justice officials are spreading the lessons learned from community prosecution. In February 2007, a two-day National Prosecuting Authority conference on Community Prosecution and Restorative Justice was held in Cape Town, with the audience consisting of the 250 most senior prosecutors in the country (with a spotlight on the nine community prosecutors).

As results are gathered from around the country, researchers are examining a number of key questions, including what kind of models might fit any given location, and how community prosecution as it exists in South Africa, with its unique history and problems, can be defined in the present and shaped for the future.

UPDATE: In March 2008, an extensive independent research report on the South African pilot sites was released. The report found that partnerships between community prosecutors, municipalities, local communities and police can significantly help reduce crime rates. To read more, click here.

 

 

Sex offense cases often present challenges to the police who investigate them, the district attorneys who prosecute them, the judges who adjudicate them, and the probation officers who supervise them.  Unfortunately, the traditional criminal justice system approaches each of these pieces of the puzzle working in relative isolation, with their own protocols and procedures.  In many instances these protocols and procedures are rooted in tradition and practice rather than on best practices and emerging research on sexual offenders.

In order to change this, dedicated sex offense bureaus in district attorney’s offices, special victims units in police departments, and, most recently, specialized sex offender supervision units of probation departments have been developed in many jurisdictions.  Courts, however, have yet to explore the benefits of specialization.  This is unfortunate because the problems with applying a generalist approach to the adjudication of sex offense cases are many: lack of specialized knowledge for decision-making, lack of adequate communication and coordination between the court and stakeholder agencies, lack of system accountability, and the resulting dissatisfaction of many victims with the criminal justice process.  Judges lack adequate information to guide them in making critical decisions about specialized conditions of probation.  Victims follow and track the criminal cases from courtroom to courtroom, judge to judge.  Probation officers lack the tools to safely and effectively monitor offenders in the community and report violations and Assistant District Attorneys faced with an untrained judiciary sometimes plead cases down to non-sex offense, non-registerable, charges in order to secure convictions.  

In light of the aforementioned frequent and complex challenges, the Center for Court Innovation and the Office of Court Administration spent several years examining the issues presented by sex offense cases to look for ways to improve the court response.  The Center for Court Innovation is a nonprofit public-private partner of the New York State Court System and serves as the independent research and development arm for the Courts.  The Office of Court Administration is the administrative arm of the New York State Court System responsible for supervising the administration and operations of the trial courts. 
Center for Court Innovation staff interviewed judges, probation officers, victim advocates, prosecutors, defense attorneys and sex offense treatment providers. Additionally, the Center for Court Innovation reviewed data on sex offense arrests and dispositions and sentences.  In the three pilot sites, many felony sex offense arrests resulted in misdemeanor convictions, and of those convictions 63% received community supervision as part of their sentence.   In reviewing court practices, the key questions we asked were:   

Is there a way for the court to be involved in enhancing public safety?
Is there a way to increase uniformity in how sex offense cases are handled by the court?
Is there room for improvement in coordination and communication among interested agencies in sex offense cases?

With those questions in mind, the Center for Court Innovation and the Office of Court Administration partnered to plan and implement the nation’s first three pilot specialized Sex Offense Courts. 

In January of 2006, Nassau, Westchester and Oswego Counties became the first three jurisdictions in the country to pilot specialized Sex Offense Courts.  To ensure that the most effective court practices possible were in place, court administrators and local stakeholders planned a unified approach to management of sex offense, relying on best and emerging practices in the field of sex offender management, with an emphasis on promoting offender accountability and public safety.

The mission of New York State Sex Offense Courts is to promote justice by providing a comprehensive approach to case resolution, increasing sex offender accountability, enhancing community safety and ensuring victim safety while protecting the rights of all litigants.  The two main purposes and functions of the Sex Offense Court model are to promote best practices in the resolution of sex offense cases and to facilitate and enhance coordination and communication among relevant stakeholders.

Best practices in New York Sex Offense courts include the following core components:

• Keeping victims informed
• Scheduling cases promptly
• Dedicated, trained Judge
• Supervising defendants continuously
• Implementing additional judicial monitoring of cases post-conviction/plea
• Building strong relationships with service providers
• Coordinating with probation departments
• Convening regular meetings with criminal justice agencies and service providers
• Providing court personnel and partners with education and training

The New York Sex Offense Courts incorporate all of the above listed core concepts, and are designed to work with key stakeholders such as defense attorneys, prosecutors, probation, victim agencies, sex offender-specific treatment providers, and polygraph examiners.  The Sex Offense Court model handles all cases that include a felony level sex offense charge or where the court has determined that the underlying facts of a case warrant the inclusion of the case in Sex Offense Court.  The Courts hear cases from their inception and early identification through disposition, and monitoring. 
 
As important as it is to say what the New York Sex Offense Courts are, it is also important to point out what they are not.  Sex Offense Courts are not designed as alternatives to incarceration, they are not diversion courts, and they are not treatment/rehabilitative courts.  Instead, Sex Offense Courts are more akin to domestic violence courts; defendants do not opt-in but rather all cases of a certain nature or charge are automatically routed for their entire processing and adjudication.  Sex Offense Courts, like domestic violence courts, emphasize the need for accountability of the offenders and the increasing of public/community safety.

As mentioned, one of the key elements and best practices of Sex Offense Courts is education and training for judges and non-judicial personnel.  Judicial training is integral to enhancing the court’s ability to handle complex sex offense cases in a consistent and comprehensive manner.  By understanding patterns of offending behavior, the prevalence of crossover behaviors, and effective interventions, such as the containment model of sex offender management, judges and lawyers can make informed decisions and appropriately assess special conditions of probation.

Another best practice feature of Sex Offense Courts is the use of judicial monitoring.  Court monitoring includes rapid calendaring of cases on probation, immediate communication of compliance or non-compliance of court mandates, swift response to violations of conditions of probation and SORA, and consideration of a graduated sanctions scheme. 

Given the reality that many sex offenders are sentenced to community supervision, Sex Offense Courts work with probation and parole departments to increase their participation, enhance coordination and communication between the court and the supervision agents, to promote the use of pre-sentence tools (investigations, risk assessments, polygraph, etc.) and utilize special sex offender conditions.

The Sex Offense Courts work closely with local service providers to facilitate victim access to advocacy, counseling and other social services.  Best practices dictate that a victim-centered approach is key to any sex offense containment strategy, and should guide the framework for sex offender management and the development of a Sex Offense Court.  The Sex Offense Court model was driven in part by the involvement and input of the victim agencies who expressed interest in specialized court practices and quicker resolution to cases and violations.  In some jurisdictions, a sex offense case could be transferred back and forth between and among multiple courtrooms before several different judges throughout the duration of the case; making the process all the more confusing and frustrating for victims.  The Sex Offense Court model eliminates this concern and is designed to address the needs of the victims, and includes the victim advocacy agencies in ongoing training, planning and operations meetings.

Because the New York State Sex Offense Courts are the first of their kind nationwide (with the notable exception of the few Juvenile Sex Offense Court models), research and evaluation plans are in place to determine the effectiveness of these new strategies.  The Center for Court Innovation has worked with the New York State Court System to design a court application tool to be used in all Sex Offense Courts.  Cases are tracked and data is collected to allow for a future in-depth evaluation of court procedures.  We hope to provide answers to the following research questions:
How were sex offense cases handled prior to the implementation of the Sex Offense Courts?

What the process was for developing and implementing Sex Offense Courts?
What are Sex Offense Courts ‘best practices’?
What is the impact of the Sex Offense Courts on victims?

By utilizing best practices and current research on sex offenders, we are optimistic that the Sex Offense Court model will improve case outcomes, including victim and stakeholder satisfaction with the criminal justice system response and will provide for increased accountability of sex offenders in New York and, as a result, increased community safety.

 

A prominent New York community group honored the Midtown Community Court for its enduring contributions to the neighborhood in the form of safer streets and improved quality of life. The Broadway Association, which has represented businesses in Times Square since 1911, presented its Golden Scroll Award to the Midtown Court’s presiding judge, Richard M. Weinberg, at a luncheon on Jan. 17.

The award expresses appreciation for the court’s 13 years “fostering, promoting, and improving public safety and quality of life in New York City.” The award also credits the court’s partners, including the New York State Unified Court System, the Center for Court Innovation, and law enforcement, for helping the Midtown Court serve as a “model of problem-solving justice.” 

New York State Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye gave the keynote address. Chuck Scarborough, a local anchorman with NBC, served as master of ceremonies.

The Midtown Community Court was established in 1993. The nation’s first community court, it has been credited with playing a pivotal role in the turn-around of Times Square, a neighborhood once plagued with drug dealing, prostitution, and rampant quality-of life crime. The court uses a combination of punishment and help to address problems that offenders bring to court. It also actively engages the community in developing solutions to safety issues.

Independent evaluators have documented that the Midtown Community Court’s focus on low-level crime contributed to a significant drop in local street crime and improved attitudes toward justice.

The success of the Midtown Court has led to the development of nearly three dozen community courts around the U.S. and replications in several countries around the world.

The awards luncheon was held in the Marriot Marquis on Jan. 17.

Chief Administrative Judge Jonathan Lippman gives keynote address at Fordham Law School symposium.

The following are the remarks of New York State Chief Administrative Judge Jonathan Lippman delivered at Fordham Law School on Oct. 13, 2006.

Good afternoon. I want to thank Dean Treanor and John Feerick for this wonderful opportunity to be a part of the Center’s first symposium. We are very fortunate in New York to have a law school so clearly committed to promoting the public good and to training lawyers to serve the public interest.

I couldn’t be more excited about the creation of the new Feerick Center for Social Justice and Dispute Resolution. A single phrase caught my eye in the press release announcing the new Center. In it, Dean Feerick said that the Center had, and I quote, “great potential for good works.” I like to think that we in the New York State Court System have this same potential. The challenge we face every day is how best to fulfill this potential in the face of enormous obstacles.

As the Chief Administrative Judge responsible for overseeing a $2.3 billion organization that handles four million new cases each and every year, there is never a shortage of compelling challenges to be addressed. What I want to talk about today are our efforts to re-engineer the courts in New York. And I want to highlight some of the intellectual links that connect my world, the world of the New York Court system, to the world of the Feerick Center, the world of alternative dispute resolution. There is a great deal of overlap between the ADR movement and some of the “problem-solving justice” reforms that New York State Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye and I have championed over the past decade, and which provide innovative solutions for litigants in our civil and criminal courts.

The problems and challenges that we face today in using ADR methods transcend the boundaries between criminal and civil matters in a New York court system that looks to effective outcomes for people rather than merely counting filings and dispositions. Indeed, we have long used ADR in a variety of ways, including:

• our community dispute resolution centers, which in the last fiscal year resolved 36,000 primarily civil and family cases [1]
• court-annexed ADR in our small claims courts
• court-annexed ADR in the Commercial Division of the Supreme Court
• statewide attorney-client fee dispute resolution program, and 
• mediation for parenting disputes in Family Courts throughout the State and in matrimonial matters

Lessons from ADR
It might seem ironic that the court system would look to the world of ADR for lessons, given that ADR is premised on some fundamental critiques of traditional court processes—too lengthy, too expensive and, dare I say it, too adversarial and legalistic. However, it’s true that the New York courts have taken to heart some very basic ADR principles,[2] such as: 1) a commitment to rethinking business as usual; 2) an understanding of the importance of cases that are often dismissed as “minor”; and, 3) an emphasis on restoring public trust and engaging citizens in doing justice. I'd like to take just a minute to explore each of these.

Rethinking Business As Usual
The most significant contribution that ADR has made to the courts is a simple one—driving home that change is in fact possible. Courts are, at heart, conservative institutions that rely on the slow and painstaking accumulation of precedent to guide decision making, and on an adversarial contest between two advocates who argue in front of an objective third party. These approaches make good sense and are effective in many contexts. But not always. Not for a dispute between neighbors, or a juvenile accused of vandalism, or a small claims case between two local businesses.

The ADR movement got us in the mode of asking a very basic question: Why can't we test new approaches to make justice swifter, more comprehensible and more meaningful? Well, this is a question that we now ask ourselves as part of our standard operating procedure. It doesn't mean that we're giving license to judges to abandon the Constitution or to make up the law. But it does mean that the courts can and should adapt to changing times and conditions on the ground.  It means that we should always ask ourselves if there are better, simpler and faster ways to achieve our goals. All of this is straight out of the ADR playbook.

So-called "minor" cases
Another lesson we have learned from ADR is that there’s no such thing as a minor case. Many ADR programs were created for the very reason that courts dealing with overwhelming caseloads were simply unable to pay enough attention to cases involving neighbors, relatives and acquaintances—charges of harrassment, minor assaults, business disputes and the like. The unintentional message sent to the public was that these kinds of cases didn't matter. But of course we know that they do matter—they matter a lot to the people and the communities who bear the brunt of these offenses.

Public Trust
At the end of the day, courts exist to serve the public. Unfortunately, we’ve seen a massive erosion of public trust in justice over the past generation. ADR advocates were among the first to respond to this growing public dissatisfaction. Their search for new ways of resolving disputes, as well as their efforts to engage local residents as mediators, community board members and volunteers, were all driven by a desire to reconnect the justice system to the public and improve the delivery of justice.

Problem-Solving Justice
We have actively sought to translate the lessons of the ADR movement into new court processes that better serve the public.[3] Chief Judge Kaye, who has made New York the national leader in this regard, has named this effort “problem-solving justice.” What is problem-solving justice? Not surprisingly, I think the concept was best articulated by Chief Judge Kaye when she said:

“Outcomes—not just process and precedents—matter. Protecting the rights of an addicted mother is important. So is protecting her children and getting her off drugs.”

In other words, it’s not that process and precedent don't matter. But judges and lawyers should see the forest for the trees. Going to court shouldn't be a series of empty procedural gestures—a lot of sound and fury that achieves nothing lasting or meaningful in terms of solving the problems of victims, defendants and crime-plagued communities.

This is the central insight of problem solving justice. And it is one that many of us working in the courts arrived at the hard way, after years of dealing with the fallout from too many meaningless court appearances and dispositions —dispositions that accomplished little of lasting value, because so much court activity was being driven by people who were addicted, mentally ill, homeless or suffering from other difficulties.

Midtown Community Court
New York’s commitment to problem solving justice dates back to 1993—not coincidentally the year Judith Kaye became Chief Judge—with the creation of the Midtown Community Court, which quickly became the flagship of the early problem solving movement.

In the past, judges confronting drug possession, prostitution, shoplifting and vandalism were forced to choose between a few days of jail time or nothing at all—sentences that failed to impress upon the victim, the community or the defendant that these offenses were being taken seriously by the justice system. By contrast, Midtown ushered in a new paradigm that combined punishment with help by swiftly sentencing these offenders to pay back the neighborhood they harmed through visible community service projects like sweeping streets, painting over graffiti and cleaning local parks. At the same time, offenders were provided with on-site services—drug treatment, mental health counseling, GED classes, job training—that might help them avoid recidivism and all kinds of litigation in our family, housing and other civil courts that eventually results from lives and families that are broken apart by virtue of underlying dysfunctions like addiction. This double-barreled approach—visible restitution combined with a helping hand—quickly made a positive impact in the Midtown area.
 
Red Hook Community Justice Center
Given the results, it was only natural that we sought to test the community court idea in another setting. We chose Red Hook, Brooklyn—about as far removed from Times Square as you can get in New York City, a physically isolated neighborhood dominated by one of New York’s oldest public housing developments. And we went to the same team that developed the Midtown Community Court—our independent research and development arm, the Center for Court Innovation.

The Red Hook Community Justice Center, which opened in 2000, works closely with community residents, businesses and religious and civic institutions to identify and focus on the problems of greatest concern to their neighborhood—in this case, drugs, housing and juvenile delinquency. The goal is to offer a multidisciplinary, coordinated approach to the community’s problems, with a single judge hearing neighborhood cases that ordinarily would have been heard in different civil and criminal courts.

Red Hook is nothing less than a grand experiment that tests the extent to which a court can engage residents in solving their own problems and serve as the catalyst for an entire community’s revitalization.  As anyone who has recently set foot in Red Hook can attest, the neighborhood is a much safer place than it was back in the late 1990s. Once a retail wasteland, Red Hook is starting to enjoy the kinds of services—restaurants, coffee shops, supermarkets—that everyone else takes for granted.

The Midtown and Red Hook stories have attracted the attention of justice innovators across the country and around the globe. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, consider that our community courts have been replicated in dozens of cities in the US and the United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa, Australia and Ireland, among others.

While this is impressive, I’m just as proud of the local efforts to adapt the Midtown and Red Hook model—from Babylon, Long Island, to Syracuse and back down to Harlem, jurisdictions across the State are attempting to implement elements of the community court approach.

Harlem Community Justice Center
The Harlem Community Justice Center is a multi-jurisdictional civil and family court that focuses on youth crime, landlord-tenant disputes, and the challenges faced by parolees in the low-income areas of East and Central Harlem.  The Justice Center tries to solve housing conflicts before they escalate into litigation by linking landlords and tenants to mediation, benefits assistance, social services and loan-assistance programs. The community setting encourages more informed decision making by the judge as he or she develops an understanding of the neighborhood's problem areas and eyesores.

The Justice Center works intensively with young people, intervening at the first signs of delinquent behavior to avoid further offending by connecting young nonviolent offenders to drug treatment, counseling and education and nontraditional services like parent-teen mediation, family counseling, mentoring, career training and youth courts.[4]

Babylon Community Court
This past June, we announced the opening of the Babylon Community Court, in Suffolk County, Long Island. The project seeks to move the community court approach first pioneered in urban areas to a suburban jurisdiction. The court handles all quality-of-life cases, both civil and criminal, brought by the Town of Babylon. A single judge presides over the court, which is dedicated to handling violations of town ordinances that affect the quality of life of local residents in many suburban communities: cases involving nuisance properties, such as untended yards and abandoned cars; and violations of zoning restrictions, such as unlicensed subdivisions of single family homes and businesses operating out of residential locations. The Babylon Community Court has the potential to be a national model for how to respond to the kinds of blighted, nuisance properties that mar too many neighborhoods across the country.

As you may have gathered, all of our community courts make extensive use of ADR. Each one has an active on-site mediation program that handles hundreds of disputes each year involving noise, landlord-tenant, families and small claims.

Putting Problem Solving Justice in Context
Let me take a moment here to put problem solving courts in greater context. Problem solving justice is about modifying court processes to fit the problems that are driving the activity bringing cases into our different courts. It’s about courts putting the individual front and center, and then fashioning individualized responses designed to change future behavior. The process and rules are still there, but they form the context, not the focus, of the proceeding. In the problem solving model, the judge is not just a detached and distant arbiter who manages the process and then makes a final decision or pronounces guilt or innocence and/or imposes a sentence. Rather, the judge is a proactive, hands-on agent for change who views his or her role as an opportunity for the entire justice system to intervene and not only punish the individual but, just as critically, achieve a better outcome for that litigant and his family, and for our communities and public safety.

There is a danger when talking about problem solving courts that the uninitiated will perceive them to be doing social services work—unbecoming for courts of law. Let’s be clear: the reason these courts work so well is because they emphasize offender accountability and compliance with court orders. Less adversarial? Yes. Re-thinking and re-engineering the way we do business to better serve the public? Yes. Social Work? No.

Offenders’ participation in drug treatment and other mandated services is rigorously monitored by the judge through regular court appearances, and noncompliance is punished swiftly to reinforce the importance of meeting the conditions set by the court and to drive home notions of individual responsibility. Problem solving courts do help people —that is not a bad thing. Problem solving courts do facilitate social services for people who need them—that is not a bad thing. And problem solving courts do change the traditionally passive role of the judge to be more proactive and engaged with the people appearing in their courts—and that is proving to be a very wise thing.

So far, with over 13,000 offenders having graduated from our Drug Courts and another 7,500 presently enrolled,[5] it’s clear that drug courts work much better and cost far less than traditional approaches. Research tells us that offenders in court-ordered drug treatment succeed at twice the rate of those who voluntarily enter treatment. This means that we don’t have to waste scarce resources prosecuting, defending and incarcerating the same people over and over again (in fact one Oregon study has concluded that every dollar we invest in drug treatment courts ultimately yields ten dollars in savings from reduced incarceration, victimization and crime.)[6]  And It means that our communities and streets are safer.

Other of Our Problem Solving Initiatives Include:
Mental Health Courts:  The well-documented closings of so many mental hospitals in the 1980s and the release of thousands of patients into the general population have created new burdens for the courts in the form of thousands of  mentally-ill offenders. As lawyers and judges, what are we to do with these defendants? Remain wedded to a tradition-bound system that just continues to lock them up? And what happens when they are released without having gotten effective treatment? They get recycled right back into the system. Everyone loses.

Beginning in Brooklyn with a pilot launched by the Center for Court Innovation, we have attempted to re-engineer how courts respond to mental illness by linking defendants with serious and persistent mental illnesses—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder—to long-term treatment as an alternative to incarceration. 

While our mental health courts are still new, preliminary results from Brooklyn suggest that participants experience fewer hospitalizations, reduced substance abuse and, most importantly, fewer re-arrests.
 
Domestic Violence: Domestic violence cases are among the most difficult, heart-wrenching cases that any judge handles. The chronic nature of abuse, the targeted victim, the realities of children and family finances....it is an extremely complicated web to untangle. In response, we have opened a series of what we call “integrated domestic violence courts” in an effort to streamline the court process. Rather than send domestic violence victims to several different trial courts—Family Court for child custody/visitation, Criminal Court for assault, Supreme Court for divorce—we have grouped all of these cases together before a single judge. Our integrated courts offer a coordinated response, ensuring that no one falls between the cracks.

Child Welfare Permanency Planning Mediation: Like domestic violence cases, child welfare cases are extremely complex, raising difficult issues of child safety and family preservation. Research has repeatedly found that children in foster care are highly vulnerable to a whole host of negative life outcomes, including serious long-term health problems and developmental delays. Since 2003, the court system’s ADR Office and our Permanent Judicial Commission on Justice for Children have been working with the State Office of Children and Family Services to pilot child permanency mediation throughout New York City and many other areas of the State. We in the courts have learned that many child protection issues can be resolved more effectively in a non-adversarial atmosphere that stresses good communication and working relationships among all the parties.[7]
 
Lessons
One of the most interesting and significant lessons of the problem-solving movement relates to how the judicial role and mind set have changed. Judges and lawyers are trained to respect precedent and tradition and to regard the adversarial system as the great engine of truth, so it has not always been easy to convince them that the structures of the justice system and longstanding judicial processes had to be revamped. Consider what problem solving judges are asked to do: 

• Look at each case and each litigant as a problem to be solved and not just another case to be processed
• Look beyond the immediate case in front of them and think about the big picture and larger patterns of behavior.
• Serve as conveners who forge partnerships with social service providers and bring them into the process in the service of achieving better outcomes
• Serve as brokers who coordinate relationships among stake holders
• Stay involved with each case over the long haul and use their judicial authority to promote compliance with treatment plans and strong supervision of the individuals involved.

Lawyers on both sides of the aisle have had to assume new roles as well. This may sound revolutionary, but problem-solving courts actually require that all parts of the system work together on certain cases, agreeing on who is eligible to participate in the court, developing mutually agreeable systems of sanctions and rewards, and figuring out the best way to encourage offenders to succeed in treatment. In the process, we have changed how many lawyers measure success—not by the number of convictions or acquittals, or by which side wins or loses, but whether they were able to change behavior and improve public safety.

This recasting is not without dangers, particularly as to the judicial role. Some see the specter of well-meaning, but misguided, “touchy-feely” judges intent on pursuing rehabilitation and their own personal conceptions of social justice at the expense of punishment and accountability. On the other side of the spectrum is the fear that, without the constraints of the adversarial system, paternalistic judges will use their enormous powers to engage in intrusive and lengthy interventions and effectively manage the lives of poor and powerless citizens for their own good.
We must always be conscious of these concerns, but the bottom line is that these courts are proving to be both effective and fair, and they are using the skills of lawyers and judges in ways that are meaningful and positive for our society.

Conclusion
I am honored by the invitation to speak at this, the first symposium sponsored by the Feerick Center for Social Justice and Dispute Resolution. Our society is crying out for more John Feericks, for more lawyers who see themselves as consensus builders, problem solvers, preventive peacemakers and dispute settlers. The legal academy and the legal profession have an obligation to reexamine how lawyers are being trained to deal with the great issues of our time—including crime, poverty and family dysfunction . . . just as we in the courts have begun reexamining how well we are fulfilling our constitutional mission in the face of these plagues of modern-day life. If we are to remain relevant and responsive to the public’s needs and expectations, we have to engage these cases and the societal problems they reflect, with all their complexities and, for us, the nontraditional challenges they present.

The lesson of the problem solving revolution is that the judiciary’s accountability to the public extends beyond counting how many cases we’ve disposed of, and how quickly we’ve processed them. Our communities expect much more from the courts. By helping to solve the problems that we confront in our courthouses, we help to solve the problems we face as a society. Fortunately, with each passing year, the evidence grows stronger that these nontraditional legal and judicial approaches are producing better outcomes and helping to break the cycle of hopelessness that ravages countless lives, families and communities.

Thank you very much.



[1].  Annual Report of the Community Dispute Resolution Centers Program for Fiscal Year 2005-2006.

[2]. Greg Berman and John Feinblatt, Good Courts, at 39-42, The New Press (2005).  For those interested in the origins and philosophical underpinnings – as well as future directions -- of the problem solving justice movement, I can recommend no better resource than Good Courts, coauthored by two of the criminal justice entrepreneurs I alluded to: John Feinblatt, New York City Criminal Justice Coordinator and the original Director of our Center for Court Innovation, and his successor at the Center, Greg Berman.

[3]. Problem solving courts also owe a debt to the victim’s movement, which introduced concepts of “restorative justice” or victim-centered responses such as enhancing the safety of crime victims and community restitution programs.  The movement’s emphasis on collaborating with multiple justice system stakeholders was also an important foundational principle.  At the same time, there also arose a new “broken windows” theory of law enforcement and of dealing with crime which hypothesized that tolerance of so-called petty crime ultimately led to an epidemic of more serious crime because of a societal culture that did not take criminal conduct seriously enough, particularly lower level offenses.  These and other innovative approaches that were percolating up in the 1970s and 80s encouraged judges and lawyers to start thinking outside the box of their conventional legal training and to start looking for creative and multidisciplinary alternatives to resolving legal disputes and problems.

[4]. See Michele Sviridoff, David Rottman, Brian Ostrom and Richard Curtis, Dispensing Justice Locally: The Implementation and Effects of the Midtown Community Court (1997).

[5]. Information obtained from the Office of Hon. Judy Harris Kluger, Deputy Chief Administrative Judge for Court Operations and Planning (as of June 2006).

[6]. A growing body of research indicates that treatment, rather than incarceration, is more effective at addressing drug abuse. An investment in drug treatment can save billions of taxpayer dollars a year in prison, health care, child care, transportation, and public safety costs. An analysis of California’s diversion program—which offers treatment instead of prison to nonviolent drug offenders—showed that for each dollar spent, the state enjoyed seven dollars in savings on future costs. A study of Multnomah County, Oregon found that drug court there saved $5,071 per participant per month—more than $1.5 million in annual savings for taxpayers. See NPC Research, Inc., A Detailed Cost Analysis in a Mature Drug Court Setting: A Cost-Benefit Evaluation of the Multnomah County Drug Court (July 2003).

[7]. National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, Introducing Child Permanency Mediation in New York State: Planning and Implementing a Multi-Site Pilot Project (2006), available at www.ncjfcj.org/images/stories/dept/ppcd/pdf/nysmediationbrief.pdf.

 

The British government plans to expand upon the 13 community courts already established throughout England and Wales, according to a new report from the Ministry of Justice.

By the end of 2009, the Ministry of Justice expects to have identified six additional areas where they will implement problem-solving techniques and study their benefits in an effort “to inform further roll-out,” the report says.

The 13 courts already in existence were inspired by the model of the Red Hook Community Justice Center in New York, which, in turn, gave rise to the North Liverpool Community Justice Centre and the Salford Community Justice Initiative, both in England. Collectively, these projects have helped spark the British government’s interest in rethinking the relationship between courts and the community.

“We … propose extending the use of problem-solving techniques in the courtroom, building on the lessons of the successful Community Justice pilots in Liverpool and Salford, to enable courts to target the causes of offending and therefore reduce the chances of reoffending in the future,” according to the report, which is entitled Engaging Communities in Criminal Justice.

The British government’s community justice initiative is built around several primary aims, including: achieving stronger, community-focused partnerships; using community justice to solve neighborhood problems; increasing “the intensity and visibility” of community restitution programs so that offenders, in effect, “pay back” the neighborhood for their offending; and keeping the public better informed about case outcomes.

“Too often the public don’t believe that their voice is heard, don’t believe wrongdoers face adequate consequences for the crimes they commit, don’t believe they are told enough about what happens in the system and, perhaps because of this, they don’t believe that crime has fallen when they are told so,” said Louise Casey, the British government’s neighborhood crime and justice advisor.

Community prosecution techniques are becoming "business as usual" around the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics. In fact, this approach emphasizing neighborhood knowledge and creative, prevention-oriented approaches to public safety problems has become part of the way the majority of prosecutors do business, a study of 307 offices has found.

And a closer look at the survey reveals even more common use of community prosecution techniques when the focus is on the three essential components of community prosecution - problem-solving, community engagement and partnerships:

Problem Solving
Ninety-five percent of large offices reported using tools other than criminal prosecution to address community problems, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in its 2005 National Survey of Prosecutors. Eighty percent of medium-sized offices, 72 percent of full-time small offices, and 43 percent of part-time offices also reported using alternative methods.

Community Engagement
Overall, more than half the offices surveyed engaged the community in identifying safety priorities, according to the survey. Ninety-five percent of large offices, 75 percent of medium offices, 51 percent of small offices, and 38 percent of small offices relied on the community to identify crime or problem areas.  

Partnerships
Almost 90 percent of the offices reported a formal or informal relationship with governmental agencies, 70 percent with community associations, and over half with private organizations, while about three-fifths of all offices met regularly with school and advocacy groups. Nearly half of the offices reported meeting regularly with youth service organizations and business groups. Virtually all the offices indicated a formal or informal relationship with law enforcement agencies.

Method
Questionnaires consisting of 48 questions were mailed to 310 elected prosecutors, and 307 completed the questionnaire.

 

As problem-solving innovation becomes more integrated into the way courts do business, law schools are beginning to offer courses examining problem-solving principles and practices. The Conference of Chief Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators, among others, have urged law schools to include the principles and methods of problem-solving courts in their curricula. In a parallel development, Harvard Law School recently reformed its first-year curriculum to include a new course, “Problems and Theories,” that will focus on teaching students basic problem-solving skills. A recent article in the Washington University Journal of Law and Policy entitled "Lawyering and Learning in Problem-Solving Courts" makes the case for greater engagement between law school clinics and problem-solving courts. 

Given the recent interest in problem solving and academia, this article seeks to provide a short overview of current law school classes that touch on topics of problem-solving justice. Courses and clinics are organized into five basic categories: problem-solving courts, community prosecution, restorative justice, problem-solving lawyering, and therapeutic jurisprudence. The list was compiled with the help of Michael Cobden, based on interviews and web searches. It is not intended to be exhaustive or definitive. Rather, it seeks to provide a snapshot of a rapidly developing field by highlighting courses from law schools around the country. Note that this overview is limited to law school classes and does not include courses on problem solving at graduate schools in other disciplines (e.g., criminology, public policy, social work).

Problem-Solving Courts
In recent years, proponents of problem-solving courts have sought to introduce drug courts, community courts, and other new approaches to justice into law schools. Often this takes the form of a single guest lecture as part of a larger course on a related topic. In addition to these ad-hoc efforts, several more law schools have recently piloted full-semester classes devoted to problem-solving justice.

Fordham University School of Law
Course: Problem Solving Justice: Courts as Agents of Social Change
Professors: Patricia Henry, Susan Knipps, Valerie Raine

Fordham has piloted a syllabus created by the Center for Court Innovation with the help of a panel of academic advisors. The course begins with a look at the conventional approach to case processing and offers a history of problem-solving courts, focusing on drug courts, community courts, mental health courts, and domestic violence courts. Guest speakers and site visits are a part of the course.

Brooklyn Law School
Course: Problem-Solving Justice
Professor: Anne J. Swern

This course, taught by an adjunct lecturer from the Brooklyn D.A.’s office, covers the history of the problem-solving court movement and addresses the role these new courts play within the larger justice system. Concerns about how courts should treat issues like drug addiction are introduced and discussed. Visits to both traditional and innovative courts are part of the course.

State University of New York: Buffalo
Course: A Critical Look at Therapeutic Courts: Drug Treatment, Domestic Violence, Mental Health and Gambling Courts
Professors: Mark Violante, Mark Farrell

This course is taught by two judges and involves extensive site visits. During visits to court, students attend case conferences and “shadow” court staff including district attorneys, defense attorneys, and judges. Students are required to write a 20-page paper about any aspect of a problem-solving court they have learned about during the semester.

Columbia University 
Program Title: Center on Crime, Community and Law
Course: Pro-seminar on Problem-solving Courts
Professors: Jeffrey Fagan, Michael Dorf

This Columbia pro-seminar changes subject each year. The 2003 pro-seminar focused on community justice centers and community prosecution. The course began with readings on the theoretical basis for the courts before moving on to empirical research. This pro-seminar culminated in a research paper which was defended by each student author in a final symposium.

William and Mary School of Law
Course: Problem-Solving Courts
Professor: Gregory Baker

According to Professor Gregory Baker, there are plans to create a new course which would supplement the developing Therapeutic Jurisprudence Program (see below). 

Community Prosecution
Community prosecution—a new approach to law enforcement that emphasizes neighborhood knowledge and creative, non-prosecutorial approaches to public safety problems—is being taught in a couple of law school clinics.

Brooklyn Law School 
Course: Prosecutors Clinic
Professor: Lisa Smith and Anne J. Swern

In the Brooklyn program, third-year students work alongside community prosecutors from the Kings County D.A.’s office in a clinical setting. Students are encouraged to become familiar with the community itself as they learn about specific neighborhood problems.

University of Maryland School of Law
Course: Community Justice Clinic, Community Law in Action Clinic
Professor: Brenda Bratton Blom, Terry Hickey

The Community Justice Clinic has five components in which students may participate: community prosecution, community justice council, school conflict resolution, youth advocacy/law/leadership and business development. The community prosecution component allows students to design, operate and evaluate a community prosecution project with help from faculty and the Baltimore City State’s Attorney's Office. The community justice council is a group which consists of community leaders, law enforcement, prosecutors, defenders, law students and clergy who create and evaluate offender rehabilitation programs.

New York University School of Law
Course: Criminal and Community Defense Clinic
Professors: Kim Taylor-Thompson and Anthony Thompson

The Criminal and Community Defense Clinic offers students to explore the variety of ways that defender offices can be more grounded in the communities from which their clients come and to which they return. Students work with defenders at the Neighborhood Defenders Service of Harlem and also with community advocacy groups in addressing broader issues that affect communities of individuals charged with crime.

Restorative Justice
Several law schools have restorative justice programs or courses that focus on efforts to promote alternative approaches to disputes that bring together victims and offenders. What follows are selected examples.

University of Wisconsin Law School 
Program Title: Frank J. Remington Center
Course: Restorative Justice Project
Professors: Leslie Shear, Pete DeWind

This clinical program is open to 12 second and third-year law students and is divided into two parts: Family Law Project and Restorative Justice Project. The Restorative Justice Project facilitates meetings between incarcerated felons and victims. The project seeks to teach students a non-adversarial approach to criminal justice issues.

Marquette University Law School 
Course Titles: Restorative Justice; Restorative Justice Initiative Clinic
Professors: Janine Geske

The course teaches restorative justice in both American and international settings, including victim/offender and victim/family conferencing, victim impact panels and Native American Circles. The course also explores constitutional problems related to restorative justice.

Pepperdine University School of Law 
Course: Restorative Justice
Professor: Daniel Van Ness 

This course explores the restorative justice movement, a systematic approach to criminal justice that emphasizes repairing harm caused or revealed by criminal behavior. Restorative justice incorporates aspects of alternative dispute resolution and civil law into criminal matters in furtherance of its overarching goals of healing and reconciliation. The course considers where the movement originated, how it has developed in the past twenty years, the opportunities and challenges it confronts, and specific ways in which it can be woven into and implemented as part of the criminal process.

Georgetown Law
Course: Restorative Justice In International Human Rights: A New Paradigm
Professor: Lynn Fraser

This is an LL.M. seminar offered on international human rights and restorative justice that teaches the basics of the restorative justice theory before applying it to the international issues.

New York University School of Law
Course: Retribution in Criminal Law Theory & Practice Seminar
Professor: James Frederick Gilligan and David A.J. Richards

This course discusses the role retribution should play in criminal justice. Topics discussed will include the philosophy of retributive justice and social justice in a democracy, the psychology of violence (rooted in patriarchal emotions of humiliation and shame, suppressing the moral emotion of guilt), the historical roots of American retributivism (including mass incarceration and the death penalty), and alternatives to retributive justice (including therapeutic and restorative justice). The seminar includes in its pedagogy experiments in freeing creative voice through weekly writing and theatre exercises and includes a close study of philosophy, history, psychoanalysis, novels, and plays.

Problem-Solving Lawyering and Alternative Dispute Resolution
In October 2006, the Harvard Law School revised its first-year curriculum to include a new course, “Problem Solving Workshop,” that will engage students in working on complex, multi-faceted problems involving diverse areas of law. Other schools that offer at least a course or two which teach general problem-solving lawyer skills include Stanford, UCLA and New York Law School. California Western University has taken the idea further by creating an entire curriculum and concentration called “Creative Problem-Solving.” The curriculum has three core courses: Problem-solving & Preventive Law; Cross-cultural Problem Identification and Problem Solving Skills & Theory. Georgetown Law School has a special program on “Conflict Resolution and Legal Problem Solving” led by Carrie Minkel Meadow that focuses on mediation and other forms of alternative dispute resolution. Like Georgetown, many law schools have classes in Alternative Dispute Resolution. Indeed, the Association of American Law Schools, the principal association of law professors, has a special section devoted to Alternative Dispute Resolution.

Florida Coastal School of Law
Course: Comprehensive Law Practice
Professor: Susan Daicoff

This course is limited to 30 students and has been offered during spring semesters since 2000. The official description says that the course is evenly divided between theory and skill development. Most of the course covers mediation and general lawyer skills from the perspective of law as a healing profession. One week is devoted to problem-solving courts.

University of Baltimore School of Law 
Course: Center for Families, Children and the Courts’ Student Fellows Program
Professor: Barbara A. Babb

The fellowship program has a limited enrollment of six students. The program consists of weekly two-hour seminars and weekly one-hour supervisory meetings. About eight or nine class sessions (out of sixteen) are devoted to problem-solving courts, teen courts, drug courts and family courts. Students participate in research projects for the Center.

Therapeutic Jurisprudence
Proponents of therapeutic jurisprudence, most notably Professors Bruce Winick and David Wexler, argue that therapeutic jurisprudence—the study of the therapeutic (and anti-therapeutic) impacts of legal decisions and actions—can apply to all areas of legal practice. Many of the courses listed below have posted syllabi on the website for the International Network on Therapeutic Jurisprudence maintained by the University of Arizona.

William and Mary School of Law 
Course Title: Therapeutic Jurisprudence
Professor: Gregory Baker

Students spend most of their time working in either a drug court or mental health court. This work commonly involves being a “therapeutic court law clerk,” researching constitutional and other legal issues and writing legal memoranda for the judge. There is also a community service component that requires students to provide some non-legal service to either the court or to the local community.

University of Miami School of Law 
Course Titles: New Directions in Lawyering: Interviewing, Counseling, & Attorney/Client Relational Skills; Therapeutic Jurisprudence Seminar; Therapeutic Courts Externship
Professors: Bruce Winick, Bernard P. Perlmutter, Jennifer Zawid

The first course focuses is on preventive lawyering, holistic representation and civil matters. Students are assigned a variety of readings including articles profiling attorneys who utilize therapeutic methods in their practice. Traditional cases are re-examined with an eye towards how they might have been handled differently from a preventive or holistic perspective. Students engage in mock interviews and role-playing exercises, some of which are based on real case files and some of which are scripted. Outside speakers from other departments in the University of Miami inform the class of other disciplines and how they might contribute to the understanding of the client’s perspective. In the final phase of this course, students conduct supervised interviews of clients who are in the custody of a juvenile detention facility and prepare memoranda which are shared with the public defender’s office.

The second course focuses on studying and attempting to reform substantive legal rules and legal procedures. Students will prepare a 30-40 page paper on a therapeutic jurisprudence topic or theme and will have the opportunity to participate in research or law reform activities conducted by the Therapeutic Jurisprudence Center.

University of Puerto Rico
Courses: Therapeutic Jurisprudence; Therapeutic Jurisprudence and New Directions in Criminal Lawyering; Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Therapeutic Jurisprudence; and Sentencing and Corrections from a Therapeutic Jurisprudence Perspective
Professor: David Wexler

Professor Wexler is a Professor of Law at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan, Puerto Rico, a Distinguished Research Professor of Law at the James E. Rogers College of Law, Tucson, Arizona, and the Director of the International Network on Therapeutic Jurisprudence.

Touro Law Center 
Course: Selected Topics in Professional Responsibility: Lawyering as a Happy, Healthy, Healing and Ethical Profession
Professor: Marjorie A. Silver

According to the course description, this course is geared toward students who are already experiencing disillusionment about their chosen profession. The course addresses the emotional and mental strain on lawyers as much as on litigants. Problem-solving courts and restorative justice are presented as areas of practice that might avoid the ethical and emotional difficulties of working in a traditional legal career.

New York Law School
Course: Therapeutic Jurisprudence 
Professor: Deborah Dorfman

This course focuses on mentally disabled individuals who are litigants or are the subject of litigation. It is a predominantly on-line course, requiring students to participate in a weekly chat room, discussion board, and two, day-long weekend live seminars at New York Law School.

University of Connecticut Law School 
Course: Therapeutic Jurisprudence
Professor: Robert G. Madden

This is a seminar covering a wide range of theory and skill development. One class session is titled “Specialized Courts: Applied Therapeutic Jurisprudence.” Three other sessions deal with Domestic Violence, Juvenile Justice, Drug Courts and Criminal Courts.

Mercer University School of Law 
Course: Therapeutic Jurisprudence
Professor: Bonnie Cole 

The course covers the psychology of law and the psychological well-being of practitioners. Other topics include comprehensive law, holistic lawyering and collaborative law.