On June 21, 2007, the Center’s Youth Justice Board presented the results of its year-long study of New York City’s permanency planning process to an audience that included New York City Council members, academics, judges, policymakers, and members of the press. The presentation was hosted by the Administrative Judge of New York City Family Court Judge Joseph Lauria, whose office supported the Board's work throughout the year. Written by the Board’s 16 teenage members—all New York City high schools students 15 to 19 years old, many of whom have been foster children themselves—the report, Stand Up Stand Out: Recommendations to Improve Youth Participation in New York City's Permanency Planning Process, proposes 14 specific recommendations to improve the court experiences and outcomes for adolescents in foster care.

 

The Board spent several months researching New York's permanency planning process—interviewing over 40 child welfare and court professionals, conducting two focus groups of youth in care and observing Family Court proceedings in Kings County, Bronx County and New York County Family Courts. The report focuses on concrete steps that can be taken by New York City Family Court, the Administration for Children’s Services, provider agencies, law guardians, and by young people themselves to make sure that youth in foster care play an active role in the court process and in the decisions that affect their lives.

Stand Up Stand Out: Recommendations to Improve Youth Participation in New York City's Permanency Planning Process is the third report created by the Board, which was launched by the Center for Court Innovation in 2003 as an after-school program bringing together New York City teenagers to study and devise policy recommendations on issues affecting city youth. In its first year, members studied the challenges of youth returning home after confinement for juvenile delinquency; the next year’s group focused on safety problems in New York City high schools.

This year’s report has generated even more interest. In addition to the June presentation, the Board will be presenting the report to each of the city’s county courthouses, as well as to several city agencies who have expressed interest. In addition, the New York State Judicial Institute has requested 100 copies of the report to be used at judges’ seminars. Over the next year, the Youth Justice Board will continue to advocate for their ideas and work with Family Court and child protection practitioners to turn their ideas into reality.

Watch members of the Board discuss the report on WNBC.

 

EXPANDING THE USE OF PROBLEM-SOLVING JUSTICE: Reflections on what works, what doesn’t and how to overcome challenges, the second workshop for the Bureau of Justice Assistance's Community Based Problem-Solving Criminal Justice Initiative, was held at the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta on May 23 and 24, 2007. The workshop's learning goals were to identify successes and challenges of the initiative's demonstration sites, to explore ideas for overcoming challenges, and to build skills in seeking local resources.

Keynote speakers were BJA Director Domingo Herraiz; Center for Court Innovation Director Greg Berman; Multnomah County, Oregon District Attorney Mike Schrunk; and President of the Atlanta City Council Lisa Borders. Julius Lang and Chris Watler, director and deputy director of technical assistance at the Center, spearheaded a faculty consisting of Aaron Arnold, director of the Center for Court Innovation’s upstate office; Steven Jansen, director of the Center for Community Prosecution at the National District Attorneys Association; Diana Karafin, senior research associate at the Center for Court Innovation; Michael Magnani, Director of the Division of Grants and Program Development for the New York State Unified Court System; Preeti Puri Menon, BJA’s Policy Advisor for Adjudication; Karen Moen of the California Administrative Office of the Courts’ Center for Children, Families and the Courts; and Phillip Rush, program officer at The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta.

The workshop was an opportunity for team building as well as learning, with project leaders from the following ten grantee sites attending: Pima County Juvenile Court Center, Arizona; San Diego Beach Area Community Court, California; the City of Atlanta Community Court Division, Georgia; the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians, Michigan; Bronx Community Solutions, New York; the Athens County Substance Abusing/Mentally Ill Court, Ohio; Overland Park Community Court, Clackamas County, Oregon; the Fourth Circuit, South Carolina; Lynchburg Community Court, Virginia; and the Seattle Community Court, Washington.

Here are some photos from the event:

Teams not pictured: Pima County Juvenile Court Center, Arizona; the Fourth Circuit, South Carolina; and the Seattle Community Court, Washington

 

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.