Judge Thomas Amodeo has been chief judge of the Buffalo City Court since 1994. He spoke with Center for Court Innovation staff about the C.O.U.R.T.S. (Court Outreach Unit: Referral and Treatment Services) program, which screens and refers defendants to treatment and other services.
Can you tell me about how the C.O.U.R.T.S. program started?
I go all the way back to 1990, when I first became a judge. Community organizations like the Drug and Substance Abuse Program and the Erie County Alcohol and Substance Abuse Program would send representatives into our arraignment courtroom, known as Part 1. They’d ask to take on specific cases, we’d agree, and most of the time that’d be the last we’d hear of the cases. Because of the requirements of the federal government for non-disclosure and the way the system was set up, we’d never know if the defendants did or didn’t do well.
So when I became chief judge in 1994, I said there are a couple of problems we have here: one is that we don’t get reports back to the judge, and two is that we need treatment and counseling but we need proper treatment and counseling. We needed some type of regimented screening system so that everyone who needed treatment got it. And because I didn’t know what the real problem was as a judge sitting there in front of a defendant, I needed people who could interview these individuals to find out what the real problems were and to implement a program with the best available treatment.
I sat down with Hank Pirowski, who was one of the most trusted treatment providers in our court, and said ‘Let’s get all the providers together in one place.’ We had a meeting in City Hall and close to 70 treatment providers came in from all over the county, and I sat down and told them that I wanted to set up a program we could send defendants to for screening, that I wanted people who needed treatment to be assigned to treatment in a targeted and individualized fashion, and that I wanted to track those individuals with a uniform reporting system. I said we needed help with interviewing and tracking these individuals, and that there were going to be people coming out of our court who couldn’t afford services so they were going to have to be flexible. Most of them came on board. Hank took the ball and implemented what we call now the C.O.U.R.T.S. program, and it’s grown over the years.
Every person who comes through the Buffalo City Court gets evaluated in this way?
People from pre-trial services go down at 3 or 4 in the morning to conduct preliminary interviews. We have a mental health advocate that speaks to all the defendants before court starts, and they come to court and either recommend to the court advocate or to the judge directly that there’s a need for some evaluation. So as a consequence we get a lot of evaluations.
There are so many services that it seems like most defendants touch that program in some way. For example on a petty larceny a judge may give 200 hours of community service for the individual to go out and work with the mayor’s impact team, cleaning up vacant lots, or shoveling snow if it’s the wintertime. Though the C.O.U.R.T.S. program won’t be administering any counseling or treatment directly, they will monitor the hours of community service. So I would say a good 35 or 40 percent of people who come through the courts touch the C.O.U.R.T.S. program, and there’s probably another 10 percent who touch the drug court and mental health and domestic violence courts, so you’re talking about a good maybe 60 or 70 percent of the people who come through here having some type of evaluation.
You were linking defendants to services and tracking their progress before the term "problem-solving court" was coined. Where did you get the idea that courts could or should focus on offenders' problems?
You know, I love people. You see people, you know people, you can see there’s a problem with people, and you know sometimes they’re in the court because there’s a problem that extends past the specific crime they committed. I had been practicing law since 1977 and had seen a lot of people as defendants and as litigants. I’m involved in the community centers, youth baseball, and so on—and you can see the problems that are out there. I came to the bench in 1990, one year after the crack epidemic hit Buffalo, and we were seeing all kinds of problems that were never seen before in the courts, and I think the drugs themselves manifested a lot of the other issues that were surrounding them. I knew that putting a person in jail was not going to be the answer every time. Unless we addressed the real core issues that led to a person’s committing a crime, I knew the person wouldn’t change his or her behavior. Recidivism was always a concern.
Did the C.O.U.R.T.S. program come about at the same time the drug court and mental health courts did?
When the C.O.U.R.T.S. program had been in place for about a year, Judge Robert Russell came to me and suggested a drug court. Judge Russell, Hank Pirowski and I agreed that there were individuals that needed more attention to be successful, and that the drug court could be implemented and tracked and monitored with what we had in the C.O.U.R.T.S. program. And what was nice was that all the other tools we had in the C.O.U.R.T.S. program complemented or made the drug court more successful. We had community service projects all set up that could be used as sanctions in the drug court. We had education tools set up, and drug court participants can’t graduate unless they have at least a GED. And then eventually we had Horizon and a few other non-profits working with the developmentally disabled and the co-occurring disorders in the C.O.U.R.T.S. program, and they helped us implement a program with the mental health court down the line.
What do you think are the main strengths of the C.O.U.R.T.S. program today? How would you account for how successful it’s been?
Well we just hit 40,000 referrals. And if you look at one person getting turned around in life… the C.O.U.R.T.S. program has been successful time and time and time and time again. And the strength of that is the treatment and counseling community coming together with the courts and not being selfish—dedicating their time to finding out the real needs of the individuals and then properly treating them.
We have 26 people who work in the C.O.U.R.T.S. program at Buffalo City Court. Only four of them work for the Office of Court Administration, and the rest are on loan from agencies, donating their services to the court. They perform assessments but no one is allowed to assign clients to their own agency. Sometimes we overrule them if it’s clear that their own agency is the best fit, or they make a persuasive argument that this is the case.
Do you have other advice for people trying to start similar programs, or who are having trouble doing it as effectively as you’ve done, especially getting everyone on board as effectively as you’ve described?
We’re very fortunate in Buffalo. Maybe I take it for granted that the treatment providers are all working and helping one another but if you get everybody together and say here is the program we’re going to run, do you want to be a part of it or not, I would say that 90 percent of them are going to say they want to be part of the program. And it’s not difficult for a social service provider to send one of their employees to help you with screening, and in the smaller courts you may only need one or two people in there helping to screen every day. But it’s really getting everybody together at a table to talk about a problem, and how solving it together benefits everyone.
June 2006