The Center for Justice Innovation—and our operating programs—are regularly featured in the media. Here is a sampling of the press coverage of our work.
If it is the goal and the desire of San Franciscans to reform and humanize the criminal courts, then the Community Justice Center plan is a reasonable, and perhaps positive, step.
Before a standing room only crowd gathered in the stately law library of New York Family Court in Manhattan last Thursday afternoon, a group of teenagers reported that youth in foster care would be better served if they were more involved in the process aimed at finding them a permanent home.
Mr. Fagan is a 38-year-old case manager for Bronx Community Solutions, a nonprofit group that looks for alternatives to jail time for people convicted of low-level crime. He hatched the idea for a basketball league facing ex-offenders against police officers in the tense aftermath of the police shooting of Sean Bell.
He jokingly refers to himself as Manhattan's King of Prostitution. Might as well be the King of Illegal Street Vending, Public Urination, Graffiti, Disorderly Conduct, Subway Fare-Beating and Aggressive Panhandling, too. These are the cases New York Supreme Court Judge Richard Weinberg presides over every weekday at the Midtown Community Court.
They've studied recidivism among their just-released-from-prison peers, and school safety, to little effect. Maybe the third time's the charm. Next month, the 17 teenage members of the Youth Justice Board, a project of the Center for Court Innovation, will release their recommendations to improve the city's Family Court System.
The Crown Heights Community Mediation Center on Kingston Ave. sits quietly perched in the middle of an urban war zone, dispensing peace, nurturing, learning and common sense in a neighborhood that desperately needs more of it.
The lawyers and the policy makers who launched the Center for Court Innovation 10 years ago knew it would be a splendid idea to expand on the experimental Midtown Community Court and create a formal research and development program for the New York court system. But they had little inkling of how attractive the concept would be to judiciaries beyond the state, and beyond America's borders. (subscription required)
