For a justice system to be truly just, it must be accessible to all individuals. However, litigants may face challenges when courts are not responsive to their cultural identity. For survivors of domestic violence, these challenges present additional barriers towards accessing justice and obtaining fair outcomes.
For a justice system to be truly just, it must be accessible to all individuals. However, litigants may face challenges when courts are not responsive to their cultural identities. For survivors of domestic violence, these challenges present additional barriers to accessing justice and obtaining fair outcomes. Watch Building a Culture of Justice and read the viewers' guide to learn how justice-system staff and stakeholders can serve litigant needs by implementing culturally-responsive practices in courts handling domestic violence cases.
In this New Thinking podcast, Harvard Law School Professor James Greiner talks with Aubrey Fox about why he launched the Access to Justice Lab, which has researched topics as varied as how to provide self-help materials to defendants involved in civil debt collection cases to the effectiveness of commonly used pretrial assessment interview tools in criminal court. Greiner also discusses what he sees as a strategy for improving the legal profession's openness to evidence-based thinking.
Undertaken to inform the work of the Center for Court Innovation’s Legal Hand project, this street-intercept study in Crown Heights, Brooklyn documents the most common civil legal needs facing the community, and how, if at all, community members address these needs.
This study examines the validity of the COMPAS with offenders who have a serious mental illness. A widely used risk-needs assessment tool, the COMPAS was found to be a good predictor of re-arrest with this population, although it was more effective in distinguishing low-risk offenders from all others than in identifying those who pose a medium as opposed to a high risk of re-arrest. Overall, approximately two-thirds of study-participants were classified as low risk.
In this New Thinking podcast, Raymond H. Brescia, associate professor of Law at Albany Law School, speaks with Aubrey Fox and Robert V. Wolf of the Center for Court Innovation about the role lawyers can play in addressing poverty and eviction, why New York City has been dramatically expanding funding to provide lawyers to respondents in Housing Court, debt collection cases as the next great issue for public interest attorneys, and how a good lawyer is like a patronus from a Harry Potter book.
The Red Hook Community Justice Center serves as a hub for an array of unconventional programs. This video highlights the unique and multi-faceted roles that the Justice Center plays in the lives of its community members. The common thread is that the Justice Center is changing lives every day.
This planning toolkit is a blueprint for communities, violence interrupter programs, and traditional victim service providers that want to improve their responses to young men of color who have experienced trauma.
In partnership with the New York City Police Department, the 2015-16 Youth Justice Board created this short video to increase understanding, cooperation, and trust between law enforcement and youth, and promote stronger police-community relationships.
Dannel P. Malloy, the governor of Connecticut, was the keynote speaker at Justice Innovations in Times of Change, a summit sponsored by the Center for Court Innovation and the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Assistance in September 2016. The governor spoke about reforms under way in his state that have raised the age of criminal responsibility to 18, reduced the use of incarceration, and lowered crime to levels not seen since the 1960s.