This fact sheet summarizes the mission of Poverty Justice Solutions, an initiative that seeks to close the justice gap in New York City by expanding the pool of attorneys available to represent low-income New Yorkers in Housing Court and apply an innovative problem-solving approach to housing court matters across the city.
This report details the design, implementation, and impacts of Up & Out, a brief, non-custodial intervention to help misdemeanor defendants critically consider ways to avoid future justice-involvement. The intention of the program is to offer a meaningful, proportionate alternative to short-term incarceration. Research suggests this population has a strong propensity to repeat justice-involvement fueled by needs for treatment and services in areas such as housing, substance use, and mental health.
Prosecutors across the country are increasingly developing innovative strategies to divert pretrial defendants to community-based programs. While risk assessment can be a powerful aid to identifying eligible participants, in practice, selecting and putting into place the proper tool can be challenging. Drawing on recent studies of risk assessments used in pretrial contexts, this document lays out key principles for ensuring their effective implementation.
This study seeks to validate the Criminal Court Assessment Tool on a sample of misdemeanor defendants participating in a deferred prosecution program in Cook County, Illinois. We developed the brief, publicly accessible risk-and-needs assessment for use in high-volume jurisdictions. In this study, it was found to have good overall predictive accuracy, with program participants identified as having significant needs related to substance use and employment, supporting the use of diversion to services in lieu of prosecution.
How do we reconcile the call in some quarters for more low-level enforcement with a desire to reduce the impact of the criminal justice system, particularly on communities of color? This Boston University Law Review article attempts to answer that question by articulating a new approach to misdemeanor justice that reconciles the maintenance of public safety with the urgent need to reduce unnecessary incarceration.
Who gets to decide which reforms to the criminal justice system receive the imprimatur of "evidence-based"? To combat what she sees as the monopoly over these decisions created by the high cost of the current evaluation model, Angela Hawken founded BetaGov, offering free and fast evaluations of public policy programs. What is more, as Hawken explains on our New Thinking podcast, the ideas tested generally come from practitioners, or even clients, inside the systems themselves.
If the justice system replaced jail and other traditional sanctions for misdemeanor defendants with services and treatment, what should those interventions look like? By identifying the drivers of repeat, low-level offending, this in-depth profile of misdemeanor defendants in New York City lays the groundwork for developing more effective and proportionate responses.
On our 'New Thinking' podcast, Nashville's top public defender Dawn Deaner explains why she thinks public defending has been "set up to fail" and how working to engage the community—both those who need public defenders and those who never will—is a lifeline for a profession in crisis.
This planning guide is intended to assist courts to better meet the needs of self-represented litigants in domestic violence cases. It describes specific practices that courts can adapt, proposes ideas for enhancing existing programs, and suggests strategies for working with community partners in order to more holistically meet the diverse needs of domestic violence litigants. The information in the guide is based on the recommendations of national experts who helped identify core values and critical strategies relevant in domestic violence cases.
As part of our podcast series on prosecutor power, Scott Hechinger of Brooklyn Defender Services offers a view from the other side of the adversarial process, discussing prosecutors' impact at key decision-points in his clients' cases and the prospects for reform in a time of increasing scrutiny of prosecutorial discretion.
