The Center for Court Innovation works to improve outcomes for young people involved—or at risk of involvement—in the justice system. This fact sheet describes the Center’s youth justice programs, which seek to promote accountability, engage young people in skill-building, and spark civic engagement.
This research report examines the first year of a new pilot program at nine sites in New York State. The impact analysis found that the program did not undermine public safety and was most effective for high-risk youth.
In this article in the Office of Child Support Enforcement’s Child Support Report, Liberty Aldrich, director of domestic violence and family court programs at the Center for Court Innovation, explains how a court-based problem-solving approach to child support cases can increase child support payments, reduce negative consequences, and build healthy parent-child relationships.
This report provides a case study of case caps for defense attorneys from 2010 through 2014 in Brooklyn, New York. The report finds that indigent defense agencies were successful in using new state funding to achieve compliance with case caps.
This document summarizes early results from a pilot program in Upstate New York that is testing the efficacy of the Domestic Violence Risk Factor Guide for Judges, a risk-assessment tool designed to allow judges to view language in a petition through the lens of risk factors, to gather additional information as needed, and to apply case law and remedies to address the risk indicated by the petition.
In this article, mental health court graduation, in-program jail sanctions, and rearrest were tracked for 654 participants in the Brooklyn Mental Health Court. In general, risk factors for negative outcomes included a prior history of arrest or incarceration, having current property charges, current unemployment, homelessness at time of intake, and having a co-occurring substance use disorder.
This article reports findings from an investigation of 24 criminal domestic violence courts across New York State. Overall, the 24 courts achieved a modest positive impact in reducing recidivism among convicted domestic violence offenders.
This article synthesizes findings from four recent studies examining the integrated domestic violence (IDV) court model. Based on a one family-one judge concept, the New York State court system has established more than 40 such courts across the state since 2001. These courts seek to achieve more informed judicial decision-making, fewer conflicting orders, improved service delivery to victims and their children, and a more efficient and comprehensible case processing system.
With funding from the U.S. State Department, the Center for Court Innovation along with the Inter-American Commission for Drug-Abuse Control of the Organization of American States completed a diagnostic study of the Addiction Treatment Court in Guadalupe, Nuevo León, the first program of its kind in Mexico. (Spanish version is separately available here.)
Domestic violence is one of the most pressing problems facing Native American and Alaska Native communities. Although the reauthorized Violence Against Women Act recognizes the authority of tribes to prosecute non-Native offenders, more tools are needed. This paper explores whether specialized domestic violence courts, which focus on enhancing victim safety and promoting offender accountability, can be part of a multi-faceted approach for tribal justice systems to address domestic violence.