New Thinking, from the Center for Justice Innovation

Drug Testing and the Ordeal of Probation Nov 12, 2024

Think of probation as an enormous testing period: will you be able to adhere to the thicket of conditions governing your daily life? Fail at any of them and you could be sent to prison. At the heart of this testing ethos is drug testing: almost all of the almost three million people on probation in the U.S. are drug tested—peeing in a cup, generally under the observation of a probation officer. The tests are time-consuming, expensive, and traumatic. There is also little evidence justifying their use.

Full show notes

Special issue of the Federal Sentencing Reporter on drug testing and supervision

Hear our 12/23 episode: ex-NYC probation commissioner Vinnie Schiraldi calls for probation’s “incremental abolition”

Inside Literary Prize: And the Winner Is… Aug 14, 2024

A brief, moving excerpt from the recent award ceremony at the New York Public Library announcing the inaugural winner of the Inside Literary Prize, the first major U.S. book award to be judged exclusively by people who are incarcerated.

Hear from Freedom Reads founder and CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts, and from this year’s winner…

And please be sure to listen to our earlier episode, profiling the work of some of the judges for this prize: ‘Inside Literary Prize: Shakopee Women’s Prison.’

**Inside Literary Prize: Shakopee Women’s Prison** Aug 01, 2024
“They actually care. They want to hear about what we think, the ones that they have shut away.”

The Inside Literary Prize is the first major U.S. book award to be judged exclusively by people who are incarcerated, some of the most prolific readers in the country.

Yet the walls we erect around incarcerated people also disappear them from conversations about culture, politics, and history—conversations to which they can make vital contributions.

In this special episode, hear a behind-the-scenes portrait of what a day of judging sounded like in Minnesota’s Shakopee women’s prison.

*Full show notes*

Mental Health and Anti-Blackness May 06, 2024

What would it mean to decriminalize mental health—to stop criminalizing the symptoms of what is very often untreated mental illness? And what would it mean to put racial justice at the center of that effort? The outcomes of the criminal legal system being what they are, those two questions are really inseparable.

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Recriminalization in Oregon Mar 19, 2024

Three years ago, Oregon broke with the War on Drugs, decriminalizing the possession of most illicit drugs. The measure promised instead a “health-based approach.” But the legislature has just ended the short-lived experiment.

The law met stiff headwinds from the start: from the arrival of fentanyl on the West Coast to a relentless opposition campaign.

But part of what went wrong was a challenge for any legislation: implementation. How do you make a sweeping new approach work on the ground?

Morgan Godvin was at the frontlines of Oregon’s decriminalization fight. “We have come to a fork in the road,” she says. For now, progress towards an evidence-based approach to drug use “has fallen prey to fear-based policy.”

Full show notes

Gideon at 60: Deconstructing Mass Supervision Dec 16, 2023

Vincent Schiraldi used to run probation in New York City; now he’s asking whether it should even exist. Schiraldi says some of the roots of mass supervision—and its connection to mass incarceration—can be found in a surprising place: the Supreme Court’s 1963 Gideon decision. It recognized, but failed to adequately support, a poor person’s right to a lawyer.

Hear the final episode in our “Gideon at 60” series.

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Gideon at 60: Uncivil Justice Nov 16, 2023

A profile of the fight to secure lawyers for people facing eviction and the radical impact that is having in Housing Court. With its 1963 Gideon decision, the Supreme Court guaranteed a lawyer to any poor person facing prison time. For criminal cases, the decision was both sweeping and critically incomplete. On the civil side, the campaign for a right-to-counsel is taking a different approach—it’s slow and piecemeal, but it’s also working.

This is the second episode in our series on the legacy of the Gideon decision. Hear the first episode here.

Full show notes

**Gideon at 60: The Unfunded Mandate** Apr 04, 2023
As the legal scholar Paul Butler wrote ten years ago, “On every anniversary of *Gideon*, liberals bemoan the state of indigent defense.” On this 60th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision granting a lawyer to every poor defendant facing prison time, there is much to bemoan. Yet as the harms of the criminal legal system come into sharper relief, there is a larger question: even if Gideon‘s promise was fulfilled, how much would that change who principally suffers under the current system: the poor and people of color?

*Full show notes*

**When Young People Go to Prison for Life** Feb 14, 2023
April Barber Scales was a pregnant 15-year-old when she received two life sentences; Anthony Willis was 16 when he was sent away for life. After more than 25 years behind bars, they each received something desperately rare: clemency. They describe how they fought against a prison system that “sets you up for failure.” We also hear from an organization in Baltimore that works exclusively with young people at high risk of violence. Rather than arrests and incarceration, what do these young people *need*?

Full show notes

Emphasizing the Harms Nov 04, 2022

A recent two-day training for Manhattan prosecutors was a drumbeat on the harms of incarceration; hardly the typical message prosecutors receive. The training was part of a wider effort by D.A. Alvin Bragg to expand the use of alternatives such as treatment and restorative justice. But in a newly cramped climate for criminal justice reform, can that effort become a reality?

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Evicting Evictions Jun 28, 2022

Housing is a human right. What if we designed our systems—beginning with Housing Court—to embody that? Given the current eviction crisis, it’s a far-off concept, but there’s work to make it a reality in pockets across the country. In this special episode, hear a profile of one of those efforts in a Brooklyn neighborhood.

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Reform and Its Discontents May 09, 2022

Nominated for a Media for a Just Society award, revisit New Thinking’s conversation with activists Victoria Law and Maya Schenwar. In their book, Prison By Any Other Name, Law and Schenwar contend that much of what is packaged today as “reforms” to the criminal legal system are extending, not countering, that system’s harmful effects. So what is the ultimate goal of reform of a system like the criminal legal system?

Full show notes

Why Data Doesn’t Stick Mar 24, 2022

Efforts to reform the justice system often tout they’re “evidence-based” or “data-driven.” But at a moment when a national increase in crime, likely triggered by the pandemic, seems to have put the reform movement on its heels, why do arguments based on data rarely seem to win the day? Guests Christina Greer and John Pfaff are both scholars and frequent media commentators working at the intersection of criminal justice data and politics.

Full show notes

Hear Pfaff on New Thinking as part of our series on Prosecutor Power

Can We Close Rikers? Jan 25, 2022

New York City has committed to closing its notorious Rikers Island jail facility by 2027. That could dramatically reorient the city’s approach to incarceration. The plan envisions a citywide jail population of just over 3,000 people. But the population at Rikers has been growing for months, and Rikers itself is engulfed in crisis amidst a historic spike in deaths. What are the prospects for finally getting Rikers closed?

Full show notes

The Question of Dirty Work Nov 22, 2021

Eyal Press contends there are entire areas of life we’ve delegated to “dirty workers”—functions we’ve declared necessary, but that we strive to keep hidden. In his new book, Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, Press points to the transformation of jails and prisons into the country’s largest mental health institutions. He calls the people struggling to offer treatment in those settings “dirty workers”—not because their work isn’t noble, but because collectively we’ve put them in a situation where it’s impossible to practice ethical care.

Full show notes

Hear a related New Thinking episode with Homer Venters, the former chief medical officer for NYC Jails.

Taking Reform Out of Its Comfort Zone Oct 25, 2021

Justice reforms often exclude people with charges involving violence, even though these are the same people most likely to be incarcerated and to be in the most need of the programs and treatment reform can bring. But a felony court in Manhattan is offering alternatives to incarceration, regardless of charge. Can a treatment-first approach be brought to scale inside of the same system responsible for mass incarceration in the first place?

Full show notes

The Crisis on Rikers Island Sep 22, 2021

An audio snapshot from an emergency rally demanding immediate measures to release people from New York City’s Rikers Island jail. Eleven people have died in the custody of the city’s jail system this year as Rikers’ chief medical officer warns of “a collapse in basic jail operations.”

Cages Don’t Help Us Heal Aug 10, 2021

Hurt people hurt people. That’s not an excuse for harm, but it fuels much of the criminal legal system. At 19, Marlon Peterson was the unarmed lookout on a robbery where two people were killed. Peterson spent a decade behind bars. He writes about those years, and the childhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, that preceded them, in his new memoir, Bird Uncaged: An Abolitionist’s Freedom Song. I made my own choices, Peterson says, “but I also did not choose to experience the type of things I experienced.”

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One of These Days We Might Find Us Some Free: Reginald Dwayne Betts Jul 20, 2021

In 1996, 16-year-old Reginald Dwayne Betts was sentenced to nine years in prison for a carjacking. He spent much of that time reading, and eventually writing. After prison, he went to Yale Law School and published a memoir and three books of poems. But he’s still wrestling with what “after prison” means. This is a conversation about incarceration, Blackness, and the weight of history, both political and personal. Betts’s most recent collection of poems is Felon.

Full show notes

This episode was originally released in January 2020.

The Cycle: Police Violence, Black Rebellion Jun 30, 2021

In her new book, historian Elizabeth Hinton highlights a “crucible period” of often violent rebellions in the name of the Black freedom struggle beginning in 1968. Initiated in almost every instance by police violence, the rebellions—dismissed as “riots”—have been largely written out of the history of the civil rights era. Hinton contends the period is critical for understanding the roots of mass incarceration and contains important lessons today for people organizing against police violence.

Hinton’s book is America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s.

Full show notes

Policing, Race, and a Crisis in Mental Health Jun 01, 2021

One of every four people killed by police is experiencing a mental health emergency. Changing how we respond to crisis in the moment, and to widespread, ongoing mental health needs, means deferring to the leadership of people with lived experience and putting racial equity at the center of every reform. On today’s episode, listening to the people who know how to fix systems, because they’re surviving those systems’ harms.

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Does the Criminal Justice System Cause Crime? Apr 26, 2021

What’s the most effective way to reduce the chance of an arrest in the future? A new study suggests it’s shrinking the size of the justice system in the here and now. Boston D.A. Rachael Rollins and the director of NYU’s Public Safety Lab, Anna Harvey, talk about the benefits of not prosecuting low-level charges—an almost 60 percent reduction in recidivism—and the challenges, even with data in hand, of bucking the conventional wisdom.

Full show notes

Hear Rachael Rollins’s 2019 appearance on New Thinking

How Will the Death Penalty End? Mar 25, 2021

Journalist Maurice Chammah says the federal execution spree during the final weeks of the Trump presidency is evidence of the death penalty’s continued decline, not its resurgence. Chammah is the author of the new book, Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty.

Chammah tracks the long arc of the death penalty—its use and its symbolism—alongside the evolution of the criminal justice system as a whole. And he grounds his discussion in American history, particularly the history of Texas, the epicenter of the American death penalty.

In Texas, Chammah contends, a romantic myth about rough frontier justice has been used to obscure the extent to which state-sanctioned execution grew out of mob-driven lynchings, generally of Black men, common across the South after the Civil War until well into the twentieth century.

Full show notes

COVID-19 Behind Bars: A Pandemic of Neglect Feb 02, 2021

Homer Venters has been inspecting prisons, jails, and ICE detention centers for COVID-compliance almost since the start of the pandemic. The former chief medical officer for New York City jails says what were already substandard health systems and abusive environments have deteriorated sharply, where even people positive for the virus can languish unseen for days. Any fix to health care behind bars, he says, has to start with listening to the people these facilities have worked to silence: those with lived experience of the conditions.

Full show notes

Listen back to Venters’s New Thinking interview, ‘Jail-Attributable Deaths’

Heal and Punish? Treatment and Trauma Inside a Coercive System Jan 19, 2021

How effective is therapy or treatment when it’s used instead of incarceration, and what are the challenges to conducting it inside the coercive context of the criminal justice system? New Thinking host Matt Watkins is joined by clinical psychologist Jacob Ham who works with justice-involved young people affected by trauma, and John Jay College’s Deborah Koetzle who evaluates programs aiming to help participants rebuild lives outside of the justice system.

Full show notes

**This episode was originally released in January 2019**

Josie Duffy Rice: Fighting a Big Fight Dec 17, 2020

Josie Duffy Rice says remaking the justice system is a generational struggle, but it’s one progressives are winning. The well-known criminal justice commentator and activist, president of the news site The Appeal and host of its podcast, Justice in America, explains why she believes in the power of big ideas and offers her take on the federal election, “defund the police,” and the role of the media in promoting, or thwarting, change.

Full show notes

Guns, Young People, Hidden Networks Nov 30, 2020

Why do some young people carry guns? It’s a difficult question to answer. People in heavily-policed neighborhoods with high rates of violence aren’t generally enthusiastic about answering questions about gun use. In this special episode, hear from three of the authors of a groundbreaking year-long study into young people and guns. The findings are disturbing, but if the goal is to learn directly from marginalized communities what they need to combat gun use, no less important is the remarkable way the research was conducted.

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Reform and Its Discontents Oct 26, 2020

In their book, Prison By Any Other Name, activists Victoria Law and Maya Schenwar contend that much of what is packaged today as “reforms” to the criminal legal system are extending, not countering, that system’s harmful effects. So what is the ultimate goal of reform of a system like the criminal legal system? (Episode nominated for a Media for a Just Society award in 2021.)

Full show notes

What We All Get Wrong About Gun Violence Oct 05, 2020

While crime of nearly every kind has been declining amid COVID-19, in cities across the country, gun violence and homicides have been the exceptions. Long-time researcher and former Obama DOJ official, Thomas Abt, says there are proven solutions to reduce the violence. But he says both the right and the left fail to grasp the essence of any solution: focus on the violence itself. Abt is the author of Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets.

This episode was originally released in July 2019 (new episodes start next week!)

Full show notes

Listen back to New Thinking’s episode with Patrick Sharkey, author of Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, The Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence.

Learn more about the Center for Court Innovation’s “credible messenger” violence interruption program, Save Our Streets.

Misdemeanors, Race, and a History of Injustice Aug 20, 2020

The alleged use of a $20 counterfeit bill, selling loose cigarettes on a street corner, a broken brake light—think how many police encounters that ended with the killing of a Black person began with misdemeanor enforcement. If you want to shrink the role of police and the justice system, misdemeanors are the best place to start. Low-level, often “order maintenance,” charges make up 80 percent of criminal cases, and it’s here the justice system’s endemic racial disparities are at their most yawning.

In this conversation from February 2019, Alexandra Natapoff explains how the consequences of the sprawling misdemeanor system can trail someone for life. She calls that system “one of the great, under-appreciated engines of racial inequality in this country,” tracing its roots to the backlash against Reconstruction at the end of the Civil War.

A professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, Natapoff is the author of Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal.

Full show notes

Restorative Justice is Racial Justice Jul 06, 2020

Restorative justice is about repairing harm. But for Black Americans, what is there to be restored to? This episode features a roundtable with eight members of the Center for Court Innovation’s Restorative Justice in Schools team. They spent three years embedded in five Brooklyn high schools—all five schools are overwhelmingly Black, and all five had some of the highest suspension rates in New York City.

Episode page

The episode features music from Zanny London, a student at one of the high schools in the program. Find more of his work on SoundCloud and Instagram.

Justice and the Virus: Racial Patterns Jun 03, 2020

The death of George Floyd after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee to Floyd’s neck for close to nine minutes has triggered a wave of long-held anger and revulsion across the country. Vincent Southerland, the executive director of the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at NYU, compares Floyd’s death—in public, in broad daylight—to a lynching. The furor comes in the midst of a pandemic itself exacerbated by racism. How will COVID-19, and the reaction to police violence, affect the deep racial patterns of the justice system?

Episode page

Interview recorded May 29

Hear the first episode in the ‘Justice and the Virus’ series with Rachel Barkow

Justice and the Virus: Rachel Barkow May 22, 2020

With justice systems across the country scrambling to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a lot of talk about what justice is going to look like when the virus ends. But what has the response actually consisted of—especially from prisons and jails, which have emerged as epicenters of the virus—and is there any reason to anticipate a “new normal” to emerge? New York University law professor Rachel Barkow explains her skepticism.

Episode page

Hear Barkow on New Thinking discuss her 2019 book, Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration

Interview recorded on May 19

Getting People Off Rikers Island in a Pandemic May 05, 2020

The infection rate from COVID-19 in New York City’s Rikers Island jails is currently almost 30 times the rate for the U.S. as a whole. As the city struggled to get people out from behind bars—criticized both for moving too slowly, and for even contemplating releasing anyone early from a jail sentence—it turned to a trio of nonprofits to repurpose a successful program on the fly. The urgency of supporting people being released abruptly from jail in the midst of a pandemic is clear, but so are the challenges. The experience also raises the question: what happens to criminal justice when the virus ends?

Interview recorded on May 1

Episode page

See a summary of results from the Rikers Early Release Program

Listen to a related New Thinking: ‘Jail-Attributable Deaths’

The Inequities of COVID-19: A Focus on Public Housing Apr 17, 2020

In cities across the United States, the effects of the coronavirus are not being experienced equally. Whether it’s infection rates, deaths, or job losses, people of low income and people of color are being hit hardest. In New York City, many of those effects are concentrated in communities where public housing is located. The Center for Court Innovation’s Neighborhood Safety Initiatives program works with public housing residents. On New Thinking, the program’s Alicia Arrington explains the challenge, and the response.

Full show notes

Episode recorded on April 14

Criminal Justice as Social Justice: Bruce Western Feb 12, 2020

Bruce Western’s book, Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison, is, as its title suggests, about the challenges confronting people re-entering society after a period behind bars. But it’s also inevitably about the deep harms of incarceration itself. And moving further backward still, it’s about the problems and life-histories that leave people vulnerable to the criminal justice system in the first place. Ethically, Western asks, what are we to make of a system whose default response to those problems is jail or prison? In Homeward, Western outlines a very different, much more hopeful vision.

This is an updated version of an episode originally released in September 2018.

Full show notes

“One of These Days We Might Find Us Some Free”: Reginald Dwayne Betts Jan 16, 2020

In 1996, 16-year-old Reginald Dwayne Betts was sentenced to nine years in prison for a carjacking. He spent much of that time reading, and eventually writing. After prison, he went to Yale Law School and published a memoir and three books of poems. But he’s still wrestling with what “after prison” means. This is a conversation about incarceration, blackness, and the weight of history, both political and personal. Betts’s most recent collection of poems is Felon.

Full show notes

Introducing ‘In Practice’ Jan 02, 2020

In Practice is a new podcast from the Center for Court Innovation focusing on practitioners—people working on the ground to make things better for those touched by the justice system. On the first episode, host Rob Wolf looks at the challenge domestic violence cases pose to probation departments. Subscribe today (Apple podcasts)!

College Incarcerated Dec 19, 2019

At 24, Jarrell Daniels was released from prison after six years behind bars. It was a Thursday. The following Tuesday, he came back to the same facility in street clothes to attend the college class he’d started on the inside. He’s now a sophomore at Columbia University. The class that so inspired him was a novel experiment in an already unconventional setting: half of the students were people incarcerated in the facility, and half were local prosecutors. Their subject was the criminal justice system. Hear more about the experience, now being replicated by other district attorney’s offices, from Daniels, and from Lucy Lang, who conceived of the idea. A former Manhattan assistant district attorney, Lang is now the executive director of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution.

Full show notes

Kim Foxx: Rooted in Humanity Dec 04, 2019

With Kim Foxx running for re-election as State’s Attorney in Cook County (Chicago), it’s an excellent moment to revisit one of the best conversations we’ve had on the podcast. Foxx, the first African-American woman to lead the office, has faced a campaign of sustained, often vicious, opposition from the moment she took the job and every indication is she should expect more of the same in her attempt to renew her mandate. But recent reporting—notably from The Marshall Project—suggests she is also following through on her promise to transform Chicago’s justice system. What is clear from this candid September 2018 interview is that Foxx knew she’d be fighting off critics every step of the way: “I think people wanted to have a narrative about what it meant for a black woman from the projects to have this job.”

Full show notes

Hear all of the episodes in our Prosecutor Power series.

What Do We Know About Community Service? Nov 08, 2019

Community service has long been a staple of sentencing in the U.S., and has long enjoyed a sunny, mostly uninterrogated, reputation as a more restorative and humane alternative to fines and fees or short-term jail. But two new reports—one from the Center for Court Innovation and one from the UCLA Labor Center—suggest many of the ways courts are actually using community service is undercutting its potential to act as a genuine alternative sentence.

The episode is in two acts. In Act One, an on-location snapshot of community service at the Center for Court Innovation. In Act Two, Joanna Weiss of the Fines and Fees Justice Center runs through some of the troubling recent findings, and outlines recommendations for making an alternative sentence work.

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Ending Bail, Closing Rikers: How Change Happens Oct 15, 2019

The movements to end cash bail and close jails are connected, and gabriel sayegh has been in the thick of organizing both fights. The co-executive director of the Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Justice explains why he thinks New York’s impending reforms to bail are potentially the most sweeping in the country. And in a critical week for the campaign to close New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail facility, sayegh, one of the founders of the #CLOSErikers effort, outlines why the heated debate on the left over what is to come after Rikers, is a split organizers have long known was coming.

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Jail-Attributable Deaths Sep 25, 2019

As chief medical officer for New York City jails, Homer Venters realized early in his tenure that for many people dying in jail, the primary cause of death was jail itself. To document these deaths, Venters and his team created a statistical category no one had dared to compile before: “jail-attributable deaths.” His work led him into frequent opposition with the security services. It also led to his book, Life and Death in Rikers Island, about New York City’s notoriously violent jail facility.

Full show notes (transcript, images, resources & references)

Art vs. Mass Incarceration Sep 04, 2019

Can art transform the criminal justice system? On this special edition of New Thinking, host Matt Watkins sits down with two New York City artists on the rise—Derek Fordjour and Shaun Leonardo—who both work with our Project Reset to provide an arts-based alternative to court and a criminal record for people arrested on a low-level charge. With the program set to expand city-wide, the three discuss art’s potential to help heal a racialized criminal justice system.

Full show notes (images, links, transcript, etc.)

Beyond the Algorithm: Risk and Race Aug 14, 2019

**episode originally aired in October 2018**

About two out of three people in local jails are being held awaiting trial, often because they can’t afford bail. What if a mathematical formula could do a more objective job of identifying who could be safely released? That’s the promise of risk assessments. But critics call them “justice by algorithm,” and contend they’re reproducing the bias inherent to the justice system, only this time under the guise of science.

UPDATE August 2019: Since this episode aired, the report covering much of the same ground as the podcast has been published. You can read ‘Beyond the Algorithm’ here. The study was also covered by The Marshall Project and The Appeal, among others.

Full show notes (includes episode transcript and our famed resources & references section)

The Art and Science of Reducing Violence Jul 10, 2019

In 2017, more than 17,000 people were murdered in the United States, most of them in cities. Thomas Abt, a long-time policy-maker and researcher, says that far from intractable, there are proven ways to reduce the violence, but he worries the urgency of acting now is being ignored. And when it comes to how we think about violence, he has a bone to pick with both the right and the left. Abt’s new book is Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets.

Full show notes

Marilyn Mosby, Karl Racine: “We’re Talking About Humans” Jun 21, 2019

With so much of the focus now on keeping people out of jail and prison, it can feel like there is a reluctance among criminal justice reformers to work on improving life for the more than two million people already there. But one group beginning to mobilize on the issue is prosecutors—or at least “progressive” prosecutors. Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby and Washington, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine explain what they learned on a tour of European prisons, and the “bright line” they see running from the overt racial control in America’s past to the disparities and dehumanizing practices inside jails and prisons today.

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Prosecutor Power: Scott Hechinger on the Urgency of Reform Jun 06, 2019

If you’re not following Scott Hechinger on Twitter, you’re missing something important. A public defender and the director of policy at Brooklyn Defender Services, Hechinger is a fantastic explainer and participant-witness at the frontlines of the justice system. In May 2018, he joined our series on prosecutors, outlining how prosecutor power is exerted at key decision-points in his clients’ cases, mostly to their detriment. Chosen by the Vera Institute of Justice for its ‘Best of 2018‘ awards, we’re revisiting that episode with a new introduction in light of the remarkable new series from Ava DuVernay, ‘When They See Us.’ The series dramatizes the story of five black teenagers arrested and imprisoned for the rape of a white woman in New York City’s Central Park in 1989 showing how prosecutor and police power is used to force false confessions from the five teens. Their case is an extreme one, but it’s by no means an isolated example. Indeed, what emerges from the discussion with Hechinger is how much the system, as part of its day-to-day operation, relies upon a combination of coercion and incentives to get what it wants from defendants.

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The Pathological Politics of Criminal Justice May 22, 2019

Rachel Barkow contends criminal justice policy is a “prisoner of politics,” driven by appeals to voters’ worst instincts and an aversion to evidence of what actually works. Defined by its severity and unfairness, the criminal justice system, she says, is counterproductive to the goal of public safety it claims as its justification. In her new book, the NYU law professor makes a provocative case for “freeing” criminal justice from the political imperative in order to achieve real reform.

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Emily Bazelon: When Power Shifts May 01, 2019

The well-known journalist and commentator Emily Bazelon talks about her new book, Charged, on the “movement to transform American prosecution,” and where she thinks power might be shifting in the criminal justice system. So-called progressive prosecutors are very much a minority among elected D.A.s, but what if they could be the model for dismantling what she calls America’s “giant machine of punishment”?

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Misdemeanors Matter #3: Rachael Rollins Reboots Low-Level Justice Apr 17, 2019

Rachael Rollins says she has seen the criminal justice system from “almost every angle.” Now, as Boston’s first female African-American district attorney, she’s setting the agenda. She explains her new approach of “services not sentences” as a response to low-level “crimes of poverty” and the urgency of changing the traditional role of the prosecutor.

Full show notes

New Jails to End All Jails? Mar 29, 2019

Rikers Island was once the dream of progressive reformers for a more rehabilitative corrections system. Now New York City, taking advantage of its plunging jail population, has pledged to replace the scandal-plagued complex with four smaller redesigned facilities—located near courthouses, not on an isolated island. It’s a shift the mayor says will end the era of mass incarceration in the city. But can building “better” jails lead to less reliance on jails overall? New Thinking host Matt Watkins moderates a public discussion of “Justice by Design.”

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The Cost of Being Poor? The Fight Against Fines and Fees Mar 13, 2019

Almost any encounter with the criminal justice system comes with a price tag, and fines and fees are capturing millions of Americans in a cycle of poverty and justice-involvement. Various states across the country charge you for using a public defender, a DNA sample, your monthly parole meetings, even a jury trial. And that’s in addition to the fines attached to any conviction. Fall too far behind on your payments and you could end up in jail. On this episode, we hear from a judge in Washington State who’s come up with an innovative solution to help break this cycle, and from Alexes Harris, a leading researcher on how fines and fees are used across the country.

Full show notes (includes pictures, episode transcript, and resources & references section)

Prosecutor Power #8: What’s Next for Progressive Prosecutors? Feb 20, 2019

How can the recent victories of the campaign to elect reform-minded district attorneys be wedded to larger systemic change to ensure the movement’s gains outlast the next election? On the final episode of our Prosecutor Power series, the ACLU’s Somil Trivedi says progressive D.A.s have to take the next step of campaigning to reduce their own power.

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Misdemeanors Matter #2: Alexandra Natapoff on a Legacy of Injustice Feb 06, 2019

Alexandra Natapoff calls the misdemeanor justice system a “quiet behemoth”: making up four of every five criminal cases in the U.S., neglected by scholars and reformers, and potentially harming those caught up in it for life. In Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal, she describes a system warped by financial incentives that acts as a leading engine of racial and social inequality. She also says the reforms are obvious, and already happening in pockets across the country.

Full show notes (includes pictures, episode transcript, and resources & references section)

Prosecutor Power #7: Strength in Numbers Jan 25, 2019

The movement to elect reform-minded prosecutors has been around long enough and scored enough victories that progressive D.A.s now have their own support network: Fair and Just Prosecution. Miriam Krinsky, its executive director, explains why she thinks “starry-eyed idealists” who want to transform the justice system need to get the message that “the biggest difference they can make is to go and work in a prosecutor’s office.”

Full show notes (includes pictures, episode transcript, and resources & references section)

Heal and Punish? When Therapy Is the Alternative to Incarceration Jan 09, 2019

How effective is therapy or treatment when it’s used instead of incarceration, and what are the challenges to conducting it inside the coercive context of the criminal justice system? New Thinking host Matt Watkins is joined by clinical psychologist Jacob Ham who works with justice-involved young people affected by trauma, and John Jay College’s Deborah Koetzle who evaluates programs aiming to help participants rebuild lives outside of the justice system.

Full show notes (includes pictures, episode transcript, and resources & references section)

Rikers: An American Jail (Best of 2018) Dec 26, 2018

Highlights from a public screening and panel discussion of Bill Moyers’s ‘Rikers: An American Jail,’ moderated by New Thinking host, Matt Watkins. Commenting on the film and the future of criminal justice reform are Tina Luongo of the Legal Aid Society, Jill Harris of the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, and two of the people formerly held on Rikers featured in the film: Barry Campbell of the Fortune Society, and Johnny Perez of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. This episode was originally released in July 2018.

Full show notes (includes pictures, episode transcript, and resources & references section)

Prosecutor Power #6: Larry Krasner, The Antagonist Dec 12, 2018

As a defense attorney, Larry Krasner sued the Philadelphia police upwards of 75 times. In late 2017, he was elected D.A. in a landslide. As part of our series on the power of prosecutors, Krasner explains why he has little patience for compromise in a city whose justice system is “an outlier in a country that is an outlier.”

Full show notes

Race, Trauma, and Healing in Crown Heights, Brooklyn Nov 09, 2018

An audio portrait of Make It Happen, our program working with young men of color in Crown Heights, Brooklyn affected by violence. Through interviews with participants and practitioners, the episode explores the intersections of trauma, involvement with the justice system, and the lived experience of race. This episode was originally released in April 2018 and chosen as ‘Best of 2018‘ by the Vera Institute of Justice.

Full show notes (includes pictures, episode transcript, and resources & references section)

Misdemeanors Matter #1: Social Control and the Lower Criminal Courts Oct 26, 2018

In Misdemeanorland, Issa Kohler-Hausmann argues the lower courts are no longer primarily concerned with whether people actually committed the offense they’ve been accused of. Instead, the focus is on future behavior: upholding social order through managing and assessing—often over long stretches—everyone with the misfortune of entering Misdemeanorland. It’s an argument that forces us to rethink what justice should look like in low-level cases.

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The Most Hot-Button Issue in Criminal Justice Reform? Oct 05, 2018

About two out of three people in local jails are being held awaiting trial, often because they can’t afford bail. What if a mathematical formula could do a more objective job of identifying who could be safely released? That’s the promise of risk assessments. But critics call them “justice by algorithm,” and contend they’re reproducing the bias inherent to the justice system, only this time under the guise of science.

Full show notes (includes pictures, episode transcript, and resources & references section)

Prosecutor Power #4: Kim Foxx, Rooted in Humanity Sep 20, 2018

Kim Foxx’s unexpected 2016 victory in the race for State’s Attorney for Cook County (Chicago) helped to ignite the movement to elect prosecutors promising something other than being “tough on crime.” As part of our series on prosecutor power, Foxx explains the reforms she’s put in place, her struggles with being the face of a system that continues to fail so many of her constituents, and offers her take on the “incredible” gains made by the movement to elect a new kind of prosecutor.

Full show notes (includes pictures, episode transcript, and resources & references section)

Criminal Justice as Social Justice: A Conversation With Bruce Western Sep 06, 2018

Columbia University’s Bruce Western, a leading expert on the connection between mass incarceration and poverty, discusses his new book, Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison, and outlines his vision for a justice system rebuilt to respond to the deep deprivation and trauma fueling much of the behaviour that leads to imprisonment.

Full show notes (includes pictures, episode transcript, and resources & references section)

Financial Insecurity and Domestic Violence: A Conversation about Child Support Aug 22, 2018

For survivors of domestic violence, financial insecurity is often a huge problem. Without money to support themselves and their families, survivors can struggle to gain independence. In this New Thinking podcast, Michael Hayes from the Office of Child Support Enforcement and Krista Del Gallo from the Texas Council on Family Violence talk with Robert V. Wolf about strategies that states and the federal government are promoting to help survivors safely access child support.

Prosecutor Power #3: Reform From Within—The Brooklyn D.A. Aug 08, 2018

Jill Harris says she’s “shocked to find myself working for a D.A.” A long-time advocate for criminal justice reform, Harris, now the head of the Brooklyn D.A.’s Justice 2020 reform initiative, offers her take on the role of the prosecutor in the third installment of our series on the debate over prosecutor power.

Full show notes (includes pictures and resources & references section)

How the Law Intersects with Everyday Life: Promoting Access to Civil Justice Jul 20, 2018

Legal Hand seeks to help people resolve civil justice issues before they need lawyers and court intervention. In our latest New Thinking episode, learn about how the program works, how civil justice issues impact different communities, and why it can be hard to get basic legal information to the people who need it.

Rikers: An American Jail Jul 05, 2018

Highlights from a public screening and panel discussion of Bill Moyers’s ‘Rikers: An American Jail,’ moderated by New Thinking host, Matt Watkins. Commenting on the film and the future of criminal justice reform are Tina Luongo of the Legal Aid Society, Jill Harris of the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, and two of the people formerly held on Rikers featured in the film: Barry Campbell of the Fortune Society, and Johnny Perez of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

Full show notes (includes pictures, episode transcript, and resources & references section)

Keeping the Peace: Patrick Sharkey on Sustaining the Great Crime Decline Jun 20, 2018

Patrick Sharkey, the author of Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence, discusses the wider costs of violence and the threat posed by inequality and disinvestment to the current fragile gains. He points to the signal role of community organizing and community-based nonprofits in combating violence and building safer, more resilient cities.

Full show notes (includes pictures, episode transcript, and resources & references section)

How Do We Tell What’s Working? Disrupting the Justice Evaluation Model Jun 06, 2018

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.

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Putting the Public in Public Defending: Standing Up for a Profession in Crisis May 23, 2018

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.

Full show notes (includes pictures and episode transcript)

Prosecutor Power #2: A Public Defender on the Urgency of Reform May 04, 2018

As part of our 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 weighing the prospects for reform in a time of increasing scrutiny of prosecutorial discretion. (Episode chosen as ‘Best of 2018‘ by the Vera Institute of Justice.)

Full show notes (includes pictures, resources, and episode transcript)

**Violence, Trauma, and Healing in Crown Heights, Brooklyn** Apr 19, 2018
An audio portrait of Make It Happen, our program working with young men of color in Crown Heights, Brooklyn affected by violence. Through interviews with participants and practitioners, the episode explores the intersections of trauma, involvement with the justice system, and the lived experience of race. (Episode chosen as ‘Best of 2018‘ by the Vera Institute of Justice.)

Full show notes (includes pictures and episode transcript)

Prosecutor Power #1: John Pfaff on Mass Incarceration Mar 27, 2018

On ‘New Thinking,’ author John Pfaff outlines his argument for how prosecutors have contributed to mass incarceration and considers how much can be expected from the emerging breed of progressive D.A.’s. This is the first in our podcast series on the power of prosecutors.

Full show notes (includes pictures, resources, and episode transcript)

Kansas City Domestic Violence Court: Assessing Risk, Addressing Needs Mar 20, 2018

In this New Thinking podcast, Judge Courtney Wachal and Megan Sartin, the offender accountability coordinator, explain the operations of the Kansas City Domestic Violence Court, an Office on Violence Against Women designated mentor court.

Reducing Incarceration Now: A Conversation About ‘Start Here’ Mar 07, 2018

The Center for Court Innovation’s Greg Berman and Julian Adler discuss their new book, Start Here: A Road Map to Reducing Mass Incarceration.

Full show notes (includes pictures, resources, and episode transcript)

Renewing Justice: When the Library Becomes a Community Court Feb 21, 2018

Since 2016, the community court in Eugene, Oregon, has met every week in the downtown library. It’s part of an effort getting a lot of attention on the West Coast to bring problem-solving justice to friendlier settings. On our ‘New Thinking’ podcast, hear about Eugene’s success with the new model.

Project SAFE: Improving Services for Criminalized Black Women Jan 10, 2018

On our ‘New Thinking’ podcast, Afua Addo, our coordinator of Gender and Justice Initiatives, explains our project aiding justice-involved black women who are survivors of intimate partner violence and sexual assault.

Designing Decarceration: Architect Deanna Van Buren Oct 17, 2017

On our New Thinking podcast, the Oakland-based architect explains her firm’s mission to use design to counter incarceration and promote the use of restorative justice. She also discusses her work on our Near Westside Peacemaking Center in Syracuse, N.Y.

Improving Access to Civil Justice: A Conversation with Jordan Dressler Aug 15, 2017

Jordan Dressler, the director of the recently created New York City Office of Civil Justice, discusses Mayor Bill
de Blasio’s ambitious five-year plan to provide free or low-cost legal assistance to every low-income New Yorker
facing eviction, deportation, or other potentially life-altering civil proceedings. The interview focuses in detail
on the benefits this guarantee is expected to have on tenants confronting landlords in Housing Court (the latter
almost always represented by lawyers). Hosting this episode of New Thinking are
Ignacio Jaureguilorda, director of Poverty
Justice Solutions, our program that seeks to close
the justice gap in Housing Court, and Robert V. Wolf, the Center for Court Innovation’s director of communications.

Using Volunteers to Evaluate the Courtroom Experience: A Conversation about CourtWatch of King County, Wash. Jun 15, 2017

Court observation programs around the country send volunteers into courts to observe, collect data, and sometimes
issue reports about what they’ve seen. Their goals include keeping courts accountable to the public and improving
transparency, but not all courts are eager to receive public feedback. CourtWatch of King County, Washington, has
worked closely with its local courts since the program’s founding, trying to build a relationship that is more
collaborative than adversarial. As Laura Jones, manager, and Mary Laskowski, services and outreach coordinator, explain
to New Thinking host Robert V. Wolf, this collaborative approach has allowed CourtWatch to support judges and court
administrators in efforts to improve the court experience for everyone.

This podcast was supported by Grant
No. 2015-TA-AX-K023 awarded by the Office on Violence Against Women, U.S. Department of Justice.
The opinions, findings, or recommendations expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily
reflect the views of the Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women.

**The End of Rikers? Courtney Bryan on the Call to Close the Rikers Island Jails** Apr 21, 2017
Rikers Island is “a stain on our great city” and should be closed. That’s the headline-grabbing conclusion of the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform. Matt Watkins speaks to the Center for Court Innovation’s Courtney Bryan to learn more about the Center’s role in researching and producing the commission’s report, and the steps needed to carry out its recommendations. We also hear a range of activists and reformers react to the pledge to close the notorious jail facility.

Courtney Bryan. January 2017

Reducing New York City’s Jail Population Mar 23, 2017

New York City’s incarceration rates have been dropping steadily, but a new report from the Center for Court Innovation, in collaboration with the Vera Institute of Justice, suggests the city’s jail population can still be brought significantly lower. The report looks in detail at key decision-points along the path from arrest through bail to sentencing and makes concrete suggestions for how to improve the system, especially for those defendants detained awaiting trial. In this New Thinking podcast, Matt Watkins speaks with Michael Rempel, the report’s lead author and the Center’s research director.

Problem-Solving in L.A.: Multiple Issues, One Collaborative Court Jan 16, 2017

In this New Thinking podcast, Judge Marcelita Haynes of the Los Angeles Superior Court talks with Matt Watkins about Community Collaborative Courts, the county’s new approach to problem-solving justice. Judge Haynes says the courts look for long-term solutions to a range of problems—from mental health issues to homelessness—that can fuel repeated contact with the criminal legal system.

Seeking Evidence: A Professor Looks for Empirical Proof to Improve Access to Justice Dec 16, 2016

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.

AUBREY FOX: So this is Aubrey Fox. I’m today’s
guest host for The New Thinking Podcast, which is the Center for Innovation’s podcast where we interview legal
experts and researchers. And I’m very fortunate to be joined today by Professor James Greiner, who is the William
Henry Bloomberg Professor of Law at Harvard University. Does this mean that you’re connected to our former Mayor
Bloomberg?

PROFESSOR JAMES GREINER: Actually, I think that, if I have it right, the Chair was
named after his father and he established it on his father’s behalf. It’s a rotating chair, so I have it
for another few months before it rotates to someone else. But that is the connection.

FOX: So
you’re not dining with Mayor Bloomberg on a regular basis?

GREINER: I haven’t had the
pleasure yet. I’m sure it’ll be terrific. I’m guessing he probably sets a good table, but I haven’t
had the pleasure yet.

FOX: Among many things, Jim, is the faculty director of something called
the Access to Justice Lab, which is a really exciting new initiative that he started where he’s trying to bring
evidence-based research to the study of criminal justice and civil justice. And so we want to talk to Jim today about
his work with the Access to Justice Lab and also some of his thinking about why it’s important to introduce
this evidence-based approach, and want to talk to him a little bit about some of the particular issues he’s
investigated.

Jim, maybe where we’ll start is just to let you talk about how you got interested
in this area of criminal justice and civil justice, and tell us a little bit about your background.

GREINER:
Sure. So when I graduated from law school, I hadn’t taken any statistics courses or any sort of quantitative
courses in college or anything like that. I just wanted to be a regular practicing lawyer. So I did that for 3 years
for the Justice Department and then 3 years for a private law firm, a law firm called Jenner & Block in DC
and, at the time, I was litigating cases that involved some numbers. So, employment discrimination class actions,
litigation about the 2000 decennial census, whether you could use statistical techniques to try to correct for over-counts
and under-counts according to racial groups. I’d always been interested in social justice issues and criminal
law issues.

When I moved over to the private law firm, I did a couple of pro-bono cases that we
picked up. And basically, through the practice, redistricting was in the area I did, got interested in numbers and
what numbers and evidence-based thinking could bring to the table in terms of social justice issues. And so after
6 years as a practicing attorney, I left the practice of law for 5 years to get a PhD in statistics.

And
then when I got my PhD in Statistics I started researching in a bunch of areas, but the one I was having the most
fun with, really enjoying and the one that I thought I could potentially do some good with was access to justice
issues, more on the civil side than on the criminal side, but some on the criminal side also. So issues like, how
do you make law work and be accessible for folks who can’t afford to hire lawyers to interface with the legal
system. And on the criminal side, how can we make existing institutions perform what we want them to perform better.
How can we release more people who are not dangerous, how can we reduce the criminal footprint on communities and
still maintain a system of law and order, etc.

So those are the big-picture issues that I found
most interesting.

FOX: So, having a statistician as a professor
of law. Is that an unusual development, or is that something that’s been going on for decades and decades?

GREINER: No, I think there are only 2 of us still in the legal academy that have stats degrees– stats PhDs.
I know the other person, unsurprisingly. But having someone as a law professor who knows, as we say, “how to
count”, that’s not all that unusual. It’s just folks typically have economics degrees or political
science degrees or something like that. But the hardcore statistics is what I really wanted to get invested in. And
the reason for that was I pretty much knew when I was going into the statistics program that I was a litigator through
and through. I was always going to be a litigator. I was going to care about courts and administrative agencies and
the practice of law at a person by person level.

And so I didn’t feel like I wanted to learn
a lot about the big-picture political science theory and big-picture economic theory that those folks do. And so
I just said let’s go straight into the heavy numbers.

FOX: And so tell us a little bit about
the Access to Justice Lab. What does it do, when did you get it started?

GREINER: We’re talking
in December of 2016. It’s only been in existence since July of 2016, and it is funded by a generous grant from
the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The foundation itself cares about evidence-based thinking across a lot of different
spheres, and it funded the lab. And basically the lab has 2 overall missions. One is to produce useful, rigorous
evidence that would assist policy makers and judges and lawyers in what they do. Especially with respect, again,
to access to justice related to folks who can’t afford to hire lawyers to interface with the legal system for
them.

And then the second overall purpose is to try to tear down the resistance to rigorous empirical
evidence, especially via the randomized control trials, or randomized field experiment, that resistance that exists
within the legal profession and within the judiciary.

I think that in law, especially with the
practice of law, we are in roughly where the medical profession was in about 1938 or 1940. Basically, we are beginning
to engage in the debate about whether our profession should be evidence-based in the way that medicine was engaging
in a debate about whether drugs and medical devices should have evidence behind them before they are allowed to be
sold to the public.

And there are many folks in law, on both the bench and the bar, who think
that randomization in law is unethical or is unnecessary. Unethical because randomization takes away the professional
judgment about who should get what, and unnecessary because we know that, as lawyers and judges, all of our professional
judgements are perfect, or very, very good and, therefore, we don’t really need to investigate them all that
much. And so the Access to Justice Lab’s second purpose is to try to suggest to folks that scientific-based
thinking and evidence really can bring a lot to the table and it may end up overturning accepted truths within the
bench and the bar.

FOX: I’m glad, in your comparison to the medical world, you didn’t
bring up leaches. So at least we’re… We’re 100 years ahead of where we could be.

GREINER:
Right.

FOX: And, just to follow up for a moment, I kind of want to get your sense of the state
of play on this because I understand that there may be resistance to RCTs, which are the most rigorous form of evidence-based
analysis and require dividing a control group from an experimental group and giving some people something that you
don’t give the control group. But there is a history of doing research into criminological issues. So it’s
not like you’re starting from square one. So I guess in this mix of some history and some resistance, where
would you say we are at the moment?

GREINER: I’d say more resistance than history with respect
to courts and judges and lawyers. So you’re absolutely right that there is a reasonably well developed literature
in the criminology field. And a good portion of it, not as much as many criminologists would like, but still a good
portion of it backed up by randomized studies to try to figure out whether, say, afterschool programs prevent people
from getting arrested, or whether certain types of treatment as a condition for probation are effective in preventing
recidivism. But if you notice in the 2 examples that I gave you, one of them is sort of prior to the involvement,
the intervention is prior to the involvement of the criminal justice system, and one of them is post sentencing,
sort of after the involvement of what we call the lawyer-based or court-based criminal justice system.

And so there has been substantially less in that portion of the criminal justice system where the lawyers
and the judges get involved to the point where, when a co-author and I try to catalog all of the randomized studies
that have been done in United States law, criminal or civil, that involved randomization of a decision that would
otherwise have been made by a judge or a lawyer, so it’s how we defined randomized studies in law. We’re
taking a decision that otherwise would’ve been made by a judge and a lawyer and randomizing it to find out whether
the decision is worthwhile or would be an effective style of treatment or something like that. We could only find
about 50 in the history of the United States, based upon all areas of law, all sorts of settings.

So
if you think about medicine starting from 1938 or 1940, the number would probably be uncountable, be tens of thousands
or hundreds of thousands of randomized studies that have involved replacing a judgment that would’ve otherwise
been made by a medical professional with randomization in order to figure out whether the treatment or the intervention
works. Whereas we could find fewer than 1 per year in law. So again, I absolutely agree with you. Criminology has
much more of a history. It’s a much more developed field. But they’re basically working in their rigorous
evidence prior to the formal legal system or after it in the lifetime of a particular defendant or person or crime.
And where we think the evidence really needs to be focused is, at least in terms of a new effort, we need to focus
on where there isn’t as much evidence right now, which is inside courts and law offices.

FOX:
One of the reasons that I wanted to speak to you, Jim, was the Center for Court Innovation, while we’re known
more for our work on criminal court programs, we also have been developing a civil justice portfolio. And so I’m
curious to hear you talk about some of the work you’ve done on issues, and you’re continuing to do, like
debt collection and the assignment of council in housing court cases. And I guess the framework I have for my question
is, making the case for this kind of research may rest on finding kind of practical implications that flow from the
research. So I’m wondering if you can give us some examples of research you’re doing and what you see as
the things that a practitioner would immediately identify as, well that’s really interesting and useful.

GREINER: Absolutely. So I guess, two examples. And I don’t want to go on for too long, so stop me if
this turns into a monologue, but two examples with respect to financial distress work which you mentioned, the debt
collection work that you mentioned, one of the premises of that work is that there is just never going to be enough
money, there’s just never going to be enough of a social commitment to provide a lawyer at state expense for
every individual who can’t afford to hire a lawyer who has a legal problem. Even if we were to restrict that
set to people who are facing court adjudications that affect basic human needs by some definition, which is the ABA’s
proposed definition. It’s called the Civil Gideon Project, this idea that we can provide lawyers at state expense.
I just don’t think the resources are ever going to be there. Some smart economists have tried to calculate that
and it’s in billions upon billions of dollars would be needed.

With that in mind, it’s
probably going to take a battery of lots of different things to address the access to justice problems that we’re
having in United States society, and one of those things, one of those many things that we need, is going to be self-help.
How’re you going to make complex subjects accessible, complex procedures and complex principles accessible to
folks who can’t afford to hire lawyers for them so they can try to address legal problems they have on their
own?

So the financial distress work that I’m doing is an attempt to try to say, well, if
what we need are self-help materials, and we need basically to educate people about how to solve their own problems,
what sorts of principles can we draw from non-law fields that would help us make self-help materials more effective,
or would we hypothesize that would make self-help materials more effective?

For instance, if we’re
trying to get people to a particular location at a particular time of day and on a particular date to do something
they would rather not do because they decide it’s good for them, how do we persuade people to do that?

Well, if you pose the question at that level of generality, you recognize that… Voting. Political scientists
study how you get people to vote on a particular day at a particular time. Public health officials study how to get
people out to take flu shots, or to get colonoscopies on a particular day. These are all studies that have been run.

But in law, our self-help materials don’t actually use any of the lessons from any of those other fields
about how to get people to a court date. We think that’s bad. We think that if good lessons are learned from
those fields, we should try them in law and see if they work.

Similarly, there’s an entire
field called adult education, or just education period, about how you communicate complex concepts to people who
need to be able to use them. But in law, our self-help materials don’t currently use the lessons from adult
education. And you can see that because if you read the legal self-help materials, they’re word-heavy. There’s
just lots and lots of text. Whereas adult education folks, or education folks generally are saying, no, no, no. You’ve
got to use images. So, in our case, we’re using cartoons.

And so, the idea there is to say,
let’s try to create the best possible self-help materials that, under the state of the art, we currently know
how to create using the lessons from all these different fields. But then, let’s don’t declare victory
there. Because maybe there’s something about law, or maybe there’s something about the way that we did
the self-help materials that would make them not effective, or maybe there’s something they’re not understanding.
Or maybe the best possible self-help materials are just not enough in a system that is so complex that self-help
is just not an option.

So we go test them. We go put them into the field and we do a randomized
experiment. In one randomized experiment, we might randomize people to either get self-help materials or an offer
of representation from an attorney. Or in another experiment, we randomize whether people get self-help materials
versus no further assistance. Our self-help materials versus existing self help materials which, in many cases, just
don’t exist.

So that’s one example. I’ve got another one but, again, I don’t
want to go on and on.

FOX: I’ll just cut in for a moment to say the research you’re
doing on self-help or pro se council is relevant to us because we run a program called Legal Hands, which essentially
employs volunteers who are not lawyers. So it’s a bit of a blended model. This is people who are physically
talking to a community member, so it’s not something that you go online to get self-help materials. But they’re
not lawyers. And it speaks to your general point which is, it may not be possible to have a lawyer for every person
on every case of relevance to them.

GREINER: Absolutely. I think what your program is doing is
mixing a partial service-based solution with a partial self-help so it might be a sort of guided self-help. Absolutely.
Again, I think part of the problem, one of the reasons why I find this field so much fun to operate in but also so
frustrating is that we just don’t have any evidence to suggest, to guide us as to when we need a partial service-based
solution, partial self-help, and what settings a total self-help solution is sufficient. Or maybe it’s not the
legal setting, maybe it’s the type of person. Which people can take care of it on their own if guided appropriately
either by self-help materials, or which ones are going to need some service along with it. So absolutely.

FOX: Let’s hear your other example.

GREINER: Another example that comes to mind
is the problem of triage which is basically, whenever there is more of a particular type of case, or another way
to put it, more clients than you have the capacity to provide the highest level of assistance to. So in our particular
study that we’ve been trying to get underway and still in the planning stages for, this setting is victims of
domestic violence who come to a legal services provider and seeking assistance with obtaining civil protection orders
from courts, and the legal services provider has the capacity to assist in terms of providing full representation
to. Around 1/3 of the folks who come to it who are eligible for the help, income and asset eligible, and who are
actively seeking civil protection orders.

Now that by the way, that number, 1/3, would go down
substantially if the legal services provider did more outreach in the community. So we’ve looked in the court
systems where this LSP is operating and in fact a substantial number of people are already in the court system seeking
civil protection orders without council. And so you only see the tip of the iceberg, and you can’t even handle
the tip of the iceberg, in terms of providing full representation, the traditional attorney/client relationship to
these folks, much less the whole iceberg. So what do you do?

And it turns out that in medicine,
again, to use that analogy, there’s been lots of study about how to make these triage decisions. It’s both
an ethical question and an operational question. Ethically, what do you want to do when you’re in that sort
of scare situation, and that comes up both in medicine in terms of something like when you don’t have enough
organs for transplant, it comes up when you have Hurricane Katrina knocking out power in a hospital and you don’t
have enough evacuation capacity to get all of your patients out of your hospital. That was the subject of a recent
Radio Lab episode. So there’s an ethical dimension to that question.

There’s also an
operational dimension. Suppose what you wanted to do was to say, we should use these resources to save the most lives.
Or, in a civil protection order context, we should use these resources to try to get as many people as possible civil
protection orders because that’s what they’re for and that’s best for the community. How would you
do that? How would you go about doing that? And one way you would go about thinking about it, the way that the military
thinks about it when we’re talking about battlefield casualties is, you say, well try to distinguish people
into 3 groups. One is a group of people who are going to be able to succeed on their own. So in battlefield casualties,
these are going to be people who are going to survive the battlefield even if not assisted immediately. You don’t
provide immediate assistance to them. In the legal services provider, people who are going to be able to get civil
protection orders on their own, you don’t offer full representation to them.

For people who
are never going to be able to survive on the battlefield, or never going be able to get civil protection orders on
their own, even if given the full representation, you don’t give them full representation either, because it’s
not affecting the outcome.

The people you do give battlefield assistance to, or full representation
to, are the folks that you can change their outcome. If you give assistance, they’ll survive or they’ll
get the civil protection order. If you don’t give assistance, they won’t survive or they won’t get
the civil protection order.

So that’s one way to think about it. But if you want to do that,
you face the problem of, how do you go about distinguishing those people. Because a lot of study and a lot of different
settings, again, emergency room setting is one example, turns out that’s a very hard thing to do. To figure
out who you can actually change the outcomes for. So we’re pursuing a randomized experiment that’s designed
to try to add to our knowledge of how do you distinguish those folks. And most importantly, whether lawyers, given,
exercising professional judgment, can in fact predict which people really would benefit from the help.

FOX: And I guess what you’re talking about raises a big issue for me, which is, let’s give a concrete
example, in New York city they’re talking about investing potentially $200 million more a year in hiring lawyers
to represent people facing eviction in housing court. So there is actually more money now in areas of the law there
hasn’t been a lot of money in the past.

However, you’re no doubt correct that there
isn’t enough money to cover every case at every moment. And so I guess having an RCT or a research study is
great progress towards this habit of thinking in a kind of, I would use the term problem solving way. But how do
we get to more fundamental change? What’s the way to inculcate this way of thinking in a legal services organization
in a more fundamental fashion?

GREINER: It’s a really hard question and one that we’ve
been scratching our heads about in the Access to Justice Lab about. Because that’s our overall mission. One
way of thinking about this is, if the Access to Justice Lab is going to be one of the few institutions around the
country that’s going to be doing randomized studies in the law and we’re going to depend on those few institutions
to produce evidence, we should stop. We’re never going to be able to produce enough evidence. Even as a lab
and even as an institution, 1 or 2 institutions are never going to be able to do it. Just the same way one center,
Johns Hopkins can never produce enough randomized experiments in medicine to make progress in medicine possible.

So we have to start a movement. We have to get people to think this way and to demand this evidence. In
terms of the strategies we’re pursuing in the Access to Justice Lab, we’re, first of all, going to try
to produce studies and try to educate folks about, hey, this evidence from this study can be useful in your practice,
it can get you to think about ways other than the way you were thinking before, or ask new questions about what you
should be doing to be more effective.

We’re in the process of producing a short course so
that folks who, either want to do these studies as researchers or to form partnerships with researchers to get the
study done, so these field operators will know more about what’s required and how to do them. We will be doing
persuasion in terms of just appearing at conferences and giving speeches and talking to anyone who will listen to
us about why this is so critical and, quite frankly, we think that there’s an ethical duty to do these studies.

Because if you think about it in the civil protection order context, our view is that if we triaged more
effectively, more people would have civil protection orders than currently do with no additional injection of resources.
When you think about it that way, there may be an ethical duty to do these studies, as opposed to, oh, well they’re
just curiosities. We think ultimately that we’re going to need to persuade funders to demand evidence. Maybe
not demand the evidence, show it to me right now or I’ll cut your funding, rather say, if you don’t have
the evidence, I want you to, this is a funder speaking to a legal services provider, I want you to engage in an evidence
gathering study. And sure, I’ll fund your efforts, your services as long as you are gathering evidence about
whether those actually work.

FOX: Well, this is fascinating work. And thank you so much for agreeing
to speak with us. Again, I’m Aubrey Fox. I’m the guest host of the New Thinking Podcast for the Center
for Court Innovation and joined today by Professor James Greiner who’s a Professor of Law at Harvard University
and the Faculty Director of the Access to Justice Lab. They have a great website that you can go online and take
a look at some of the studies that they’re participating in. Thank you so much, Jim.

GREINER:
My pleasure, thanks for the opportunity.

How Can Lawyers Help Address Poverty and Eviction? A Conversation with Law Professor Raymond Brescia Dec 13, 2016

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.

ROB WOLF: Hi. I’m Rob Wolf, Director
of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Joining me today is Aubrey Fox, who was my colleague here at
the Center for Court Innovation for about 15 years, where he helped set up a number of innovative programs that we
run, including Bronx Community Solutions, and he is now helping out in various capacities as a consultant. Today,
he and I are going to do a podcast together. Aubrey, let’s tell listeners who we’re speaking with today.

AUBREY FOX: We’re interviewing Ray Brescia, who is a Associate Law Professor at the Albany Law School.

WOLF: Why are we speaking with him?

FOX: Rob, as you know, the Center for Court Innovation
is known for our work on criminal court programs and we operate criminal courts and partnership with the New York
State Court system all over the city, but people may know a little less is that we also have some new experiments
in the civil justice space.

WOLF: Specifically, civil refers obviously to noncriminal. That’s
family, housing, that sort of thing?

FOX: Exactly. Two of the programs that we’re running
now, one is called Poverty Justice Solutions, in which we assign recent law school graduates to nonprofit civil justice
firms around the city, and they work mostly on housing court cases. We also have new program called Legal Hands,
where we employ volunteers and train and equip them to give advice to people who are facing issues, in hopes that
it can help them keep out of court in the first place.

WOLF: I know Poverty Justice Solutions
is focused particularly on working with people who face evictions.

FOX: Yeah, I mean a lot of
the nonprofit civil justice law firms in the city focus on eviction and housing court cases, and there’s an
immediately obvious reason why. A lot of New Yorkers face issues with their housing, and we know now that there are
some very direct links between housing and poverty. People who struggle to pay their rent, if they get evicted, there
are all sorts of negative consequences that accrue from that. The city is paying a lot more attention to try and
intervene, and at the very least provide legal representation to people who are facing eviction in housing court.

WOLF: It’s both a more humane approach, trying to prevent people from losing their homes, but there’s
a practical aspect too, that it’s going to cost the city, and impact the quality of life for both the tenants
and people who live in the city if they don’t prevent these evictions.

FOX: Yeah, I mean
there’s one estimate just produced by the city council that you could save about $300 million dollars, the city
that is could save about $300 million a year if it kept around 5,000 families out of shelters. It costs about $43,000
per family per year to put someone in a shelter. Obviously, if there is an appropriate way to keep them in the housing
that they currently have, and thus keep them from going into a homeless shelter, then it would seem that everyone
would be better off.

WOLF: I guess the rationale is that without representation, they may be losing
their homes, their tenancy unfairly, because they don’t have the right advocate. Legally, if someone was articulating
their position and their rights, they hopefully would be able to stay in their home.

FOX: Yeah,
I mean the housing eviction cases are often very complicated, and sometimes the existing rules and laws aren’t
applied because in this case, the defendant who’s facing eviction doesn’t know their rights, doesn’t
have legal representation. It’s an issue that the city is really directly focused on, and as you say, not just
because losing a house, your home is a huge personal crisis, but because the consequences of losing your home end
up being faced by the city quite often.

WOLF: Well so let’s get Professor Brescia on the
phone. Just so people understand, I’m actually in our office in Manhattan, you are in your special studio in
New Jersey, also known as your home. Now we’re going to be joined by Professor Brescia, who we’re calling
in his office.

FOX: In Albany.

WOLF: In Albany, there you go.

FOX:
Yes, all right.

WOLF: Okay, let’s get him on the line. Ray Brescia, welcome to the podcast.

PROFESSOR RAY BRESCIA: Thank you very much, thanks for having me.

FOX: Ray, where we
wanted to start was just to get you to tell us a little bit about how you got involved in public interest law.

BRESCIA: Well, it goes back to being a young person and being very concerned about politics and the world,
and being very excited about things that were happening around me. I was a child of the 70’s, and so there was
a lot of politics that went on in the 70’s. Some of my earliest memories were of the end of the Vietnam War,
and then Nixon’s resignation. I just have always been interested, I think it comes from a family that’s
very interested in political issues, and over the years as I was growing up, I realized that a lot of people about
whom I was reading in the newspaper were lawyers and involved in the issues that I was interested in. That really
sparked my interest in becoming a lawyer.

WOLF: You’ve been deeply involved now in the civil
side of the law and civil justice, so you’ve observed recently how there’s been growing interest in civil
justice. In fact, the city created recently an office of civil justice, and now there’s talk of what’s
being referred to as “civil Gideon”, and Aubrey and I were curious, you know if you could maybe explain
what civil Gideon means. Obviously Gideon refers to the 1963 Supreme Court decision that gives people right to counsel
in criminal cases. What does that mean on the civil side?

BRESCIA: On the civil side, it would
mean the same thing in civil cases as you see in many criminal cases, not all criminal cases. Lower level offenses,
you don’t have a right to counsel, but on the civil side, just like on the criminal side, when people talk about
civil Gideon, they mean a right to counsel in cases where fundamental human rights are at stake, shelter, loss of
benefits, things like that. If you look at sort of what the consequences are of not having counsel in a criminal
case and in a civil case, in many of the more impactful civil cases, the outcome can be the same. Someone could be
institutionalized, someone could be incarcerated, someone could be, you know their freedom could be restricted if
they become homeless, if they have to move into a shelter.

If the consequences are similar in
certain civil cases as they are in some criminal cases, then the importance of counsel is similar as well. I think
a lot of people don’t understand, they think that there’s legal aid, and so people have a right to counsel
in an eviction case, but they just don’t. The number of people in a place like housing court in New York, which
evicts 25,000 families a year, low-income tenants who can’t afford an attorney, most of them do not have access
to counsel, even though we do have phenomenal legal aid programs that can provide services to low-income people and
to help them prevent eviction.

Short of the funding that recently came down from the city of New
York, when I was practicing in housing court in New York City, a very small fraction of low-income tenants had counsel.
That meant that they faced eviction without a lawyer, and eviction cases can be very complicated. I think what the
de Blasio administration is doing and what city council is proposing is really going to expand access to justice
in housing court, and hopefully in other settings as well, at least in New York City, to ensure that in really important
cases on the civil side, like in the criminal side, people have access to a free lawyer.

WOLF:
Let me just throw out some numbers too related to what you said. The office of civil justice said that in 2013, only
1% of tenants in New York City housing court were represented by attorneys, but they project that with their investment
of, I think $100 million, the city’s investment in fiscal year 2017, 27% will be represented, one in four basically,
of tenants will be represented. That would represent a dramatic shift, and would you anticipate that that would then
dramatically change outcomes, you know fewer people would in fact be evicted and have to move into shelters and that
sort of thing?

BRESCIA: Certainly. It’s going to do two primary things: One, it’s going
to ensure that many thousands of tenants have a fighting shot in housing court. Once you do, if you have a fighting
chance, most of the time a lawyer can make a huge difference in raising important defenses, negotiating viable solutions
that don’t require the tenant losing his or her home, dismissing cases because the landlord’s case is weak.
In the first instance, many tenants who, with representation, are going to avoid eviction, period, full stop.

I think a second consequence of the increased number of tenants with counsel is that landlords are going
to bring fewer cases. A lot of landlords now don’t have to worry about their tenant being represented, and they
can bring trumped-up cases, they can bring cases that are weak. They know at the end of the day, many tenants won’t
even show up to fight the case because they think that there’s no hope in fighting the case, because they don’t
have a lawyer, they don’t know their rights. Many move out when they get the eviction papers, or simply sit
back not knowing what they’re supposed to do, and don’t defend themselves. I think landlords count on that
for at least a percentage of cases, and if they know that tenants are going to be represented, not only are they
only going to bring the strongest cases that they can, but they’re not going to bring the cases that they think
they can get by on weak claims.

FOX: One thing I find really interesting is you have the city
investing a lot more in this area, but I guess I’m curious about the context here. What do you think is driving
this idea that we should take a second look at the relationship between poverty and housing? Is it driven mostly
by practical conditions on the ground, is there an intellectual momentum that has developed that is starting to reframe
these issues?

BRESCIA: I would like to think that there are two main drivers of seeing this issue
as an access to justice issue, that is an issue that centers around the low-income people’s lack of access to
a lawyer. One is moral, and it’s based in our fundamental belief that in our democratic system, people should
have a right to defend themselves adequately in a court of law when legal claims are made against them, so that’s
the moral case to be made for access to justice. I think more practically that there’s a fiscal case that can
very easily be made for the investment of counsel.

Counsel in a housing case is usually provided
by a nonprofit for roughly about $3,000 a case. They’re reimbursed for the number of cases that they handle
for about $3,000 a case. A family that is evicted that goes through the shelter system costs the city about $30,000.
If you can, by the provision of a lawyer, you can prevent that family from becoming homeless, you’re saving
the city and the people of the city of New York and any other jurisdiction that takes this view, you’re saving
them lots of money. There’s an absolute moral case, but also a practical fiscal case.

WOLF:
It’s interesting that you say the lawyer only gets $3,000, which makes me think about the attractiveness of
going into civil justice law for law students today. I mean, there is a trimmed down market on the corporate or the
money-making side, so to speak, of the legal profession. Is it more attractive? Are you seeing a shift? Are more
law students interested in civil justice, especially as there’s more interest and more need for lawyers, as
there is at least a little more money to pay for them?

BRESCIA: I think a lot of people go to
law school, a lot of law students go to law school because they want to make a difference, and they want to do work
that is meaningful that makes a real difference in people’s lives. Too often, law school debt, practical reality,
economic realities drive students away from those reasons that they went to law school to begin with. The more that
funding is made available as the de Blasio administration is making such funding available for nonprofits to represent
low-income tenants in housing court and hopefully in other settings, there’ll be more opportunities for students
to get back to the reasons they went to law school in the first place.

FOX: We’ve talked
mostly about housing court, but there are other types of civil legal cases. I just wonder if you want to bring up
another example of the kind of case where a good attorney could really make a difference in the lives of somebody
in a particular type of case.

BRESCIA: Well, you know there’s another area that’s gotten
a lot of attention lately is consumer debt. Consumers, which are everybody, people, can mount up consumer debt from
an old credit card, from an old cell phone bill, maybe they move, they don’t get the last bill, and penalties
can accrue, and the consumer can face a lawsuit in court for a $200 bill with fines and penalties can quickly become
something that escalates and grows into a two, three, $5,000 bill that the filing of a lawsuit against them alone
will impact their credit score. They find that their wages are garnished, their bank accounts are frozen, they can’t
pay their rent, they can’t buy things like medications or food.

Another area where lawyers
can make a real difference, I mean it’s hard to say that fewer defendants get represented in consumer debt cases
than in housing court cases, because in 1% of housing court cases, the tenant has representation, but it’s actually
less than 1%, at least in New York City, according to research that the Urban Justice Center did years ago, less
than 1% of tenants have representation. That can have a real impact on people’s lives, and can spiral into an
eviction case if they can’t pay their rent, or a hospitalization if they can’t get medication to keep them
out of the hospital.

That’s another area, and these are very straightforward cases, they’re
often very strong defenses, that a pro se person, someone without a lawyer, doesn’t really know how to raise
such defenses, but with a lawyer, that defendant can easily raise very strong defenses and often get the cases dismissed.
Our experience has been, and lawyers who do this work, that the mere presence of a lawyer in a case is enough to
get the plaintiff to simply withdraw the case, that they don’t want to fight it because they know that there
are so many strong defenses that will be raised by a lawyer who is worth his or her salt. It’s like in Harry
Potter, it’s like the character, you know they can call out their character that helps them defeat the evil
beings, it’s not a Horcrux.

WOLF: Their patronus.

BRESCIA: Their patronus,
exactly, thank you very much. You know it’s like a patronus, you can call forth your lawyer and the plaintiff
just runs away.

WOLF: Well, it sounds like a situation that is also ripe for abuse then, that
as you said with housing cases, if people bringing these consumer cases, these debt cases, knew a lawyer would be
there, they’re less likely to even bring the case because they know that there maybe isn’t a lot of substance
to it. I wonder, what about the Center for Court Innovation, in collaboration with several partners also has a program
called Legal Hand, which basically gives advice to pro se litigants. They can go to a community walk-in storefront
situation and get some advice, and I wonder, short of providing an attorney, and perhaps in some cases where an attorney,
there isn’t enough money to give everyone an attorney yet, but at least giving them some legal advice, how useful
is that, do you think? Does that also have a practical impact?

BRESCIA: I think it does. You have
to do what we call in the legal services world “effective triage”. You have to identify cases where they’re
relatively straightforward, where advice alone is enough to arm the tenant with the information, or whoever the party
is, the party seeking the information, that it’s a straightforward case where simple information would be enough
to prepare him or her to defend him or herself in court or in an administrative proceeding like a welfare hearing
or the DMV, wherever it is. It depends on a number of factors, I think the first factor is the complexity of the
case.

Is it a case where straightforward information that’s easy to understand is enough,
so the person can defend his or her rights? Then it will depend also on two other things, I think, what’s at
stake, and then the ability of the individual in the context he or she finds him or herself in, to use the information
obtained effectively. Things that are, where there’s high risk, you know Warren Buffet doesn’t deal with
issues, billion dollar deals without a lawyer, someone who’s facing an eviction or the loss of a child or the
termination of welfare benefits, given what’s at stake, it’s very difficult to say to that person, although
we do it every day, “You don’t get a lawyer.”

With what’s at stake, I think
that’s another factor to think about because of the risk of loss of what’s at stake. Then, is this individual
someone who can manage the case with a little bit of information, or is it someone because of disability or because
of the complexity of the case, can’t handle the issue on his or her own? You sort of have to go through a series
of questions to triage each case to determine, is this a case where a little bit of information is going to be enough
so that person can protect his or her rights, or are there enough of these variables that say, “Wait a minute,
this is a person who needs full representation.”?

WOLF: Well, thank you so much for taking
the time to talk with Aubrey and me today.

BRESCIA: Thank you for having me.

FOX:
Thanks Ray.

WOLF: We’ve been speaking with Ray Brescia, who’s an associate professor
at Albany Law School, and he’s been speaking with us about trends in civil justice and some of the exciting
things that have been happening here, particularly in New York City. To find out more about the Center for Court
Innovation and some of our civil justice programs, and in fact all our programs, you can visit us at our website
at www.courtinnovation.org. I am Rob Wolf, director of communications, and my cohost today is Aubrey, you want to
say who you are again?

FOX: I’m Aubrey Fox, and I’m going to try to find a patronus
after this interview’s over. They sound useful.

WOLF: Thanks everyone, and thanks for listening.

Houston’s SAFE Court Offers Victims of Human Trafficking a New Path Nov 09, 2016

In this New Thinking podcast, Ann Johnson, an assistant district attorney and the human trafficking section
chief with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, discusses her office’s strategies for combating
human trafficking, including increased enforcement against traffickers and buyers, and diversion from prosecution
for victims. One of the office’s diversion programs, SAFE Court, gives those aged 17 to 25 who are charged with
prostitution the opportunity to clear the charge from their criminal records by completing a year-long program of
monitoring and social services. SAFE Court was created with support from a Smart Prosecution grant from the U.S.
Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance. To learn more, visit the Association of Prosecuting Attorney’s
Smart
Prosecution website.

ROB WOLF: Hi. I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications
at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome to another New Thinking podcast. Today I am speaking with Ann Johnson,
who is an Assistant District Attorney with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office in Texas. She is also
the Human Trafficking Section Chief of that office. For those who may not realize, Harris County is where Houston
is located, very large county. Thank you very much, Miss Johnson, for joining me today.

JOHNSON:
Thank you. It’s an honor to be here. It’s an honor to speak with you on behalf of District Attorney Devon
Anderson and the other folks that are working tirelessly to combat human trafficking in the Houston area.

WOLF: You’re here today and tomorrow to observe what goes on here in New York at some courts that are
also working to address human trafficking.

JOHNSON: Yes, we are very fortunate that our SAFE court
team, which is a prostitution diversion court, our defense attorney, our probation officer, our judges and our research
partner and myself have been able to come up and visit two of your companion courts to be able to work with our peers
and exchange ideas and see about the innovations that are taking place here locally.

WOLF: Well,
as I said when I introduced you, you are the Section Chief for the Human Trafficking Division in your office. You
do have a robust program going on there as well. I wanted to talk to you about that. In particular, I thought we
could focus on what you guys are calling the SAFE court, which I understand stands for Survivors Acquiring Freedom
and Empowerment court. I was hoping you could tell me a little bit about how that court got started and what its
goals are.

JOHNSON: The vision for this court actually started about four years ago when then
District Attorney Mike Anderson hired me to come in as a human trafficking specialist. I had been with the DA’s
Office. I had left for health reasons and I was actually doing juvenile defense work and began representing children
who were charged with prostitution. Through the course of that time in private practice, not only did we challenge
a case of an individual charged with prostitution of which the Texas Supreme Court ruled in the case of IN RE: B.W.,
that children are the victims of child prostitution not the offenders.

Myself and District Attorney
Devon Anderson were actually the two founding defense members of a court called GIRLS court, which is for Growing
Independence and Restoring Lives, which assist children at risk of human trafficking, who are in our Juvenile Justice
System between the ages of 10 and 17. With this background, I came back to the DA’s Office in February of 2013
and the commitment at that time was just recognizing that Houston was well known as a hub of human trafficking and
District Attorney Anderson had this vision to see how we could best combat the issue and reenergize our focus within
the DA’s Office.

At the time, we began looking at cases of individuals charged with prostitution
because we knew from the Texas Human Trafficking Prevention Task Force report that the State Department was estimating
that we identify about 0.04% of victims in existence. We knew that we had hundreds of people being charged with the
offense of prostitution. The commitment was to start with the new vision from the legislature, which was that now
in Texas, if you are a victim of human trafficking, it’s a defense to prosecution for prostitution.

Our office has taken this commitment that that’s a defense that we value and want to assist the defense
bar in identifying. We began this new procedure of reaching out to the defense bar, talking with individuals who
were charged with prostitution and helping them identify and disclose a human trafficking defense. We’re very
proud of those efforts, but what we saw is we began to see a population of young offenders who did not technically
have that defense. Yet they got into the gang when they were 13 or 14. They don’t have high school diplomas.
At this point, they’re of an age where they’re willing, but not reaching the level of force, threat, prod
or coercion. We saw a very vulnerable population that legally we were able to prosecute, but inherently we wanted
to do something more.

District Attorney Devon Anderson sought the smart prosecution grant, with
the vision of being, of us targeting this population between 17 and 25, charged with prostitution with the companion
being that we would be evaluated by Sam Houston State University and have a research component to see if we could
come up with a way to divert these folks out of the life.

WOLF: Just to clarify, this smart prosecution
grant comes through the Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance.

JOHNSON: Correct.
We were one of the original recipients of that grant. We were very honored to be part of that initial “Smart Suite”
prosecution and glad that we could create and comply with the Department of Justice in trying to combat the issue
of the vulnerability of human trafficking for people that are caught in the Criminal Justice System.

WOLF:
Also, to clarify, you had said the statute had changed, so the other cohort of people you were talking about, if
they do have a defense of human trafficking, their cases … What happens then? They are dismissed?

JOHNSON:
They are dismissed. The legislature in Texas and people always say, because the case of B.W. was a case of first
impression and they say, “Really? All these reforms are coming out of Texas.” I say, “Absolutely.”
These reforms have come from the Texas Supreme Court, the legislature has given us incredible tools and District
Attorney Devon Anderson has been very committed to this process of leading this charge to not only identify victims,
but to better prosecute pimps and exploiters, such as johns and the demand side. That’s what we’ve been
doing in the office for the last almost four years to combat this issue of human trafficking.

If
they are technically a victim of human trafficking, we dismiss their case. They’re no longer in the Criminal
Justice System and we are dependent on those private public partnerships that can provide services. Where they legally
can be prosecuted, we are still offering them the diversion of working through the court process or working through
a pre-trial diversion contract with our office, so that ultimately their case is being dismissed.

WOLF:
Is that what the SAFE court is?

JOHNSON: That’s what SAFE court is and that’s what we
do with other populations. Our District Attorney Devon Anderson has expanded these efforts beyond this age requirement
of 17 to 25. She says in her leadership is that arrest as recovery, not as conviction. She has a vision to make sure
that we are assisting this population that maybe charged as defendants, who have an underlying vulnerability, who
need our help to get out of the game. That’s important because it not only helps the individual and stops that
revolving door in criminal justice that is not only costly to the person, but it’s costly to the community.
By doing this, we are not only helping people, but we are helping community safety in general.

WOLF:
How do you help them? What services are you offering them?

JOHNSON: When those are in our system,
are with our contract or in SAFE court, the assistance is provided for mental health services or drug treatment services.
We work with the Harris County Probation Department. They work with our private partnerships, which we are very fortunate
to have a number of key partners, such as the Houston Area Women’s Center and the Bridge and other organizations
that many other communities might find already assisting domestic violence population.

Basically
where you see other service providers who are helping those who are vulnerable in the community, that’s a key
partnership that your court can set up and establish with.

WOLF: Do you mandate that participation?
Is that how the court works?

JOHNSON: Yes. By being in the court and I’ll tell you when we
started a lot of people looked at us and said, “You guys are nuts. Why in the world would somebody sign up for
a program where they’re going to have to do basically a year-long probation, when they could take time served
and just take their conviction and go about their business?”

WOLF: It’s voluntary. You
offer them, you say, “You could get a conviction or you could do, follow this mandate and it’ll consist
of this in your case. If you do it, the charges will be dropped, but it’s more work.”

JOHNSON:
Correct. We work with the defense bar and that’s an important key component is the buy in from both the prosecutor
and the defense attorney and we give them the option. “Sure, you have the path within the Criminal Justice System
to have a conviction and go on about your business, but you have this new path, which it’s going to be a harder
walk, but the vision is once you make that walk within the year, your case is dismissed. You can seek an expunction
and not only is it like this never happened, but you have the tools that are provided to help you with those basic
necessities of shelter, of education, of drug treatment.”

People didn’t think we’d
have people sign up, but in the first year, we had many more than we thought we’d have. In fact, we’ve
had 43 so far in the court, when we promised that we would have 20 in the first year. We had such an outpouring of
requests from defendants who wanted to become clients of SAFE court that our district attorney expanded the program
to allow for this alternative pre-trial diversion.

Harris County is in a position that if somebody
wants help from our office, District Attorney Devon Anderson has said, “We’re going to find a way to give
it to you.” That it is a new vision that we are finding is allowing people the ability to get on with their
lives.

We recently had a graduation. We have graduations where we reward people and say, “We’re
glad that you’ve made it out of this program.” Our defense attorney, who works on the court was at a local
restaurant getting lunch and all of a sudden heard her name. She turned back and sure enough it was one of the clients
and one of the graduates. Of course, this individual is thriving and doing well and her children are doing well.
She’s been able to put building blocks in place to be incredibly successful. Those are the kinds of stories
that keep us going and those are the kinds of stories that we hope we can expand to a new population, who in the
old days were being convicted for an offense of which now we recognize there’s a vulnerability that we need
to help assist with.

WOLF: It sounds like you’re basically not only part of this movement
that’s redefining what a charge of prostitution means from someone who is a defendant to someone who is more
like a victim. You’re also redefining the role of a prosecutor because you’re trying to help people not
get, people who in theory have met the definition of a crime and you could technically and you do charge them in
some cases, but you’re trying to help them not have a permanent conviction of their record. That’s a very
different attitude, some might say, for a prosecutor to take.

JOHNSON: It is a different attitude
and we are proud of the fact that it is working. When we came back, and I was in a specialist position back in 2013,
you had more than 2,000 individuals that were prosecuted or charged with the offense of prostitution. At the time,
you had some 56, I’d call them pimps or people that are charged with promoting or compelling individuals into
prostitution. The district attorney’s vision has been that we do this three prong approach of identifying victims,
getting them out of the system and prosecuting pimps, exploiters, who are receiving money and those who are the demand
or the buyers.

We’ve had another very important shift, which is the legislature gave us a
tool last session and redefined the offense of prostitution. People would ask us, “How many seller and how many
buyers are you prosecuting?” Under the law, they were defined in the same way, so we didn’t have the ability
to track that.

WOLF: Everyone was charged with prostitution?

JOHNSON: Everyone
was charged with prostitution.

WOLF: Whether you were selling or buying?

JOHNSON:
Correct. We didn’t have the distinction in Texas yet, so last session we’ve had great leadership from Houston
with Representative Thompson and Senator Whitmire and Senator Huffman, who have led the charge on human trafficking
efforts and have given us this tool to say, “Okay, let’s redefine these individuals.” What we saw
last year, once the law changed, we had 90 people who were charged as buyers.

So far this year,
law enforcement has really kicked in their efforts to try to go after that demand and we’ve been very fortunate
to have great connections with the Houston Police Department and the Harris County Sheriff’s Department, who
have upped the investigation side on demand. This year, as of August 30th, we had 644 cases against johns or the
demand. That’s a critical shift and critical component, which helps us further balance out the interest between
those that are being sold, those that are buying and those individuals who are engaged in the offense of pimping.

We also have a wide variety of tools where we can charge individuals and we most often charge, which people
don’t realize, Texas has gotten this right since the 70’s and Texas had a statute of compelling prostitution
of a minor on the books since 1973. It’s a law that has been there to be utilized and we most often charge under
that offense or that crime because it’s got good case law and it’s a good provision that protects individuals
from being compelled into prostitution, whether you’re a minor or an adult.

We also have
other ranges of aggravated promotion or promotion of prostitution. So far this year, as of August 30th, we had 101
individuals that we had charged with promotion or pimping. We’ve seen a steady decline over the or a steady
decline over the last four years of sellers and an increase every year of cases against pimps, promoters for various
levels of offenses and now buyers, which we can track. It has also meant that we have increased the commitment of
prosecution and so our office is not just a specialist, but now I’m the Human Trafficking Section Chief. We
have wonderful district attorneys that work with us from our felony grade prosecutors of Ana Martinez and Chelsea
Honeycutt to our misdemeanor prosecutors that we have working on the demand side and with our overflow populations.
We now have five prosecutors, an investigator and a paralegal and many of us are on call 24/7 for law enforcement.

WOLF: You mentioned an important component of the smart prosecution grant is that there’s a research
component. That’s the smart in the, you know, that’s what makes it smart, I guess, is trying to find out
what works and what doesn’t. I wonder if there’s anything that you can share with me about the research
partner, Dr. Lisa Muftic and what she has found so far. I know her reports haven’t been finalized yet, but I
just wonder if there’s anything you can share as far as what you’ve learned about how the program’s
going.

JOHNSON: The District Attorney’s Office has attempted many reforms and there’s
a key component of recognizing that data is critical. We, as individuals, have all of these stories of people that
we work with, like the circumstance of the individual in the restaurant, who’s doing very well. We hear those
things, but then we have to look and say, “Okay, but what are our numbers? What’s the big picture?”
We are very fortunate that Dr. Muftic is evaluating our data, looking at the information and also evaluating us and
saying are we doing well and where do we need to evolve. The entire team has been open to doing that.

So
far we have had people stay on track for our four phase graduation. Of course, we’ve had people that have not
made it that we’ve had to evolve and work with and try to figure out how to best assist them. Since we’ve
had this overflow population because we’ve had so much interest, we’ve been able to provide an alternate
pre-trial diversion where they’re not getting the same level of assistance. For example, they’re not getting
the monthly interaction with the judge. They’re not getting that monthly interaction with our probation officer
and our defense attorney, who are dedicated to SAFE court.

So far, what Dr. Muftic has found is
that the population that’s in SAFE court is recidivating at about a third. That overflow population who’s
not getting the intensive services, but at the same high risk level is recidivating at about half. She tells me that
that’s a statistically important distinction. We do know which recidivism rates are something important that
people want to see, are you successful. That’s a good indication of where we’re going, but more importantly
the individual contacts that we’re having with the individuals is we see people that are coming back to the
court. We also have people who are in the court, who develop a trust level with the team and then disclose levels
of human trafficking.

When that happens, at that point, we dismiss and divert them out, but we’re
very proud of what we’ve been able to provide with regard to the trust and relationships between our team and
the clients and being able to give them a path in the future to say, “Hey, I need help.” We measure success
on many levels.

WOLF: It sounds like the fact that it’s been such a, I guess, a popular option
that people have been choosing when given that opportunity has allowed you to enhance the quality of your research
because the original, as you explained before, you can accommodate 27 people actually in the SAFE court, so that
overflow is getting not quite as intensive services and you can see that there is in fact a different long term result
in terms of recidivism. The recidivism is higher for people who aren’t getting the same intensity as the SAFE
court participants.

JOHNSON: Not just that, but the change in approach. For example, in the first
year, when we started the grant, we worked with the defense bar and let them know we, as the DA’s Office, wanted
to reach out to their defendant and see if they were an option. In the first year alone, we had 887 people who were
potentially eligible for the court and so by working with the defense bar and saying, “Hey, may I assist you
with your client? May I help you talk to them?” It opened the door to the client reaching out to us who normally
we know that this population’s vulnerable, that they haven’t had the best interaction with authorities,
that they may have had prior experiences through Children’s Protective Services or bad experiences where they’ve
been taken out of their home or put in foster care or their parents have been incarcerated. That’s usually kind
of a turn off to the system.

By being able to have that connection with the defense attorney to
open the door to the conversation, each year we’ve increased the identification of human trafficking victims.
Last year, not last year, but this year to that date of August 30th, even though we had some 1,000 individuals charged
with selling, we were able to reach out to them and so far had identified 264 victims. That’s a significant
increase over what the State Department suggests we’re doing in the normal process, so we know that this modification
in prosecutor procedure is allowing victims to not be prosecuted. We are equally as proud of that and the fact that
we are able to dismiss a case and not convict an individual. Justice takes many forms and so we’re proud that
we’ve been able to identify that and lead that charge within Harris County.

WOLF: Do they
just say, “I’m a human trafficking victim” or what’s the threshold?

JOHNSON:
Yeah. This is, I think, an interesting dilemma for many counties. One, because of what we’ve been able to do
in Harris County, we are often asked to speak with other individuals and so I’ll go to these meetings where
it’ll be state wide and people will say, “Oh, yeah. You guys in Houston, you have this issue, but we don’t
have this issue.” I’ll always say, “Well, do you have prostitution?” They’ll say, “Yeah,
well we have prostitution.”

My response is, “If you have prostitution, you have human
trafficking. It’s just a function of the type of commercial enterprise, that you’ve got to have some level
of exploitation for individuals.” I’ll have people that’ll say, “My client’s not a victim
of human trafficking.” I’ll say, “Well, how do you know?” They’ll say, “I asked, ‘Are
you a victim of human trafficking?’ And they’ll say, ‘No.'” There are many reasons they
may say, “No.” They may say, “No” because they know that they can’t disclose that information
because their pimp has told them that they can’t, but they may also say “No” because they see the
same public awareness that we do, which is usually the idea of a human trafficking victim is an international child
who’s being held in bondage and they think, “well, that’s not me. I’m 22 and I have a college
degree. Surely, I’m not a human trafficking victim.”

When we conduct our interviews,
we are asking questions, not that straight forward of “Are you a human trafficking victim?” but we ask
other questions that we know when they answer them and they disclose levels of force, threat, prod and coercion,
that they don’t realize that’s what’s happening. We then identify them as human trafficking victims.
We also have the circumstance where the word can get out on the street and say, “Hey, just tell me you’re
a human trafficking victim and your case will get dismissed.” We know that that happens as well. When we conduct
our interviews, we’re not just getting the information, but we were work to corroborate the information. We
find independent sources that corroborate what the individual’s telling us, as opposed to just having someone
telling a version of events. We work very hard to identify, not only based on what the individual’s telling
us, but other secondary information that corroborates the validity behind that.

WOLF: Sounds like
you’re doing amazing work and cutting edge work. I’ve been speaking with Ann Johnson, who is an Assistant
District Attorney in the Harris County District Attorney’s Office. She is also the Section Chief of Human Trafficking
there and that’s where they have developed this amazing model called the SAFE court, Survivors Acquiring Freedom
and Empowerment. If you want to find out more about the SAFE court, you can visit the Association for Prosecuting
Attorneys website, which is working with them on the Smart prosecution grant as well as the Center for Court Innovation’s
website www.courtinnovation.org. I’m sure they can also visit your website, which is …

JOHNSON:
Actually we are still working on our websites, but for those counties that are wanting to do this or looking for
it, the key partnership is the judge and we are very fortunate to have Judge Pam Derbyshire and Justice Bill Boyce,
who have taken this on. Judges are the key and as Doctor Muftic would say in the surveys that we do with our clients,
“Everybody loves the judge.” That’s an important component. Judges have the ability to make this happen.
The DA’s Office is a critical component as well, but there are many judges out there that could start this initiative
and they’re kind of the tip of the spear to be able to combat the issue and treat individuals in this way.

WOLF: There are some inspiring words there, judges. Thank you again for taking the time to talk with me.

JOHNSON: Thank you.

WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center
for Court Innovation. Thank you for listening.

Taking a Collaborative Approach to Addressing Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Justice System Oct 25, 2016

Tshaka
Barrows, deputy director of the Burns Institute, discusses his organization’s collaborative and community-centered
approach to addressing and eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in the justice system. Barrows spoke with Robert
V. Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, after participating in a panel on Race and
Procedural Justice at
Justice Innovations in Times of Change on Sept. 30, 2016.

TSHAKA BARROWS: We
call it a system, but it really isn’t a system. It’s much more of a grouping of semi-autonomous agencies
that have very little accountability to each other.

ROB WOLF: Hi I’m Rob Wolf, Director of
Communications at the Center for Court Innovation and today I’m in North Haven, Connecticut at the Justice Innovation
in Times of Change conference. Sitting down with me is TShaka Barrows who is Deputy Director of the W. Haywood Burns
Institute, which works to address racial and ethnic disparities in the justice system. The institute is based in
Oakland, California. You’ve come a long way to attend the conference and participate and to sit and talk with
me, thank you very much.

BARROWS: I’m glad to be here.

WOLF: Let’s
talk about the work of the Burns Institute and in particular, how you work with jurisdictions to reduce racial and
ethnic disparities in the justice system. You have a specific approach you take to looking at this issue and trying
to address it. Maybe you could summarize for me what that approach is.

BARROWS: At the Burns Institute,
our approach is to build a collaborative of the different agencies that make up the justice system and I always tell
people, I just told the group, we call it a system, but it really isn’t a system. It’s much more of a grouping
of semi-autonomous agencies that have very little accountability to each other. The whole notion of trying to address
disparities has to be done with that context in mind because much of one agencies decision bump into the next, bump
into the next and the impact is felt by the individuals who are going through it and we see it in the disparity numbers.
To really create a strategy to address it you have to have all those key players from each of those agencies as a
part of your collaboration. We also fundamentally don’t think that just having those kind of traditional stakeholders
is enough. Our process requires that we engage meaningful participation from community stakeholders who’ve had
experience with the justice system, who live in the neighborhoods that our data shows are the target neighborhoods,
where more people are coming from, so that they can both bring that experience from having traveled through the system,
though the various agencies, being passed from one to the other, but also what it’s like living in the community
that is targeted for higher involvement for various reasons, policies, policing policies, could be that there’s
a lack of resources, any number of conditional factors.

This whole notion of creating more fair
notion of procedural justice can’t be done without accounting for that fact that certain neighborhoods are much
more highly representative in the system, our process we really aim for participation with community stakeholders,
which is very different. People are a little bit afraid of that. The idea that you’re sitting in a meeting sharing
data with people who are upset with the agency, who did not feel that they were treated fairly, who are angry about
the realities that folks in their community face, is a threatening notion for most traditional stakeholders who already
a conversation of race in this country, typically is a bit unnerving for people, it’s not like that’s a
regular practice that we have.

WOLF: And you literally bring everyone together in the same room?
That’s the process, it’s like, “Let’s all sit down together.” What does that look like,
how many people are actually sitting around a table or in a auditorium?

BARROWS: That’s a
great question. We build a collaborative and it’s a process to even build it. We don’t try to just come
in with a cookie cutter kind of prescription. We want to understand from the local players. Justice happens locally,
there’s culture. Who do they think are the key people they need to be there and how many? So sometimes we may
get huge representation from one agency, where it’s like, “You guys are kind of dominating the meeting.”
and we may need to adjust that so there’s a need to attend to the actual formation. Typically it’s, I’d
say, between 10 to 20 stakeholders depending on the size of the jurisdiction. We work in very small rural places,
they may not have a huge collaboration. I’ve worked in jurisdictions that have had up to 30 people who meet
every month, but that becomes to be a challenge in and of itself because if everybody just introduced themselves
that would take time. For us to have meaningful dialogue about certain issues in a meeting of that size, it can be
a challenge and so we really want to look for a sweet spot that allows for equal representation across the agencies
and doesn’t leave behind any one particular group.

WOLF: What happens then there, what’s
the process? You said every month, so it’s an ongoing … Are you trying to build a permanent infrastructure
for dialogue or is it a time limited, let’s meet for an x number of times to work on this?

BARROWS:
That’s another great question. Our process would be monthly, we hope as we’re setting the jurisdiction
up to maintain the process without us. We do a whole orientation to really try to help everybody to fully participate.
We don’t people just sitting there and they’re like, “I don’t know what this is, I don’t
know what’s going on,” acronyms are flying over their head. We spend time doing coach ups for the community
stakeholders and we also orient the system folks to what the meeting would be like when they have community members
there who might be more frustrated or going to ask lots of questions. Rarely, our systems stakeholder, is very good
at telling the story of their institution and how they’ve got to this point. We have also started working with
them, they’re telling a story, you’ve got to own this. You didn’t do all this, you don’t have
to apologize for the history but you need to own the fact that there were some practices that were not the best that
we were doing and we’ve been working on trying to address, because that engenders a level of respect for the
process and opens up the community to thinking that, “Okay, you really are serious about doing something different.”

WOLF: And when everyone sits down, have they already accepted the premise that there are racial and ethnic
disparities –

BARROWS: Yeah.

WOLF: Or do you also need to establish that as
the facts on the ground?

BARROWS: We will likely re-visit, lot of times people will say, “Oh
yeah, no we’ve all … We understand we have a problem.” And then it’s like, “Let’s talk
about it.” And then we start asking. “What do you think is contributing to the problem?” It’s
one thing to say, “Yeah our jail or our juvenile hall is full of people of color.” It’s another thing
to say, “And we think we have a responsibility for that, we think we’re contributing to that.” When
we ask the question, “What do you think drives this?” Everything but them usually is the response that
we get which let’s us know you probably don’t realize what this is going to feel like and you’re going
to feel like, “Well why are you guys asking us about what our decisions are?” It’s because you have
control over that, you don’t have control over external factors like Hollywood violence and movies, culture
of violence in music, or just the fact that there is this history of segregation in the country. You can’t just
undo that in your collaborative, you don’t quite have the power to say, “You know what, let’s just
change the zoning and all the ways that the neighborhoods are set up and let’s go ahead and make it so that
job discrimination doesn’t happen anymore.”

It’s like those things aren’t
really in the purview of that particular collaborative but their decision making practices are. You can control who
you violate for probation, do you send out bench warrants before actually reaching out to people in their native
language? Do you know if your court letters are landing on folks who couldn’t understand it in the first place
and so now you’re putting a warrant out for someone who never fully engaged in the information in the beginning.
So we then analyze each decision point by race, ethnicity, gender, geography, and offense. It’s a way to understand
that each decision point, what are we doing, what is the impact of our decisions, where are people going, what’s
happening?

WOLF: How do you know what the impact on all those factors you just said at each decision
point, meaning at arrest, or a decision to charge, or a decision to carry a case forward, or a decision to sentencing
or to plea. All those things are decision points right? Do you just ask people, “What do you do?” Or you’re
looking at actual hard data and numbers?

BARROWS: We first go to hard data and numbers if they
have it, often times they don’t. That is a huge problem. We’re also not researchers, this isn’t a
research project. We’re not trying to prove that our data that we’ve got is super accurate. Basically we
use what you have to try to figure out a way forward. Understanding your data might not be perfect. One issue we
see all the time is the issue of ethnicity around Latinos. Very few jurisdictions have a really great practice for
capturing Latinos within their justice system. Typically they get captured as White, so it skews the White population
up and it skews their Latino population down and it throws all the comparisons that we want to make off. There’s
a set of conditions that contribute to it because it’s an ethnic group, people speak Spanish, maybe they don’t.
There’s a lot of factors, they can be very light skin Latinos. One of the things we ask is, “Who decides?
Is it your staff? Do you ask the person directly? What’s the process for the collection of the data?”

Typically once we start to analyze it and show it back to them in meetings, we’ll start to get some
pushback, “Where did you get these numbers, what is this? This is wrong.” It’s like, “These are
your numbers, we got them from you. They may not be as accurate as they could be but this is what we have right now
so let’s get started.” We don’t want to be in the process of never ending cleaning of data, reviewing
the data, and then getting into this adaeration of the questions and throwing this, “What else do we need to
think about, what else?”, versus “I think we know enough.” There’s a tribe on our … We have
a reservation in our county and 30% of the young people in our justice system or 30% of the adults are coming from
that reservation, I think we can start there. Maybe we want a tribal affiliation and we need to go a bit deeper and
those things are helpful but that’s where we like to begin. Once we orient folks to the process, we’ll
do a history, talk about how this country started, how the justice systems are started, give everybody equal understanding
of the playing field, and then what we like to do is start actually looking at data, looking at what they have.

Like I said, we’re not a bunch of researchers. We take people’s dirty data and use it, we’re
not just going to say, ” We can’t go forward until this is pristine.” It’s like, “Well no,
this is what you have right now.” There’s tiers, so the first tier is if you think it’s not clean
enough, what do you need to do to adjust it and we can try to help with some of that but really that needs to be
owned by the jurisdiction. How do you analyze it? Is this a new practice? If it’s new, they might become defensive
when all of a sudden you’re sitting in a meeting with your peers, other agency heads, looking at data that really
shines a light on your staff’s practice in terms of making decisions and feel like, “Well wait a minute,
why is everyone looking at us?” There’s a first group to get baited scrutiny, usually it’s a little
bit raw, because this is a whole new practice. They may not even look at this data regularly internally and so there’s
not a defense in place to explain away what’s happening, there’s this kind of nervousness. That’s
a process in and of itself.

All of this takes time, none of this is fast. Our main goal is to
get to the point where we can have the group establish a target population for racial and ethnic disparities that
they want to move safely out of their system. We keep looking at the decision points, not going to pick the most
politically challenging, we’re not going to look at armed robbery, if you will. A lot of times people are not
ready to say, “Yeah, let’s move those folks out of the system safely.” We’re looking at bench
warrants, violations of probations, offenses that aren’t about overall safety at all but much more about administration
of services, but totally contribute to disparities in real ways, so you can imagine.

WOLF: So
then you get consensus and you say, “We’re going to target -“

BARROWS: We’re
going to work on these target populations.

WOLF: People who’ve violated probation or young
people or something that -“

BARROWS: We try to show it as a number per month. What I don’t
want to do is say, “Yeah, each year you have 500 violations of probation and 50% of those are Black male and
from these two neighborhoods.” Over the course of the whole year, how do you understand what your work is? What
I like to say is, “Okay, and of that per year how many is that per month? What are we actually talking about
on a monthly basis? Can we dig deeper to understand how these live?”

Now we’re looking
at each month and maybe 25, 30 people were violated. Let’s understand the nature of that, what are the probation
officer’s perspectives on this, what programs were they in? You want to then, we call it peeling back the onion,
you get down to this target. Now you want a focus group, you want to bring line staff, you want to talk to people
directly who have been in that experience and you’re looking for not just a policy change but you’re trying
to understand what kind of innovation or intervention can we come up with to move this.

WOLF:
It sounds though like it’s on a very … I don’t want to say small scale, but you have to target this group
and that group in terms of making a difference. It’s not like, “Here’s a solution.” And it ripples
throughout the whole system and disparities.

BARROWS: No, you have to monitor and track it. It’s
everything you said and you have to monitor and track – Literally we’ve come in and people said, “Yeah
we have disparities. 81% of our inmates are African American.” And it’s like, “Okay, well what else
do you know about it?” “Nothing.”

What could you do? You’re just going to
say, “Oh, let’s just release 81% of the inmates and reduce the disparity.” Nobody’s going to
do that. They get their hands tied. We have all this big picture data, annual shots, none of it helps people to know
what to do to move forward. We’ve developed a strategy and approach that really breaks it down into workable
pieces and we even have a slide that we go through that really shows people if it’s a state law and that’s
the reason why this person is locked up, you can’t change that. But if it’s a policy that you just detain
people for this because you feel strongly, well you can stop that tomorrow. That’s just an internal office policy,
that’s not a state law. Understanding how these things play out is really crucial but it takes time, it takes
that investigative work. You have to include the people who do the work on the day to day, the line staff not just
the supervisors and managers, these are people that are trying to make it work.

WOLF: I want to
ask one more question but I think it’s probably a complicated one that has a long answer. How do deal with the
issue of implicit bias? Everything that you’ve described to me is something you could see on paper and go, “Oh,
look at this number, look at this policy, you put these together and that equals a disproportionate or disparity.”
What about these things that are more intangible yet that we know impact at these decision points. Why someone, they
decide to charge someone with … Give someone a higher charge and someone not a higher charge. If there is bias
involved and it’s happening in the back of their heads and they don’t even know it, how do you address
that?

BARROWS: Well because we can do case level analysis we can could show two similar situations
and say, “Let’s talk about … How did you make this decision here? Why did you make this decision?”
And not try to label someone and say, “We’ve caught you.” We’d rather show them what they’re
doing and see if they themselves can see these patterns. We also bring in community people in the meeting you are
going to naturally see those patterns because that’s their experience. They’ll ask the question very directly
to say, “I don’t think that that makes sense.” You need that person who’s not going to play so
much by the rules to say, “Why do we do that? That doesn’t seem to make sense.” or “Why is that
in this neighborhood?”

I’ll give you an example. In one city we worked in, in a particular
area of town, any Latino kid with a marker was considered in a gang and was writing gang messages on the walls and
creating potential shootings. It was a narrative that turned into an automatic hold for any Latino kid with a Sharpie.
Somewhere there’s bias loaded into that but if you just came in the door and said, “You guys are racists
and you’re picking on Latino males,” you’re going to run into a lot of opposition. It’s another
thing to start peeling it back to say, okay, well this is some of what we’re hearing from your own staff, public
defenders, certain judges see these kids with markers and they think gang membership. Everybody kind of follows suit
but when we’ve actually looked at it, that’s not the case. And try to come at it in a way where people
are going to be able to listen and hear.

WOLF: Absolutely fascinating, sounds like you’re
doing amazing work.

BARROWS: Trying to, trying to.

WOLF: They’re very
difficult and complicated issues.

BARROWS: Yeah.

WOLF: I’ve been speaking
with Tshaka Barrows who’s the Deputy Director at the Burns Institute in Oakland, California which is working
to address and diminish and eradicate racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system. Thank you so
much for taking the time to talk with me.

BARROWS: Thank you.

WOLF: I’m
Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation here at the Quinnipiac University School
of Law for our Justice Conference and thank you very much for listening.

Reuben J. Miller, assistant professor of social work at the University of Michigan, and his research collaborator
Hazelette Crosby-Robinson participate in a panel at — **The Potential for Bias in Risk-Assessment Tools: A Conversation** Oct 19, 2016
In this New Thinking podcast, Reuben J. Miller, assistant professor of social work at the University of Michigan,
and his research collaborator Hazelette Crosby-Robinson discuss some of the criticisms that have been leveled against
risk assessment tools. Those criticisms include placing too much emphasis on geography and criminal history, which
can distort the actual risk for clients from neighborhoods that experience an above-average presence of policing
and social services. “Geography is often a proxy for race,” Miller says. Miller and Crosby-Robinson spoke
with the Center for Court Innovation’s Director of Communications Robert V. Wolf after they participated in
a panel on the “The Risk-Needs-Responsivity Framework” at Justice Innovation in Times of Change, a regional summit on Sept. 30, 2016
in North Haven, Conn.

Reuben J. Miller,
assistant professor of social work at the University of Michigan, and his research collaborator Hazelette Crosby-Robinson
participate in a panel at “Justice Innovation in Times of Change,” a regional summit.

WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications
at the Center for Court Innovation and today with me at the Justice Innovation in Times of Change Conference here
at the Quinnipiac School of Law in North Haven, Connecticut are two of the panelists who participated in a discussion
about risk needs assessment tools. They are Professor Reuben Miller, who is an assistant professor of social work
at the School of Social Work at the University of Michigan and his research assistant at the School of Social Work,
Hazelette Crosby-Robinson. Thank you so much for taking the time after your panel to sit down and talk
with me.

MILLER: Thank you for having us.

WOLF: So, I wanted to
just start off talking about the risk assessment tools and some of the criticisms that have been leveled against
them because, as we heard on the panel from Sarah Fritsche, a colleague of mine at the Center for Court Innovation,
their use has exploded and they’ve been embraced as a decision-making tool in the criminal justice setting.

MILLER: Sure.

WOLF: But you raised some potential concerns about them and some of their
limitations and I wondered if you could share what some of those limitations are as you see them.

MILLER:
Sure, I’m happy to. So, Hazelette is my research associate and collaborator. She’s super modest.

So, I’d like to first preface this by saying, some scholars have suggested that we’ve really entered
an actuarial age. So it’s not just risk assessment in criminal justice, but a whole cost benefits calculus,
a whole risk calculus that’s based on actuarial models that try to predict future harm. So they try to predict,
much like an insurance company would try to predict the future risk of a car accident. In a criminal justice setting,
these risk needs assessments are trying to, one, gauge the needs of incarcerated individuals or people who have been
convicted of a crime to try to figure out where they could shore up deficits in their skill sets or in their general
stability. So for example, they might examine things like housing stability, or whether or not one was employed,
or what kinds of service needs they may have. So for example, if one has a history of substance use and abuse, that
would indicate that they need treatment or some sort of intervention based around these things.

And
at the same time, they’re trying to gauge the risk of re-offense, so the risk that they will commit a crime.
So there are a number of criticisms. The literature that engages this is fairly long. I tend to think about some
of the movers and shakers in this field, Kelly Hannah-Moffat, Bernard Harcourt, Sonia Star, Faye Taxman. Faye Taxman’s
work is actually helping us to think about important ways that we can implement risk assessment that reduce some
of the biases that are sort of baked into it, but just to talk about some of the critiques that have come from this
literature and of course my own, on the one hand there are static factors like where one lives, so geography, their
prior criminal history. These are things that they can’t avoid. And the privileging of recidivism as an indicator
of success. These are all problematic for the following reasons.

So geography is often a proxy
for race. We know that we live in a country that has a pattern of residential racial segregation. And we know that
policing and criminal justice resources of all kinds are overwhelmingly distributed in areas where poor people of
color tend to live. The problem is, people are now being arrested from, returned to, and even given programs designed
to rehabilitate them all within low income communities. Very bounded geographic districts. And so what you get is,
you get the overwhelming concentration of criminal justice resources, and you get a signaling of what that all means.
So if the substance abuse treatment house is located in a neighborhood, then that tells me that there’s substance
abusers there. Right? And so that signals narcotics forces to the community. It says something about the community.
Halfway houses are also overwhelmingly there. And so one must think about what the concentration of these things
do. So now okay, as it relates to risk. Being in a neighborhood like this triggers a higher risk score. It is indeed
one of the measures of risk, and so in that way it’s a proxy for race. Sorry, I know I’m talking quite
a bit, but –

WOLF: No, and just to kind of summarize though, or to recap what you’ve said
so far, the way risk assessment tools work, they place a high value on the location someone’s from. They place
a high value on their history with arrest.

MILLER: That’s absolutely right.

WOLF:
And so, if there’s a preponderance of enforcement there, some people are more likely to have an arrest record
or –

MILLER: The study from Stop and Frisk made this abundantly clear. That even when people aren’t
doing anything wrong they’re being overwhelmingly stopped if they’re black or Latino. And so we know that
criminal justice contact increases the likelihood that one will be arrested. And so anyway, this is a big problem
of using prior arrest records for example and even prior conviction records, so now you’ve got a bunch of arrests.
By the time you get to the prosecuting attorney, they’re going to say, Look, you’ve been arrested 14 times.
“Well, I’ve been arrested 14 times but never charged.” No, but you have a history of arrest, and so
I’m going to now charge you because I see a pattern. This is how statistical discrimination might work, or does
in fact work in practice. So now the prosecuting attorney sees a pattern. Sends it before the judge, who looks at
this pattern and interprets it to make a decision about the length of the sentence when the conviction is read, as
is a jury if it ever goes to trial. 97% of cases never go to trial, but when it goes to trial, juries are presented
with the same evidence of patterns which have more to do with where the police are concentrated than what people
are actually doing.

WOLF: So what do you say to the notion that these instruments are validated?
That they predict? This information, whether there’s a potential bias incorporated into them, they still can
predict six months to a year out whether someone is going to recommit a crime.

MILLER: Yes, with
great reliability. But it’s a population being normed against itself. And so, overwhelmingly concentrate criminal
justice resources in a particular neighborhood, which leads to more arrests, which leads to more convictions, which
leads to more imprisonment. Then I look at those who were imprisoned, and I use that to validate my measures. So
the problem, is this sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, this feedback loop, this is one problem.

Another
problem is that, and Kelly Hannah-Moffat points this out brilliantly, correlation and causation are very different
things. It’s like the standard social science response that any bench chair social scientist gives when they
look at two relationships and people use that as some sort of cause, but likelihood that particular groups of people
are more likely to commit a crime, doesn’t mean that having committed a crime in the past means you actually
will commit a crime. And so what we’re doing is, we’re treating relationship as if it’s a cause, as
if it’s a fact. And so I will sentence you now based on my assumption of your future danger to commit a crime
based on a set of assumptions that I use to justify the overwhelming concentration of police to begin with. Police
aren’t the culprits here. It’s a rationality, it’s a way to approach problems, that I think must be critically
investigated.

WOLF: And you also pointed out in your presentation that perhaps the cultural context,
the environment and the changing policy culture where for instance, marijuana arrest which were so vigorously pursued
several years ago are now considered a low priority, or they’re not even being done anymore. And yet, people
have a record of those arrests and if history of arrest is a factor, someone in the audience also questioned this,
should we drop those particular kind of arrests as a factor because we don’t care about them anymore? Do they
indicate further likelihood of going against the law or are they just something someone did because they like marijuana
and that’s it?

MILLER: That’s right. And this is a part of the rigidity of risk assessment.
This is rigidity of risk categories. So to place one in a category, you are an offender. And in Michigan, where I’ve
done a lot of research and where I’ve worked, habitual offenses … and it’s not like this in Michigan,
but it’s like this in many, many states, most states I would argue … being a habitual offender means more
time, greater risk, more punishment.

CROSBY-ROBINSON: Up to life.

MILLER: Absolutely.
So what does it mean to habituate? What am I looking at? Well, if I’m not being careful about the criminal codes,
if I’m not carefully examining what I considered a crime at a given moment in time, and adjusting my instrument
for that. Which must happen, probably, annually. If I’m not adjusting my instrument for that, if not quarterly. If
I’m not adjusting that for different understandings of what is right and wrong, then what I’ll end up doing
is habituating someone. Giving them longer sentences, giving them harsher treatment, deeper levels of punishment,
or indicating they need deeper levels of intervention.

WOLF: So tell me what recommendations you’d
make. Because you also made a point in the panel that there are some good things about risk assessment. They do take
away discretion form judges or people whose own bias might lead them to make the wrong decisions?

MILLER:
Absolutely. The benefit of risk assessment is to use it to avoid the criminal record to begin with. This one bit
of it. So if you have low risk, low leverages, as my colleague pointed out earlier today, then you are not indicated
for intervention of any kind. And it’s better to just release these folks without intervention of any kind.

WOLF: Right, and that’s what the research supports.

MILLER: The research supports
it, absolutely. So what risk assessment allows … the careful prosecutor, judge, public defender, et cetera to do
is to remove some of the discretion, because much of the decisions that are being made are based on a gut feeling.
So I am reading something in the defendant. They don’t have remorse, or they haven’t shown accountability
for their actions, or they have, as one of the panelists raised, belligerent interactions, let’s say with their
parent or the prosecuting attorney or the defendant. And my assessment is happening divorced from what it means to
actually be in court in that moment in time. How might a child, 17 years old, respond to facing 20 years in prison?
How should they respond? Should they be depressed, sad, angry, avoidant? What are our expectations in this moment.
And so risk assessment, what it allows us to do is say, Okay, let me take a step back, let me look at what actually
happened. Let me get away from my intuition, let me think about a more objective way to assess how this defendant
should be treated.

An interesting note … So here it is. We can use smart risk assessments to
think carefully and critically about how we treat offenders, what level of intervention that we lay out whether that
intervention be prison, or jail time, or a diversion program, or a treatment group. There’s no perfect way to
do this which is why constant reevaluation is necessary. You can’t settle, this is the instrument for me. You
can’t settle. It’s not the instrument for you –

CROSBY-ROBINSON: Continuous improvement.

MILLER: Continuous improvement.

WOLF: And maybe testing … if I understood what Sarah
Fritchey said, my colleague the researcher for the Center of Court Innovation, that you also can test these instruments
within certain populations and see, are they producing more negative outcomes for an African-American population?
And ask these questions that you’re asking to weed out the bias that might be built into that.

MILLER:
Absolutely. The questions that we’re raising are in some ways a set of philosophical questions but they’re
questions about the application, the use of, the embrace of, instruments to determine whether or not someone is a
future danger. Perhaps this is just the wrong approach altogether. Not the risk assessment … not that one doesn’t
need to think about ways that they can help predict behaviors of individuals. I think that’s useful in some
ways, but it certainly needs to be challenged, it needs to be questioned. What am I predicting? Who am I predicting
this for? What are the possibilities for this person once these predictions are made? These are questions that need
to be addressed.

WOLF: So, Miss Crosby-Robinson, let me ask you, as we talk about these kinds
of assessments, you bring to bear your own set of experiences with the correctional system as a researcher and you’re
own past history which you refer to on the panel as someone who had been formerly incarcerated. And I wonder what
insights that had allowed you to bring to bear to this notion? Presumably a long time ago they didn’t have these
risk assessments, I don’t know … when you were initially had your first contact with the correctional system,
the justice system. And now they do and you’ve had a lot of contact and opportunity to interview and spend time
with people are incarcerated and I wonder where you come down on this issue?

CROSBY-ROBINSON:
Well, first of all, I think it’s a good idea to have a risk assessment, as Ruben has said earlier, because it
removes some of this pressure from judges and prosecutors to make these decisions based on their own personal bias
or how they’re feeling at the time. But what it does not account for are all of the little various innuendos
that a person is going through when they come out. Family reunification can create a stressor. If somebody’s
coming out and they have to be paroled to a family address, a suitable relative for placement. So they’re coming
to this family address, but the family address that the parole officers decided that the person can parole to is
not really the best environment, and sometimes the issues that they had that led to their incarceration stem from
the family issues that they were having at the time. Or it’s not in the right environment or they don’t
have really enough support from their family. And things happen because lives are fluid and things change.

For instance, we interviewed a person who was 17 years old and she was pregnant. She had a mental illness,
she’d been in the mental health system since she was 8 years old. She lived with her grandmother. We interviewed
people three times, as soon as they were discharged and then 30 days after they’d been out. Then 60 days and
90 days. And so, following her, by the time we got to her third interview, her grandmother dies. She’s living
in her grandmother’s house. This is the only stable person she’s known in her life. Her grandmother has
raised her since 9 years old. She just had a baby, the baby isn’t even a year old yet. Now she’s 18 years
old, she has a mental illness, and she’s relying on that system to become her support now where her grandmother
was everything. Well, these are things that a risk assessment would just not pick up. Because you never know what’s
going to happen. So now what happens to this individual? We’re at the end of the time that we follow this person
for our study. But you know, the question is in our mind, what happens?

And another thing that
I find frustrating, is no matter what your risk assessment is and if you get it right or not, then when a person
who gets out into the community, whatever the risk assessment decided that they need as a support or an intervention,
there’s no community resource for that.

WOLF: The theme I’m hearing from both of you
is that these risk needs assessment tools cannot be judged or effectively used apart from the environment, whether
it’s the environment that created the measurements of risk, or the needs. Because if you can identify the needs
and say great, but if you don’t have the resources in the community it’s meaningless information.

MILLER: So, Faye Taxman has a great paper. She finds that, on the need side of things, substance abuse treatment
is indicated in about 90% of the folks who were justice involved, but the capacity to provide the treatment, either
in prison or out. Something like 25% of folks in prison were able to actively engage in regular substance abuse treatment
that needed it. And so what this does is it creates another deficiency that one might judge or regard as a part of
the risk of this individual recidivate. Did you complete programming? What was programming available, either in prison
or out?

WOLF: Well, this had been a very vigorous and interesting conversation and I really appreciate
you’re both taking the time to speak to me about your work.

MILLER: Yeah, thanks for having
us.

WOLF: So, I’ve been speaking with Professor Reuben Miller, assistant professor of social
work at the School of Social Work at the University of Michigan and his research assistant and collaborator, Hazelette
Crosby-Robinson and we’re all here today in New Haven at Quinnipiac University school of law for the Conference
of Justice Innovation in Times of Change, which is sponsored by the Center for Court Innovation and the Department
of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance and hosted by Quinnipiac University. You can find out more about risk
needs assessment and criminal justice reform in general at our website, www.courtinnovation.org. I’m Rob Wolf,
thanks for listening.

Fairness, Procedural Justice, and Domestic Violence: A Conversation with Judge Jeffrey Kremers Aug 30, 2016

In this New Thinking podcast, Judge Jeffrey Kremers of the Milwaukee County Circuit Court
brings procedural justice to bear on domestic violence. Sharing his insights from the bench, Judge Kremers talks
about the importance of procedural justice for both defendants and survivors as well as their families, and discusses
strategies for addressing the unique challenges posed by domestic violence cases.

This podcast was supported by Grant No. 2015-TA-AX-K023 awarded
by the Office on Violence Against Women, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, or recommendations expressed
in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Justice,
Office on Violence Against Women.

AVNI MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Hello. You’re
listening to the New Thinking podcast. I’m Avni Majithia-Sejpal from the Center for Court Innovation. Today,
I’m joined by Judge Jeffrey Kremers. He is a judge of the Milwaukee County Circuit Court in Wisconsin, and we
will be talking about the intersections of procedural justice and domestic violence. Judge Kremers, welcome.

JUDGE JEFFREY KREMERS: Thank you. I’m glad to take part in this podcast this afternoon.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Let’s start with procedural justice, which refers to the experiences of defendants, litigants, victims, and
others within the justice system, and suggests that these experiences have a direct impact on justice. Procedural
justice emphasizes the importance of good communication, clarity, respect, and objectivity or freedom from bias.
Research has shown that when people believe that they were treated fairly, they’re more likely to comply with
court orders regardless of the outcome of their cases.

So, Judge Kremers, why is procedural justice
important to you, and in your experience as a judge, have you witnessed its impact on the people in cases who come
through your court?

KREMERS: Our mantra in the criminal courts in Milwaukee is that every interaction
is an opportunity to reduce harm. If that’s our goal, to not only do justice, but also more importantly in terms
of your question, be perceived as doing justice, then I want to make sure that people have a voice, meaning they
can be heard, that we understand each other, that is they understand what I am telling them, and I understand what
they are telling me or asking me. That the court system is neutral in all respects, that’s gender neutral, race
neutral, wealth-based neutrality, and that everyone from defendants, victims, witnesses, staff, lawyers, the public,
are all treated respectfully. Then, of course, I need to use the tenants of procedural justice.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Over the years, you have worked extensively with the issue of domestic violence and have presided over a specialized
domestic violence court. What are the typical cases that you see?

KREMERS: I preside in a criminal
court, which means I handle any criminal case from a disorderly conduct up through attempt murder, where the parties
involved have been in a domestic relationship, meaning they’ve either lived together or they have a child together,
and the criminal act is between those two parties. They might be married, in which case there may be a parallel family
court case going on, which seek to resolve the issues of custody or visitation or physical placement of the children.
There might be a civil order of protection or an injunction in place, which will also be impacted by the criminal
case. There very often are children involved, so children’s court may be involved, the Bureau of Child Welfare
may be involved.

All of those other parts of the system may impact what we’re doing, but
in my court, the focus is on whether or not the State can prove the criminal allegations they’ve brought against
the defendant. That also brings into play issues of no contact and the fact that, in many cases, the defendant is
the bread winner in the family, so there are issues of financial support for the victim. There’s emotional support.
All of those things can come into play in the handling of a criminal case.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: How
would you say procedural justice can apply to cases like this, especially when there are families and children involved,
and safety is a primary concern?

KREMERS: Safety is always the number one concern in any domestic
violence case, but at the same time, we’re dealing with a very complicated situation because in every other
kind of criminal case, or almost every other kind of criminal case, the victim and the defendant are strangers or
at least don’t have the same dynamics as a domestic violence kind of case. But here, there are very mixed feelings
that the victim comes in with, and sometimes they just want the violence to stop. They really don’t want the
defendant to go to prison or jail. They still love the person. They still want the person to be around for the children.
So there are these kinds of mixed emotions on the part of victims.

In addition, our system of
justice gives out mixed messages. In family court, or even in children’s court, the idea is how do we unify
these two parties or this family? How do we get them back together? Whereas in a criminal case, the push is more
towards how do we separate them safely? How do we get this victim to move on, or the defendant to move on, where
the victim doesn’t want to be in contact with the person anymore? So the messages are kind of mixed between
what they might hear in family court, family unification, and what they hear in the criminal court, no contact. That
is a difficult conversation to have and a difficult path to weave as you handle the case.

It’s
all the more critical that we employ the really strong principles of procedural justice because it’s how you
say it and how you explain it that become so critical to both parties, the defendant and the victim, and anybody
else who’s connected to the case.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: When you’re concerned about the safety
of victims in your courtroom, how do you balance the victims against the defendants, particularly with the view of
asserting your neutral position?

KREMERS: The way I would respond to that is to say that I don’t
believe there’s anything incompatible with the principles of procedural justice in addressing both victims’
safety and defender accountability. I think we can do both if we focus on how we address the issues that are before
the court, and keep in mind those principles that I stated before of voice, and neutrality, and understanding, and
respect, and therefore, focus on how we do what we do in court and not so much on the what or the why. Those are
important, obviously. Determining what somebody did, whether it amounts to a criminal violation or not, and why they
did it, in terms of focusing on an appropriate sentence, are all obviously critical to the outcome of the case.

But equally critical is how we go about doing that. The relationships that bring people to our court are
almost never single incident cases, and you cannot address the event that’s in front of you without an understanding
of the relationship that brought the people to you. If you can’t talk to people and get them to tell you what’s
going on in a way that they feel safe telling, they feel like they’re being heard, then you really don’t
understand the context, and therefore, can’t really address the situation no matter what the outcome of the
case is.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Procedural justice is usually framed from the perspective of defendants,
but with domestic violence cases, victims are extremely important to the case. What are some of the challenges that
you think they face within the court system?

KREMERS: One of the biggest challenges that victims
face, for example, is the notion that “Why did she stay with him? Why did she dismiss a protection order? Why
didn’t she cooperate last time he was charged with beating her up? And why should we believe her now? Or why
should the system help her now when she didn’t give us an opportunity to help her before?” It’s almost
paternalistic, and it comes back to them in the form of prejudice or bias.

If I’ve learned
anything about procedural fairness, it is that it really applies to everyone who comes in contact with the court
system, from victims, defendants, lawyers, witnesses, the public, the staff, everyone. We have to develop strategies
that focus on the needs and the import of each of those individuals or groups of individuals, so that signage and
how we treat people when they come in the building to primarily how our staff in the courts treats people.

With respect to victims and their children, we have had problems. Certainly every court that I’ve been
in has had problems with how victims get treated in the courts, and that’s at the clerk’s officer when
they’re filling out paperwork, and the district attorney’s office, and the courts themselves when they
check in. Whether it’s the bailiff or the clerk of court or the court reporter, they all have to understand
that their body language, their facial expressions, the way they answer questions, are all critical events in the
life of that victim. The challenge for us in the system is to treat every single case as though it’s the first
one we’ve ever heard, but with the experience of all the cases we’ve ever heard behind us.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
What about challenges to do with paperwork, technical language?

KREMERS: Within our system, most
of those issues are addressed because the district attorney’s office has a very strong victim advocate program
where every victim in a domestic violence case is assigned an advocate who helps them navigate the court system.
So if there are papers that need to be filled out for victim compensation, for example, or if they want to get a
restraining order or an injunction, there’s another set of advocates. When they come to court, the victim advocate
is there, and they have a separate waiting room where they can wait and not sit in the courtroom in the presence
of the defendant or his family or friends or whatever the case may be. That kind of a support system for victims,
I think is critical.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Do you come across victims who are also dealing with questions
of immigration? How does that complicate domestic violence cases, and particularly the question of procedural justice?

KREMERS: We deal with a number of victims and defendants who have immigration issues. It is a significant
complicating issue in those cases. Victims are very reticent to participate or cooperate because they’re afraid
that they’re going to be deported or held. And that’s just the ones who we know about. There are lots of
other instances of domestic violence where there are immigration issues, and the victim doesn’t even report
it to the police because they’re afraid. And, of course, the victim plays on that, and I’ve seen it in
court. I had a case last week where the victim indicated that the defendant was holding her papers and would not
give them back unless she dropped the charges. So I had to address that by telling him that we were going to have
a bail hearing, and if the victim doesn’t have all of her papers back they then, I would consider that as an
aggravating factor in determining his bail. So it’s a complicating factor.

I think more than
and bigger than immigration issue is cultural competence. It’s one thing to understand the immigration implications
of what’s going on, but it’s even a bigger question for us to understand what the cultural issues are:
Why do they act the way they do in court? Why do they come into the court the way they do? Why do they not come into
court? What is their expectation? It’s particularly heightened in those communities that are very close-knit
and relatively compact. I think it’s incumbent on judges and staff to be culturally competent and to see how
those issues play out not only in the way they act in court, but also what our culture is and how we, therefore,
interpret what they do, or how we see what they do, or how we hear what they say. Because if we’re letting our
culture get in the way of understanding their culture, then procedural justice just goes out the window.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: As faculty at the National Judicial Institute on Domestic Violence, you’ve been involved
in efforts to train other judges. Can you talk about what you pass on to judges regarding domestic violence and procedural
justice?

KREMERS: I’d go back to my first answer about making sure they understand what the
principles of procedural justice are in terms of neutrality, and voice, and respect, and understanding, and that
judges understand the context of what’s happening in front of them. That they learn how to listen and not assume.
I think it’s critical to understand that how you talk to a defendant or a victim has a lot of say, I believe,
about whether they’re going to come back in your court. We know that domestic violence is a learned behavior,
so if they can learn it, they can unlearn it, and that starts with how they are treated in court. If I just call
them a name and talk down to them, or be disrespectful to them, you can see it in their eyes. They just shut down.

I watched a judge do a guilty plea one time, and if I gave you the transcript of the guilty plea, you’d
say “That was perfect. He asked every question he should have asked, and he got a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’
answer every place he should.” But I was sitting in that courtroom, and I watched the judge do it. He never
once looked at the defendant. Never once. He was just on autopilot. When that defendant got up and walked past me,
he didn’t know I was a judge, he’s just talking out of the courtroom with some family member, and he said,
“That,” using a profanity, “never looked at me, didn’t pay any attention to me.” That’s
a perfect example of an opportunity lost to try and make a connection with a defendant.

So I always
ask defendants, “Why do you think this happened? What do you think you need to do to change?” I then will
talk to them about what they said to me, and why they did what they did, and what caused it. Now they’re in
a position where they’re willing to listen and to talk about it. That’s the kind of message that I try
and give to the judges at the institute.

The last one, I guess, that I say again and again is
every interaction you have with the defendant and the victim is an opportunity to reduce harm in your community.
Don’t waste that opportunity.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: On that concluding note, Judge Kremers, thank
you for sharing your experiences and insights on this very complex subject.

KREMERS: Thank you.
It’s my pleasure.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: This is Avni Majithia-Sejpal, and you’ve been listening
to the New Thinking podcast. To hear more of our podcasts, you can visit www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for joining
us.

Foundations Can Support Justice Reform, If You Know How to Ask: A Conversation with James Lewis Aug 19, 2016

Private foundations are an overlooked resource for innovative justice programs. James H. Lewis, senior
program officer and director of research and evaluation at the Chicago
Community Trust, offers insight into how foundations make funding decisions and shares tips for attracting
foundation investments in justice programs. The interview was conducted by the Center for Court Innovation’s
Director of Communications Robert V. Wolf at Community Justice 2016, where Lewis participated in a panel on “Funding
Change.”

JAMES H. LEWIS: Individual foundations generally can be more flexible and
creative in what they’re doing than government can because you don’t have, the accountability is to a much
smaller group of people in a foundation who can make their own decisions, because it is private money and not taxpayer
money.

ROB WOLF: Hi. I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation
and I am at Community Justice 2016 in Chicago, Illinois where over 400 people have gathered to talk about justice
reform and are sharing strategies for how they can improve the justice system.

Right now I’m
sitting down with someone who participated in a break-out session that focused particularly on funding. James H.
Lewis is the Senior Program Officer and Director of Research and Evaluation at the Chicago Community Trust. And,
James, I thought maybe you could just briefly explain to listeners what the Chicago Community Trust is.

LEWIS: The Chicago Community Trust is the Chicago region’s community foundation and community foundations
are an aggregation of different gifts from families and individuals that are made for the benefit of a specific place.
And we take those together, we manage those funds, and then make grants from them just as any foundation would.

It’s distinctive because the corpus of our money does come from a lot of different families rather
than from a single family, like the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gates Foundation where it’s
a single family that gave. We are about 800 of those combined.

But we make grants like anyone
else. They do need to be for projects that are predominantly to the benefit of residents of Cook County here in Illinois.

WOLF: You do in fact have a geographic focus, Cook County which is where Chicago is located and surrounding
suburbs?

LEWIS: Yeah, yeah. Most community foundations are chartered that way, but a lot of family
ones are too. Chicago has a lot of just what you would think of as conventional foundations that have in their mission
that they serve residents of Chicago or residents of a particular suburb or wherever that family had value.

WOLF: We’re here at Community Justice 2016 so the word community, I don’t think is a superficial
nexus here, community justice programs often have a geographic focus as well. So I wonder, as programs that are activated
by notions of community justice and they are focusing on particular neighborhoods, does it make sense for them to
look and see if there is a community trust or a community foundation that might be servicing the same neighborhood?
Is there a natural synchronicity there and might that be a potentially successful route for them to find funding?

LEWIS: I think they should certainly look to see that. Community foundations in different communities really
vary by how much discretionary giving they have. We’re fortunate to have an awful lot of unrestricted money
that we can use for projects of our own choosing. Many community foundations are much more donor driven, and so the
donors have left instructions with the foundation on how to spend it and in those cases there is less room for creativity
in what you’re going to do. So while I think it’s great for anybody with a project to look to their local
community foundation, I certainly wouldn’t limit myself to that. I would also investigate other foundations
of any sort that had in their mission to serve that neighborhood, community, city, region as a priority.

WOLF: Basically, you’re a foundation like any foundation then. That’s kind of what you were saying.

LEWIS: Yeah, from the grantee’s point of view, from the applicant’s point of view we look like
any other. We have guidelines, we have applications, we make grant decisions periodically through the year. So from
the outside we look like any other foundation.

WOLF: And so do you have any advice or suggestions
for community justice initiatives, many of them are government or court or maybe police or prosecutor lead programs.
They might not necessarily be eligible to obtain grant money, but they may have partners, non-profit partners that
are, and they may be less familiar with reaching out to a private foundation than they are perhaps reaching out to
the government or the Department of Justice to apply for grants. So do you have any advice for them about approaching
a foundation versus perhaps a government agency to obtain or apply for money?

LEWIS: Yeah. I think
the main difference is that individual foundations generally can be more flexible and creative with what they’re
doing than government can because you don’t have, the accountability is to a much smaller group of people in
a foundation who can make their own decisions because it is private money and not taxpayer money. And so those individual
foundations aren’t bound by the same kinds of laws and rules and appropriations and budgets that governments
are. The decisions within the foundation on which projects to make grants on aren’t bound by generally a blind
reading of the applications or a jury decision, those kinds of things that are typical of the way government RFPs
are usually done.

It’s much more about whether in the view of a program officer or an executive
director of that foundation whether something that’s proposed makes sense to them, is something that they think
is going to be impactful, something they think that their board of directors of their foundation will be proud to
have their money on. So I think it’s a place to take, my advice is to take your creative ideas, take the things
that you don’t think the government will fund, take the things that might be a little risky, those kinds of
things are the things the foundations do best.

WOLF: And it sounds like there’s more of a
human touch there you’re saying, rather than there being a blind review process. You’re more directly engaged.
Would you perhaps visit a place before you give them a grant rather than just taking a paper application and making
a decision based on a blind or anonymous information?

LEWIS: Yeah. I think that’s a really
important factor for anyone trying to understand foundations, in fact, is that very much so. And in most instances
for somebody you’re funding you will in fact meet with them, and in most instances with most foundations there’s
an opportunity to negotiate what you want to do with that program officer. And it’s not like the typical government
RFP where you send in the thing and it’s adjudicated and you get one bite at that apple.

With
the foundation, if you send in a proposal and the foundation program officer finds it interesting, maybe it’s
not exactly what they were looking for but it’s interesting, they’ll call you up, you can have a phone
conversation. You might have a meeting. You might go back and forth. You might actually negotiate what’s done.
They’ll say we like this part but we don’t like that. Maybe you could find another funder for component
of this that we don’t really do or aren’t interested in.

I’ve done this many times.
This is really interesting concept. I know there’s two other people who are interested in this too. If you would
just bring all three of them to the table I think we could do something. If you could include this neighborhood,
if you could include that school, so there’s a lot more room to negotiate something with a foundation. That’s
why again it’s good forum for raising money in a creative way, because you really can evolve it and work toward
what you’re trying to do.

WOLF: And it sounds like because there’s a community focus
in it, and in a community foundation in particular and also in a community justice program there’s also perhaps
shared knowledge about, because they’re both knowledgeable about the community, it sounds like that could be
a very productive process where there’s a meeting of the minds where the foundation is bringing their knowledge
and concerns about the community priorities and needs and the community justice program which is looking at it through
a justice lens, also is bringing knowledge and it sounds like there could be a catalyst there.

LEWIS:
Yeah, I think that’s very true. The working in a foundation is not a profession where you typically, where you
go to school in it, you get a first job in it and then … most people who are program officers and particularly
the senior program officers are people who have long histories of their career working in that community in the fields
in which they are funding.

I myself was a professor at a local university. It was a commuter type
university. It was very integrated into the community before coming. Before that, I was with the Urban League here
for ten years, so I came from a position of being very grounded in the types of issues that the trust is interested
in. And I think that’s true of most of my colleagues across different foundations. That they had professional
careers in that field before they became funders in it. And so they’re very grounded in what the issues are
and who the players are and what the specific neighborhood and community needs are.

WOLF: And
is criminal justice commonly an area of focus? I know your trust, you described here, is interested in
certain criminal justice related goals like reducing recidivism and disparities, racial disparities in the justice
system. Are you seeing a trend there? There’s a lot in the news about the criminal justice system.

LEWIS: I would say so. The problem of urban violence, I guess it’s been with us for a long time, but
I think really caught the attention of a lot of people more in the 1990s, and then the cost of incarceration across
the country has become a driving force, right? I think a lot more bipartisan, I don’t want to overstate it,
but there is more bipartisan interest now in getting people out of jail and prisons than there would have been 10,
20 and especially, you know 30 years ago. So I think there is a lot more interest on the part of foundations, and
they do it in different ways.

In the Midwest, the Joyce Foundation has a specific gun violence
initiative that they do. MacArthur has been interested in various areas of restorative justice. The Woods Fund here
in Chicago, restorative justice. We’ve been engaged in it, in violence reduction and equity issues. So different
foundations have their own twist on it, but I would say in general there has been increased interest. I think it’s
a fairly fertile field right now.

WOLF: So if you were to give justice practitioners interested
in finding out about trusts that are community focused or just any kind of foundation and applying and succeeding
with their application, are there some bullet points you could share about what they should keep in mind?

LEWIS: Yeah. Well, I think it does. Because there is so much variation across foundations, there isn’t
any single way to know what one wants or how they’re taking applications. There really isn’t any substitute
for getting in the internet and checking out what they’re individual initiatives and programs are, and what
the application process is. And people can send things in that way.

I would also really, really
strongly support though taking the additional step of trying to seek out people like me in forums like this conference
or in various kinds of neighborhood settings. A lot of us are going to those kinds of meetings, and we’re on
different commissions and task forces and committees of local government or community development, all of those kinds
of things. Find those program officers and talk to them about what you’re doing and equally important to find
out what they are interested in. Because it’s partly about what you want as someone creating a program but it’s
also about that program officer needs to take back to their board. And so you want to just enter into that conversation
with them the best way you can.

WOLF: So I suppose it also helps to have an elevator pitch, a
short, concise description of what they’re doing, but one that sounds like you’re saying is customized
to the particular foundation or program officer that they’re speaking to.

LEWIS: Yeah. It’s
certainly helpful to be clear in that way. On the other hand, I will give the other hand. That if you’re at
some conference, you find yourself sitting there at lunch, you find yourself sitting next to a program officer from
a foundation that you think might be able to help you, that program officer does not like to be pitched there at
that table with seven people sitting around where it’s just not a good place.

That’s
the place to just get to know the person, like you would to be able to start the relationship building. Don’t
pitch your idea unless it comes up in the conversation naturally. But just treat it as a relationship building opportunity,
not as a sales opportunity because partly it’s hard for the foundation person to negotiate something like that
in front of others, and partly because they may not be able to tell you exactly what they’re thinking about
it when there are others around and when honesty is important in that negotiation. And, they want to eat lunch.

WOLF: You mean they’re human beings.

LEWIS: Yes. So it’s a good setting to
make friends, but not necessarily the moment to make the actual pitch.

WOLF: All right. Excellent
advice. Thank you so much. I have been speaking with James Lewis, Senior Program Officer and the Director of Research
and Evaluation at the Chicago Community Trust. He has been a panelist here at Community Justice 2016.

You
can find out more about what has gone on here at the conference and listen to other interviews of other participants
and attendees on our website, www.courtinnovation.org. I am Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for
Court Innovation. Thanks very much for listening.

A panel on Restorative Justice at Community Justice 2016 features, from left, moderator Erika Sasson of
the Center for Court Innovation, Jose Egurbide of the Los Angeles City Attorney's Office, Captain Joe Balles
(retired) of the Madison (Wisconsin) Police Department, and Judge Herman Sloan of the Atlanta (Georgia) Community
Court. — **Strengthening Ties Between Police and the Community: A Conversation about Restorative Justice in Madison, Wisconsin** Aug 09, 2016
Joe Balles, who recently retired as a captain after a 30-year career with the Madison (Wisconsin) Police Department,
discusses restorative justice and police legitimacy with Robert V. Wolf, director of communications at the Center
for Court Innovation. A mentee of Herman Goldstein, considered the father of problem-oriented policing, Balles was
instrumental in the creation of the Dane
County Community Restorative Court, a diversion program based on the Native American principles of peacemaking.
The interview took place during Community Justice 2016.

A panel on Restorative Justice at Community
Justice 2016 features, from left, moderator Erika Sasson of the Center for Court Innovation, Jose Egurbide of the
Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office, Captain Joe Balles (retired) of the Madison (Wisconsin) Police Department,
and Judge Herman Sloan of the Atlanta (Georgia) Community Court.

CAPTAIN
JOE BALLES: One of the reasons I got trained as a peacemaker is because I’m trying to add even more legitimacy
to this work, so that it actually becomes formalized and more ingrained and peer accepted.

ROB
WOLF: Hi I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. I am at Community Justice
2016, in Chicago, where hundreds of justice practitioners from various jurisdictions around the country and around
the world, are gathering to talk about justice reform. With me right now is Captain Joe Balles, retired from the
Madison Wisconsin Police Department. We’ve sat down to talk for a little bit about restorative justice. He participated
in a panel here at Community Justice 2016, on restorative justice and he was very involved with that concept in his
work in the Madison Police Department.

You were involved in starting something called The Dane
County Community Restorative Court. So why don’t you explain what that is, and why you wanted to start something
called a restorative court that has this word ‘restorative’ in it?

BALLES: Sure Rob
it would be a pleasure. In 2013 the NEKC foundation funded a study in Dane County, it was conducted by the Wisconsin
Council on Children and Families. And that report, published in October 2013 really statistically laid out what was
the state and the human condition of the African American population in Dane County. And their report in its breadth
covered so many different measures across the spectrum that were just all jumped out and many in Dane County community,
and Madison’s the capital, Wisconsin, 500,000 is the county population, almost 250 is the city of Madison, and
when you look at that it was really pretty telling, and everybody just accepted it as the base-line. There was really
little argument about the data or anything, it was so overwhelming. One number in particular with regards to racial
injustice was that Dane County African Americans represent about 4.8 % of the population, but when you look at the
number of people that we send to prison every year, African American’s in Dane County represent 44% of the people
we send to prison.

Based on that report a Dane County Board African American supervisor, Sheila
Stubbs, who ironically I have known for many years, she brought forward a proposal in November 2013 to the County
Board, and got it stuck in the 2014 budget to create a pilot Community Restorative Court in South Madison that would
look a 17 and 25-year-olds and try to divert them. Those who have been arrested for misdemeanors, divert them from
the formal traditional criminal justice system, to a Community Restorative Court predicated on the ideas of peacemaking
in justice circles. And …

WOLF: And maybe we will just pause for a second. When we talk about
restorative, we’re talking about … I know it’s about restoring both the community, but also …

BALLES: Repairing harm to the victim, and the community.

WOLF: And the offender to an
extent—

BALLES: And really doing an assessment of the offender because, you know Rob, when law
enforcement issues citations, or we arrest young people, 17 to 25 year-olds. For a lot of times it’s these kind
of nuisance level types of crimes, if they be theft, criminal damage to property, disorderly conduct, obstructing
an officer, there are other things that are going on there with that person at that point in time, that they happen
to come on an officer’s radar screen. Because oftentimes when we make an arrest we are not out driving around looking
for them, we get called by the 911 system because we are responding to something that we ultimately end up investigating,
whether it be a fight in progress in a public place, or inside a private residence, we have to deal with what it
is that we walk into. And this was a way to take. And instead of sticking that 17 -25 year-old in the formal system,
where in Wisconsin, something that unlike a lot of states in the country, we have an online court system called CCAP,
and once you get arrested and you then appear and make an initial appearance in Wisconsin Circuit Court, a record
of you starts online on the internet in Wisconsin’s Circuit Court database. It’s totally publicly accessible,
there’s all sorts of warnings about how it’s not supposed to be used for discriminatory purposes, or employment
purposes etc. but everybody in Wisconsin knows about it and once you get something onto CCAP it’s impossible
to get it off, damn near impossible, I won’t say it’s impossible but it’s damn near.

We
find these 17 to 25 year-olds, it hurts them for employment, it hurts them for schooling, hurts them for housing,
many different things.

WOLF: So the Community Restorative Court, they would be … that’s
a total diversion, they wouldn’t have a record in the system?

BALLES: It’s a total diversion.
Right. And the way we have created the diversion is, in the spring of 2015 we worked, together with our Dane County
District Attorney, Ishmael Ozanne, the head of our Dane County Department of Human Services, Lynn Green, Madison
Police Chief, Mike Koval and our city Attorney Mike May, and myself I was involved in this. We created an MOU, and
in the Memorandum of Understanding I outlined the parameters of what we were going to try to do in the pilot, and
it was a 12 month MOU, it actually expires next month in May. Wel certainly expand it, continue on, but we definitely
need to tweak, kind of what we are doing right now, to build some more caseload.

But the important
thing is that over the past year and a half now we have created another option for dealing with this behavior out
in the neighborhoods, that both is victim rights focused, but at the same time focused on the needs of the offender,
where we hired a Community Restorative Court coordinator. That’s a funded position, not through a grant or something
that we could possibly loose, but we actually created a new position within the human services budget for Dane County
where this position lives. And that’s really huge, because now we’ve got that position we don’t have
to fight for it every single year. And what we’re trying to do is, our District Attorney’s office has been
very creative already, they’ve got 700 cases currently in different states of deferred prosecution. And what
we are really hoping to do long term is to take a piece of that deferred prosecution case load that they have right
now, and those cases that go to deferred prosecution are ready and ideal, many of them primed, for a peacemaking
process.

WOLF: And so peacemaking, as I understand, we have a program in Brooklyn, The Center
for Court Innovation runs through the Red Hook Community Justice Center is based on traditional Native American practice,
bringing people together in a circle, and people solving the problem and the issue collectively. So is that the model
that you are using?

BALLES: Yeah it is the model. And what happened was, is that after we were
looking around in the spring, or in 2014, once we had that money funded to create the coordinator court, CRC coordinator
position, we got a hold of the Center for Court Innovation.

And they, and with the help of some
BGA Technical Assistance money, they brought our team, seven of us, out to New York where we were up in Harlem at
the Community Court up there, we went down met with Judge Calabrese in Red Hook and got to see the phenomenal work
he’s done. He is nothing short of an American Hero in terms of what he’s done out there. And then lastly
we went over Brownsville, where at the time we were there it hadn’t started yet, but we talked with the folks
and we looked at the building. I think it was an old catholic church if I’m not mistaken, or something to that
effect, or maybe an old school that they were looking at setting up, but we were out there in Brownsville and talking
to them too. So we left New York with a lot of great ideas that we brought back to Madison to figure out how we wanted
to set this up.

And we went to work, doing community meetings where we brought the community
in and told them we were looking for volunteers. We worked with Johnathan Scharrer, a person I haven’t mentioned
enough. Johnathan Scharrer is a professor at DW Madison Law School that teaches the restorative justice training
at the law school. And Johnathan was solicited by us to help us teach and train our peacemaker program, which is
now a 16-hour class. We’ve got over 40 trained, and myself, just a few weeks ago I went through the two-day
training myself.

WOLF: And has it started, the restorative—

BALLES: Yes. Last
July we started actually making referrals from the south police district. Again we are just focused on my old district
where a new captain is at right now, because I left in January. But we are going through every arrest that we make,
and we make probably 60 some arrests every month, and we are looking for those cases that we can divert. But right
now our MOU is focused on, really kind of looking at first offenders 17 to 25 of age, but what we are realizing and
our challenge is, we need to get into more complex cases, because some of the things that we heard at this conference
for instance, is that you don’t want to be doing interventions on low risk populations, okay. And generally
in our model that we have right now, those are our first offenders, they don’t have a lot you know; the 21 year-old
that gets drunk and stole a coffee cup at the convenience store at 2 o’clock in the morning, who is on his way
to a graduate degree in engineering at Wisconsin, probably isn’t the guy that really needs to go through the
Restorative Court.

And so we are now trying to look at really the more complicated cases and get
some of those individuals offenders, respondents, as we call them, diverted to peacemaking.

WOLF:
So get me a little bit into your head as a police officer. Although there are police officers who’ve been involved
in all kinds of innovative strategies, community policing and engaging the community. I think it’s probably
less common, this notion of restorative justice engaging the police. So what attracted you to this? Why were you
drawn to this idea of restorative justice?

BALLES: Great question Rob. For me it just was a logical
extension of my journey and my career and 30 years in policing. I did my graduate work at Wisconsin in the early
80s, where I was able to have met great mentors like Professor Herman Goldstein, who is the godfather of problem
oriented policing. And in the late 80s early 90s I happened to be part of some of the early efforts at defining what
community policing is in this country. I was a neighborhood officer myself in the city of Madison, where we identified
13 kind of high crime little pockets in the city of Madison. And I was one of 13 neighborhood officers in the late
80s that went out into those neighborhoods and built relationships with people, and really tried to find alternatives
to arrests, and other ways of dealing with crime and the crack dealing, and the gang behavior and things like that,
that we had out in those neighborhoods.

That to me was a very unbelievable moment in my career
as a law enforcement officer, because it really defined me, and really set in place my core values in terms of the
need for police in the community. It really had this very, very close partnership and understanding with the community
that you were trying to police. Because policing isn’t something that police do, but policing is something that
we do collaboratively with the community, and the community shares a big part of that.

So for
me, when I look at restorative justice, quite honestly it’s like a graduate school version of community policing
as we knew it, but it brings more formality to it. And the peacemaking process, and just the respect and dignity
of how everybody participates equally in the process, it’s so different, it’s so radically different than
the traditional adversarial justice system as we know it today. It’s really, what we are talking about here,
is changing the culture of the justice system, and I think that restorative justice really hit. I am excited about
it. I think we are just literally just scratching the surface and we get many, many, kind of, laboratories going
on. Much like we experimented 20 plus years ago with community policing in Madison, now I see a lot of communities
around the country experimenting with different models of community justice.

One of the reasons
that I got trained as a peacemaker, because I’m trying to add even more legitimacy to this word, so it actually
becomes formalized and more ingrained and peer accepted. I don’t want it just to be the tree-hugging people
who are out there being trained as peacemakers that ….

WOLF: The hippies.

BALLES:
The hippies, you know …. But here’s a 30-year veteran of law enforcement, recently retired captain, very involved
in this community through rotary, The United Way, coaching basketball, whatever it might be, but I also see that
people like me also need to become peacemakers because we’re part of the community, and we need to be part of
that restorative justice process.

WOLF: Well let me ask you just one final question. Which is,
with all the concerns that everyone is aware of, their assisted police, a report about Chicago police released this
week, there is a lot of concern that there’s a culture among some police officers where there is antagonism
between the community they serve. There is institutional racism, I mean there’s all kinds of things, and you
just spoke about a very personal journey that you took and, you know, 30 years down this road, although it didn’t
take you 30 years, but you evolved to a position where your eyes have been open and you’ve embraced new ways
of doing things, and you’re talking about restorative justice. And I also know, you had mentioned before we started,
that you have been advising someone who is working with the task force, the President’s task force, on 21st century
policing. You are very involved nationally, now that you’ve retired, in helping police jurisdictions think differently.
What advice or insight do you have into how maybe restorative justice or other tools can be used and how can you
get police officers interested in them, who haven’t walked in your shoes specifically?

BALLES:
Right, great question Rob. I mean I think we are at a …with regards to policing I think we are at a kind of crossroads
in this country very similar to where we were when UCR part one crime was at its highest in the early 1990s. I mean
a lot of the initiatives that led to President Clinton’s 100,000 officer initiative when he was first elected
and the 1994 crime bill. I think today we are similarly situated. But interestingly we don’t have the same amount
of crime that we had back then, but how our police interact with our communities. And I think we’re really struggling
with this whole nature of the increasing diversity of our country, particularly in our larger urban areas. Any community
50,000 and over, okay you are really starting to see some very changing demographics.

One of the
areas that I am working in right now is out in King County, Seattle, and I happened over the past year meet Sue Rahr,
who was a former King County Sheriff, that is now the executive director for the Criminal Justice Training Commission
for the state of Washington, and she was on President Obama’s 21st century policing task force. And Sue penned
the piece that Harvard published a few years ago, questioning are we training our police officers to be guardians
or warriors. And when you look at the President’s task force report and what Sue and the colleagues that were
on the task force, they identified six pillars that put forth a road map for police chiefs and communities all over
the country, to really internally look at themselves to see and measure themselves to see how they are doing and
where they could improve. And that first pillar is all about trust in legitimacy, and in that part of the report,
and it’s not a very long report, it’s only 30 pages long, there’s a lot of reference to procedural
justice both internally and externally. Because one of the things we know, and we’ve found many years ago in
Madison, is that you can’t put police officers into an organization where good work is not recognized, where
they have abusive supervisors, where there’s no systems of accountability. When you have internal cultures like
that you’re going to get bad policing on the backside of it. There’s just no way. You might get some good
policing by accident, but if you’ve got inside those police organizations that are so dysfunctional, you can’t
expect any better result.

Many years ago a guy name of David Couper, the police Chief of Madison
at the time. He led Madison on a 20-year kind of culture revolution that transformed our department where he hired
the first women. Today over 30% of officers in the Madison Police Department are women. 90% of us have, at least,
a four-year degree, 20% of the department are people of color, for a 455 officer department in a community of 250,000
we are doing pretty dam good in terms of trying to at least recruit, retain individuals that we can take and put
out there on the streets every day as police officers, and with the proper training and guidance. There is a lot
of police departments in this country that, quite frankly, are really struggling to do that.

I’ll
end Rob with something in terms of the need for police departments in communities to think futuristic about how they
build police departments. Chief Cooper once said many years ago, “If you want to see what your community is
going to look like 15 years from now, walk into a kindergarten classroom.”

WOLF: Makes sense.

BALLES: Absolutely. And if you’re not trying to build and recruit and prepare your police department in
terms of this diversity, to what that kindergarten classroom looks like today, your losing ground already. So I think
we’re at a unique opportunity here, I think restorative justice is quite frankly really the next evolution here
of the conversation. We’ve got some tough problems that we are dealing with in this country, but I really feel
optimistic. I think about the tools that we have, the evidence based practices, and a lot of great organizations
like the Center for Court Innovation, that are helping agencies and police departments all around the country and
justice systems, help is good there.

WOLF: Well that’s a very nice and positive note to end
on. So thank you. I’ve been speaking to Captain Joe Balles who retired just this past January from the Madison
Police Department, and is now very involved in a number of things both in Madison and nationally regarding innovations
in policing. And we’ve been speaking this afternoon at Community Justice 2016, the international conference
that’s being held here in Chicago. I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation.
To find out more about restorative justice and about the conference and about the work the center does, visit our
website at, www.courtinnovation.org, and thank you for listening.

Mike Lawlor, second from left, who is Connecticut's under secretary for Criminal Justice Policy
and Planning, participates in a panel on — **A Second Chance Society: A Conversation about Justice Reform in Connecticut** Jul 12, 2016
Mike Lawlor, Connecticut’s under secretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning, discusses Governor
Dannel P. Malloy’s Second Chance Society, a series of justice reforms (including dramatic changes to bail and
juvenile justice policies) that seek to reduce crime, lower spending on prisons, and help rebuild relationships between
criminal justice professionals and the communities they serve. This New Thinking podcast was recorded in Chicago
in April 2016 after Lawlor participated in a panel on “Jail Reduction and Public Safety” at Community Justice 2016.

Mike Lawlor, second from left,
who is Connecticut’s under secretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning, participates in a panel on “Jail
Reduction and Public Safety” at Community Justice 2016.

MIKE LAWLOR:
People gradually buy into the fact that, after all, the whole point of the criminal justice system is to reduce crime,
and if that’s what’s happening, everybody’s doing a good job.

ROB WOLF: This is
Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation in Chicago at Community Justice 2016 where
there’s a lot going on, a lot of panels talking about justice reform, people from all around the country and
even around the world sharing ideas. One of those people with some interesting and cutting edge ideas is with me
right now. His name is Mike Lawlor. He is the Chief Criminal Justice Advisor to Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy,
and he just participated in a panel on jail reduction and public safety.

A lot of interesting
things are going on in Connecticut around justice reform, Mike, and I thought maybe you could explain a little bit
about what the governor’s agenda is. I understand it’s something called the Second Chance Society.

So what’s it all about?

LAWLOR: So yeah. My boss, Governor Malloy, talks extensively
about his goals for what he refers to as a “Second Chance Society.” And really that covers all of the ground
of the criminal justice reform initiatives we’re seeing around the country. He also articulates this with clear
goals, and goal number one is to reduce crime. Goal number two is to reduce spending, and goal number three is to
restore confidence in the criminal justice system, confidence among victims of crime who often come away thinking
that they did not get justice, confidence among African Americans and Latinos who thinks the system is just not fair
to them, and confidence among all citizens who see, every day, these examples of wrongful convictions or corruption
or misconduct by police or prosecutors or probation officers or corrections officers or even judges sometimes even
state legislators and governors, from time to time.

All of this undermines confidence in the criminal
justice system, so restoring people’s confidence and at the same time reducing crime is our goal. And we think
that by making a variety of changes across the board, we will continue to see a reduction in Connecticut’s crime
rate, which is at its lowest point in 48 years, and we’ll see we won’t have to spend as much money running
prisons, because for the immediate past 20 years or so we’ve spent more money running prisons in Connecticut
than we have running colleges, which is kind of crazy.

Gradually we can rebuild these relationships,
mainly between the criminal justice professionals and the community, and what you call community policing or something
else. It’s very important to build up that level of trust.

WOLF: Well those are really ambitious
goals. So what are the actual policies that are being proposed to achieve these goals to reduce crime, reduce spending
on the criminal justice system, and build confidence in the justice system?

LAWLOR: Okay, so let’s
start with what Governor Malloy has actually proposed this year, which is currently being considered by our state’s
legislature. It has two components. Number one is bail reform. Number two is raising the age of juvenile jurisdiction.

On the bail reform initiative, a number of states, most recently New Jersey, New Mexico, the New York Supreme
Court, have acknowledged that bail is a real problem. In other words, people sitting in jail because they can’t
afford to post what oftentimes are relatively low amounts of bail. The governor this year has proposed that we not
have money bail for people charged only with a misdemeanor, with an exception for cases involving violence, for example
family violence cases are often charged only as misdemeanors, but there is a very high risk that something bad is
going to happen.

He’s asked our state sentencing commission to look at a comprehensive reform
and report back next year so that potentially the legislature could enact comprehensive reform, as was the case in
New Jersey and New Mexico, Connecticut has a state constitution that guarantees bail to all offenders.

But many states, and the federal government have an option for what is know as preventive detention. So,
if there is an evidentiary showing that someone actually is a danger to the community, they can be held without bail
at all.

In Connecticut, at the moment, the governor’s concerned that the people who really
should be locked up pre-trial are not. The high-risk, career criminal gang-banger types, bcause they have frequent
flier points with the bail bondsmen and things like that, it’s easy for them to get out if they get arrested,
even if there’s kind of a high bail.

On the other hand of the spectrum are the people that
don’t need to be in jail, but they’re sitting there for months on end, waiting for their cases to get resolved
because they can’t come up with, in some cases, a few hundred dollars to get out the door.

So
that’s a big priority for us, and we think over time that will have a big impact on our jail population, but
more importantly …

WOLF: What’s the actual proposal?

LAWLOR: So the
proposal is no money bail for misdemeanors, and allowing all offenders who actually have a money bail that’s
been set for them, to have an option of posting 10% in cash that they would get back at the end of their case if
they show up for all their court appearances and that is the case in many states.

In Connecticut,
it’s actually an option that judges have pursuant to rules of court, but it’s not in statute, and we think
that by putting it into statute, it’ll be used more extensively.

Also, part of that proposal
is that whatever money is accrued, because this cash will be sitting in a savings account while the court process
plays out, all of that money that’s earned through interest will go to our legal aid operations in the state.
So it wouldn’t be going to the state. It would be going to help fund legal assistance for the poor. And any
money that is captured because people do not show up in court and we forfeit their money bail, that would also go
to legal aid.

So we’re trying to create a system that has no incentive to have higher bail
just to raise money, and at the same time, make it more of an option to actually get out, especially for people who
are poor.

WOLF: And you would presumably be saving money because fewer people would be held in
jail unnecessarily pre-adjudication.

LAWLOR: Right. We know about half the people in jail right
now in Connecticut, because they can’t post bail, are in there on relatively minor charges. So, now, obviously
on a case-by-case basis, there may be very high risk factors involved, but, in general, there’s way too many
people being held just because they can’t come up with enough money to post bail.

And we’d
like to get to the point where money bail is just not used at all. If you’re really dangerous, prosecutors would
have to put on an evidentiary showing, and you could potentially be held as a public safety measure, but the vast
majority of cases that really don’t meet those criteria would not sit in jail while their cases are pending.

WOLF: What if someone repeatedly doesn’t return to a court date?

LAWLOR: Well, the
proposal we have this year says that even if it’s a misdemeanor where no money bail is allowed, if the new misdemeanor
is in fact a failure to appear, that would allow for money bail to be set. But we know that, we’ve done a lot
of deep dives into our data that we have and the rate at which people fail to appear is actually higher if a bail
bondsman has posted bail for them.

Connecticut is the only state in the country— Now, keep in
mind we do not have any county courts, everything is run by the state. We have no county jails. We have no elected
prosecutors. We have no elected judges, and all courts are state courts, so it’s easier for us to make changes.
But we have the only statewide accredited pre-trial services agency in the country. It’s run in the judicial
branch. It’s very well staffed, and they are very good at sorting out offenders by risk and monitoring defendants
in the community with non-financial conditions of release.

So we have the infrastructure to really
expand this a lot, and to the extent that we can save jail bed days, we can save a lot of money and at the same time
get better outcomes, because all we know for sure is that putting somebody who’s really a low-risk, high-needs
person in jail, even for a short period of time, you’re actually increasing the odds that they’re going
to recidivate once they get out. So we’re trying to not do things that make it worse.

WOLF:
And it sounds like you have the infrastructure in place to do what bail supposedly does, which is to encourage someone
to come back to court, but you have a non-bail, non-monetary means to monitor compliance with that. And so, what
were some of the other …

LAWLOR: The juvenile … so I think the more ambitious goal the governor
has for this year is to raise the age of juvenile court jurisdiction from what it is now, 18, up to 21. So, if we
do it, we’ll be the first state in this country to do it. Other places do it. For example, Germany, which the
governor visited last year, you might have seen it on 60 Minutes. They did the piece a couple weeks ago.

In Germany, if you’re under 21 and you get arrested and go to court, the judge makes an immediate decision
whether the case will be handled pursuant to juvenile rules or adult rules and apparently 80% or 90% of the cases
are dealt with as a juvenile case, in effect.

So, the governor said, “Since we have gotten
some very good outcomes with our juvenile justice reforms that date back about 10 years, we’ve seen a dramatically
reduced number of young people getting arrested. We have historically low number of juveniles in juvenile detention
or in our juvenile prison-like facility, that if we’re getting these good outcomes by the earlier reforms, maybe
we can get those similar outcomes for 18, 19, and 20 year olds going forward.”

We’re
beginning a process where we’ll gradually phase this in. We’re also going to make changes in the way we
handle offenders under the age of 25. So, we want to have specialized parole and probation supervision for people
under 25 so that the officers involved, that’s their specialty, dealing with younger people. We’re going
to have a special correctional facility just for offenders under 25. We already have one for offenders under 21.
We want to have another one for the next age cohort there.

WOLF: And the rationale is because
they have different needs and are more amenable to rehabilitation?

LAWLOR: Exactly. And on top
of that, mixing a 21 year old kid whose got all sorts of problems that have landed him in jail with some 40 year
old career criminal guy’s probably not a good idea, and I think any person with common sense would understand
that that’s probably the case.

I don’t think it’s done by design that all these
people are mixed together in our prison system, but why not change it? We don’t have to build a new prison,
we just allocate one for the next age cohort and put in staff that specializes with that.

All
of this … the recent developments in brain science has really informed criminal justice policy planners like myself.
I think people now, for the first time, are realizing that you need to have a special approach to younger offenders,
meaning under 25.

If we are successful in getting some of these young people off this trajectory
towards career criminal status or lengthy terms of incarceration, we’ll need a lot fewer prison beds in this
country.

So, earlier I referred to our juvenile justice reforms that have already taken place
in Connecticut. First and foremost, Connecticut was one of three states in the country that used to treat 16 year
olds as adults all the time. So it was Connecticut, New York, and North Carolina. Back in 2007, the legislature voted
to increase the jurisdictional age up to 18, but to do it gradually, in increments, and establish a very robust planning
process to get there.

So we spent two years figuring out how to do this. Starting on January 1,
2010, we went from 16 to 17. Then on July 1, 2012, went from 17 to 18, and added all of that to the juvenile courts
and subtracted all of that from the adult courts.

It would be fair to say, “So how did that
turn out?” And now we know. It’s 2016, we have all the data. First of all, people had predicted, when we
did this, the juvenile courts would be overwhelmed with new cases, and actually today there are fewer cases coming
into the juvenile court than there were before because there’s are a lot fewer young people getting into trouble
that lead them to court in the first place.

Second, we know that we have an all-time low number
of kids in juvenile detention, and that has to do with a lot of different policy changes, not just raising the age.
But don’t forget, it used to be that on your 16th birthday you were automatically an adult. You never could
be in juvenile detention. Now we’ve added all 16 and 17 year olds, and even with that we’ve got a historic
low.

We have three juvenile detention facilities in our state. One of the three has closed. The
other two are about one-third full, and we’re probably going to close one of those two shortly. We’re closing
150 bed juvenile prison-like facility altogether. We’re just gonna close it. It’s down to 40 kids right
now.

So all of this has to do with fewer younger people getting into trouble and getting arrested
and ending up in court and ultimately incarcerated. We see that this effect is playing out now for already 18, 19,
20, 21, 22, 23 years. It’s like a trough moving through the arrest statistics.

And for example,
17 year-olds … the last year we have complete data for is 2014, there was 60%, six zero, 60% fewer arrests of 17
year-olds statewide in 2014 than there were in 2008, and it’s dropped in equal increments every single year.

In the adult system, we measure the number of kids in jail 18 to 21 years old who are actually incarcerated
on a particular day. That number has dropped from 2062 on January 1, 2008, down to 960 on January 1, 2016.

WOLF: You know the numbers right off the top of your head, don’t you?

LAWLOR: These
are important numbers.

WOLF: … recite them a lot. But lowering the age, it sounds like it’s
easier to do because the population is smaller, but it didn’t create fewer arrests. There are other factors.

LAWLOR: Right. Definitely. So, it’s the raising age, actually … we went up to 18, now we’re
proposing to go to 21.

See, juvenile court works differently and has a different triage mechanism
for new cases coming in. Not everybody ends up in front of a judge, and don’t have all the formal proceedings
with mandatory court dates, et cetera, which kind of sets up people for failure. You get charged with failure to
appear if you don’t show up on time, and go to your probation officers … there’s a lot of chutes and
ladders that kind of get you into trouble.

The juvenile system is much less formal. Much focused
on needs-assessment and hooking people up with appropriate interventions without an overlay of let’s say, court
appearances, a guilty plea, a probation officer. We are convinced that approaching young people differently will
get you better outcomes.

The reason I’m citing these statistics is, 10 years ago, when we
first started talking about this stuff people said, “If you make these changes, you’ll get these outcomes.”
So here we are, fast forward ten years. We’re getting those outcomes. Maybe it’s a complete coincidence,
but I don’t think so.

Other examples of changes have been in school systems themselves. We
know now that there’s a very high correlation between suspensions and expulsions, even in younger grades, and
ending up in prison down the road.

There’s an extensive study in the state of Texas, which
actually has very good data going back a long time, for every single kid in their public school system, and that’s
clearly shown that schools with the exact same type of kids and type of issues which tend to suspend and expel a
lot of kids, versus schools which are very similar but suspend very few kids, it’s the high suspension schools
that end up with the high incarceration rate down the road.

So, there’s something about not
ostracizing, jettisoning, younger people but trying to deal with their issues up front that means that they’ll
be much less likely to end up in the criminal justice system down the road. So it’s this kind of thinking, which
is really a complete re-thinking of schools, justice, service provision, everything else that gets us to where we
are today and sustains the momentum we hope to continue for the next few years.

The goal at the
end of the day is reducing crime. If crime’s going down, that’s good. If crime is going up, something is
wrong.

WOLF: And you said this, you thought, was the bigger task. The more challenging component
to implement of the Second Chance Society, the raising the age is this requiring how you have to persuade the legislature.
Are they on board?

LAWLOR: Well, it’s a lot easier to talk to legislators and ordinary citizens,
even journalists, editorial boards, about why we think this would be successful because we can cite the success of
earlier, similar initiatives.

And the process that the governor has recommended is gradual and
incremental with a lot of planning built into the front end. It’s really more about re-allocating resources,
because everything you add to the juvenile system, you subtract from the adult system, so we think it’s very
workable.

But people, appropriately, are apprehensive, skeptical, because it’s new. It’s
a completely different approach to this. It’s worth noting that we are making provisions to … it wouldn’t
be 100% of the people under 21 go to juvenile court. Obviously, murders and very serious crimes, very high-risk kids
of kids, there would be an option, with discretion, informed by specific standards or findings that need to be made,
to deal with a case in adult court.

So it’s not one-size-fits-all, at all. It’s very
focused on risk assessment, needs assessment, with the stated goal up front of reducing crime, reducing recidivism
among kids who are actually coming in to court.

We think, based on our experience, that just talking
about these things as the actual goals, talking about the fact that we now have the capability to measure all this
data, make it very transparent so everybody can see what’s going on, that affects behavior of everyone on the
front lines: the cops, the prosecutors, probation parole, corrections, everybody. They know what the goal is, they
know that you’re able to figure this stuff out, and I think people gradually buy into the fact that, after all,
the whole point of the criminal justice system, one would think, is to reduce crime. And if that’s what’s
happening, everybody’s doing a good job.

WOLF: Well, thanks for explaining all that, and
good luck with all your exciting stuff going on in Connecticut.

LAWLOR: Thank you.

WOLF:
I’ve been speaking with Mike Lawlor, who is Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy’s Chief of Criminal Justice,
well, the Chief Advisor to the governor, right?

LAWLOR: Policy stuff.

WOLF:
Your exact title is, Undersecretary, Criminal Justice Policy and Planning Division.

LAWLOR: That’s
the job. I’m a bureaucrat.

WOLF: Well, we need bureaucrats to get this done, right?

LAWLOR: There you go.

WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center
for Court Innovation, and Mike and I have been speaking outside of the rooms where Community Justice 2016 is occurring
here at the Hilton in Chicago, where for two and a half days, people from around the country and even a few visitors
internationally have been discussing justice reform. To find out more about the Center for Court Innovation and about
justice reform, and about community justice, visit our website, www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

**‘An Open and Inviting Court’: Judge Joe Perez of the Orange County Community Court Talks Procedural Justice** Jun 15, 2016
Joe Perez, the presiding judge of the Orange
County Community Court, discusses how the principles of procedural
justice inform both design and process in his courthouse. Perez is a lifelong resident
of Orange County whose father was the first Spanish-speaking attorney and judge in the county. The interview with
Robert V. Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, took place while Judge Perez was in
Chicago to speak at Community Justice 2016. Wolf interviewed Judge Perez’s predecessor and the
founding judge of the Orange County Community Court, Wendy
Lindley, in 2008.

Judge
Joe Perez speaks during a panel on race and legitimacy at Community Justice 2016.

***The following is a transcript.***

JUDGE JOSEPH PEREZ: The words, “I’m proud of you,” go so far
with this population because no on in the criminal justice system has ever said that.

ROB WOLF:
I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at Center for Court Innovation here in Chicago at Community Justice
2016 where people from all around the country and even around the world have come to learn and discuss justice reform,
new strategies, new ideas, new programs, and research. Lots
of topics have been discussed and are being discussed during this two and a half day conference. With me right now
is someone who presented and also practices community justice, Judge Joseph Perez, who is the presiding judge of
the Orange County Community Court. He has presided there for the last two years, but he’s in fact been a judge
for the last nine years. Today we were
going to talk a little bit about procedural justice. PEREZ, could you tell me a little bit about what procedural
justice looks like at the Orange Country Community Court?

PEREZ: Well,
to start with, we’re unique in that we are a standalone court in the middle of Santa Ana where what we’ve
tried to do is have a one-stop shop where people who don’t even have to be charged with crimes can come in to
get services. Who do we have there? We have the Healthcare Agency of Orange County, which can provide healthcare
services. Once a month during our homeless courts,
we bring in a nurse practitioner with a line of nurses to assess and treat the homeless. We have Social Services
Agency of Orange County there which also provides assistance. Food stamps, cash aid if they qualify to assist them
in that regard. We also have vocational rehab from the state to assist people in getting jobs. We have the Veteran’s Administration there and they are
there because unfortunately in my county, Orange County, California we have a large population of homeless that’s
in fact there was a study that was recently done that specifically targeted Orange County, which is a fairly high
socio-economic status county, and it came out and it said virtually every veteran that is discharged into the county
of Orange would have been homeless by for family or friends. It’s
an extraordinary issue. We have Veteran’s Administration Office there. We also have legal aid that comes in
several times a week that can assist people with civil legal actions. We have a place where people can bring their
children to be watched while they go into court or seek out these services. All of those kids get to go home with a book. This is an extraordinary opening and inviting
court. We have a sandwich board outside that says, “Visitors are welcome. This is not just for people that are
charged with crimes.”

WOLF: That’s a key tenet of procedural
justice that you are open and welcoming, and I suppose transparent about the services you offer, and make it easy
for people to come and go. I suppose it’s not a confusing place as someone comes in and they aren’t there
particularly for a court purpose, but they want assistance in one of the areas you’ve just described. That’s
easily accessible.

PEREZ: Yeah. The whole environment of our collaborative court is
to defuse and deescalate the intensity of the criminal justice system, frankly. We have pews in my courtroom instead
of seats. I can’t take credit for it. My predecessor, Judge Lindy Linley, she built that place from the ground
up. You walk into our court, we get people from all
over the United States, all over the world, come into our court and say, “Wow, this is an extraordinary place.”
This is not like you would think of a courtroom. It’s an inviting place. It looks like a church for crying out
loud with really nice chandeliers. It’s
a beautiful place. With an open area, we don’t have bars that separate our inmates. We have a glass panel and
the reason why she did it, it’s brilliant. So they can see out. They feel a little bit close and connected to
those that are not in custody and they can also see visually and hear auditorily what these folks are doing to stay
out of trouble.

WOLF: This is in the courtrooms?

PEREZ:
This is in the courtroom.

WOLF: That is in the courtroom where they have access
or they can hear everything that’s going on.

PEREZ: Yeah, and they can see everything
that’s going on. We don’t try to separate them like many do. We want them to be able to see and hear what
we’re doing for those that are in custody because it’s a learning experience. A lot of what we do in our
court is teach and provide the services necessary to keep them from coming back. Procedural justice, in my opinion, making people feel comfortable, and making them feel like they’re
heard. When a judge cares and they see it, and they feel it, and I do care very much, and my caring is to keep them
from ever coming back. To stay out of the system, to provide them whatever services are necessary that we can provide
and keep them from coming back. Really
celebrating with them as they move theirselves along. The fact that you care and if they see that, it’s an extraordinary
thing because all of a sudden, they want to be able to tell you, and impress you, and say, “Look, I’m doing
this, judge. Take a look at what I’m doing.” The words, “I’m proud of you,” go so far with
this population because no one in the criminal justice system has ever said that when you think about it.

WOLF: In fact, it’s probably a lot of judges or it’s in the traditional mode
the way people thing of judges, they don’t think of a judge saying to a defendant, “I’m proud of you.”
It’s not like that’s something you do naturally. It also has been substantiated by research that one of
the components of procedural justice is in fact the relationship between the judge and the defendant. It’s allowing them to have the voice, the understanding of the procedures, a sense
that they’re being treated fairly. In fact, speaking that way to a defendant embodies those principles that
research has shown have had positive results/impacts on defendant compliance and acceptance of sentences, and long-term
success.

PEREZ: It has to be sincere. The interesting thing, and this is
mentioned this week, that the personality of the judge is pervasive throughout the court. The staff, the bailiffs,
everybody in my courthouse really comes back to you. I’m a second generation judge. My father, he was the first Spanish-speaking attorney in Orange County and then from there, he became
the first Spanish-speaking judge. I remember being a toddler running around my father’s court and there was
this sense of peace. I don’t know how to explain it, but it started with my dad. He was a very generous, kind,
caring judge, and it had a heck of an impact on me.
I remember lawyers coming in and saying, “That’s your father?” “Yes.” “Let me just
tell you something. We love coming to this court because we are all treated so fairly. Everyone’s listened to.”
There is not a person that walked into that court that wasn’t treated with respect. I don’t care whatever
you were charged with and that’s the way it should be.

WOLF:
That’s remarkable. It’s interesting because you talked about somebody being handcuffed, but being treated
nicely. Procedural justice doesn’t mean that the court is in any way abdicating security. There’s metal
detectors and there’s accountability. None of those things are being abdicated when when you do engage in procedural
justice.

PEREZ: Not at all. It’s how you do it as far as I’m concerned. You
make reasonable boundaries. Everything we do in our court, and I say this to defendants all the time, “Everything
we do is geared for one reason and that’s to graduate you and see that you never come back.” Look around. I have them look around and I say, “Look at everyone here
including the prosecutor. All of us want you to succeed.” Have you ever heard that in any other courtroom? The
answer is no. The prosecutor wants to send you away and there’s this adversarial environment where people are
arguing. Our is not that way at all. Quite the opposite. Setting
up these courts is another issue and I’ve talked about it. There is a lot of abrasiveness in setting these courts
up. I’ve mentioned previously that my predecessor, she was told, “You continue on this path, someone challenges
you on election, we may not support you,” and she said, “I’m doing it.” I’ve had people
call me the Clappy Court. Perez’s Court is the Clappy Court.

WOLF:
Because you applaud?

PEREZ: Yeah, exactly. Social worker with a robe I mentioned.

WOLF: A hundred times.

PEREZ: I’ve had probation officers
say, “So you’re going to hug a thug?” The interesting thing is those folks that make those statements
have never been a collaborative court and they certainly have never been in mine. There has not been one person that
has walked into my court and has seen what we do and walked out and said, “This is a waste of money or time.” In fact, we’re saving money. Since 1995, we got a yearly report that
goes out talking about our statistics. Since 1995, when the court began, the number is somewhere around 110 million
dollars that we have saved in costs for jail. When I go in front of the legislature, I go in front of those that
want to shut us down, it’s not necessarily legislature, but when I try to speak about what we do, all I do is
I say, “We’re saving lives and money.”

WOLF: Very
expensive.

PEREZ: Does anybody have a problem with it? Seriously, we have the data to
back it up. These people are not coming back. Some do of course, but the recidivism rate has basically been turned
upside down. I’ve told the legislature that, “I wish you guys had a camera in our court to see what we
do. After you watch and you see what we’re doing here and you have a problem with it, then talk to me, but don’t
throw stones from outside without knowing what we do.”

WOLF: I just want
to ask you one more thing and it’s something that you mentioned when you participated in the panel yesterday
on race, legitimacy, and community justice. You said something to the effect that it was, “Important for a judge
to look like the people in the community the courthouse is serving.” I wonder if you could just say a little
bit more about that. Explain why you think that.

PEREZ: Well, I think what they need
to do is understand the community that they’re in and if possible, come from that community. Like I said, my
father grew up blocks from where we were. It’s heavily Hispanic and you can see when people come in, they see
the last name of Perez and they think, “Oh, this is someone that may understand what I’ve gone through.”

WOLF: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me and sharing with me
some of the work you’ve been doing at the Orange Country Community Court.

PEREZ:
It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.

WOLF: I’ve been talking to Judge
Joseph Perez of the Orange County Community Court, and we are both here at Community Justice 2016 in Chicago. If
you want to find out more about what happened at the conference on The Center for Court Information website at www.courtinnovation.org
and you can listen to more podcasts, including one I did a few years ago with Jude Linley, who founded the court.
Thank you very much for listening.

Jails as Psychiatric Facilities: Addressing Mental Illness in the Justice System with Judge Steve Leifman Jun 14, 2016

Judge Steve Leifman, associate administrative judge of the Miami-Dade County Court Criminal Division and presiding
judge of its Criminal
Mental Health Project, has worked at the intersection of mental health and the criminal justice system
in Miami-Date County for decades. In this podcast, he
outlines the challenges of addressing the high occurence of mental illness in Miami’s courts and prisons, the
fraught history of incarcerating those with mental health needs, and ways in which the justice system can change
its response to those living with mental illness.

AVNI MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Hello and welcome to the New Thinking podcast. This is Avni Majithia- Sejpal from the Center for Court Innovations.
Today, I’m joined by Judge Steve Leifman who is the Associate Administrative Judge at the Miami-Dade County
court in Florida and the presiding judge of Miami’s Criminal Mental Health Project. Welcome to our podcast,
Judge Leifman.

JUDGE STEVE LEIFMAN: Thank you very much.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I
wanted to start by talking about Miami. The statistics say that Miami has a very large population of people dealing
with mental illness, almost 10%, which is more than any other urban community in the U.S. You have said that the
county jail serves as the largest psychiatric facility in the state of Florida. Why do you say that?

LEIFMAN:
Miami-Dade County has a very high prevalence of mental illness, as you’ve stated, with any urban area in the
United States. That really comes from a couple factors. One, we start with our own norm of mental illness such as
probably 3 to 5%. Then we pick-up a couple percent from our weather. A lot of times family members or people with
mental illnesses, they don’t want to be in Chicago or New York during the cold winters and so they end up coming
out to south Florida to escape the bad weather.

Then also during the Mariel Boatlift in the ’80s,
Castro literally emptied all the psychiatric facilities onto the boats, so the people that were actually fleeing
for political freedom from Cuba. Between the other factors and our own norm, it’s a very, very high prevalence.
Unfortunately, Florida also is very poor in its funding of mental health issues depending on the data anywhere from
48 to 50th per capita in mental health funding.

Only about 1% of the people in the county who
actually need services get access to the services that they need and so there’s a large unmet need. Many people,
unfortunately, will end up in the acute systems of care which sometimes means the Dade County jail.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
When we say mental illness, what are we talking about?

LEIFMAN: We are not talking about sociopaths.
We are talking about people that have been diagnosed with an organic brain illness such as schizophrenia, bipolar
disorder, or major depression.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Then I wanted to ask you about the 11th Judicial
Circuit Criminal Mental Health Project which you helped to establish in the year 2000. What’s the history behind
it, why was it created, and what does it do?

LEIFMAN: It actually started as a result of a case
that I had in 2000 where I had a defendant who turned out to be a Harvard educated psychiatrist who had an onset
of schizophrenia and had become homeless, and was recycling through the criminal justice system. It was really pretty
traumatic for all of us involved in the case. He had a full blown psychotic episode in my courtroom and it was an
eye-opener into how inadequate our community mental health system was as well as the court’s response for people
with mental illnesses.

If you had a serious mental illness and you were arrested on a low-level
misdemeanor charge, the court on the vast majority of cases, we were just releasing people back to the street telling
them to go see a psychiatrist for competency restoration. We are putting people who are very ill back out on the
street without any access to treatment and so I was able to bring together a meeting of all the traditional and non-traditional
stakeholders. We literally mapped out how our criminal justice system intersected with our community mental health
system and frankly it didn’t.

I think once we had mapped it out and realized how poor of
a response we had, we had an obligation and a responsibility to make some significant change. It was for everybody’s
sake to improve public safety, to spend our tax dollars more efficiently, and equally important to help people who
have illnesses have access to recovery.

We decided we needed a two-part approach. We needed to
stem the flow of people coming into the system that were coming in unnecessarily and we also needed to have an approach
where people that did penetrate the criminal justice system so that we could get them out if it was an appropriate
thing to do. We created a very expansive, what’s called, Crisis Intervention Team Police Program.

Over the years, we have actually trained over 4700 police officers including every single agency in Miami-Dade
County and it has made a startling difference. Between 2010 and 2015, we handled 48,669 mental health calls and only
made 109 arrests. It had a significant impact on the reduction of our jail. It actually helped us close one of our
jails.

We also realized that we also needed to set-up post arrest diversion program. We initially
set-up a misdemeanor diversion program whereby any individual with a serious mental illness who’s arrested for
a misdemeanor, if they meet criteria for involuntary hospitalization, generally within 3 days, we have them diverted
from our jail into one of our community crisis stabilization units.

We reset the case for a couple
weeks. During that period, A, we allow them to become more stable, but at the same time my team is working on lining
up their benefits, finding them housing, getting all these supports in place that people need for recovery and it’s
been phenomenally successful. Our recidivism rate dropped from over 70% to about 20% today. Our state attorney allowed
us to expand it to our non-violent felony cases.

We put into play about five years ago, a felony
diversion program and that program has a recidivism rate of only about 6% for those that complete the program which
is about 70%. The program alone has saved the county between 35 and 40 years of jail bed days. When we set-up the
third program, that diverts people from competency restoration hospitals and keeps them in a local facility. Instead
of just [inaudible] on the restoring competency, we actually focus on reintegrating them back into the community.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Would you say that deincarceration is the way forward?

LEIFMAN: I think
jail should be the last resort for people with mental illnesses. It shouldn’t be the first entry point for people
with mental illness, which it has become. Our jails have become the de facto mental health facilities all around
the country and it’s really not fair. Most of these individuals have serious trauma issues and arrest often
re-traumatizes them.

Their lives are generally so fragile to begin with that even a day in jail
can help further the stigma against them, sever ties from employment, from housing, from family, and make it even
that much more difficult for them to reintegrate. Now there are some people that do commit crimes that are offensive
enough or dangerous enough that need to be in bars, so the program really is about identifying the people that don’t
need to be in jail and making sure that we get them out.

One of the things that we do now is we
use a risk assessment tool. We evaluate everybody that comes to our program and line-up the right services for each
individual. The key is to really understanding what the individual needs, doing our best to line-up the right services
for that particular individual, and then help reintegrate, reassociate them back into the community. If you do that
with all the supports and services that they need, this population can do very well.

In fact,
what most people don’t understand is that, number one is, people with mental illnesses are no more dangerous
than the general population and on medication they’re actually have a much lower propensity for any violent
crimes than people without mental illness. Sadly, they’re much more likely to be victims of violent crimes than
perpetrators.

The other thing I don’t think people understand is that most people with mental
illnesses have much better recovery rates than actually people with diabetes and heart disease. The key to these
illnesses just like most illnesses is identifying them early and treating people early. I think the problem arises
when we ignore the problem and we see people who have been sick for many years, and have had many psychotic episodes.

What we’re trying to do in our community as well is working with our school system now to educate all
of our teachers so that they can do a better job identifying kids that are showing signs and symptoms of mental illness
so that we don’t wait for them to grow-up in our system to try to get them access to treatment at a much earlier
stage. We look at this as not as a court problem or a court solution, but really a community problem that requires
a community solution.

It really requires a community to come together and to make the structural
changes that are necessary that help access treatment for people.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Within the
courtroom, how do you balance responding to the treatment needs of defendants with the need for public safety?

LEIFMAN: If somebody commits a violent offense, now that is not someone that’s probably a good candidate
for our program. The people that we accept in our program are, A, generally charged with committing low-level non-violent
offenses nor do they have histories of committing violent offenses. There are very good risk assessment tools on
whether or not that they’re going to commit further crimes in the future and so we do use those.

It
may sound counterintuitive, but the people that are scoring moderate to high risk are the ones that we want in the
program because those are the ones you want to wrap your arms around, get them the right services, follow them more
closely and monitor them so that they’re not picking up new offenses. The people with low-risk don’t need
that kind of court supervision. They’re going to be absolutely fine back in the community and the chances of
them reoffending are very, very, very low.

I think as communities look to set-up these programs,
the key is to take the moderate and higher risk people who are going to get out of jail anyway, and make sure that
we’re appropriately monitoring them, and helping them change their ways, getting them housing, getting them
case management, getting them peer specialists so that we know that they are going to stay out of trouble and stop
committing offenses.

By doing that, you get better outcomes, you spend your dollars more wisely,
and you have a bigger, better impact on improving our public safety.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: In your
experience in dealing with mental illness in the justice system over the decades, have you seen a change in the justice
system response to mental illness?

LEIFMAN: That’s a great
question. Yes. There have been [inaudible] in how the courts are beginning to approach and deal with people with
mental illnesses. There’s a lot of initiatives that are going on and particularly since prevalence is just so
high in the criminal justice system.

We started several years ago, an organization called the
Judge’s Leadership Initiative and we created a parallel group called the Psychiatric Leadership Group. We now
go around the country training judges on how to identify people with mental illnesses, how to respond better in court,
and how the judge can be the community facilitator to bring people together to make the structural changes that are
necessary to have a better improved response.

There’s a national movement going on right
now. We’ve begun this initiative called Stepping Up. More than 250 counties in the United States representing
more than a third of the American population have passed these resolutions agreeing to step up to reduce the over
representation of people with mental illnesses.

The jails are now spending almost $70 billion
a year to partially deal with this problem and it’s enormously expensive. It cuts into infrastructure projects,
it affects our tax base, and it’s such an unnecessary waste of money because we don’t get good outcomes
from what we do today.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I also wanted to talk to you about a very interesting
book called Crazy by the reporter, Pete Early, which was personal, but also investigative look at mental illness
in the justice system. He got access to the Miami-Dade County Jail for research. Were you involved in that decision?
Was it an easy decision to give him access or were there reservations about it?

LEIFMAN: Yes.
I felt that it was incredibly important for someone to tell the story. While the focus was on the Miami-Dade County
Jail and some of the horrors that went on there, we could have been any jail in the United States. He did a brilliant
job documenting what goes on and I think it really was illuminating for a lot of people in the country, and helped
us take a critical look at our own system. We’ve been able to almost use his book as a blueprint on how to improve
our system.

The difference between today and when he wrote that book are night and day. We closed
down the horrible 9th floor that he highlights in his book. We opened up 2 jail floors that are just for people with
mental illnesses. Instead of sticking our heads in the dirt and resisting what was going wrong, we fixed it.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Would you say that opening up the jail to scrutiny from a reporter has actually benefited
Miami?

LEIFMAN: There is no doubt. It wasn’t just Pete. We also opened it up to our local
CBS affiliate. Inevitably the Justice Department came in and took a hard look at our jail, and all those things helped.
Since that day, we have special training for our corrections officers. There has been a significant reduction in
violence on those floors since we’ve made those changes and we’re getting people out of the system, and
not keeping them so long, so it’s less of a burden on the justice system and the jail system to begin with.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I wanted to ask you about the state of mental illness in the justice system today, what
you think the challenges are, and what the future can perhaps look like.

LEIFMAN: I think we’re
turning a corner. We have a long way to go, but we have finally acknowledged and recognized that we have a problem.
It’s also interestingly pleasantly enough one of the only non-partisan issues that we have seen in my legislature
as well as in congress. Part of the problem that we have today is, aside from inadequate community resources to handle
some of these and the capacity to handle some of these problems, all of the laws regarding both treatment and financing
for mental health were really written 40 and 50 years ago.

These laws were all written at a time
when most people with serious mental illnesses were still in state hospital. It really requires a modernization of
the laws so that they better reflect the science, research, and medicine of psychiatry and mental health. As we begin
to do that, I think we’ll start to see this great change.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: On that note,
I think we will conclude this podcast. Thank you so much for your time, Judge Leifman.

LEIFMAN:
Sure. Thank you for doing this.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I’m Avni Majithia-Sejpal and you’ve
been listening to the New Thinking podcast. To hear more of our podcast, visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.
Thanks so much for listening.

‘My Partner, My Enemy’: New York State Judge John Leventhal Jun 07, 2016

Judge John Leventhal is the author
of “My
Partner, My Enemy,” a book chronicling his experiences presiding over the Brooklyn
Domestic Violence Court, the first felony domestic violence court in the nation.
In this New Thinking podcast, Judge Leventhal discusses memorable
cases from his tenure, the domestic violence court model, and why he felt it was important to write a book about
domestic violence. Judge Leventhal presided over the Brooklyn Domestic Violence Court from its opening in June 1996
until 2008. Since 2008, he has served as an associate justice of the New York State Supreme Court in the second department
of the appellate division.

RAPHAEL POPE-SUSSMAN: Hi, this is Raphael Pope-Sussman
of the Center for Court Innovation. In today’s podcast, we’re joined by New York judge, John Leventhal
of the Second Judicial Department, Appellate Division in Brooklyn. From 1996 to 2008, Judge Leventhal presided over
the nation’s first Felony Domestic Violence court, based in Brooklyn’s Supreme Court. He has chronicled
this experience in a new book, My Partner, My Enemy, from Rowman and Littlefield. My Partner, My Enemy presents vignettes
of some memorable cases Leventhal heard in Domestic Violence court, as well as Leventhal’s reflections on how
the justice system can best serve victims of domestic violence. Judge Leventhal, thank you for speaking with me today
and welcome.

JUDGE JOHN LEVENTHAL: Thank you. It’s my pleasure to participate in this podcast
on a very important subject.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Why did you write this book?

JUDGE
LEVENTHAL: Well, I was taken by all of the cases that I had and there were some that stuck out to me as very, very
unusual, which was emblematic of the types of cases that judges and people experience in their lives. I thought that
it would be helpful, not only to talk about the cases, but to bring it to dramatic attention, but also to make suggestions
as to how to better protect the victims, the scope of the problem, how the problem has somewhat abated since the
court was established in 1995, and also why we should have specialized courts to deal with domestic violence issues.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Can you describe to our audience, some of whom may not be familiar with the concept of a domestic
violence court, how that court operates?

JUDGE LEVENTHAL: We started out as a pilot project in
the aftermath of a very celebrated domestic violence case, the Galina Komar case and, after that, this was really
the project of former Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye, who was really the innovator and mother of all problem-solving
courts in New York and the Center for Court Innovation who came up with all these good ideas and protocols for problem-solving
courts.

What we learned at the very beginning is that people continually come back in domestic
violence situations and we were trying to pretty much break the mold and we started the domestic violence court as
a pilot project. It eventually became a model court where the justice department was sending judges and administrators
from all over the country to come watch our court and, eventually the state department was sending judges, administrators
and lawyers from all over the world to watch the court.

POPE-SUSSMAN: What happens in domestic
violence court?

JUDGE LEVENTHAL: Well, one judge handles the case from the arraignment, on the
indictment, to motions, to pleas, to either trial and sentencing. What happened was that, one of the things that
I learned when I visited Quincy, Massachusetts when I first started, in Quincy, misdemeanors are punishable up to
2-1/2 years for a misdemeanor and the judge had great power over them. What I was struck by that there was a great
violation of probation calendar.

What I sought to do was to reduce the violation of probation
calendar. I would bring my probationers back. Those who were lucky to get six months in jail plus five years’
probation and they didn’t get state prison time, I would bring them back every two or three months for a year,
year and a half, and what we discovered is that the violation rate was less than half of the general probation population,
which is remarkable when these people were so intimately involved and knew one another.

What had
happened was, that even those who I sentenced to state jail time, when they came out of jail, parole saw the success
that we were accomplishing with probation and they asked me to bring the parolees back when they were released from
jail within one month, so that I would read them the Order of Protection, the conditions of parole, and reinforce
that the judge is still watching them. That’s why this was such a successful court because the judge was involved.
There was intensive judicial monitoring and the defendants were always reminded that the judge is watching them.

POPE-SUSSMAN: You’ve taken a very unique approach in this book with each chapter, a vignette, based
around a character or two characters. How did you select these stories out of all the cases that came before you?

JUDGE LEVENTHAL: When I decided to write the book, I went back to my notes. I didn’t actually ask for
the transcripts of the pleas or the trials or the hearings, but I went back to my notes on the number of cases and
I picked the cases that were emblematic of the types of situations, attorneys, prosecutors, and judges would see.
I picked two cases on same-sex violence and each case had another aspect of domestic violence in it. Of course, there
was heterosexual violence as well, the prototypical domestic violence situation. I tried to pick out cases which
would add to the dialogue, which would add to the discussion, and to bring more awareness to the problem.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Why did you select this approach?

JUDGE LEVENTHAL: Because I thought that,
after OJ Simpson, after Galina Komar, and even after Ray Rice and these celebrated cases, they go back into the background
and I didn’t want domestic violence to be the flavor of the month, the fad of the day, and I didn’t want
it to disappear. I figured if I wrote this book, that it would be out there, people would read it and realize that,
number one, this problem existed before OJ Simpson. This problem continues to exist and this is a problem that started
out and was only brought to the attention, first by the Women’s Movement and then it went from a private matter
to a women’s issue to a societal issue and that we should keep it in the forefront and remember it and it shouldn’t
be forgotten just because it’s not a celebrated or a case that gathers the public attention.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
I think there’s so many heart-wrenching stories in the book. I was particularly affected by the story of someone
you called Deadly Dave. I know these are pseudonyms but, who was Deadly Dave?

JUDGE LEVENTHAL:
He was a fellow who was actually the head of a domestic violence accountability group, or Batterer’s Intervention
Program, who would actually be in charge of the men and he would come in every week and report to the court, but
the thing which was so interesting about Dave is that he would tell me that, “Oh, these knuckleheads don’t
get it.” If anyone could talk the talk it was Dave and I thought if anyone could walk the walk, it was Dave.

Then the program really wasn’t doing well, so I stopped dealing with that program about a year or two
before but then, when I read on Christmastime two years following that he had killed his girlfriend and her boyfriend,
I was shocked that it was him. What made this more outrageous, they were looking for him, and that he went to a precinct
and told the police, “I’m the one you’re looking for,” and right in front of the police, he shot
himself in the head.

It was a real eye opener for me. It really reinforced that domestic violence
cuts across all strata of society. You can’t have any true assumption that someone is not going to be a batterer,
no matter who they are.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Domestic violence cases are so complicated and I think the
title of your book alludes to that. The perpetrator is also the partner of the victim. How can the justice system
protect victims of domestic violence?

JUDGE LEVENTHAL: The police are never in the home, but there
are certain aspects where we can do. For example, in England and in New Zealand, they have a procedure where you
can call the police and find out if your boyfriend has been convicted of a domestic violence crime. I think that
would really be a wonderful, wonderful thing. A suggestion that I made years ago, when I was starting out with this
through the police department has been effectuated, where they have digital cameras in the police cars, where they
can take pictures of the victim immediately, so when the woman says, “I wasn’t hit,” or, “It
wasn’t that bad,” and then you show the pictures at the arraignment, would be a big deal.

I
envision also improvements where the judge can have access to the emergency room records at the arraignment, whereby
we would know, number one, it would result in more pleas. Judges are in the position of convicting people but, if
you eliminate the cases that shouldn’t be dismissed, which are dismissed in domestic violence cases, then you
can concentrate and have trials on the cases that should be trialed. Also, you would have more discovery both for
the prosecution and for the defense at an earlier stage in the proceeding.

Other things that we
can do, we can have, every college campus should have an orientation about sexual violence and harassment. We should
have programs on teen dating violence in high schools. There are many things that we can do. Another thing that we
can do, we can make sure that shelters, which are needed, if a woman is to leave her abusive boyfriend or spouse,
we should make shelters more available to the women and not preclude women who have adolescent, teenage male children.
A lot of the shelters do not allow them into those shelters. The woman is then faced with the choice of either staying
with her abusive husband or giving up her teenage child, which you shouldn’t have to do.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Any final thoughts?

JUDGE LEVENTHAL: My final thought is that, anyone who thinks they know everything
about this problem is clearly mistaken. We’re not interested in just processing the cases. We’re interested
in protecting the complainant while the case is pending and even after it is over. We’re interested in forming
a partnership by all of the agencies, including the defense bar. We are interested in having a coordinated community
response so that everyone’s on board. The only way a judge can participate in this is if they get the defense
bar on board. Success for this court should be measured that any of the defendants who appear before a judge in the
domestic violence court should never commit another violent crime in the future. That’s how I judge the success,
which is pretty much unobtainable, but that’s the only way I can judge success.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.

JUDGE LEVENTHAL: It was – I always think
that dealing and speaking on domestic violence issues is really a duty. You’re very welcome.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
This is Raphael Pope-Sussman of the Center for Court Innovation and I’ve been speaking with Judge John Leventhal
about his new book, My Partner, My Enemy, now available on Amazon. For more information about the Center for Court
Innovation, visit www.courtinnovation.org.

Kerry Walker
of the Neighbourhood Justice Centre in Melbourne, Australia, discusses best practices for community justice during
a session at Community Justice 2016. — **10 Years of Community Justice in Melbourne, Australia: An Interview with Kerry Walker** Jun 02, 2016
In this New Thinking podcast, Kerry Walker, director of the Neighbourhood
Justice Centre in Melbourne, Australia, describes some of the ways the Justice Centre engages
the community, all with the long-term goal of promoting the rule of law and a “civil, caring society.” She reflects
on lessons learned as the Justice Centre approaches its 10^th anniversary, including, “Never
act alone [but] only … in partnership.” The podcast concludes with a discussion of ways the Justice Centre is using
technology to promote safety and make the court more user-friendly. The interview took place while Walker
was in Chicago to attend Community Justice 2016.

Kerry Walker of the Neighbourhood Justice Centre in Melbourne, Australia, discusses best practices
for community justice during a session at Community Justice 2016.

***The following is a transcript***

KERRY
WALKER: Allow for the unintended consequence, because it’s often stronger than your first program
idea.

ROB WOLF: Hi, this is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court
Innovation. I’m at Community Justice 2016 in Chicago, Illinois. It’s an international summit that’s
brought together over 400 people interested in court reform. With me right now is Kerry Walker, who is the director
of the Neighbourhood Justice Centre in the city of Yarra, which is part of the city of Melbourne, Australia. Hi Kerry.

WALKER: Hello Robert.

WOLF: I thought it would
be interesting to talk to you today about the Neighbourhood Justice Centre, because you are shortly going to celebrate
your tenth anniversary.

WALKER: We are.

WOLF:
Congratulations.

WALKER: Thank you.

WOLF: I thought
we could talk about the Justice Centre generally, and also focus in on community engagement, which is something that
is an important part of community courts and community justice centers, and something that I know you guys are particularly
good at doing. Why don’t we start with that. Let’s talk about community engagement. Maybe you can just
define the term for me, because I think for people unfamiliar with community courts, they might say, “Why is
a court of any kind engaging with the community? A court is supposed to remain apart from the community, above the
community.” Maybe you could explain to me what community engagement means.

WALKER:
Community engagement for us is premised on the principle that ordinary citizens have a right to understand the law.
They have a right to feel justice in their communities, and they have the right to be part of that relationship between
the law and themselves and their neighbours. I think it’s a new way of looking at the rule of law, and to say
that justice must play an active role in a community. If we are serious that what we want to do via courts and via
the rule of law, is to have a civil caring society where there is strong stewardship and tolerance and fairness,
then we must play a part in that.

WOLF: Let’s talk a little bit about
that. You have neighbourhood in your name, and community justice, which is the approach you’re speaking of,
has the word community in it, so that means that there’s a very local element, you’re working in a particular
neighbourhood. How exactly do you let the community initiate things? How do you communicate or open that communication?

WALKER: I can give you some examples of the type of activity we do. For instance, if there is
to be a local festival, we will ring and say, “We would love to be a part of that, and we would love to come
to the festival, but in order to come to the festival, we want to help either take the minutes or do the photocopying
or help put up the tents. We want to do something, we want to be really active. We don’t want to just turn up
on the day with our trestle table and our books and say, ‘Hi, aren’t we lovely and wonderful, come and
talk to us and we’ll tell you what we do.'” We, I think, show by example about putting our shoulder
to the wheel, and show that we are really serious in participating, and therefore getting to know people.

WOLF: Where’s the intersection of justice? If you’re involved in a community
activity, how does that intersect with what you’re actually doing in the court?

WALKER:
We have quite a different legal system to the American system, and it is, in some ways, more monolithic and more
difficult to have that participatory interaction at the court phase. However, what we have done is the community
work part of what we do, is very carefully chosen.

WOLF: What do you mean?
Community work can mean like a restitution project, which a defendant might be sentenced to as part of their sentence?

WALKER: Yes.

WOLF: I see. Does the
community help you identify areas where crime and safety issues, where the court can focus on certain safety issues,
whether it’s street corners or types of offending that the community’s concerned about?

WALKER:
Yes. We are part of a number of local safety committees that we have been invited to be members of that. Again, we
wait to be invited. We don’t say, “We’re the Justice Center, we should be a part of this.” What
we say is, “If there is ever an opportunity where you think we could be helpful, we would love to take that
up.” Invariably we do get invited. We also are invited to a number of resident-led types of meetings and committees.
We always have the voice of the community. The other part is that there are lots of groups in the community who use
our building to meet. We’ll ask, at times, that they would like one of us to come and talk to them about a particular
issue, or might just grab us as we’re there. It’s both informal and formal, but we try to embed ourselves
in what is resident-led.

We’re always also trying to leverage off the talents and the strengths
of the community. We’ve just been involved in this big project of street art, and it’s really an anti-graffiti
project. They wanted some money from us, and I said, “Yeah, I’m happy to do that, because I think it’s
really worthwhile and I can see that it’s a crime-prevention activity.” I said, “But, you are really
popular with young people, so what I want is for you to mentor and teach some young people how to do some stencil
art, but on our back wall so that they will come into the center and that they will have a confidence about what
it means.”

WOLF: I see, and the young people aren’t necessarily
involved in the justice system.

WALKER: No.

WOLF:
They’re just young people from the community.

WALKER: Yeah.

WOLF:
I suppose the impact that you’ve had on community perceptions or attitudes towards the justice system, is that
something … That would be hard to measure. Do you have, apart from anecdotally, a sense of how you perhaps, over
the last ten years, have, through your engagement, affected community attitudes towards the justice system?

WALKER: Well, what we know is that the police tell us that their relationship with the community
has improved, they say, a thousandfold, because of their relationship with us. People trust them much more because
of us. We know that the Aboriginal community feels much safer with justice than they have felt before we came, because
they tell us that, and we know that when we first came, very rarely would an Aboriginal person turn up for their
court case. We have done a lot of work over the years about encouraging that confidence, and now we have a turn up
rate between 85 and 95%. But we have done things like have a specific day for Aboriginal people where we put on a
kangaroo barbecue, and we invite their families and their support as well as local agencies. It becomes much more
than just, “Oh yes, you’re here to be processed.” It is actually a way of saying, “No, no. This
building, this place, is a part of the community, and you are always welcome here.”

WOLF:
Tell me, in January you’re going to turn ten, the Neighbourhood Justice Center’s going to turn ten. Do
you have any lessons you can share for people who are interested in community justice, in community courts, and just
interested in building better relationships between the justice system and their communities?

WALKER:
I think some of the lessons we’ve learned … One of the big lessons we’ve learned was that we got it right
when we said, “We will never act alone, we will only ever act in partnership.” That, I think, has worked,
in that it’s stopped us getting too cocky and it means if I think I’ve got a good idea, then I actually
have to go outside and find someone else who thinks it’s a good idea, or it’s not going to happen. I have
hung onto what I think are good ideas, sometimes for years, until I can find someone who will say yes.

WOLF: Someone in the community per se? Or could be another agency?

WALKER:
In the community or it could be another agency. But for instance, I have been attending a community meeting now for
ten years, and at that meeting, I, maybe every third or fourth meeting, I talk about the Baltimore Community Conferencing
Center. “Wouldn’t it be great if we did something like that?” And everyone just says, “Moving
along now. It’s a next agenda item.”

WOLF: That’s where you
bring together various members of a community where there’s perhaps been some kind of dispute or a difference
to problem-solve together, collectively?

WALKER: That’s right. Two years
ago, again, I raised it, so this is me having done this for nearly eight years, and someone said, “I saw it
on the television, I saw it about those kids. Yeah. And a local chef came down and he baked a big cake for them and
it was just great, and now they’ve got a football tent. We should do that.” I thought, “I don’t
believe this. For eight years I’ve tried to explain this, but it meant … All I had to do was just wait for
it to come on the television.”

WOLF: It’s not real until it’s
on TV.

WALKER: That’s right. Now what we’re doing is opening up a portal that
will be based on the practice of the Baltimore Community Conference Center, which I’m going to visit during
this trip.

WOLF: Fantastic, wow. Any other lessons?

WALKER:
The other is I think about … Allow for the unintended consequence, because it’s often stronger than your first
program idea. What we have found is that often when we’ve had an idea and we’ve gone through with that,
the outcomes, in fact, are things we never expected them to be. They are very powerful, because they arise out of
the relationships that are made, rather than anything that we have actually tried to drive. I think the third is
about … Messy is okay. You can’t know every step that you’re going to take. That’s what innovation
is about. If you always know what the endgame is, well, it’s not true innovation.

WOLF:
You have been doing new things all the time, I’m always hearing about new ideas that you guys are up to with
technology, you’re doing some things.

WALKER: One of the things we’re
doing and it’s in the area of family violence is we’re trying to give more confidence to the citizen. Family
violence is gendered, in the main, it’s women who apply for domestic violence orders. What tends to happen is
that women in crisis are treated much more as children. “No, let me help you do that and here’s … No
you’ll need to sit down with me to fill out the form.” They lose their agency essentially, and we thought,
“What would happen if we changed the 18 page form, took out all the legal things, put emotional intelligence
into the form, and put the risk factors in, and did it in a way that the women really felt they were able to tell
their story.” Didn’t have to come to court to do that, and sit with a stranger and perhaps cry through
it and be upset, but be able to sit with friends, or sit the library, or do it at work, wherever they felt safest.
By not having to come to court it means you don’t have to lie about where you’re going, you don’t
have to take a day off work, you don’t have to organize childcare. This you can fill it in over a month period,
so you can come in and out of it, and it’s got all sorts of safety features.

WOLF:
Doing it online that way?

WALKER: Mm-hmm (affirmative). The revolution
about this is not so much the form, which people are really focused on, but it is about … What this will do is
it will help change culture in the mainstream courts, because what this does is say … When that automated application
comes through, the court then has to contact the applicant. They will know very quickly whether or not they’ve
responded well, because the applicant has the right to then say, “Uh-uh. I’m not coming to your court,
I want to go to somebody else’s court who’s going to treat me well.” It really is putting in accountability
onto courts that they’ve not seen before. The other digital project we’re working on is that when you go
to court, you’re told, “Get there at 9:00 in the morning,” and it could be at ten to four in the afternoon
that you find out your case is adjourned. It’s like going to the airport and there’s no arrival and departure
sign.

WOLF: Interesting metaphor. Yeah. Wow.

WALKER:
What we’ve done is we’ve developed, it’s a co-design with a local company, where everyone who has
an involvement with a case will know what is going on, including the person who is going before the court. They will
be able to download an app on their phone that will show them, “Oh, yeah, my lawyer is now seeing the prosecutor.
Oh, I was supposed to go and do something. I better go and organize that. Everyone’s waiting on a report to
come from the psychiatrist. Okay, I’ll get that.” They’ll be able to see, in real time, on a commercial
grade board outside the court where their case is in the order for the day, so that they can make decisions about,
“Hmm, I might stay here, I might go away, I might ask the court to send me a text half an hour before my case
is going to come up.”

WOLF: Wow.

WALKER:
There’ll be much more power for everyone in knowing what’s going on. We think that this will, again, give
a real confidence. What we’re doing is we’re building in the analytics so that over time we’re hoping
that we can help courts discover the granularity of time, and be able to better organize themselves. It’s the
last bastion of utter disorganization.

WOLF: Clearly this is stuff you weren’t
thinking about ten years ago when you got started, so that’s just a sign of how you are continuing to evolve
and stay innovative and on the cutting edge. Thank you very much Kerry Walker for taking the time-

WALKER:
Thank you Robert.

WOLF: Here at Community Justice 2016 to talk with me. Kerry
is the director of the Neighbourhood Justice Centre, in the city of Yarra, which is in the city of Melbourne, in
Australia. I am Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Thank you very much for
listening.

Deborah Barrows, program manager of Community Partners in
Action, talks about strategies for building community partnerships during a panel on community service at Community
Justice 2016. — **‘Invest in Your Participants’: Deborah Barrows of Community Partners in Action** May 23, 2016
On any given day, the Hartford
Community Court sentences 35 to 40 people to perform community restitution as part of
their sentences. Deborah Barrows has helped create the court’s robust community service program by harnessing
relationships developed during her long career, including 28 years with the Hartford Police Department. In this New
Thinking podcast, which was recorded at Community
Justice 2016, Barrows discusses how to build community partnerships, the importance of treating
program participants with respect, and how she helped launch “Footwear with Care,” an initiative that provides
free shoes to participants in need.

Deborah Barrows, program manager of Community Partners in Action, talks about
strategies for building community partnerships during a panel on community service at Community Justice 2016.

DEBORAH
BARROWS: You want real community service? Invest in your participants, listen to them, value them. People don’t
want to be there but I thank you for coming. What? Thank you so much for coming. I appreciate you being here.

ROB WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation and I am
in Chicago at Community Justice 2016, where there are over 400 people from dozens of states, 6 countries, I think
over 100 jurisdictions, who are here to learn and talk about different aspects of community justice and court reform.
Right now I’m speaking with one of the invited speakers and also an attendee at the conference, Deborah Barrows,
who is the program manager of Community Partners in Action, which is an organization that’s been contracted
by Hartford Community Court to provide the community service which is an essential component of the Hartford Community
Court and of many community courts. So, Deborah, I wanted to start off asking you maybe you could actually explain
Community Partners in Action? What is your relationship to the court as a community based organization?

BARROWS: Thank you, and thank you so much for this opportunity. It’s exciting to be here. This is wonderful.
I’ve learned so very much. Community Partners in Action as a non-profit agency has been around over 100 years
and we work with individuals that have been involved in a criminal justice system to help them get re-integrated
into the community and doing so, under that umbrella, there are re-entry services. There is a program that deals
with women that have been incarcerated and help get them back into the society. There’s a component of basic
need, so there’s a lot of different programs under that umbrella.

WOLF: Your particular role
there is to work with the court and provide kinds of community restitution or community service projects that defendants
are sentenced to?

BARROWS: That is correct. Once an individual, it has been determined that an
individual will serve community service, that is where we take over and I oversee the community service component.
I have a staff of 7 individuals, 5 of which are in the field as supervisors, and we take our participants out on
a daily basis.

WOLF: Well, so tell me about some of the work you do because you guys put out a
newsletter and the descriptions of the kinds of community service you do, the range of it, the number of different
things that you do is kind of unusual. You’ve really been successful in terms of being creative with your community
service. I know you, in addition to a community garden, you’re involved in some environmental restoration projects
along the river. You work with a Jewish cemetery to help them maintain the cemetery. A lot of interesting things,
so maybe you could explain and give some examples of the kind of community service you’re doing, and maybe offer
some insight into how you’ve developed such a robust program?

BARROWS: I think what I need
to step back at is for 28 years I wore a hat with law enforcement, with the City of Hartford police department, so
I was a police officer operating a police cruiser and I managed to have some supervisory roles. It became very evident
then that we needed to do things differently. We needed to develop partnerships and collaborations with all of the
different entities, all of the different organizations within the community. So, when I was fortunate enough to be
offered this position as program manager of community service, my predecessor was gone so I had no one to really
show me the ropes. So, I reflected back on those partnerships and back on those collaborations, and thought, my goodness,
what a great idea to reach out to those individuals and say, “Hey, remember me. Here I am. I now have individuals
who I want to have become re-energized and re-invested in the community. I still have my police associations, my
clergy and all the different agencies, so let’s develop this collaboration and really do what we can to make
Hartford the beautiful place that we want it to be.” I attend community meetings. I stay involved in the community.
We have neighborhood revitalization zone meetings. In doing so, I’m going to individuals, I’m saying, “Listen.
On any given day I have between 35 and 40 people who are mandated to give back, so let’s really make this work.”
I find myself meeting with individuals, representatives, from the Jewish cemetery who say, “Hey. We need help.”
Absolutely. I find myself meeting with Riverfront Recapture. We have presence along the river. We have presence in
many of Hartford’s beautiful parks.

WOLF: So, what kind of- give some examples of what it
is the defendants are then doing in this scenario?

BARROWS: We are doing at Ebony Horse Women
which is a therapeutic equestrian center. We are working with horses. It’s also an educational component of
course. We’re doing some gardening. We are working along the riverfront and just cleaning the river, getting
it ready for the Dragon Races and cleaning out the trails, doing some gardening there. We have a presence in the
parks. We were just cleaning out the playgrounds and making it beautiful. Of course we have a presence on the streets.
So, just these collaborations and for me, it’s being able to say, “Listen. I don’t have all the answers
and until we come together and have this conversation about how all of us can fit in, how all of us contribute and
value the people that are involved, that’s when we make the real difference.”

WOLF:
Have you had resistance when you approach someone and say, “Oh, I’ve got some defendants here. They can
help.” Are some people, “Well, I don’t know. Is that safe?” I mean, I imagine people in addition
to the union issue, I imagine there’s a whole range of questions or concerns that might come up depending on
the kind of work you’re talking about.

BARROWS: Absolutely it is, and we sit down and work
though that. I think dialogue and communication is key, and letting people know what we bring to the table. We are
here to do this. This is what we’re offering. Ultimately, everyone wants people to get reconnected. This is
part of their community also. They may be offenders. They may be drug dealers. They may be prostitutes but for people
they deserve the right to be valued, to be respected and they are part of our community.

WOLF:
I imagine, as you said, it’s educational in some context. Some of the defendants perhaps have never-

BARROWS: Oh my goodness, yes.

WOLF: Interacted with a horse before, or been aware that
the river is an environmental concern and that it’s polluted or there’s trash along the river and that
it makes a difference to clean it up.

BARROWS: Hartford is such a rich, rich, diverse city in
its history, so each time our participants go out to these sites, there is an individual to sit and talk with them
about the meaningfulness of their work, and validating them as people so when they go up to the riverfront there’s
someone to talk about the river and its connection. When you go to the Jewish cemetery there’s someone to talk
about the richness in the cemetery. It’s one of the oldest, most beautiful cemeteries around. Just getting that
education, a lot of people have not gone anywhere other than their little front door, so they really don’t know.
Being able to do some of these things under this non-profit organization that’s helped people get back into
society is just amazing.

WOLF: It sounds like your experience, formally
as a police officer and at the police department, gives you a unique perspective. I mean, you spoke of the relationships
that you’d already had in the community and the ideas that you’d already developed in your career as a
police officer. I imagine that gives you a different kind of stature or credibility. When you’re approaching
people they feel, well she’s not putting us in danger. I mean, she’s someone who’s very knowledgeable
about the law and justice, and accountability.

BARROWS: As a police officer or as an in any field,
you’re only as good as your listening. If you’re an active listener and you can really tune into what people’s
needs are and what the community’s needs are, then that can just enhance you in your role in whatever it is
that you want to do. Being a police officer, I was not the one who had all the answers. I was the one that was generally
able to listen. I was looking at intervention and prevention years before it was taught, because I knew that we had
arrested everyone. It just didn’t work. I would sit in my cruiser on the corner and I would have made an arrest
of someone, and by the time I’m sitting here doing my paper the person would come by, “Hey, Officer Brown.”
I’m like whoa. To me, I wasn’t finished with my paper.

WOLF: Meaning
they were already released from –

BARROWS: Yes, they were already released. It was not working.
There was something else. The individuals that were standing on the corner. The answer was not to arrest them. Why
are they standing on the corner? What can we do? Do I need to collaborate with employment agencies? Is it a mental
health issue? Who do I need to collaborate with? I took those things and I’m doing the same thing as a program
manager overseeing community service. The individuals that work under me- I’m no nonsense. I believe in treating
people the way that they deserve to be treated because that’s when you really get your value, you get your work.
Community service is only as good as the individuals that are involved in it, so if you don’t engage and invest
them in the work, you’re not getting anything. You want real community service? Invest in your participants,
listen to them, value them. People don’t want to be there but I thank them. Thank you for coming. What? Thank
you so much for coming. I appreciate you being here. This is going to be a great experience. People are coming in
that are homeless. If you look down and someone needs some shoes, offer them a pair of shoes. You see someone has
tattered clothing, offer them some clothing. Take them aside, treat them with dignity and respect. Someone comes
to the window and says they’re hungry, okay I understand the importance of community service but you have a
food pantry. It’s okay to go get them a cup of coffee, a little bit of water and something to eat. Let them
know that you care about them as a person and you value them as a person. That’s what Community Partners in
Action does so very well.

WOLF: I know you started something related to a program specifically
about footwear because many clients don’t have adequate shoes. Maybe you wanted to share a little bit about
that program as well?

BARROWS: It’s funny. I talk about it and the tears flow down my eyes
because I think about where it started. Individuals come in and they don’t have adequate footwear. We want to
hold them accountable. We want them to perform community service but we’ve got to address their needs. Their
needs have got to be addressed. If it’s sub-zero degree weather, they can’t go out without a coat. They
can’t go out without adequate footwear. So, we had a small contingent of shoes and footwear there. In trying
to look at better ways, we’re always looking at how to cultivate relationships, how to do things better. An
individual, there is a police officer that is housed at city hall and he works with individuals- the shelters release
everybody early in the morning and the individuals, they meander around all day long. There is an individual who
works for another organization who works with people released from the shelter and he goes under the bridges and
tries to get people from living under the bridges to come and get the services they need. So, somehow we all talk,
and we all communicate. I’m thinking small and that’s another thing. Whatever your vision and your dreams
are don’t think small, think big because big becomes reality. I’m thinking small. I’m saying, you
know what? I can use a few pair of shoes. I can use a resource card that people can wear where they can get a hot
meal, a shower. So, I happen to talk with the officer. I happen to talk with the other individual. We convene a meeting.
I call the chief of police who’s a friend of mine. Chief Rovella, why don’t you come in for a minute. Let’s
talk about this footwear thing and thus, we have a couple of volunteers that came in and now we have something called
Footwear with Care. Started last week where the Hartford Police Department provided two cruisers, two officers, one
of them the city hall officer, and the individual who owns a sneaker store in West Hartford. She was able to secure
donations from several different vendors, The Northface, Sockanese, New Balance, and all of these sneakers were stuffed
into these police cars. In addition, a second piece of it was utilizing the media. For this particular day, people
were allowed to come down, you take a picture of the cruiser, you take a picture with the officer, but bring a pair
of gently worn sneakers. Clothing is always available. Footwear is not. So, we have another hundred and something
pairs of sneakers that were donated. People that came by that didn’t bring sneakers wanted to make donations,
so it’s that collaboration. It’s the police. It’s the shelters. It’s the hospital, the podiatrists.
It’s just great. It’s the churches.

WOLF: It’s amazing what you can do when you
bring a few-

BARROWS: It is amazing.

WOLF: Caring people together to focus,
concentrate on a problem or issue and the solutions you come up with.

BARROWS: It’s amazing
the number of individuals who want to make a difference. There are a lot of people out there who we don’t tap
into their energy who want to make a difference, that want to do something and are just waiting on being asked.

WOLF: Well, sounds like there’s some good advice there for anyone who wants to replicate what you’re
doing. Think big. Don’t have small dreams.

BARROWS: Don’t have small dreams.

WOLF: Go out and ask people who maybe want to help.

BARROWS: And
care. We had a situation a few weeks back where an individual came in. He was in a shelter. He had ended up going
and using the bathroom at a private facility and ended up getting arrested. He came to court and he was nodding.
He was obviously under the influence of something and he’s nodding back and forth. I’m at the window at
that particular time and I’m talking to him, and I’m talking to him. “Well, I got this ticket, and
this and that.” I validated his feelings. “I hear that you should have not gotten a ticket. However, you
were someplace where you should not have been.” “Well, you know, nobody cares. I have this problem. I’m
using 10 bags a day.” I said, “We have services here. There’s some resources here.” I said, “They’re
immediate.” I said, “I have a social worker here. I have individuals here that will talk to you. I could
get you some help. If you want a bed, they will get you a bed immediately.” We’re talking and of course
they’re crying and they’re nodding, and you know, we talked for about 20, 25 minutes and then they leave.
Came back 2 weeks later. “Where’s Ms. B?” So, they come and get me. How you doing Sir? How are you?
“Well, I’m not too good. I OD’d.” I said, “What do you mean?” “They had to give me
Narcan. I almost died.” So, I said, “Well tell me about that. Let’s go get some coffee. Let’s
talk about that.” At that point I’m not a social worker, but I don’t have time to go grab the social
worker because I have this conversation. I have this dialogue.

WOLF: That’s the listening
you were talking about?

BARROWS: Yes, yes. The immediate thing is of course, go get the social-
but I can’t. I have him right now. “Well, tell me about that experience?” “Well, you know, they
tell me they had to resuscitate me and you know … ” I let him talk and he went on, and, “I’m ready.
I know I need to get some help but I can’t go today. I just can’t go today.” “Tell me more.”

WOLF: Wow.

BARROWS: Talk for another 15 minutes. Left. Came back
a week later, “Where’s Ms. B?” Thank goodness I was there. “I’m ready now. I’m ready
now.” It was just wonderful.

WOLF: Well, that is remarkable.

BARROWS:
To make a difference.

WOLF: There’s a lot in that story.

BARROWS: Just
something so small, just listening.

WOLF: Being patient, and letting people on their own schedule
in this instance.

BARROWS: Each one of us can make a difference. Each one of us can save a life
and there are lives to be saved. I don’t have all the answers.

WOLF: Well thank you very
much for taking the time to share your experience.

BARROWS: Thank you.

WOLF:
I’ve been speaking with Deborah Barrows, the program manager of Community Partners in Action, which provides
the community service component at the Hartford, Connecticut Community Court and we’ve been chatting together
at Community Justice 2016, the international summit on community justice here in Chicago. (music) I’m Rob Wolf,
director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. You can find out more about the conference. You can
find out more about Hartford Community Court. We’ll also provide a link to Community Partners in Action on our
website, and thank you very much for listening.

Reducing Violence Through Media Training and Cultural Awareness Apr 28, 2016

This podcast is part of a series highlighting innovative approaches to reducing violence and improving health
outcomes among at-risk minority youth at the nine demonstration sites of the Minority
Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. One of these demonstrations sites is the Stand Up Participate program in Hennepin County, Minnesota, an initiative led by the community-based
organization Asian Media Access, Inc. in partnership with local public health, law enforcement agencies, and other
community-based groups that seeks to reduce youth violence by helping young people acquire skills for self-sufficiency, improve self-esteem,
and develop cultural pride.

Ange Hwang, executive director of Asian Media
Access, and Tyree Lawrence, executive director of the community-based LVY Foundation, joined this week’s podcast to discuss the philosphy behind
Stand Up Participate’s curriculum, which includes audio/visual
technology training, culturally based family engagement programming, health education, and organized activities with
police and community members that seek to improve communication and mutual understanding.

RAPHAEL
POPE-SUSSMAN: Hi. This is Raphael Pope-Sussman of the Center for Court Innovation. This podcast is part of the series
we are doing with people seeking to curb violence and improve access to public health for at-risk minority youth
as part of the Minority Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. The Initiative is a partnership of the Office of Minority
Health at the US Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services at
the US Department of Justice that encourages collaboration among public health organizations, law enforcement agencies,
and community-based groups.

Our podcast series highlights innovative approaches at the 9 demonstration
sites that have received funding under the program. This week, we’re looking at the Stand Up, Participate Program
in Hennepin County Minnesota. Stand Up, Participate is an initiative led by the community-based organization, Asian
in Media Access in partnership with local public health and law enforcement agencies as well as other community-based
groups like the LVY Foundation. Stand Up, Participate seeks to prevent youth violence by helping young people acquire
skills for self-sufficiency, improve self-esteem, and develop cultural pride.

I’m speaking
today with Ange Hwang, executive director of Asian Media Access, and Tyree Lawrence, executive director of the LVY
Foundation. Ange, Tyree, thank you for speaking with me today and welcome.

HWANG: Thank you.

LAWRENCE: Thank you.

POPE-SUSSMAN: For starters, can you describe Stand Up, Participate?

HWANG: Sure. This is Ange from Asian Media Access. Stand Up, Participate has been focusing to use bi-cultural
healthy living as a concept to encourage particularly Asian American community and African American community so
we will hope is by working through cultural pride and really giving you there a control sometimes. Sometimes that
will be something they’d be proud of so they will be more willing to participate and to change their behaviors.
So they would decrease the at-risk behaviors and really be able to participate back to the communities.

We are doing that through couple different venues. In Asian Media Access focusing on multimedia training
so the youth will build on self-esteem. We focusing on the cultural classes such as Asian dances so the youth can
be able to regain the culture pride. Tyree will do a little bit different than us and I will have him to talk a little
bit more.

LAWRENCE: Yes, our part of the Stand Up and Participate movement really focuses on entrepreneurship
and economic development. A lot of the young men, the African American young men in particular, are often challenged
with some of the caveats they face in society and certain stigmas, if you will. We leverage the ability for them
to tap into their own personal potential and their talents and then take it to another level by allowing them to
explore those talents in a way that ends up in a form of business or some type of trade or skill set so that they
can really find alternatives to whatever lifestyle may be prohibiting them from just living life in general and just
being, quote unquote, normal.

HWANG: Yeah. I think Tyree’s strategy is touching a very important
part is to really giving youth a choice, giving them a power to choose some of the skills they like to acquire such
as entrepreneurship and such as multimedia. After they do that, they’re really building their own team to get
away from other negative influence around them to really be able to focus and really starting to become a contributing
citizen. Then we bring in our partners, particularly at the public health and the police departments, to providing
such as mentorship such as talking about how we can improve relationship together with the police department and
also having them to even just take them to shop. We have one activity, back to school shopping with the cops. The
cops pick up 30 at-risk youth and then we got Target Foundation to support. Each youth has $100 spending money so
the cop guide them through Target to purchase all the school equipment. By doing this type of activity and empower
the youth to have a choices and power and control, they feel they can choose a better route for themself. I feel
this strategy is very effective.

POPE-SUSSMAN: How is funding from the Minority Youth Violence
Prevention Initiative enable Stand Up, Participate to work with its target population and expand services?

HWANG: The funding for us has been so helpful particularly being able to do a lot of trainings and recruiting
support groups with this youth and we can do a lot of creative and innovative outreach. I would like to particularly
emphasizing that by culture healthy living, we have been utilizing, as a central theme, for all the activities particularly,
for example, our Asian youth. We try to encourage them to exercise more, so Asian dances and martial arts. That’s
really tied them back to their culture roots. We really attract more youth to the program with this type of activity
instead of trying to utilizing mainstream activities. We design the project with that bi-cultural activity in mind.
That would help more and more of those at-risk youth of color would be willing to come into the program because it’s
coming from their culture and it’s built on their strengths. This funding source is so important. Tyree, want
to add more?

LAWRENCE: Definitely. We will also parallel. It’s a huge mechanism that’s
been able to help us as far as promoting the abilities and the talents of these individuals who may not, otherwise,
be on a platform. For instance, being able to get in front of a corporation like 3M and show the many attributes
that parallel what they’re currently teaching their employees has been phenomenal. We wouldn’t have been
able to develop this type of platform had it not been for the funding.

HWANG: Yeah. I think, particularly
I would really want to piggy back what Tyree had said. If not had the funding, we won’t be able to develop.
I think this is really the key because a lot of times we see a lot of funding, maybe supporting a police academy
and police academy to outreach to other youth and then recruit. But we do actually opposite way. We starting with
the community. We have the community build that support group. Then outreach back to the police, back to the public
health in seeking for support, seeking for training, and seeking to improve that relationship.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
How have the youth been responding to the programming so far?

LAWRENCE: The youth have been actually
responding quite positively to what we’re trying to do as far as encouraging a more self-initiated healthier
lifestyle. We’re taking strife in the youth group that I deal with and are they ready to sit down across from
police officers and have these wholehearted discussions? I would say we haven’t reached that point just yet
but what they are open to are more creative and innovative ways of having their side be understood, per se, by police
officers so that there can be a more creative dialogue and hopefully we progress to something like that in the near
future. Our attempts have been, I don’t want to say difficult, but not as easy as I had anticipated when starting
this project.

HWANG: But that is exactly we need to hear, Tyree,
because we are dealing with at-risk youth who has a distrust to the police. We having this baggage in our community
for a long time and if not coming from the community, sometimes it’s very hard for this group of at-risk youth
to be able to accept this type of activities. Why bother to communicate with the police? We are doing just fine.
So that’s a lot of that type of thinking coming from our youth. That’s why we doing this from community
perspective that the community feel the police really want to reach out. They really would like to build that bridge
between both.

POPE-SUSSMAN: How are you measuring outcomes?

HWANG: We have
a very dedicated evaluator working with us from the University of Minnesota has been helping us to do two major data
collecting efforts. One is doing the youth survey, pre- and post-. We really focusing a lot on those relationship
and we got a lot of high mark. For example, the question we ask is “Do you always feel there’s a caring
adult in the program?” We’ll always have more than 95%, pre- and post-, have a very high comparison. We
do well on that area.

The other part is the teacher survey because we want to prove our methods
work particularly at the academic outcome level. We have all the youth to take survey back to their teacher, have
their teacher directly mail to us in talking about, “Did you feel this youth change in their behavior? Do they
turn in the homework now? Do they participate at the class? Do they be able to work well with the classmates in the
school?” All these are very positive feedback. We just conclude our first year’s evaluations and we come
back was 85-90% all the mark from the teacher regarding … We have about 170 survey back so regarding those 170
youth we serve, they are hitting the high mark and teacher give them a lot of improvement particularly they notice
throughout the year.

LAWRENCE: I’d also like to add the very unique part of that survey,
it was very interesting when we started out as a team. We were very intentional about our efforts to reach out to
the youth that we, quote unquote, were using at-risk so that they understand what do they feel are great outcomes
of this. It wasn’t just what society or even what we thought was a good outcome and measuring that against also
what the teachers are saying but we wanted to know for them, what would be success in your eyes? That is a very special
part of the survey that has been, in my opinion, very innovative in the ability for them to voice on the survey we’re
producing our own business. We are acquiring trade skills toward having the job opportunities. We are meeting CEOs
and executive where we normally wouldn’t have been exposed to this types of thing. Those are massively impressive
outputs to these youths in so many different facets and that’s just a small component of the survey but in their
mind, it’s the main thing.

HWANG: Definitely. This really tie back into that relationship
evaluation, the evaluation is designed really talking about how we can utilizing relationship, building this relationship
to motivate the youth to change. It’s not just to say you come to our program, you learn the skills. But the
skill is part of their life, can change their life to better so we will be able to have the skills so that youth
can earn more money for their family, for example, or to even just simple Asian dance. One of my at-risk male dancers
won the first place this year at the Hmong New Year’s and they’ve been so proud of themself and used to become
acting with the Hmong gang. Now they are out there on the stage with 20,000 people cheering for them to get this
first place at the Hmong Dance Competition. It means so much to them. They’re really also pointing out a different
direction so in the evaluation, they would say they love dance. They love the opportunity we create for them particularly
improve the point.

If we can build the relationship with these youth, we will be able to really
encourage them to choose to use different arts to relieve their anger, to express themself on the stage, to be proud
of themself, to speak up, then we can have some alternative. Then we hope those messages will be able to create a
long-term impact to create a better system for us.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Well thank you so much.

LAWRENCE: Thank you.

HWANG: Thank you so much.

POPE-SUSSMAN: This
has been Raphael Pope-Sussman of the Center for Court Innovation and I’ve been speaking with Ange Hwang, executive
director of Asian Media Access, Tyree Lawrence, executive of the LVY Foundation. For more information for on the
Center for Court Innovation, visit www.courtinnovation.org.

At Community Justice 2016: Above, Denise O'Donnell, director of the Bureau of Justice Assistance,
delivers her keynote address. Below left, Jose Egurbide of the Los Angeles City Attorney's Office participates
in a panel on Restorative Justice. Right, Mark Kammerer of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office
discusses Risk/Needs Assessments on a panel. — **Prosecutors Explore New Solutions to Public Safety Concerns: A Conversation about the ‘Smart Prosecution Initiative’** Apr 28, 2016
The Bureau of Justice Assistance at U.S. Department of Justice created the Smart Prosecution Initiative to encourage prosecutors to explore new solutions
to public safety problems. Grant recipients work with researchers to document outcomes and develop effective, economical,
and innovative responses to crime. In this podcast, Denise O’Donnell, the director of the Bureau of Justice
Assistance, sits down with Jose Egurbide of the Los
Angeles City Attorney’s Office and Mark Kammerer of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office to talk about their Smart Prosecution
programs, which use risk assessment tools to divert low-level offenders from court. The conversation took place while
the three were in Chicago to attend Community Justice 2016.

At Community Justice 2016: Above, Denise O’Donnell, director of the Bureau
of Justice Assistance, delivers her keynote address. Below left, Jose Egurbide of the Los Angeles City Attorney’s
Office participates in a panel on Restorative Justice. Right, Mark Kammerer of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s
Office discusses Risk/Needs Assessments on a panel.

ROB WOLF: Hi. This is
Rob Wolf, director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. We are at Community Justice 2016 where 400
people have gathered in Chicago for 3 days to share ideas about justice reform. With me are 3 people who are leaders
of efforts to improve justice systems both locally and nationally: Denise O’Donnell is the director of the Bureau
of Justice Assistance at the Department of Justice; Mark Kammerer is the Supervisor of Alternative Prosecution and
the Sentencing Unit at the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office; and Jose Egurbide is the Supervising
Attorney in the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office.

Something you all have in common is a
grant program supported by the Bureau of Justice Assistance called the Smart Prosecution Initiative. Denise O’Donnell,
I thought maybe you could explain what the Smart Prosecution Initiative is and how the Bureau is using it to support
innovation and test new ideas.

DENISE O’DONNELL: Sure. I’m a former prosecutor, and when
I came to BJA I felt we really didn’t have enough focus on prosecutors and the role prosecutors can play in
justice reform. We had a great program called Smart Policing that had been operating for a number of years that actually
funded police practitioner partnerships- research partnerships to look at innovative approaches and collect data,
analyze them and assess the outcomes of the program.

We brainstormed a little about that and thought
it was a great model for prosecutors as well. So prosecutors can innovate. They can try new approaches. They can
work with a researcher, collect data and work on programs like diversion programs, like community justice centers,
and so many other initiatives.

It’s now part of a smart suite of programs at BJA. We now
have 9 programs working in this model to really promote criminal justice innovation.

WOLF: Mark
and Jose, now both of you have grants under the Smart Prosecution Initiative. They’re similar in that they’re
both helping divert offenders from more traditional sentences. Let me ask you both, why would a prosecutor’s
office be interested in diverting people from punishments that would get them more deeply involved in the justice
system?

Mark, do you want to go first?

MARK KAMMERER: Sure. We’ve actually
been involved in diversion for decades. When I came to the office in 2000, there was a drug diversion program that
had been around since the 70’s, but one of the things we found with a lot of our alternative sentencing, basically
treatment courts, is that people had engaged in significant criminal activity before they got to treatment court.

What we wanted to do was possibly intervene with people at an earlier stage, with the hope being we could
interrupt the cycle before they got to the point where they had significant background that would warrant being in
an intensive 24 month probation program. Our office has been, especially in the last 4 or 5 years, very involved
in diverting people out of the system as early as possible. We’ve implemented a medical model that people are
diverted at the earliest point with the least amount of intervention possible, knowing that we have a whole system-
a whole continuum that we could advance to another level if needs be.

The Smart Prosecution process,
the grant that we received with that, was to … We were able to involve risk assessment in our process. One of my
experiences from working in healthcare is you really need to objectify things as much as possible so we know who
it is that we’re working with, and why we’re working with them, and what would be the best interventions.
That was one of the gaps in our system, was we did not have sufficient risk assessment involvement. That was a cornerstone
of the proposal that we made to BJA that was funded.

WOLF: I know, Jose, your initiative as well,
you’re diverting people and you’re also doing risk assessment. Let me just ask you, I thought prosecutors
classically are interested in guilt and innocence. What does a risk assessment tool, like both your programs use,
do for you?

JOSE EGURBIDE: Thanks, Rob. We’re very excited to be here. Of course we’re
very grateful for BJA’s leadership and the opportunities that that’s creating as well as the CCI risk and
needs assessment tool. What that’s doing for us is, it’s giving us an alternative to an already congested
court system where we can focus more on rehabilitation and, as Mark said, looking at it at the front end.

You often see a lot of rehabilitation happening upon reentry. We also believe that when you talk
about alternative prosecution, when you talk about restorative justice, you need to restore the victim, you need
to restore the community, but you also need to restore the offender to a position where they’ll be a more productive
member of society going forward.

WOLF: Let’s talk a little bit specifically about what a
risk assessment tool is. You both use a similar tool that the Center for Court Innovation developed with Bureau of
Justice Assistance support. It’s evidence based, it’s been tested, but tell me how it actually functions.
What does it tell you and what does it allow you to do?

EGURBIDE: A needs and risk assessment
tool … and now there are some tools that are just risk assessment. The Center for Court Innovation tool that we
use was selected specifically because it also focuses on a needs assessment. So again, when you talk about restorative
justice, our program, the Neighborhood Justice Program, intercepts those individuals at the pre-filing stage, before
a case- a criminal case is ever filed against them. That allows us to take a look at needs responsivity,
take a look at what are some of the dynamic risk factors that this individual exhibits and be able to fashion out
either resources or obligations that will address those needs and that risk.

I think when you’re
talking about, as Denise was mentioning, Smart Prosecution, this is an evidence based approach that will lead to
better outcomes. It will lead to a lower level of recidivism.

WOLF: So Mark, what do you do? You
get the results of the assessment and then what kinds of sentences, or I guess they’re not formal sentences
because it’s diversion, but what kind of services are you linking the offenders to?

KAMMERER:
One of the things that we were able to do with our Smart Prosecution grant program was to give specific types of
interventions to people based on the level of their risk. What had happened in the past, we had a misdemeanor diversion
program without risk assessment and everybody that was eligible for other reasons, all received the exact same intervention
with the exact same expectations.

Now with this program, we divide- the CCI tool divides people
into low, medium and high risk levels and so we have a different expectation of people, what they need to do in order
to have their case dismissed based on the level of their risk. What we do is, people at the lowest levels have an
intervention and maybe an assessment and a referral to services; at the high end, are required to be engaged in a
cognitive behavioral therapy program. We’re looking at changing criminogenic thinking for people that are higher
risk.

A side benefit for us has been the ability… is to show that people with a higher level
of risk can be just as successful in a program like this as the people with a low level of risk. We’ve actually
been able to expand our eligibility criteria in terms of charging within the time period that we’ve been with
this grant funding. People who would not have been eligible when we started this program, now are eligible because
we’ve been able to show people with a little higher risk are not really a higher risk, they just need a different
intervention.

WOLF: Just for people who are listening who might not be familiar with the risk
needs responsivity theory, which is what this whole model is based on, that a response or treatment in order for
it to be effective, it needs to match the offenders risk of re-offending. Someone at a higher risk of re-offending
should have a higher intensity intervention.

KAMMERER: I’m sorry to interrupt, but that’s
exactly what we designed. People with a higher level of risk have a higher expectation. You’re exactly right.

O’DONNELL: You know, I just want to add from BJA’s perspective, risk needs assessment tools have been
around for a long time, but what CCI did was develop a tool specifically for low level and misdemeanor offenses which
tailors the kind of response to fit the offense since individuals might normally face a couple days in jail or a
week or two in jail, so do the interventions or the alternatives match that level of accountability. Referrals to
services instead of spending 2 days in jail hopefully has a much better return on our investment.

WOLF:
Let me ask you, Denise O’Donnell, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, as you said, this program links the prosecutors
also with a research [partners 00:10:29] and you’re encouraging prosecutors and other justice practitioners
to use evidence based tools. Obviously, there’s a theme here that using evidence based strategies is important.
Maybe you could talk a little bit about why it’s important and you think, obviously these guys here and their
offices have gotten that message, but is that message getting out as far and as wide as you’d like it to get
out to prosecutors and courts and such?

O’DONNELL: Well, it’s always a struggle to reach
everyone, but I think this conference is a good example. 400 people here participating in community justice programs.
We had a recent grant solicitation for community justice programs and had 70 different jurisdictions want to establish
those programs. We can only fund 10 of them. The demand is certainly increasing but what we see in Smart On Crime
solutions is that you have to really have pilot programs. Like we see, beyond pilot programs, but you have to have
programs that you evaluate and look at the outcomes. I think that is what convinces people that a) we can expand
the model because we have some really good results or other jurisdictions become interested in trying to replicate
what has been successfully done in Los Angeles or here in Cook County.

WOLF: Jose, you wanted
to say something?

EGURBIDE: I just wanted to say that, just to echo Denise’s comments, that
through our City Attorney, Mike Feuer, who really embraces restorative justice and transformational as opposed to
transactional approach to addressing these offenses, I think that we’re really changing the way that our traditional
criminal justice system works. We’re alleviating an already congested system, but we’re doing it in a way
where, as Mark said, we’re able to fashion out specific engagement strategies for each individual because we’re
using Smart Prosecution, because we’re using a risk and needs assessment tools that’s specifically designed
for low level offenders. I think it’s great and I think that the tool, for those listeners that may not be familiar
with it, allows you to identify either housing issues, education issues or other challenges that an individual might
have and be able to link them to those services. At the end, what you have is a person who’s being held accountable
but also comes out of the process a little bit better without the negative consequences of a conviction or something
that’s going to hinder them from going forward in a positive way.

WOLF: I think that nicely
summarizes what the Smart Prosecution Initiative is all about. I want to thank you, all 3 of you, for taking the
time out from the Community Justice 2016 to speak with me.

EGURBIDE: Thank you, Rob.

O’DONNELL: Thank you.

KAMMERER: Thanks for asking us.

WOLF: I’ve
been speaking with Denise O’Donnell who’s the Director of the Bureau of Justice Assistance at the Department
of Justice, Mark Kammerer, Supervisor of Alternative Prosecution and the Sentencing Unit at the Cook County State’s
Attorney’s office here in Chicago and Jose Egurbide who is the Supervising Attorney in the Los Angeles City
Attorney’s office. I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Count Innovation. Thanks
for listening.

**Prosecutors Explore New Solutions to Public Safety Concerns: A Conversation about the ‘Smart Prosecution Initiative’** Apr 28, 2016
The Bureau of Justice Assistance at U.S. Department of Justice created the Smart Prosecution Initiative to encourage prosecutors to explore new solutions
to public safety problems. Grant recipients work with researchers to document outcomes and develop effective, economical,
and innovative responses to crime. In this podcast, Denise O’Donnell, the director of the Bureau of Justice
Assistance, sits down with Jose Egurbide of the Los
Angeles City Attorney’s Office and Mark Kammerer of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office to talk about their Smart Prosecution
programs, which use risk assessment tools to divert low-level offenders from court. The conversation took place while
the three were in Chicago to attend Community Justice 2016.

At Community Justice 2016: Above, Denise O’Donnell, director of the Bureau
of Justice Assistance, delivers her keynote address. Below left, Jose Egurbide of the Los Angeles City Attorney’s
Office participates in a panel on Restorative Justice. Right, Mark Kammerer of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s
Office discusses Risk/Needs Assessments on a panel.

ROB WOLF: Hi. This is
Rob Wolf, director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. We are at Community Justice 2016 where 400
people have gathered in Chicago for 3 days to share ideas about justice reform. With me are 3 people who are leaders
of efforts to improve justice systems both locally and nationally: Denise O’Donnell is the director of the Bureau
of Justice Assistance at the Department of Justice; Mark Kammerer is the Supervisor of Alternative Prosecution and
the Sentencing Unit at the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office; and Jose Egurbide is the Supervising
Attorney in the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office.

Something you all have in common is a
grant program supported by the Bureau of Justice Assistance called the Smart Prosecution Initiative. Denise O’Donnell,
I thought maybe you could explain what the Smart Prosecution Initiative is and how the Bureau is using it to support
innovation and test new ideas.

DENISE O’DONNELL: Sure. I’m a former prosecutor, and when
I came to BJA I felt we really didn’t have enough focus on prosecutors and the role prosecutors can play in
justice reform. We had a great program called Smart Policing that had been operating for a number of years that actually
funded police practitioner partnerships- research partnerships to look at innovative approaches and collect data,
analyze them and assess the outcomes of the program.

We brainstormed a little about that and thought
it was a great model for prosecutors as well. So prosecutors can innovate. They can try new approaches. They can
work with a researcher, collect data and work on programs like diversion programs, like community justice centers,
and so many other initiatives.

It’s now part of a smart suite of programs at BJA. We now
have 9 programs working in this model to really promote criminal justice innovation.

WOLF: Mark
and Jose, now both of you have grants under the Smart Prosecution Initiative. They’re similar in that they’re
both helping divert offenders from more traditional sentences. Let me ask you both, why would a prosecutor’s
office be interested in diverting people from punishments that would get them more deeply involved in the justice
system?

Mark, do you want to go first?

MARK KAMMERER: Sure. We’ve actually
been involved in diversion for decades. When I came to the office in 2000, there was a drug diversion program that
had been around since the 70’s, but one of the things we found with a lot of our alternative sentencing, basically
treatment courts, is that people had engaged in significant criminal activity before they got to treatment court.

What we wanted to do was possibly intervene with people at an earlier stage, with the hope being we could
interrupt the cycle before they got to the point where they had significant background that would warrant being in
an intensive 24 month probation program. Our office has been, especially in the last 4 or 5 years, very involved
in diverting people out of the system as early as possible. We’ve implemented a medical model that people are
diverted at the earliest point with the least amount of intervention possible, knowing that we have a whole system-
a whole continuum that we could advance to another level if needs be.

The Smart Prosecution process,
the grant that we received with that, was to … We were able to involve risk assessment in our process. One of my
experiences from working in healthcare is you really need to objectify things as much as possible so we know who
it is that we’re working with, and why we’re working with them, and what would be the best interventions.
That was one of the gaps in our system, was we did not have sufficient risk assessment involvement. That was a cornerstone
of the proposal that we made to BJA that was funded.

WOLF: I know, Jose, your initiative as well,
you’re diverting people and you’re also doing risk assessment. Let me just ask you, I thought prosecutors
classically are interested in guilt and innocence. What does a risk assessment tool, like both your programs use,
do for you?

JOSE EGURBIDE: Thanks, Rob. We’re very excited to be here. Of course we’re
very grateful for BJA’s leadership and the opportunities that that’s creating as well as the CCI risk and
needs assessment tool. What that’s doing for us is, it’s giving us an alternative to an already congested
court system where we can focus more on rehabilitation and, as Mark said, looking at it at the front end.

You often see a lot of rehabilitation happening upon reentry. We also believe that when you talk
about alternative prosecution, when you talk about restorative justice, you need to restore the victim, you need
to restore the community, but you also need to restore the offender to a position where they’ll be a more productive
member of society going forward.

WOLF: Let’s talk a little bit specifically about what a
risk assessment tool is. You both use a similar tool that the Center for Court Innovation developed with Bureau of
Justice Assistance support. It’s evidence based, it’s been tested, but tell me how it actually functions.
What does it tell you and what does it allow you to do?

EGURBIDE: A needs and risk assessment
tool … and now there are some tools that are just risk assessment. The Center for Court Innovation tool that we
use was selected specifically because it also focuses on a needs assessment. So again, when you talk about restorative
justice, our program, the Neighborhood Justice Program, intercepts those individuals at the pre-filing stage, before
a case- a criminal case is ever filed against them. That allows us to take a look at needs responsivity,
take a look at what are some of the dynamic risk factors that this individual exhibits and be able to fashion out
either resources or obligations that will address those needs and that risk.

I think when you’re
talking about, as Denise was mentioning, Smart Prosecution, this is an evidence based approach that will lead to
better outcomes. It will lead to a lower level of recidivism.

WOLF: So Mark, what do you do? You
get the results of the assessment and then what kinds of sentences, or I guess they’re not formal sentences
because it’s diversion, but what kind of services are you linking the offenders to?

KAMMERER:
One of the things that we were able to do with our Smart Prosecution grant program was to give specific types of
interventions to people based on the level of their risk. What had happened in the past, we had a misdemeanor diversion
program without risk assessment and everybody that was eligible for other reasons, all received the exact same intervention
with the exact same expectations.

Now with this program, we divide- the CCI tool divides people
into low, medium and high risk levels and so we have a different expectation of people, what they need to do in order
to have their case dismissed based on the level of their risk. What we do is, people at the lowest levels have an
intervention and maybe an assessment and a referral to services; at the high end, are required to be engaged in a
cognitive behavioral therapy program. We’re looking at changing criminogenic thinking for people that are higher
risk.

A side benefit for us has been the ability… is to show that people with a higher level
of risk can be just as successful in a program like this as the people with a low level of risk. We’ve actually
been able to expand our eligibility criteria in terms of charging within the time period that we’ve been with
this grant funding. People who would not have been eligible when we started this program, now are eligible because
we’ve been able to show people with a little higher risk are not really a higher risk, they just need a different
intervention.

WOLF: Just for people who are listening who might not be familiar with the risk
needs responsivity theory, which is what this whole model is based on, that a response or treatment in order for
it to be effective, it needs to match the offenders risk of re-offending. Someone at a higher risk of re-offending
should have a higher intensity intervention.

KAMMERER: I’m sorry to interrupt, but that’s
exactly what we designed. People with a higher level of risk have a higher expectation. You’re exactly right.

O’DONNELL: You know, I just want to add from BJA’s perspective, risk needs assessment tools have been
around for a long time, but what CCI did was develop a tool specifically for low level and misdemeanor offenses which
tailors the kind of response to fit the offense since individuals might normally face a couple days in jail or a
week or two in jail, so do the interventions or the alternatives match that level of accountability. Referrals to
services instead of spending 2 days in jail hopefully has a much better return on our investment.

WOLF:
Let me ask you, Denise O’Donnell, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, as you said, this program links the prosecutors
also with a research [partners 00:10:29] and you’re encouraging prosecutors and other justice practitioners
to use evidence based tools. Obviously, there’s a theme here that using evidence based strategies is important.
Maybe you could talk a little bit about why it’s important and you think, obviously these guys here and their
offices have gotten that message, but is that message getting out as far and as wide as you’d like it to get
out to prosecutors and courts and such?

O’DONNELL: Well, it’s always a struggle to reach
everyone, but I think this conference is a good example. 400 people here participating in community justice programs.
We had a recent grant solicitation for community justice programs and had 70 different jurisdictions want to establish
those programs. We can only fund 10 of them. The demand is certainly increasing but what we see in Smart On Crime
solutions is that you have to really have pilot programs. Like we see, beyond pilot programs, but you have to have
programs that you evaluate and look at the outcomes. I think that is what convinces people that a) we can expand
the model because we have some really good results or other jurisdictions become interested in trying to replicate
what has been successfully done in Los Angeles or here in Cook County.

WOLF: Jose, you wanted
to say something?

EGURBIDE: I just wanted to say that, just to echo Denise’s comments, that
through our City Attorney, Mike Feuer, who really embraces restorative justice and transformational as opposed to
transactional approach to addressing these offenses, I think that we’re really changing the way that our traditional
criminal justice system works. We’re alleviating an already congested system, but we’re doing it in a way
where, as Mark said, we’re able to fashion out specific engagement strategies for each individual because we’re
using Smart Prosecution, because we’re using a risk and needs assessment tools that’s specifically designed
for low level offenders. I think it’s great and I think that the tool, for those listeners that may not be familiar
with it, allows you to identify either housing issues, education issues or other challenges that an individual might
have and be able to link them to those services. At the end, what you have is a person who’s being held accountable
but also comes out of the process a little bit better without the negative consequences of a conviction or something
that’s going to hinder them from going forward in a positive way.

WOLF: I think that nicely
summarizes what the Smart Prosecution Initiative is all about. I want to thank you, all 3 of you, for taking the
time out from the Community Justice 2016 to speak with me.

EGURBIDE: Thank you, Rob.

O’DONNELL: Thank you.

KAMMERER: Thanks for asking us.

WOLF: I’ve
been speaking with Denise O’Donnell who’s the Director of the Bureau of Justice Assistance at the Department
of Justice, Mark Kammerer, Supervisor of Alternative Prosecution and the Sentencing Unit at the Cook County State’s
Attorney’s office here in Chicago and Jose Egurbide who is the Supervising Attorney in the Los Angeles City
Attorney’s office. I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Count Innovation. Thanks
for listening.

Sustainability Strategies for Youth Advisory Boards: A Podcast on Youth Engagement Apr 27, 2016

This podcast presents highlights from Sustainable Strategies, a one-day event organized by the Center for Court
Innovation and Coro New York Leadership Center in September 2015. Representatives from 11 organizations
discussed successes, challenges, and strategies used to meaningfully engage young people and elevate their voices
in policy discussions through youth advisory boards. Members of youth justice boards also shared their experiences
and insights with the group.

MARY WALLE: This
is Mary Walle from the Center for Court Innovation, and you’re listening to the New Thinking podcast. Today’s
conversation comes from Sustainable Strategies for Effective Youth Advisory Boards, a day-long convening of youth
advisory board practitioners, held by the Center for Court Innovation and Coro New York Leadership Center thanks
to the generous funding of the WB Clement and Jesse V. Stone Foundation.

What are youth advisory
boards? They are small programs run by nonprofit organizations and government agencies that bring the voices of young
people into policy work. Sustainable Strategies brought together youth advisory board practitioners from across New
York City to discuss their work to bring young people’s voices and ideas into meaningful policy change.

In this podcast, you will first hear from four experienced youth advisory board practitioners about how
their programs operate, the challenges they face, questions they grapple with, and best practices to keep in mind
when designing and facilitating a youth advisory board program. Then, four youth advisory board program alumni will
share their experiences in these programs and the impact that membership has had on their lives.

We’ll
start by hearing from Brooke Richie-Babbage, the founder and executive director of the Resilience Advocacy Project.
Here, she discusses the mission, structure, and challenges of Resilience Advocacy Project’s youth advisory board
work.

BROOKE RICHIE-BABBAGE: Our mission is to empower youth to become leaders in the fight against
poverty. We train young people in these spaces to identify social justice issues that they are passionate about in
their communities, and then to develop concrete community impact initiatives in response to those problems. They
spend a year becoming an expert on their campaign topic, and then every campaign culminates in an event. The event
is designed to bring youth and adult leaders into the same space to discuss and develop recommendations to push for
change.

WALLE: Brooke also discussed the challenges and tensions organizations may face when the
youth participants, not adult staff, are by design in charge of the direction and the work of the program.

RICHIE-BABBAGE: This level of youth leadership makes me uncomfortable. I believe in it, right? I started
this organization. But the messiness of it, and not knowing before the citywide town hall meetings what is going
to happen at the end can make it difficult both for me personally and as an executive director to identify funding
and resources and to know where our partnerships and work are going to go, because I am not the one picking the topic.
How do you build a structure and build on successes when you’re not in charge of that aspect of guiding the
ship?

On the flip side, I think that the work is much more diverse in ways that I don’t know
that our staff who are deeply committed to youth leadership, and, quite frankly, better at it than me, would even
have paid attention to it.

It was really our youth leaders who were out there doing the recruitment
that said, “We also need to pay attention to things like age.” The dynamic of a room where everybody’s
a senior except for two people matters. That changes things in how we do work. We need to pay attention to the fact
that a lot of young people have to work after school. If, in order to be involved, you actually need to be here two
days a week, who are we then saying can’t be involved without actually saying that? That voice and that perspective
came from our young people, so the fact that they guide our recruitment and the way that the body itself is formed,
I think is very powerful.

WALLE: Brooke went on to explore the challenges her organization faces
in running a youth advisory board.

RICHIE-BABBAGE: I just want to highlight a couple of the tensions
or questions, really, that have come out of this youth leadership work and the youth council in particular, again,
against a backdrop of an organization that believes in leadership but practices it in different ways.

The
first is, how does this group fit into our larger organizational programmatic and policy advocacy structure? There’s
a real tension between remaining nimble and responsive to what they say they are interested in, and also running
an organization and having a program that is accountable for outcomes to funders.

Second is infrastructure.
If we want them to have a real system impact, how do we have a program that has a beginning and an end, that has
some kind of structure that is measurable and that allows the participants to feel like they are achieving something
and yet is also acknowledging of the fact that if we’re serious about them having a system impact that takes
longer than a year.

Rep’s board has identified five core social justice issues around which
we want to have an impact. What do we do if young people want to focus on something that’s not on that list,
and how do we guide their choice without making it not a meaningful choice?

Finally, who decides
and enforces the rules of the group? Group work, for those of you who do it, is hard. It’s messy. Striking the
right balance between being adult experts and facilitators in a room and also allowing the young people to grapple
with the messiness of becoming true leaders is difficult.

WALLE: Next, we’ll hear from Linda
Baird, associate director of youth justice programs at the Center for Court Innovation and former Youth Justice Board
program coordinator. The Center founded the Youth Justice Board in response to the realization that the young people
the Center worked with did not have a voice at the table where decisions were being made that would affect their
lives. Linda discusses the program’s goals and its challenges.

LINDA BAIRD: The goal of the
program is to bring the voices of young people into policymaking and have them be able to give their input on issues
that affect them. We really try to caution young people this isn’t just a program where you say, “I found
all this stuff is wrong. That’s too bad.” Then we ask them to take the next step, “And what can you
do about it as a young person? What are your ideas to fix it?” – because adults don’t often hear these.

WALLE: Building on Brooke’s earlier comments, Linda talked about how the program faced the realities
of changing policy.

BAIRD: As everybody in this room probably is aware, the timeline for policy
change … Unfortunately, I have not figured out how to make it align with the school calendar. We have thought about,
in our implementation phase, what we can do so that young people can have a few really credible, meaty projects that
come out of that period. Even with adding a full extra year on the topic of study, we at the Center realize that
that doesn’t necessarily mean the issue is wrapped up and that our work is done.

WALLE: Brooke
and Linda brought up many important questions to consider while designing and facilitating youth advisory board programs.
Up next, Laura Jankstrom, Youth Action NYC program coordinator, from the Citizens’ Committee for Children, discusses
how its youth programs are structured in response to similar questions.

LAURA JANKSTROM: The Youth
Action Community Leadership course is the point of entry into the Youth Action program for interested students. At
the end of the ten-week course, the students are eligible to become Youth Action members. This is the real youth-led
piece of what we do. These guys meet every week for a couple of hours on Wednesdays for the duration of the school
year, and they pick the topics that they want to work on, and they pick the types of projects that they want to do.

For some of their projects, they want to stick to the traditional “We want to research this issue,
we want to create policy recommendations, and we want to meet with elected officials to educate them on what we found.”
They want to feel an impact immediately. They don’t want to wait for the policy change to be made a year, two
years, three years down the line. It’s a lot of times difficult to follow an issue if it’s not something
that the news is really covering a lot, and so kids aren’t seeing movement on them. I can’t just send them
an article and say, “Hey, see what’s happening with the issue that we’re working on.” A lot of
that is really done behind the scenes.

An example I have, one semester, we were doing teen mental
health, and one of the recommendations that our group brought was that there should be a teen suicide awareness day
in New York City. The following year, councilmember Steve Levin introduced a bill that would make September Teen
Suicide Awareness Month for the entire state and credited the Youth Action meeting that he took with pushing him
to introduce that bill. By that time, a lot of those kids were moving on to greener pastures, but I did my best to
reach out to them and say, “Hey, congratuations, you made a difference.”

The final arm
of our three-pronged Youth Action program is peer trainers. Kids go through the training course. If they want to,
they become Youth Action members. Then, from that group, I pick about four students every year to become peer trainers.
They develop and facilitate workshops for other programs that are interested in civic engagement, advocacy, leadership,
New York City government.

WALLE: The final adult practitioner we’ll hear from is Chris Neal,
senior director of youth programs and initiatives from Coro New York Leadership Center. He discusses the pillars
and breadth of Coro’s youth programming and the importance of youth-adult partnerships.

CHRIS
NEAL: One of the major pillars of our work is this notion of youth-adult partnership, which you’ve heard talked
about today a little bit, and that’s the idea or the work of young people working in partnership and collaboration
with adults on common issues.

I believe in youth voice, I love youth voice, but I’m also
very clear about the role that we have as adults in the room, and that is to create the hooks for young people to
hang their ideas on. They have a number of ideas, lots of wonderful things they’d like to do, and our role,
sitting in the back, but leading from behind, as Obama would say, is to provide those hooks. “Well, maybe you
might think about doing this,” or “Have you ever thought about doing that?”

The
other pillar of our program is probably youth in policy in practice. What does that mean? Youth in policy in practice
means that over the course of our work, which is the last ten years, in working with youth councils both in schools
and across the city, we found that the area where young people have the greatest impact is on how policies are shaped,
the decision making process, and then how they are implemented. We rely and we spend a great deal of our time building
the capacity of our young people to go out, collect data, collect the authentic voice and experiences of their peers,
and bring those back in a meaningful way so they can contribute to the decision making process or the implementation
process of policy. That is a fundamental of our work.

Three years ago, Coro had one youth program
and about 24 young people. Now we have three youth programs and two initiatives and about 200 young people. One of
the biggest tensions, which you spoke to a little bit, Brooke, is organizationally realizing that rather we want
to think about it this way or not, we are a de facto youth development organization. Now we need to begin to think
about what that means organizationally.

WALLE: A common theme identified by the practitioners
was the challenge of convincing the youth advisory board host organization of the value of youth voice, and figuring
out how to integrate young people’s ideas. Here’s how Chris described that challenge.

NEAL:
Something I think we may have all run into is this notion of managing up. The folks that are above you may not always
understand the importance of youth programs and having youth councils in your agency. You might have to do a little
bit of managing up, I call it. “This is the benefit of this program. This is why we need to have this. This
is how it’s going to improve our work. This is how it’s going to make us have a greater impact.” Adultism
is real, and a lot of adults do not think that young people have a place in policy, practice, and implementation.
What are young people going to do? What are they going to do for this organization? How can we utilize them?

WALLE: Now we will hear from young people on their experience as youth advisory board members. BERNADETTE,
Stephanie, Alex, and Levi are alumni of youth advisory board programs at the Center for Court Innovation and Coro
New York Leadership Center. They first discuss how the program affected their growth as young leaders and then offer
their advice on how to lead and recruit for youth advisory board programs. Last, they share how the experience impacted
their lives.

ALEX: I’m Alex. The Youth Justice Board exposed me to a whole other
world I never really about. [inaudible 00:11:37] Coro allowed me have unique access to the mayor’s office and
city government, which I think every youth should have some sort of access to. I think that’s really eye opening
and really an enlightening experience.

BERNADETTE: My name is Bernadette. YJB really influenced
me in understanding a lot about policy and how it was developed and how it affects young people. It definitely affected
me. I thought that it just affected adults, adults would just tell me what to do and I would listen. YJB really opened
a door to see how everything comes down from the top and it trickles down to the bottom.

I always
thought a leader was the one who was at the forefront of everything. I’m a shy person. Being in Coro, exploring
leadership there, I really find myself as a leader because of the fact that I can collaborate and communicate with
different people.

STEPHANIE: My name is Stephanie. One main point for me would be having to write
recommendations and actually being accomplished at the end of the year. Another highlight was the presentation at
Pace University. I felt like such an adult. It really exposed me to a world of people that I don’t think I would
have been talking to with the confidence I have now.

WALLE: One of the topics the youth discussed
was the qualities adult partners and program leaders should possess.

BERNADETTE: The relationship
should not be, “I’m the program facilitator and you’re the program participant.” It’s more
like, “Okay, so we’re working together on this same issue,” and so understanding that that type of
dynamic works best with young people, because a lot of people look at adults as authority figures, not as people
who I can be equal with.

ALEX: My facilitators would oftentimes step back, and they would say,
“Our job is to be a facilitator. It’s not to be someone who is governing over the situation that is happening
at the moment.” Oftentimes they left the room to let us sort of engage each other and not just speak to the
adult in the room, which I think does naturally happen because we’re used to a classroom environment where we
just respond to a teacher.

The facilitator is there to facilitate, but also to step back, but
also to help us have access to them and to the multiple resources that they can provide us as adults.

STEPHANIE:
Not only do we just focus on the program, but we always have check ins with our facilitators.

BERNADETTE:
I think what worked best is that the program itself is not based in a classroom style. Both YJB and Coro’s Leadership,
it’s a circle, so everybody can see each other, everybody get to talk to one another, and it’s discussion-based.
It’s not a lecture.

WALLE: Youth Advisory Program alumni continued sharing advice about these
programs, including how to recruit for them, during the question and answer segment.

LEVI: I think
that if you relate it back to current events and link the program to how it’s affecting society today, I think
they can definitely make people more interested.

BERNADETTE: They could also talk about skills
that they will do well in.

ALEX: I think maybe going in into schools and recruiting people through
the discussion of issues that are relating back to them would allow them to engage.

STEPHANIE:
I would just say get the message out to them that what they’re doing is going to be beneficial not only for
them, but for future generations.

JANKSTROM: What is one thing that really surprised you about
your experience in these programs? Is there something you think differently now than you thought when you started?

LEVI: Before I joined Youth Justice Board, I never knew much about policy or criminal justice or police-community
relationships. It gave me the opportunity to learn about it, and not only to learn about it, to be an active member
and do it. To be involved and try to change it.

ALEX: I joined the YJB in 9th grade, and that
was very early for me, but it allowed me to enter high school in a completely different perspective, in the sense
that I was able to … Instead of just having this feeling that I needed to keep my head down and do my work and
do all these different things, I felt like I could understand the people that were in society that I walked by every
day and took the subway with, and I felt like I had a closer connection to a community that wasn’t my school.
I think that’s really important, because yeah, we could all be class president or anything, but it’s important
to engage in the community, especially in a community as large as New York City.

RICHIE-BABBAGE:
In retrospect, how do you feel this work has impacted your life beyond the work in your council? How has it helped
you in school or with your peers? Can you speak to anything, one thing that really resonated with you that you’ve
been able to take away and apply it in other areas of your life?

BERNADETTE: For me, two things.
One, I am a founder of a new club called DP, which is basically Diversity Project. The main focus of DP is to include
people who you really don’t hear about or backgrounds you don’t really hear about. For me, the second thing
would be dynamics and how I was perceived the world and how other people would perceive the world, and things that
I would do or my tendencies. I think what it allowed me in school is how to navigate with different people, because
you have the loud people and you have the shy people, and so how do I connect with them to make sure that the work
is done.

ALEX: Well, the Youth Justice Board taught me, it helps practical fields like time management,
note-taking skills, and it also teaches you responsibility, which is important. I think I became more responsible
throughout the program.

STEPHANIE: It also helps you connect to the real world. For example, we
did a lot of interviews last year with stakeholders and a lot of these important people, but when we actually asked
teams to go out to the real world and to apply for a job and get the interview, it helps us in that sort of way because
now we are better at our speaking skills and communication skills.

WALLE: This has been Mary Walle
with the Center for Court Innovation. You’ve been listening to advice and best practices from youth advisory
board practitioners and youth participants from Sustainable Strategies for Effective Youth Advisory Boards.

For more information on the Youth Justice Board and the Center for Court Innovation, you can visit www.courtinnovation.org/yjb.

For more information about the Coro New York Leadership Center, you can visit www.coronewyork.org.

Thank you to the W. Clement and Jesse. B. Stone Foundation for their generous funding that made this event
and podcast possible. To hear more New Thinking podcasts, you can visit www.courtinnovation.org.

A Trauma-informed Approach to Reducing Youth Violence Apr 20, 2016

This podcast is part of a series highlighting innovative approaches to reducing violence and improving health
outcomes among at-risk minority youth at the nine demonstration sites of the Minority
Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. One of these demonstrations sites is the Children in Trauma Intervention, or CITI, program in Cincinnati, an anti-violence initiative
led by the Cincinnati Police Department’s Youth Services Unit in partnership with the Cincinnati Health Department,
Cincinnati Public Schools, and Hamilton County Juvenile Court that seeks to reduce violence and youth involvement
in the juvenile justice system through a mentorship program that pairs police officers with youth.

Nancy Wagner, who oversees grants and grant information for the Cincinnati Police
Department and Lieutenant Jay Johnstone, of the department’s Youth Services Unit, joined this week’s podcast
to discuss CITI’s unique curriculum, parent-engagement strategy, and trauma-informed approach.

The
following is a transcript

RAPHAEL POPE-SUSSMAN:
Hi, this is Raphael Pope-Sussman of the Center for Court Innovation. This podcast is part of a series we are doing
with people seeking to curb violence and improve access to public health for at risk minority youth, as part of the
Minority Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. The initiative is a partnership of the Office of Minority Health at
the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services at the US
Department of Justice that encourages collaboration among public health organizations, law enforcement agencies and
community based groups. Our podcast series highlights innovative approaches at the nine demonstration sites that
have received funding under the program. In this week’s podcast, we’re exploring the Children in Trauma
Intervention program, or CITI in Cincinnati, OH. CITI is spearheaded by the Cincinnati police department’s Youth
Services Unit in partnership with the Cincinnati Health Department, Cincinnati public schools and Hamilton County
Juvenile Court. The program seeks to reduce violence
and youth involvement in the juvenile justice system through a mentorship system that pairs police officers with
youth. This podcast focuses on CITI’S approach to trauma and the philosophy behind CITI’s unique parent
engagement strategy, which includes requiring parents of youth to participate along with their children in the program. I’m joined by Nancy Wagner, who oversees grants
and grant information for the Cincinnati Police Department, and Lieutenant Jay Johnstone of the department’s
Youth Services Unit. Nancy, Lieutenant Johnstone, thank you for being here today, and welcome.

NANCY WAGNER:
Thank you.

JAY JOHNSTONE :
Thank you for having us.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
So, can you describe to me how CITI functions?

JOHNSTONE :
Well, we run three separate sessions a year and we invite 40 kids between the age of 11 and 14 to attend each of
the sessions. And what we’re looking for are kids who are kind of on the borderline of having discipline problems
or attendance problems or struggling with their grades at school. So those are the youth that we reach out to and
that’s who we’re looking for.

It starts off with an interview process where we interview the youth. We also interview the parents of the youth
because the parents are … a large component of our program, is the Parent to Parent Program. So the parents and
the youth are equally involved through the program which runs 10 weeks. The parents meet weekly for 90 minutes and
their presence is actually required as part of the program for the kids, in order to graduate. The parents also inevitably
graduate. So the parents are required to attend and the parents then meet with a certified therapist at the meeting.

So, what we do is they start off talking as a group together and they address issues that everybody is experiencing
with their youth and then they break off into smaller groups and talk in a little more intimate setting. And then
towards the end of the session, they come back together and discuss the various ideas that they’ve learned,
the different characteristics that they actually share with the other [inaudible 03:18] parents.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
This approach is I think unique among the Minority Youth Violence Prevention Programs. Why do you feel that it’s
so important to have parents involved?

JOHNSTONE : We
think the parents help to reinforce these lessons that we’re trying to teach. The lessons of leadership and
the lessons of conflict resolution. Also, just the idea of respect. So, these are the lessons that we’re teaching
the kids and we found a strong correlation that the better attendance and stronger buy in that we have from the parents
then the better buy in and the better attendance that we have from the youth that participated in the program. So
that way when the youth go home, their parents are able to reinforce the lessons that are being taught.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Where does law enforcement fit into the program specifically?

JOHNSTONE :
What we’re trying to do is bridge that gap between the youth and law enforcement and improve those relationships
and we feel that by having the direct contact that we have with the youth in our program, we are able to help lower
those barriers and break some of the stereotypes that some of the youth might have toward the police officers. So
the police officers, is they help run the Parent to Parent. They run the daily operation of the camp itself. The
officers, they organize the lesson plan. They teach physical training and also military drills. So it’s designed
by officers and run by officers.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Can you tell me a little bit more about the curriculum that the youth follow? I know that it’s pretty structured.
I think they wear uniforms.

JOHNSTONE : Yes, the youth
wear uniforms and we try to have a pretty structured setting. Probably particularly come on a little bit stronger
at the beginning and then kind of lighten up and that’s when you find that the bond really starts forming with
the officers and the youth. And then we do teach an enrichment portion throughout the entire 10 weeks and we use
the GREAT curriculum, which is a Gang Resistance Education Training curriculum. And then we also introduce that same
curriculum to the Parent to Parent.

WAGNER:
We also have like the physical PT training. We have military drills. We have an officer that teaches…

JOHNSTONE : Martial arts.

WAGNER:
Martial arts. And then our sex education program – we have someone from the Health Department come over to teach
a class on that.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
And what is the response from the youth?

JOHNSTONE : Tremendous.
And that’s probably the most rewarding portion of the program is watching the transition from the beginning
all the way to the end and we end it with a graduation ceremony. And just watching the pride that the kids experience
and then watching the pride of the parents for completing the program. Even during the graduation ceremony we have
the youth actually give the parent awards out themselves. And it’s just a really gratifying moment. So, the
youth are very thankful of it. They show that through officers that follow up. As WAGNER talked about before, there’s
follow up and there’s mentorship. We make sure that there’s consistent follow up so that we’re always
monitoring their progress even after the camp. So, we don’t want it just to be a temporary, 10 week fix. We’re
looking more towards permanent where we’re going to follow them all the way up to the point of college and beyond.

WAGNER:
And also a lot of the officers are school resource officers. So, they’ll see these kids at the school so they
can keep in contact with them to see how things are going. And a lot of the kids form that bond and if things are
happening with them, at home or whatever, they’ll go to that officer for advice. And then we’ll also have
parents calling afterward just saying what a change in the kids. Or if they’re having a problem with the kid,
they’ll call afterwards and then an officer will go out to talk to the kid and see how he or she can help.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
You mentioned earlier that you have a trauma specialist to work with the youth. What is trauma informed care mean
to you at CITI?

JOHNSTONE : I think we’re trying
to look at from the vantage point of the youth themselves and the various traumas they might be experiencing through
a variety of stressors in their lives. So that’s where the trauma specialist comes in because she’s able
to speak with not only the children but the parents … most of us understand there’s going to be two vantage
points when you’re talking with two different parts of a relationship. So, the trauma specialist is able to
help bridge that relationship and bring the parents and the youth closer together.

One of the highlights of the program is when we have a one on one session and that’s when midway through the
program we have the child and the parent sit down together. It’s actually quite moving because at this point
a lot of feelings and concerns start to come to the surface and we’re able to work with the families and help
work through some of these issues that have been causing problems in the past.

WAGNER:
And also at the beginning each student is given an Adverse Childhood Experience, or ACE Questionnaire, and that assesses
the risk of increase health issues associated with maltreatment or other adverse childhood experiences. So then the
trauma expert will go over all this and then work with the student or the parent to see if she can help resolve some
of their issues.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Stepping back a bit, can you describe what support from the Minority Youth Violence Prevention Initiative has enabled
you to do?

WAGNER:
Actually it’s been able to keep the program going because there’s a lot of money involved. A lot of it
goes for overtime for the officers because the city is down in their [inaudible 09:14] in officers so they wouldn’t
be able to put the program on during the work period and due to contractual issues, we can’t have officers volunteering
their time. And then, the food to feed the kids involved, the trauma specialists. We also have University of Cincinnati
is our evaluator, so we need to pay them. We also have incentives which is big for the kids that’s provided
by the grant. So, it gives them a goal to reach not only to be a better person, but a lot of people know that if
you kind of put that carrot out there, they’re going to try a whole lot harder.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
And what are those incentives?

JOHNSTONE : Well, we have
weekly incentives where we recognize like the top students, the top leaders, ones who do well on the weekly spelling
test, ones that do well on the physical fitness test. We kind of toggle it back and forth between like 5 dollar Subway
card or 5 dollar BW3 Wings card. We also offer for attendance for the parents we offer 2 increments, anywhere between
10 and up to 25 dollars depending on how long they maintain their presence throughout the program, as well. And then
ultimately if the kid shows perfect attendance and shows good progress they eventually can earn a tablet.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
The kids must get very excited for that.

JOHNSTONE : Absolutely.

WAGNER:
(laughs)

JOHNSTONE : (laughs) That’s something that
you’ll see where they strive and work very hard because they realize that it’s very attainable.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.

WAGNER:
Thank you.

JOHNSTONE : All right. Thank you,
Raphael.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
This has been Raphael Pope-Sussman with the Center for Court Innovation speaking with Nancy Wagner and Lieutenant
Jay Johnstone. For more information on the Center for Court Innovation visit www.courtinnovation.org.

Breaking the Cycle of Violence By Reaching Youth At School Feb 28, 2016

This podcast is part of a series highlighting innovative approaches to reducing violence and improving health
outcomes among at-risk minority youth at the nine demonstration sites of the Minority
Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. One of these demonstrations sites is Youth Intercept,
a hospital-based violence-prevention program in Chatham County, Georgia, that aims to break the cycle of youth violence
and retaliation by providing educational services and referrals to public health services to at-risk minority youth.

Sheryl Sams, director of Youth Intercept, joined this week’s podcast
to discuss how Youth Intercept has adapted the hospital-based violence intervention model to meet the needs of Chatham
County, including the program’s development of a school-based element to serve youth in the Chatham County Public
Schools

The
following is a transcript.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Hi, this is Rafael Pope-Sussman
of the Center for Court Innovation. This podcast is part of a series we are doing with people seeking to curb violence
and improve access to public health for at-risk minority youth as part of the Minority Youth Violence Prevention
Initiative. The initiative is a partnership of the Office of Minority Health at the US Department of Health and Human
Services, and the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services at the U.S. Department of Justice that encourages
collaboration among public health organizations, law enforcement agencies, and community-based groups. Our podcast
series highlights innovative approaches at the nine demonstration sites that have received funding under the program.

In today’s podcast, I’m speaking with Sheryl Sams, director of the Youth Intercept Program, an
anti-violence program in Chatham Country, Georgia, operated by the Chatham County district attorney’s office
in partnership with Memorial Health University Medical Center, the Chatham County Public Schools, and other local
justice system agencies. Youth Intercept provides educational services and referrals to public health services to
at-risk youth, particularly black males between the ages of 10 to 18. This podcast focuses on how Youth Intercept
has adapted the hospital-based violence intervention model to meet the needs of Chatham County, including the program’s
development of a school-based element to serve youth in the Chatham County Public Schools.

Sheryl,
thank you for speaking with me today, and welcome. What is Youth Intercept?

SAMS: Youth Intercept
is basically a violence intervention program. We work first to assist individuals who actually come in the hospital
between the ages of 12 and 25 to break the cycle of violence first, to encourage positive interactions in the community,
to assist in decreasing the amount of retaliation in our community, as well as re-offenses and re-admissions to the
hospital. The other aspect of that is the prevention piece, where we are working with individuals in our school systems,
kids in our school systems between the ages of 12 and 20 who are having behavioral issues or truancy issues, or any
of those things that may be a concern to the school system as far as teachers or social workers as well as parents
that may be alarming to them that there’s a possibility of those children actually committing crimes or getting
into trouble. We work with them to actually develop positive self-esteem and give them other avenues of engagement
in the community that are positive.

POPE-SUSSMAN: The Youth Intercept Program has received funding
under the Minority Youth Violence Prevention Initiative, which is really focused on partnerships between law enforcement
and public health. I was wondering if you could talk about how that model fits into the work that is being done at
Youth Intercept.

SAMS: We are, with the district attorney office of course, it is a law enforcement
entity. What we do is, instead of trying to put people behind bars, we’re trying to keep them out, particularly
with our youth, just being able to work together to change the way that our young people think about law enforcement.
Typically, as they’re growing, they get this negative impression of law enforcement, and they think that we’re
there to harm them. However, with this partnership, we’re able to create healthy relationships between the two.
It really works well.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Your program is based on the hospital-based violence intervention
model that was created by Youth Alive in Oakland. I was wondering if we could talk about how the model works at Youth
Intercept, and how you’ve adapted it for your jurisdiction.

SAMS: Really, it works hand in
hand, pretty much the same. We are at a hospital, we’re at Memorial University Medical Center. We have a collaboration
with them, and we are able to work directly in the hospital. Our office is located 100 feet away from the ER, which
allows us to respond immediately to victims of violence and intentional injuries. They allow us to have pagers, so
we have pagers on us at all time. At that point, any time a victim of a violent intentional injury actually is seem
in the ED, we get a page letting us know that that person is there. It gives specific information on the age and
race of the individual as well as the type of injury. We’re able to respond immediately.

In
addition to that, we work with the medical staff, the trauma staff, which actually contacts us as well. We’re
able to work with them immediately within a 24-hour period, just depending on the type of injury they have. We also
work with their family members if there’s a situation where the injured party cannot talk at that time. We are
at the hospital waiting to talk to family members to get pertinent information so that we’re able to move forward
with that client.

Once we have contact with the client or family member, we basically offer them
what we call Georgia Crimes Compensation, which allows them an opportunity to have their hospital bills paid up to
$15,000 as well as counseling. If the person is working, it allows them economic support for reimbursement of $10,000,
and in the event that that person [expires 00:06:15], Georgia Crimes Compensation can actually pay up to $6,000.
We inform either the family member or the injured party about the resources that are available to assist, and then
we inform them about our Youth Intercept Program, and what services we can provide. Upon leaving the hospital, we
set up an appointment with them to then work with them on a case management plan.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
In the original Youth Alive model, there was not a school-based component, and I know that’s something the district
attorney she brought in when she came into office. I’m wondering how your office thinks that fits into the model?

SAMS: Well, I would say that with the data that we collected over the years with the hospital-based portion
of the program, we saw that there was a lot of the victims that have some of the same background information such
as truancy issues and school, and the reason why they actually dropped out of school. There were certain risk factors
that we saw that lead us to the school system. We felt there was a need to reach out to the schools and say hey,
let’s get this program started so that we can prevent other youth from coming into the hospital if we work on
the side of eliminating the issues that they have on the front end so that they don’t end up in the hospital
or perhaps deceased.

POPE-SUSSMAN: What are the results you’ve seen?

SAMS:
I would say definitely we’re having a huge success rate in the sense that we actually had about 1% of the individuals
that we’re working with who actually commit a re-offense. However, we’re seeing that there is an increase
in their education levels as well as their truancy rates, so they’re staying in school, they’re enrolled
into positive after-school activities, and are able to increase their academic scores. We’re seeing that that
has been a positive thing.

POPE-SUSSMAN: I’m wondering how you’re measuring outcomes.

SAMS:
With our school-based program, we measure the individual at intake, so we’re looking at their grades at intake,
and we compare it to their exit, as well as a midpoint of achievement. Also, looking at their truancy rate, how many
days they actually missed, when they entered our program, where were they at, and where are they now? We document
changes in behavior as well as during life skills, we do pre and post exams to determine if they are actually learning
from the life skills that we’re teaching. With the hospital-based program, we measure whether those individuals
have actually received certain services like mental health counseling and if they actually did not have a job, and
now they have a job. Or if they weren’t enrolled in school, and now they are enrolled in school. Those are some
of the things that we look at. Also, if there has been a re-offence or a re-injury, also looking at mental health.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Have you partnered with any sort of research organization?

SAMS: We are
actually working with Georgia Southern University; I think it’s the criminal justice department that will actually
work directly with us to gather data to be able to do it in a research-based form.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.

SAMS: Thank you, I certainly
appreciate it. It’s been delightful.

POPE-SUSSMAN: This has been Rafael Pope-Sussman with
the Center for Court Innovation, and I’ve been speaking with Sheryl Sams, the director of Youth Intercept. For
more information on the Center for Court Innovation, visit www.courtinnovation.org.

The Strengths and Limitations of Risk Assessment: Professor Susan Turner of the University of California-Irvine Feb 10, 2016

In this podcast recorded at the Courts,
Community Engagement, and Innovative Practices in a Changing Landscape symposium held
in Anaheim in December 2015, Susan Turner, professor in the department of Criminology,
Law & Society at the University of California-Irvine, explains how risk assessment tools are developed and
discusses the strengths and limitations of risk assessment.

RAPHAEL
POPE-SUSSMAN: This is Raphael Pope Sussman, with the Center for Court Innovation. This podcast is part of a series
of dispatches from the Court’s Community Engagement and Innovative Practices in a Changing Landscape Symposium
held in Anaheim in December 2015. The conference focused on justice reforms, including recent developments in California,
public safety realignment and Proposition 47. Public safety realignment refers to changes brought about by 2011 legislation
that shifted responsibility for certain populations of offenders from the State to the county level. Proposition
47, a ballot initiative passed by referendum in 2014 reclassified certain low level felonies as misdemeanors. I hope
you enjoy listening.

Hi, this is Raphael Pope Sussman, with the Center for Court Innovation, and
I’m here today at the Court’s Community Engagement and Innovative Practices in a Changing Landscape Conference
in Anaheim. Right now I’m sitting with Susan Turner, professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society
at University of California, Irvine. Susan, thank you for speaking with me today.

SUSAN TURNER:
Glad to be here.

POPE-SUSSMAN: What’s the process for developing a new risk assessment tool?

TURNER: Well, risk assessment tools can be developed by an organization. There are also ones that are available
that have been developed by others, so some of the first decisions that jurisdictions make is whether to do it home
grown or whether or not to buy something that’s been developed and is available for purchase, or is perhaps
free. If you’re interested in developing a risk tool for your jurisdiction, one of first things you need to
decide is what are you interested in predicting? Most jurisdictions in risk assessment are interested in predicting
some kind of recidivism behavior, such as arrest or incarceration or conviction. Then we generally use a set of variables
that are related to an offender’s prior record, age or gender, and then some other factors that may be related
to their drug use, mental health status, their association with criminal peers. You basically need to make sure that
you have the data for your left hand and your right hand side of the equation.

You gather the
information on an individual level, so for every person you’re interested in, you gather information on whatever
outcome and then their record, their variables such as their gender, their age, and their prior record. You want
to have a sample that’s large enough. You put them generally in a regression equation, where you try to figure
out whether or not these factors are predictive. You’re able to gather weights for the variables based on these
mocks. For example, if you’re predicting whether somebody would be convicted, you might have age and you’d
have a weight of 5, gender you’d have a weight of 3, different prior record variables would have various weights.
You can just imagine sort of scoring everybody up, and the higher the scores, generally the more likely someone will
recidivate. Once you do that on one half of your sample, you build your model. Then you do something called validation
on a separate set of data that you haven’t looked at before and that tells you whether or not what you’ve
developed on your first sample validates or is predictive on your second sample. That’s basically a kind of
simplistic view, but the overall gist is that you have data available, you develop your instrument on one half of
the sample and test it on the second.

POPE-SUSSMAN: What are the limitations of these tools?

TURNER: Well, there’s a lot of good things about the tools and there are, of course, always limitations
with any kind of tool. Risk assessment for recidivism is, like many other risk tools, we have risk tools in our regular
lives. You think of your car insurance premiums that you pay are based on risk assessment tools. Risk assessments
tools are only as good as the data that are behind them, number one. Another limitation to risk assessments tools
that we all need to be aware of is that they’re never 100% accurate, and probably will never be 100% accurate.
They generally are what’s referred to as a moderately good predictor, but because of the nature of human behavior
and variables that we don’t know why people do the things we do, we can never gain 100% accuracy, which sometimes
gets us into trouble with say politicians who have very high standards for whether or not you want to use an instrument.
Sometimes so high that they’re really not practical.

POPE-SUSSMAN: What are the great strengths?

TURNER: Great strengths are that we normally discuss risk assessments tools contrasted with what we refer
to clinical judgment, or some people call it gut. The research has shown that actuarial tools or risk prediction
instruments are more accurate than gut or clinical experience. Many people don’t like to believe that because
they’re often trained in a clinical background, or you can imagine a parole agent with 30 years of experience
is sometimes looking askew at risk assessments tool, but they’re more accurate. They can also result in decision
making that’s more consistent, because you can imagine the great variability if everyone follows their own gut.
You have lots of different ways the same person might be scored, so there’s consistency. There’s also,
with some risk assessments tools the advantage of time. Some of them are automated so for large numbers of people
they can be scored pretty quickly, allowing an agency to be able to get actuarial tool on a number of offenders without
the resources that may be required for, say, 45 or 50 minute instruments that are collected individually.

POPE-SUSSMAN: What roles do you see for risk assessments tools in the larger project of decarceration?

TURNER: One of the things we’ve talked about here today was the use of risk assessment and one of the
things I mentioned was that risk assessment’s been around for a long time. It’s got a resurgence nowadays,
I think partly because we’re trying to reduce the current populations that we have incarcerated and we don’t
have enough money to be able to keep everyone locked up. Money is driving a lot of decisions and one of them I think
actually may be risk assessment. We need to decide who are the highest risk people, the ones that we need to devote
our resources to, our public safety resources, and to not spend the resources on the ones who are the lower risk.

POPE-SUSSMAN: How do we ensure that risk tools don’t show bias against individuals and communities
that may have disproportionate rates of established risk factors, like housing or employment or disability?

TURNER: Very good question. I think there are a number of people who are concerned with risk assessments
tools based on dimensions that may impact certain groups unfairly. Many risk assessments tools use an offender’s
prior record as a major variable in their recidivism outcomes. Then there’s obviously the question, if prior
records are somehow biased in their very creation within communities of color, what does that mean in terms of risk
assessments tools. It’s a very valid question. One of the ways that we help address this is when we develop
tools, we take a look at and see how well the tools works with the different populations of interest.

For
example, when we developed a tool for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, we were particularly
concerned about whether the tool predicted for females as well as males, because there’s a lot of work suggesting
that some of the risk factors for women are different and for men. Also, we were concerned about whether the risk
tool worked equally well for blacks and Hispanics and whites and other groups. What we do with those is that we separate
the samples into the groups of interest and check to see whether the tool is as predictive in each of the groups.
If you find a tool that doesn’t work very well in one of the segments that you’re interested in, then you
need to go back to the drawing board.

POPE-SUSSMAN: I’ve heard that misdemeanor populations
are particularly difficult to assess. Why is that?

TURNER: Well, the discussion of misdemeanor
risk assessments has really come into the light here in California with proposition 47. Traditionally, most of us
deal with risk assessments in the felony world. All the risk assessments tools I’ve done are pretty much predicting
felony recidivism. There is a question, are these tools good for misdemeanors. There are tools out there that have
been developed for misdemeanors. There’s a tool for misdemeanor DUIs and some tools that are developed by the
University of Cincinnati team have established one that’s for misdemeanors. They basically work the same as
the felony tools. They’re predicting a different kind of an outcome, which is maybe a lower level of behavior.
What we find with our risk tools is that these tools can be very robust to different populations and different kind
of outcomes.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Do you have any big vision going forward, the next step for risk assessment?

TURNER: Well, one of the risk assessment has always been used pretrial for a long time. It’s been used
the last 20 or 30 years at the probation stage. I think more recently it’s being considered at the sentencing
stage, which I think in many ways has a little more ethical issues, whether or not in sentencing actually considering
risk as opposed to the sentence type.

POPE-SUSSMAN: What do you mean by ethical issues?

TURNER: I mean, what’s the purpose of sentencing and some people say the purpose of sentencing is that
it should be proportionate to the crime that was committed and that our statutes are based, sentences are based on
perceived severity of violent offences being more serious that property offenses and you reserve the highest sentence
lengths for the more violent. If you move to a risk based system and you say, well as we found in our research, people
convicted of violent crimes are not necessarily the most likely to re-offend, so you basically a conflict going with
what is the justice based, in terms of the offense, versus a risk based, which is about future behavior. That’s
sort of conflict that you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to deal with. In our own development of
the risk tool for the State, in our training and discussion of the tool, we’ve come across people who are very
perplexed by our findings that show that people who have convictions for violent offenses, there’s actually
what we refer to as negative weights on that, so that people with violent offenses are actually less likely to have
recidivism than those that don’t, which is very counter-intuitive.

POPE-SUSSMAN: I guess
that would also get to people’s ideas about what the justice system is supposed to do. Is it supposed to be
punitive? Is it supposed to be rehabilitative? Is it supposed to be utilitarian?

TURNER: Yeah,
I think, as I teach my students, a couple things you have to remember. If you remember a couple of things, you go
out after school it’ll be very helpful. One of the them is to remember always the different purposes of punishment.
One is deterrence, and that’s what we we think risk based decision making is based on. But there’s retribution,
incapacitation. Yeah, there’s many philosophies of what the goal of punishment is. I think risk prediction sets
you straight in the cross hairs of some of the other theories of punishment.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Well,
thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me.

TURNER: Thank you very much
for the opportunity.

POPE-SUSSMAN: This is Raphael Pope Sussman, of the Center for Court Innovation,
and I’ve been speaking with Susan Turner, Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the
University of California, Irvine. For more information on the Center for Court Innovation, visit www.courtinnovation.org

‘Evidence-based Practices for Community Corrections’: San Diego County Chief Probation Officer Mack Jenkins Feb 03, 2016

In this podcast recorded at the Courts,
Community Engagement, and Innovative Practices in a Changing Landscape symposium held
in Anaheim in December 2015, San Diego County Chief Probation Office Mack Jenkins discusses the importance
of risk assessment and how his department uses evidence-based practices to tailor its responses to offenders on probation.

The
following is a transcript.

Pope-Sussman:
This is Raphael Pope-Sussman with the Center for Court Innovation. This podcast is part of a series of dispatches
from the Courts, Community Engagement, and Innovative Practices in a Changing Landscape symposium held in
Anaheim in December 2015. The conference focused on justice reforms including recent developments in California,
public safety realignment, and proposition 47. Public safety realignment refers to changes brought about by 2011
legislation that shifted responsibility for certain populations of offenders from the state to the county level.
Proposition 47, a ballot initiative passed by referendum in 2014, reclassified certain low level felonies as misdemeanors.

Today I’m speaking with chief Mack Jenkins, chief probation officer San Diego County. Mack, thank you
for speaking with me today and welcome.

Jenkins: Thank you for having
me. I look forward to the conversation.

Pope-Sussman:
After proposition 47, what’s the role of the probation department? How has your job changed and how is the job
of individual probation officers changed?

Jenkins: With 47, what
happens is a number of individuals that we’re responsible for supervising may be eligible to be re-sentenced.
If they’re re-sentenced, some of them might actually leave our workload as it were. In that sense, we really
don’t have a role. Part of what we do right now in San Diego County as a state actually as well, is going through
the process of trying to identify individuals who are eligible to be re-sentenced under prop 47. We cooperate with
the court, with the public defenders office, and with the district attorney’s office in trying to identify individuals
who again may be eligible to be re-sentenced.

Pope-Sussman: Can you
talk about your work on community supervision? I know you’ve worked on supervision programs for DV offenders,
sex offenders, substance offenders.

Jenkins: Sure, happy to. The
great role that the probation department plays in the criminal justice system is a community supervision role. What
that means is I actually think we are very key players and sometimes understated players because folks don’t
really have general public and sometimes even other system stakeholders, don’t have a great awareness of what
we do. What we do is critical because when you think about the American criminal justice system, law enforcement
is very well known. The courts are really well known, but law enforcement’s role really ends at arrest. The
court’s role in the traditional system ends at this position. Those individuals who are in the juvenile justice
system, probation is the most common judicial sanction in this country in the criminal justice system.

What that means is individuals who’ve committed crimes get arrested and are adjudicated come to probation.
Our role there is to work with those individuals, hold them accountable for orders that the court may have imposed
on them, then this is the most important part of our role. Our role is to help them make changes in their behavior
so that they can leave system better than how they came to it. That’s what we do. We, probation as an entity,
as community corrections practitioners I think are critical in recidivism reductions and keeping our public safe
and restoring troubled lives.

Pope-Sussman: How do you deal with
maybe some of those particularly challenging demographics?

Jenkins:
Again, that’s a good question. I appreciate that you ask it because what we are learning in 2013, 2015 is that
in order to really deal with individuals that come into the system, we shouldn’t look at them by the crime that
they were convicted of. What we have to do is look at them to see who they are as an individual. See what has been
their history both in the criminal justice system but also outside of it. What have been their efforts at prior treatment,
other things in their lives so that we can have a better understanding of how that person got to where they are today.
Then craft an intervention, a case plan that addresses deficits that may have been in their life, and try and engage
them in a positive case plan or treatment plan to make changes.

That’s how we deal with them.
It’s not to say that folks that have been convicted of domestic violence offenses are the same as everybody
else because they are many times there are things related to individuals who and I’m just using domestic violence
as an example. Many times individuals who are domestic violence offenders do have some common traits. One of them
being alcohol. Alcohol is very, very common in domestic violence offenses. Again, we know that what we want to do
with individuals like that is focus on alcohol services, but at the same time maybe anger management and things like
that.

Pope-Sussman: Something that I’ve been reading about in
this field of community supervision and I’m wondering your perspective is, how would you respond to concerns
that expanded community supervision makes it easier or more palatable to keep individuals under some form of correctional
authority?

Jenkins: Again, I think it’s a good question. Here’s
my thought, is part of what we do is we do use in my field right now the term evidence-based practices. I always
say evidence-based practices for community corrections. Some of the tenets of the evidence-based practices, in other
words, some of the basic tenets of using practices that show research, by research that they’re effective. One
of the tenets is recognizing who you need to spend time with and who you don’t. Not everybody that comes into
the criminal justice system is at the same risk or has the same likelihood of staying in it, or has the same likelihood
of continuing their behavior.

In terms of questions about community corrections keeps people under
correctional supervision, what we actually know is that even if somebody comes into the criminal justice system doesn’t
want doesn’t mean they need to stay there. Basically what I’m describing is the tenet of risk-based supervision.
What we do is we employ tools to help us identify who’s who. We try to identify those folks who are most in
need of intensive supervision. At the same time identify those folks who don’t need it. Those folks who don’t
need it, we call them low risk offenders. They might well be on probation, but they might be on an unsupervised probation,
because they don’t need intervention. That’s how I respond to it. We don’t treat everybody the same.

Pope-Sussman: Where would you like to see probation in your jurisdiction in
10 years?

Jenkins: What I’d really like to see is the rank and
file officers becoming in addition to as a part of being an impactful and effective deputy probation officer, behavioral
specialists. What I tell my staff now is that they are criminal justice [behavioralists 00:07:17]. What that means
is I think that the profession, the vocation, deputy probation officers can have a higher level of competency of
knowing more about what are some of the behavioral factors that or some of the factors that influence behavior of
the individuals that they work with, and can be across the board better prepared and better skilled at engaging with
those individuals and helping them change their behavior.

Sometimes it happens right now an experienced
officer might learn some of those things, I won’t say intuitively because it’s from experience, it’s
not intuition, it’s from experience and so they do that already. There’s a way for us to teach it. There’s
a way for us to teach those skills, to teach very specific interventions, to teach engagement techniques, that’s
what I’d really like to see and I think can happen. I’m retiring now so I won’t continue that effort
in my role as chief, but I do hope to continue where to try and take the vocation to that level across the board.

Pope-Sussman: Is there an idea of maybe of some sort of formal professional
development in that area?

Jenkins: I think so. I think we’re
already and a lot of individuals that become probation officers come with academic backgrounds in criminal justice,
but as many may come from academic backgrounds of social work or psychology and things like that. That just makes
the point that what a probation officer is is somebody who works with another person, who works with people. One
of the efforts that I’m already involved in is working on a way of changing criminal justice curriculum for
criminal justice schools around the country, to make sure that it includes a curriculum that better prepares future
probation officers to be behavioralists as it were.

That involves things like teaching motivational
interviewing skills so that criminal justice graduates I think should come out of the school with if not a level
of competence in motivational interviewing, a level of understanding about what it is, and so they may later can
get training to hone the skill. Again the effort is to really change criminal justice degrees around the country
so that we can take advantage of I’ll even use the word science of behavior change. The individuals that are
being educated right now are better educated and then later can be better skilled to employ some of the practices
that the research is very clear show is effective in behavior change.

Pope-Sussman:
Those are all my questions. I really appreciate you taking out the time to speak to me.

Jenkins:
Thank you and good questions.

Pope-Sussman: This is Raphael Pope-Sussman
of the Center for Court Innovation and I’ve been speaking with Mack Jenkins, chief probation officer for San
Diego County. For more information on the Center for Court Innovation visit www.courtinnovation.org.

New Approaches in Indigent Defense Jan 27, 2016

At Reinvesting
in Justice, Wesley Shackleford, deputy director of the Texas Indigent Defense Commission, talks about indigent defense, procedural
justice, and improving access to legal services for those who cannot afford it.

AVNI
MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Hi. This is Avni Majithia-Sejpal and you’re listening to the New Thinking Podcast. I’m
at the Dallas City Hall with Wesley Shackelford, Deputy Director of the Texas Indigent Defense Commission in Austin.
We’re both here at Reinvesting in Justice, a conference that brings together a wide range of criminal justice
practitioners to discuss challenges and highlight innovative work being done in the field of Criminal Justice today.
Wesley is speaking on a panel about procedural justice a little bit later today, specifically as procedural justice
intersects with thinking about racial disparity within the justice system. Wesley, welcome to the New Thinking Podcast.

WESLEY SHACKELFORD: Thanks, Avni.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Today’s big topic is Reinvesting
in Justice. How do you interpret that?

SHACKELFORD: Coming at it from the indigent defense world,
we’re looking to find new innovative ways to provide required indigent defense services in working with partners
in county government who are interested in trying new approaches.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: For the benefit
of our listeners, can you summarize what your panel is going to be about and also what you specifically will be talking
about?

SHACKELFORD: Sure. It’s a diverse panel, the Chief of Police for Dallas and he’s
going to be talking I think about community relations with the police department especially with communities of color
in Dallas. We also have panelists from my parent organization, the Office of Court Administration also based in Austin
and he’s going to be talking about procedural justice in the court system directly. I’ll be addressing
indigent defense systems and innovative programs that my agency’s been involved in creating.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Can you tell us a little bit about that?

SHACKELFORD: My organization provides grant funding to
counties to help support the provision of legal services to poor people charged with crimes. I’m going to be
talking in particular about our discretionary grant programs where we’re partnering with counties who are interested
in advancing their own systems through partnerships. Really moving in new directions from what I’ll call the
legacy system of court-appointed counsel systems, which is still the by far predominant form of provision of indigent
defense services in Texas. Some of the programs that we’ve been working on are what we call managed assigned
counsel programs. This is in communities where the courts who by statute are the ones in charge in Texas of determining
who is going to be appointed to represent indigent defendants. They make the assignments on individual cases to specific
attorneys.

They in some places have decided that that’s not something they want to do. We’ve
been supporting them in developing this new system. It really started back in 2009 in Lubbock County. The judges
there took the initiative to essentially spin off the management of the appointment list and the assignment of counsel
to a non-profit Bar-led organization. They started it with a subset of cases, mental health defendants and with some
case workers to support the attorneys in that work. After a couple of years in learning the new system and what the
issues were, they expanded it to the entire criminal court system. At this point in Lubbock all of the appointments
are managed by this Bar-led organization. The courts have nothing to do with the selection of counsel. The Bar panels
with the Chief Defender reviews all requests for support services like investigators, expert witnesses. They also
review and approve all the fee vouchers which is another of the powers that is given to the judges in this state.

That was such a success that Travis County in Austin has also now launched the same system. As of this year
the criminal court appointment system is managed by a non-profit Bar Association with Chief Defender, two Deputy
Defenders, an investigator and so forth. This has been a big sea change and we see it as an opportunity for counties
around the state who may not be ready to take over the entire system through the creation of, say, a public defender’s
office where you have staff attorneys managing the provision of counsel. These are still private attorneys but it
provides a lot of independence from the courts and it also provides an opportunity for more direct oversight and
quality control which are things that judges aren’t really in a position to do.

Chief Defenders
who manage the system are. They help staff cases if need be. They provide mentoring services and then they annually
review performance and provide pointers and training opportunities for all of the private assigned counsel attorneys
in the jurisdiction.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: That’s really interesting. You talked about the success
of the reform initiatives in Lubbock County. Can you elaborate on that? What kinds of results are you really seeing?

SHACKELFORD: I think it is the same attorneys but I would say the quality is better. They’ve created
mentoring programs both in Lubbock and now in Travis County which I think has the effect of enhancing the quality
of representation, bringing up the new generation. I think Lubbock, one of the challenges they faced was an aging
criminal defense attorney population retiring. It wasn’t really a process without a public defender’s office
to mentor and train young attorneys who wanted to go into the defense world. The old model of starting in a prosecutor’s
office, it wasn’t really attractive to a lot of young attorneys so they’ve been able to establish a full-scale
mentoring program under the auspices of the Managed Assigned Counsel program. I think that’s probably one of
the biggest enhancements.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Why is procedural justice important according to you,
and how can it really speak to addressing issues that minorities face within the criminal justice system?

SHACKELFORD: For the criminal justice system to have credibility in the community or at large, there has
to be justice perceived. It’s both the appearance and the actuality of fairness in the proceedings. Really that’s
what the initiatives that we’ve been undertaking are trying to enhance. The court-appointed counsel system can
at least lead to the appearance that the defendant’s attorney may not have their interests aligned with the
defendant. You speak to defense attorneys and they’ll talk about the difficulties in establishing a good relationship
with their client when they may feel like the attorney was foisted on them and works for the judge. Even the prosecutor
when in fact, the prosecutor doesn’t have anything to do with it but there’s still that perception. The
procedure, if you will, of having the court assign it can lead to that and that undermines really the whole justice
system and really is at the root of the second initiative that I wanted to speak about.

That’s
a client choice initiative that’s underway in Comal County which is New Braunsfels. It’s a small to mid-size
community between San Antonio and Austin. They are for the first time in the United States have implemented a system
whereby the clients, the defendants who’ve been charged with a crime, get to select the attorney who will represent
them. This is the system that’s in place in common law countries across the world, England, Scotland, Australia.
It has been for many, many years but has never really been tried here. We got the idea from a Cato Institute report,
Free Market Principles from 2010 and Norman Lefstein which is one of the thought leaders in Indigent Offense nationally
from the Indiana University School of Law, has partnered with us to create the program.

There
was a very large stakeholder committee with a national oversight board to develop the model and it began operation
just at the beginning of this year. There’s going to be a full evaluation of course, but the main concept behind
it is that the interests of the clients are going to be aligned with their defense attorney rather than the defense
attorney’s interests are aligned with the client. The only way they’re going to get appointments in the
system is if a client chooses to have them represent them. It piggybacks on the court appointed system. These are
attorneys who have already been qualified and screened by the judges, which is the system we have, as being qualified,
have the requisite training and experience to provide representation. From that pool, that relatively large list,
basically all the criminal defense attorneys in the community, the clients can choose.

We found
so far that about three-quarters of them do elect to choose their own attorney. If they don’t maybe they don’t
have any knowledge, they will be assigned an attorney off the wheel as they always have been. It turns out that attorneys
do have reputations in the community and defendants can get information to make an informed decision. It’s really
no different than anyone else who need to buy a service be it hiring a plumber or an accountant or anything else.
You gather the information and you make a choice about who you think is going to provide you the best service.

The attorneys at least initially, have already reported that it’s much easier to establish a trusting
relationship with their client because they feel vested in the choice. This was the attorney they in fact chose to
represent them. It’s going to be really interesting to see what the results are. Does it improve the quality?
What are the perceptions of the clients in the community? What do the defense attorneys report? There’s a robust
evaluation by the Justice Management Institute that’s going to take a look at this and we’ll have a full
report in 2016.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: What are some of the challenges facing indigent defense today,
particularly as it intersects with procedural justice and issues of disparity?

SHACKELFORD: The
overarching issue and it may always be issue is inadequate resources. In public defender programs and assigned counsel
systems, if there isn’t enough funding to provide meaningful representation, then it’s very hard to have
procedural justice. You can have a system of attorneys who are there in name only who stand up with the defendant
while they plead guilty to the crime they’ve been charged with and accept the offer that the prosecutor makes.
We do have a system that’s based largely on guilty pleas. The challenge is when the defense attorneys don’t
have adequate time and resources to properly investigate the cases that you can undermine the belief that the system
is fair. If you’re in the defense community, if your attorney doesn’t have time to actually track down
the witness that may be able to attest to your defense, then you’re not going to have any trust in the system.
I think that’s probably the overarching consideration.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Thanks for talking
to me today.

SHACKELFORD: Thanks for having me.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I’m Avni
Majithia-Sejpal and I’ve been talking to Wesley Shackelford at Reinvesting in Justice. To listen to more New
Thinking Podcasts or to learn more about our work, you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for
listening.

Innovations in Pretrial Justice: The View from Denver Jan 20, 2016

At Reinvesting
in Justice, Aubree Cote, smart pretrial site coordinator for Denver, talks about the city’s
reform efforts and what different states and jurisdictions can learn from each other regarding pretrial justice.

AVNI
MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Hello and welcome to the New Thinking Podcast. This is Avni Majithia-Sejpal, and I am here in Dallas
today talking to Aubree Cote at the Reinvesting In Justice conference. Aubree is the Denver site coordinator for
the Bureau of Justice Assistance Smart Pretrial Demonstration Initiative. Welcome, Aubree.

AUBREE
COTE: Hi, thank you.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: You just participated in a panel that was very interesting.
For the benefit of our listeners at home, can you tell us what that panel was about and what you specifically were
talking about there?

COTE: Sure. The panel was around pretrial practices, and I was able to talk
about the Smart Pretrial, which is a demonstration initiative that Denver is participating in as one of three sites.
The other two sites are the state of Delaware and Yakima County, which is in Washington State. The Smart Pretrial
is a program that is allowing all three of those jurisdictions to look at front end processes within their criminal
justice systems. The work is divided in three different phases. Phase one of the grant is around planning, which
has really been about system analysis and looking at system processes, system mapping, gaps within our pretrial system,
and evaluating that so that we can, in phase two, implement some opportunities we may have to make improvements in
that system. The third phase, which would be the third year of the program, is sustainability. That’s where
hopefully the successful practices we put in place in phase two, we can sustain as well as working as a site for
other jurisdictions who may be looking at pretrial reform.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Speaking of Denver
and pretrial practices, what is the Smart Pretrial grant attempting to address?

COTE: Denver is
very fortunate in that we have a pretrial services program that has been around for a very long time. We started
doing some pretty significant pretrial reform work about 7 years ago in Denver. Some of that was around the implementation
of risk assessment. Colorado uses a risk assessment specific to a Colorado population. Denver implemented that in
2012. Additionally, in 2013, the bail statute in Colorado was essentially rewritten, which really changed how bail
was set. Smart Pretrial has really helped us to focus in on some of the changes that we’ve already made, and,
as a system, really look at what other opportunities that we have now that we know more about some of the changes
that were made a few years ago.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Can we break down what pretrial practices are?

COTE: Pretrial… The system itself is really the time where a defendant, between the time of arrest all
the way until disposition in a case. What we’ve found is that many defendants are in custody during that period,
and oftentimes are in custody held on a financial bail. If they’re not able to post that, they remain in custody
until disposition. Pretrial reform really looks at using risk assessment to determine whether those defendants should
be released or detained. Generally, most defendants are low-risk and can be released. Supervision practices can be
used for moderate risk-level defendants who, with some case management, specifically around appearance and not committing
new crimes, can be successful during that pretrial period.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Why is pretrial reform
so urgent today?

COTE: I think it’s interesting that there has been a concentration on looking
at the front end of the system that, 10 years ago, you didn’t hear much about. Most of nationally, jail populations,
or around 60% of the jail populations, are pretrial defendants. Obviously, that’s having a huge impact on those
that are in custody and haven’t even been found guilty and are not serving a sentence. A second piece to that
is that, historically, bail has been around financial means. I think in looking at jail, we’re seeing that,
oftentimes, defendants are buying their way out of custody, leaving poorer defendants to remain in custody.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Can you talk about some specific pretrial practices that help to reduce incarceration?

COTE: Yes. I would definitely go back to risk assessment. I think that has been very important in Denver,
and nationally also. I think changing the culture where judges and court personnel are making decisions based on
either detention or release, instead of a financial amount that they think may or may not ensure that the defendant
returns. Risk assessment has really helped us change how we look at a defendant that is arrested, and also the need
to be arrested. Is it necessary for a defendant to go into the jail, or can we somehow look at risk on the front
end and determine that they don’t even need to take up a jail bed day. We know the research is telling us that
defendants who are in custody even for 2 or 3 days can be very negatively impacted by that.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
In Denver, what are some of the key causes of incarceration?

COTE: Denver is an interesting jurisdiction
because we are a city and a county. There are multiple layers within our system. We have municipal cases, which are
very low level ordinance nuisance type crimes, and then we have misdemeanors and we have felonies. Because of that,
we have a jail that has a variety of populations. What we’ve found is that, when we apply risk, it doesn’t
always correlate to charge type. In the past, felonies obviously would have higher financial bonds. We can’t
now assume that, just because they have a felony, that they’re higher or lower risk. That risk assessment has
really allowed us to look through a different lens to see who should be in our jail. Ideally, we would have a jail
that is high-risk defendants, and all of our low-risk, which would be most of them, are released, and the medium-risk
population is released with some type of pretrial supervision.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Are there any
strategies that you can share with us regarding implementing successful alternatives to pretrial detention without
compromising public safety?

COTE: I think that making decisions around supervision based on risk.
One of the things that we’re looking at in Denver is our pretrial supervision. We have several levels of pretrial
supervision. Our outcomes are very positive for defendants who are on that supervision. One of the things that we’d
really like to look more deeply into is specifically what type of supervision works well for different risk levels
of defendants. Right now, the research in the field doesn’t get very specific about what we know works with
certain levels of defendants. One of the things that we want to look at in Denver is really specifically what part
of our supervision is working well and for which defendants.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I wanted to return
to your panel for a moment. Given a variety of stakeholders involved coming from different parts of the country,
I imagine it generated some interesting conversations and insights.

COTE: One of the benefits
of forums like this, where different jurisdictions are able to sit down and talk, is it’s always so interesting
that we all work in very different systems. However, there was definitely a conversation within that panel that there
is a large pretrial jail population, and what different jurisdictions can do. It’s interesting. The judge on
our panel from New York statutorily has different limitations than we may have in Colorado. Yet, they are instituting
a program around pretrial release. That’s very similar to what we’re doing in Colorado and is being done
in other states. I think that part is always very beneficial.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Thanks so much
for talking to me. That was an instructive conversation. I’m Avni Majithia-Sejpal, and I have been talking to
Aubree Cote at Reinvesting In Justice. To listen to more New Thinking Podcasts, or to learn more about our work,
you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks so much for listening.

Race, Data, and Procedural Justice: A Conversation with David Slayton Jan 13, 2016

At Reinvesting
in Justice, David Slayton, executive director of the Texas Office of Court Administration, talks
about using data to implement procedural justice and address racial disparities in the justice system.

The following is
a transcript

AVNI MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Hello, this is
Avni Majithia-Sejpal, and you’re listening to the New Thinking Podcast. Today I’m at the Dallas City Hall
with David Slayton, who is the administrative director of the Texas Office of Court Administration in Austin. We’re
both here at Reinvesting in Justice, a conference that brings together a wide range of criminal justice practitioners
to discuss challenges and highlight innovative work being done in the field of criminal justice across the state
of Texas and elsewhere. David is speaking on a panel about procedural justice in a little while here. Specifically,
how procedural justice intersects with thinking about racial disparity in the justice system. David, welcome to the
New Thinking Podcast.

DAVID SLAYTON: It’s great to be here.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Today’s big subject is “Reinvesting in Justice.” From
where you sit, what does reinvesting in justice even look like, and why is it so important right now.

SLAYTON: Right now, we face really challenging times, and making sure that the dollars and
the efforts that we put into criminal justice are being effective at what we want them to do. The outcomes are important.
It’s not just about inputs and outputs anymore, whereas maybe in the past that was a huge focus, how many cases can
we get done, or how many are we having filed. Focusing on, are we actually making an impact with the efforts that
we’re putting in? I think that’s an exciting thing to be able to focus on as we do our work.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: For the benefit of those who are not here today, can you summarize
what your panel is going to be about, and what you specifically will be talking about?

SLAYTON:
We have the Dallas City Police Chief on the panel, which will be really interesting to hear his perspective on law
enforcement’s interaction with the public. We’re going to have the deputy director of the Texas Indigent
Defense Commission, whose focus is upon court-appointed counsel, and of course, making sure that there’s a feeling
of fairness in that system. I’m particularly focusing on procedural fairness, and the work that we’re doing
in the state to try to make sure that people, not only are being treated fairly, but that they feel that they’re
being treated fairly in the court system. Obviously, that feeling is as important as the reality.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Can you talk about procedural fairness?

SLAYTON:
Sure. One of the key things with procedural fairness is we want to make sure that when people enter the court system,
that they know what to do and that they understand what’s going on. The court system has been around for centuries
and it’s built for attorneys who are very learned in the system and understand exactly how it works, it’s built for
judges. Sometimes the language that’s used and the procedures that’s used in the courts are not as easily
understandable to the public and sometimes that leads to confusion, leads to a feeling of unfairness. So, making
sure that people not only are treated fairly, but that they understand what’s going on, that they are able to
understand those procedures and the forms and the languages that’s going on is really important. Then, obviously,
at the end of the day, making sure that people are, indeed, treated fairly based upon the situation in their case,
and that outcomes are similar for all different groups, no matter what their background is.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
There is a lot of discussion across the spectrum about racial disparities in the criminal justice system, and outside
of it. Can you talk about how maybe procedural fairness actually addresses that, or can possibly address that?

SLAYTON: Yeah. I think one of the real key things that’s important … I’m
going to be talking about this on my panel today … is the need for us to really take hard look at that with data.
There are different communities that are involved in our criminal justice system who are over-represented. We know
that for a fact, we see it. Oftentimes, I’m not sure that we have, in the past, been willing to take a hard
look at the data to see–what are those degrees of over-representation?

What
I see happening today, at least in the judiciary in Texas, is, really, a willingness to really peel back the layers
and see: what does the data show, as far as the effect on different groups, and the disparities that are there? And
what can we do about it? Whether it be in the child protective system, child welfare system, we’ve been looking
at that, the truancy system, the children involved in the juvenile justice system, all the way up to the criminal
justice system. I think it’s really important for us to take a look at that. And making sure that people are being
treated from the beginning of their involvement in this system, all the way to the end is important. I think procedural
fairness plays a big part in that.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: What is the data telling
us?

SLAYTON: I think the data is revealing what we know, which we know anecdotally,
there is indeed over-representation of certain groups. I look, in particular, to a study that was done a few years
ago, that has had tremendous impact in our state, which was a report called “Breaking Schools Rules.” It
was done by the Council of State Governments Justice Center and the Public Policy Research Institute from Texas A&M.
It looked at about a million kids in our school system in the state, and what their involvement was in the school
ticketing for minor offences.

What the report found is that, number one, there
was over-representation of minorities, but even disparity in the treatment of those minorities for similar offences.
With all other factors equalized, the educational background of the parents, to the income, to school district, to
even school campus level; if we equalized all those things, the factor that still showed as a differentiation in
the way they were treated was race. Besides race, we also saw an issue with individuals who had disabilities being
overrepresented and the treatment being different. What that led to was really a real focus, and a real effort to
try to reform and put in place reforms that would address that. It’s a really excting thing to be able to see the
data show that, and then to take action based upon that.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Are there specific practices of procedural fairness that can actually address some of these disparities that we are
talking about?

SLAYTON: You know, one of the things that’s really important
is the training that we have been in … I want to talk about this today too … is the training that we have been
doing with judges on implicit bias. We know it exists. We know, as humans, we have our biases. I think it’s sort
of like the step one of AA, admitting we have a problem is sometimes the number one. I think, a lot of times, just
for judges and court staff and prosecutors and defense attorneys to realize that they have implicit bias is an important
factor. Then, controlling that with tools, to make sure they can overcome those natural biases that exist. I think
that’s number one, the training behind that is really important.

Then
number two, really trying to overcome that by making sure that we have things like community courts and drug courts.
Making sure that the people who are on the bench and in the courtroom look and act like we do, that speak the same
language as we do. All those types of things, I think, are really important to making sure that people really do
feel that the system is fair and that they are not going against someone who is very different than them, speaks
a different language from them, and therefore, they don’t feel they are getting treated as fairly as they should.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Are there any interesting initiatives in the state of Texas that you
can talk about?

SLAYTON: One of the things that I am going to talk about today,
when I was court administrator in Lubbock County, which is a medium-sized county in west Texas … The judges there
really felt like it was important to ask the people who were coming before them, how they felt about the job the
judges were doing. In fact they labeled it “Judge the Judges.” So, everyone who went before the judges
was asked to answer a survey about their interactions with the judges that day.

Some
of the questions that they asked were, first of all, “Was finding the courthouse easy? Did I have forms that
I needed? Did I feel safe? Was I able to do my business in a reasonable amount of time?” and “Were the
hours that the court was open, did that make it easy to conduct my business?” Because oftentimes that can be
an issue. Then it went a step further, and for those individuals who actually appeared before a judge, it asked them
the following questions. They were asked to grade on these statements: “The judge listened to my side
of the story before the decision was made”; “The judge had information necessary to make a good decision”; “I was
treated as everyone else”: and “As I leave I know what to do next.”

What
we did was, we asked everyone who was leaving the courthouse that had been before the judge, “How do you feel
about this?” And we got some really great feedback. We asked information on the survey about demographics, and
what type of case it was, and which court level they went before. We really started to get some information that
allowed to drill down into the feelings of different individuals who were coming before the courts. It gave the judges
valuable feedback as to how they could address the issues that might be a concern for the public. So, that’s
one example. We’ve seen some other courts in the state also replicate that survey. I think that it’s really
just helping us to use that information to make positive changes within the court system.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: When it comes to procedural fairness there are sometimes skeptics who
suggest that perceptions of fairness have very little to do with actually adjudicating, and also take up a lot of
time that judges and others don’t necessarily have. Are there ways you address the skepticism?

SLAYTON: You know, I am going to say this today, and I think, in this day and age, it’s really
true that the public sees the court system through the lens of the entire criminal justice system. So, if you have
police brutality, or you have a wrongful conviction, or you have an issue in the defense side or the prosecution
side, it’s all the court system, in people’s eyes. So, I think you have to think about this with our partners and
the criminal justice system, as a system-wide issue that we have to address. And if we don’t do that I’m
not sure we really make a real difference. I think that’s the key, is really looking at that from the system-wide
perspective and then making changes based upon that.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: What
are some of the most urgent challenges facing procedural justice, particularly as it pertains to dealing with some
of the racial disparities that we are seeing across various platforms and institutions in the country right now?

SLAYTON: I’m gonna talk about this today. One of the real issues that I see is
the whole issue of community engagement. I’ve been talking at the state level with the chief justice and others
about the need for us to really do a better job of engaging with the community. In the past when we looked at judges
doing community engagement, it’s been going to the Rotary or going to the bar assar association and speaking. I’m
not sure that’s exactly that type of community engagement that is most beneficial, and we need to figure out
a way to get into different communities across our state and our local communities and have discussions about, how
do you feel about the court system? What do you think the challenges are? How can we better connect? I think that
is one of the biggest things.

The second thing, in my mind, that we can do
better is to be more transparent. We are doing our best to be transparent, but there is even more we can do. For
instance, we have limitations in our data. If someone asks me for racial disparity data, I have limitations in what
I can say. So, we are doing some work at the state level to try to get more data, that is more granular that we can
begin to really take a look and study these issues a little bit better.

Then,
the last thing I would say, is really opening up our records from a perspective so that anybody can see what is going
on. You mentioned earlier, “Is this a real issue, is this a perception issue.” It doesn’t really matter
at the end of the day. Perception is reality. So, I think making sure that people can actually validate or not, their
assumption, is really important, and so, that transparency, I think, is really key.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Great. David, thanks so much!

SLAYTON: Thank you for having me today.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I’m Avni Majithia-Sejpal and I’ve been talking to David Slayton
at Reinvesting in Justice about racial disparity and the need for procedural fairness. To listen to more New Thinking
podcasts, or to learn more about our work, you can visit our website atwww.courtinnovation.org.
Thanks so much for listening.

Improving Outcomes for Individuals with Co-occurring Disorders Jan 07, 2016

At Reinvesting
in Justice, Michael Young, chief public defender of Bexar County in Texas, talks about innovative
programs to assist defendants with mental health challenges.

The
following is a transcript

AVNI MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Hello
and welcome to the New Thinking podcast. This is Avni Majithia-Sejpal and I’m here in Dallas talking to Michael
Young at the Reinvesting in Justice conference. Michael is the Chief Public Defender for Bexar County in Texas. Welcome
Michael.

MICHAEL YOUNG: Good afternoon
Avni.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Can you talk about your
panel today which just concluded and particularly your own contribution to it?

YOUNG: This
afternoon we participated in a panel for dealing with persons in the criminal justice system who have a co-occurring
disorder. A co-occurring disorder means you’re charged with a crime, but at the same time you’re going
through the criminal justice system, you’re suffering from a mental illness or an addiction or some other condition
attendant to that criminal justice situation. Basically, the gist of the panel was myself, also Stephen Bush from
Shelby, Tennessee, Shelby County, Tennessee, and Judge Marcia Hirsch out of New York. Each of them deal with the
mentally ill in the criminal justice system through different programs.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: What
are some of the various challenges facing practitioners who are working with defendants who have co-occurring conditions?

YOUNG: There are a lot of different considerations
you have to think about. Obviously, if you’re dealing with someone who has a mental illness as a criminal defense
attorney, one of your first considerations is: is this person competent to proceed? Do they understand the proceedings
against them? Sometimes that’s a fine line when you have someone who’s suffering from a mental illness.
Now, obviously, if you do have a mental illness, that doesn’t mean per se that you’re incompetent, but
it’s certainly one thing that you have to be looking at. Another thing is I think you need to be prepared for
a great deal of client contact because a lot of representing those who are mentally ill is developing trust. You
will probably spend 10, 15 times the amount of time dealing with a client who has a mental illness over one who doesn’t
because there are so many issues of trust, of explaining the process to them. It’s very time intensive.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I understand that you work specifically
with indigent defendants dealing with mental illness. Is that correct?

YOUNG: Yes. We have a mental illness defense team. They’re
attorneys who represent persons who have a mental illness but are also charged with an offense. We’re also working
at the jail during the initial booking process to represent those persons who have come into the criminal justice
system but have a mental illness.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Can you tell us more about the program itself?

YOUNG:
It’s the first of its kind in the state of Texas. Right now, you are entitled to an attorney if you’re
indigent, if you cannot afford to pay for one. The difference is: when do you get to see that attorney? It may be
several days after your arrest before you actually are able to visit with your attorney. The program that we’ve
initiated, we actually have public defenders at the jail, so immediately when you walk in the jail, if you’re
identified as a person with mental illness, that public defender is your attorney from that moment forward. We determine
if you have a mental illness through several different mechanisms. Law enforcement will talk to them and ask them
questions about their mental health background. There’s also an ability to do what’s called a CCQ which
is a Continuity of Care Query. There’s a database for people who’ve ever had a mental illness that’s
maintained, and if we find that they have already a diagnosis for mental illness, we’ll begin representing them
right then.

That’s especially critical because these people are already
in crisis. They’ve just been arrested. They’re going to see a judge. We want to make sure they don’t
say anything that’s going to damage their case, and the primary focus of what we’re trying to do is find
some type of community based treatment to send them to in lieu of them being booked into jail. It could be a homeless
shelter if that’s their primary problem. It could be drug treatment if that’s a problem. It could be counseling.
Basically, we try to connect that person with treatment in the community, and then we present it to the judge that,
“Judge, if you give this person a bond, they are not going to go to jail, but they’re
going to comply with this treatment that we’ve setup for them.”

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
You mentioned it’s the first such program in Texas. How long has it been up?

YOUNG:
The program was actually supported by the Texas Indigent Defense Commission. That’s the entity in Texas that
was created as part of the Fair Defense Act which oversees indigent defense. They fund indigent defense through either
discretionary spending or through grants if we have an innovative program, so we presented this as a grant proposal.
It was funded effective October 1, so we’re very new into the program.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Wow. Was there a history there? Were you finding that in Bexar County there was a need specifically to work with
defendants who are dealing with mental health issues?

YOUNG:
That’s a great question Avni. The Council of State Governments is really a national organization that’s
focused on criminal justice reform. They did a study for Bexar County from April 2014 through February 2015. During
that time period, there were 55,000 people who were booked into Bexar County Jail. They were able to determine that
approximately 11,656 of those persons had a mental disorder attendant to their arrest, so that’s a large population
that was not being diverted from the jail even though the county had setup programs, and there were a lot of community
based programs available. During the time period of the study, only 125 of the approximately 11,000 were diverted
from the jail. The goal of the program, obviously, is to increase the number of people we divert from the jail to
these community based treatment.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Right. I know it’s early, but have you been seeing any preliminary results?

YOUNG:
Everything in criminal justice right now is being driven by evidence based methods. In other words, data collection
is critical to whatever we’re doing, so we are collecting data to prove the viability of this program. Obviously,
anecdotally we have a lot of stories.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
I’d love to hear some.

YOUNG: We have one
young lady who came in, and when the judge evaluates someone for bond, generally, they only look at the criminal
history and the current charge. The judge basically told us before we presented the case, “This person’s
not a candidate. I’m not going to give them a PR bond” even though she was suffering from a major depressive
disorder. Upon evaluation, we found out that the reason she had this depressive disorder is because she had been
diagnosed with terminal cancer, only four months to live. After verifying that with her oncologist, presenting that
to the judge, obviously, the judge changed their mind, and I think that was a great victory. This lady only had four
months to live, and she was probably going to spend several months of those in jail if we hadn’t of gotten her
out.

Also, people actually come to court. That’s what we’ve been
noticing. Before, if people got out on a commercial bond with no treatment, we had a big problem with them failing
to appear. At least in the last 30 days, we’re seeing people show up. We’re seeing them complying with
coming to court, and I think that has a lot to do with the arrestee feeling like they have an advocate. They have
somebody who’s working for them, somebody that’s believing in them. Because a lot of the times what has
happened, people at this point in their life have strained most of their relationships, and nobody really believes
that they’re going to do what they say anymore. Our public defenders work hard to build a relationship with
them there at the jail and say, “Now come on. You’re going to come to court. You’re going to go do
this treatment.” I just think that connection really impacts them actually, ultimately showing up for court.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Speaking of community, do you find that
linking defendants with community services has an impact on recidivism rates?

YOUNG:
We are going to be looking at that. We believe that if we treat the co-occurring disorder, if we get them into some
kind of community based treatment facility, that it is going to have a great impact on recidivism. Again, anecdotally
it’s easy to see. We’ve had a young man who is a serial criminal trespasser. He routinely trespasses at
a bus stop, and every time he gets picked up, he spends 20 days in jail, and then he’s released credit for time
served. He spend 20 days in jail, and the reason he’s doing this is he’s homeless, so the last time he
got arrested, we were able to connect him with Haven for Hope which is a local homeless shelter. The idea being he’s
not going to be coming back through the system because we’ve addressed the base cause of his repeated criminal
trespassing.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Right. Based on
your panel and the other conversations happening here today, it sounds like there are a lot of new and fairly innovative
programs dealing with mental health in the state of Texas or just nationally.

YOUNG:
Certainly in Texas, we’re not unique. We being Bexar County in that we are trying to use provisions of the Code
of Criminal Procedures, specifically 17.032, to get these mental health bonds. What’s unique about our program
is when we’re doing it. We’re doing it when they first walk in the jail, but Collin County in McKinney,
Texas very near here in Dallas, they have a similar program where they’re trying to connect the defender with
the arrestee as quickly as possible to get them out into treatment. I think there’s a lot of different counties
in Texas that are looking at it. Houston, Harris County is doing something similar, but nationally, Stephen Bush,
talking about the Jericho Project, a great project out of Tennessee where they’ve been working with getting
people into treatment instead of a conviction or keeping them in a criminal justice system.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
What do you think are the most urgent needs for supporting defendants with co-occurring conditions?

YOUNG: That’s an excellent question. A lot of our problem
right now is, again, the misperception of the public that these are inherently violent people because they have a
mental illness. Obviously, that is not the case, but we need to ensure that the public understands that what we are
doing is actually going to maximize their protections. For example, if someone commits a crime and they’re given
a commercial bond, if they can somehow pull together $200 or $500, they’re going to get out, and they’re
not going to be seen by the system for several months until they actually come to court. Under what we’re proposing,
the person who’s going to get out, it’s not going to cost them anything, but they’re going to be required
to go to weekly treatment, report to pretrial officer once a week, and if they step out of line, either don’t
go to treatment or don’t report, that’s going to immediately be reported back to the judge. It’s actually
a program that’s going to maximize public safety.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Thank you so much for talking to me. It was a really instructive conversation. I’m Avni Majithia-Sejpal and
I have been talking to Michael Young at Reinvesting in Justice. To listen to more New Thinking podcasts or to learn
more about our work, you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks so much for listening.

‘Hammers Don’t Work’: Alameda County Chief Public Defender Brendon Woods Dec 30, 2015

In this podcast recorded at the Courts,
Community Engagement, and Innovative Practices in a Changing Landscape symposium held
in Anaheim in December 2015, Alameda County Chief Public Defender Brendon Woods discusses diversion and
the importance of giving low-level offenders the opportunity to avoid a criminal record.

The following is a transcript

RAPHAEL POPE-SUSSMAN:
This is Raphael Pope-Sussman with the Center for Court Innovation. This podcast is part of a series of dispatches
from the court’s Community Engagement and Innovative Practices In a Changing Landscape symposium, held in Anaheim
in December 2015. The conference focused on justice reforms, including recent developments in California, Public
Safety Realignment, and Proposition 47.

Public Safety
Realignment refers to changes brought about by 2011 legislation that shifted responsibility for certain populations
of offenders from the state to the county level. Proposition 47, a ballot initiative passed by referendum in 2014,
reclassified certain low-level felonies as misdemeanors. I hope you enjoy listening.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Hi, this is Raphael Pope-Sussman with
the Center for Court Innovation. I’m sitting here with Brendon Woods, Chief Public Defender for Alameda County.
Brendon, thank you for speaking with me today.

BRENDON
WOODS: Sure. Thank you.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Can you talk a little bit about how your office works with the DA’s office?

WOODS:
Yeah, I guess it depends on what we’re talking about with regards to working together. We collaborate on many
issues. Probably our biggest one is our Clean Slate Program, where we collaborate together with regards to getting
our clients’ cases reduced to misdemeanors, or getting them dismissed completely off their record.

Another one of our big collaborations was, about a year and a half ago,
two years ago, we started our Veterans Treatment Court. That took a real collaborative effort between the DA, public
defense, and probation, sheriff’s office, and the courts.That’s really a great program we started.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
How do you balance those partnerships with the need to obviously represent the interests of your clients?

WOODS: I think always at the forefront and
at the very beginning is a zealous advocacy that never goes away, and that’s always the case. Where we collaborate
is where we can see there will be a benefit for our clients, but a lot of that collaboration takes place every day,
takes place during pre-trial conferences, takes place with regards to resolving cases.

Once we get past that, and we know we’re going to be litigating a case and
trial, it’s all about advocacy. Even with the collaboration it’s all about advocacy. We’re always
putting our clients first.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
How do you talk to your clients about opportunities for diversion?

WOODS:
I think that’s great. Any time we have a client where they can hopefully avoid having a criminal conviction
on their record by completing a program, or doing some some sort of diversion, we completely advocate for that, because
once you get that conviction on your record it turns into this horrible cycle. Once you get that conviction with
probation, it turns into a horrible cycle, so if we can get our client some sort of diversion or treatment program,
and they avoid having a felony record, it’s critical.

At least in Alameda County, probation is in some ways, I don’t like
to call it this, but a real set up, because once you go down that path, once you’re on probation, you don’t
have the same rights you do as if you weren’t. You have the search clauses. You don’t have the right to
a trial when you violate. It’s just such a terrible downfall, so we really try to avoid that if we can, especially
with a diversion opportunity.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Are there situations where there are options for maybe a low-level diversion as opposed to a few days in jail, where
you might be concerned that the diversion opportunity is going to maybe be more onerous than the alternative, or
that the alternative might be just that they’re going to just let your client off entirely?

WOODS: No, there aren’t many diversion
programs where I would say I’m concerned about that, but if there’s a diversion program and they’re
talking about some sort of considerable amount of jail time if my client fails a diversion program then I’m
not going to agree to that. That’s a problem. We’ve got to stop going towards that model where if a client
does not complete this program they will be hammered. Hammers don’t work, especially now in the criminal justice
system. They just don’t work.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Do you think a lot of that comes from public fear?

WOODS:
It’s public fear, and it’s the old school way of thinking, and we’ve got to stop thinking that way.
It’s all about rehabilitation and incentives, as opposed to hammers.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Where do public defenders fit into this national conversation about justice reform?

WOODS: I think it’s incumbent upon us as public
defenders to direct and drive the conversation, because we’re the ones who are advocating and representing our
clients. We should be the loudest voice at the table.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Have you seen particular changes after Prop 47 in California? How has it changed the way your office works, and the
kinds of outcomes you’re seeing for your clients?

WOODS:
Primarily with my office, we do a lot of focus on Prop 47 with regards to the record remedies, and getting our clients
into court, getting their cases reduced to misdemeanors, and getting them dismissed. That’s the biggest spoke
that we focus on right now. A lot of people talk about Prop 47, and it’s going to add to the increasing crime,
or putting all these dangerous criminals out, and that’s just not the case.

That’s
not the case at all. I haven’t seen any evidence of that. We’re talking about low-level offenders who have
drug possession being treated as misdemeanors, and then low-level theft offenses. That population should never have
seen a prison in the first place.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
This is Raphael Pope-Sussman of the Center for Court Innovation, and I’ve been speaking with Brendon D. Woods,
Chief Public Defender for Alameda County. For more information on the Center for Court Innovation, visit www.courtinnovation.org.

The Neuroscience of Addiction and Pharmacological Treatment Dec 16, 2015

At Reinvesting in
Justice, Dr. Bryon Adinoff, Distinguished Professor of Drug and Alcohol Abuse Research
at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the Director of Research in Mental
Health at the VA North Texas Health Care System, talks about the latest research on addiction and pharmacological
or medication-assisted treatment, as well as how they can impact the criminal justice system.

The following is a transcript

AVNI MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Hello, and welcome to the New Thinking Podcast. This
is MAJITHIA-SEJPALejpal. Today, we are at Reinvesting in Justice at the Dallas City Hall,l where I’m in conversation
with Dr. Bryon Adinoff, the Distinguished Professor of Drug and Alcohol Abuse at the University of Texas Southwestern
Medical Center and the director of research in mental health at the V.A. North Texas Healthcare System.

Dr. Adinoff, thanks for taking the time to speak with me.

BRYON ADINOFF: Good to be here.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
You just gave a very interesting talk about the neuroscience of addiction. For the benefit of our listeners at home,
can you walk us through the highlights?

ADINOFF:The
key thing about the neuroscience of addiction, it is a brain disease. It’s a chronic medical illness just like
other medical illnesses whether it’s cardiovascular disease or pulmonary disease or epilepsy or schizophrenia
or bipolar disease. There are many similar characteristics in that it’s due to both specific genes that put
you at risk, environments that put you at risk and in the case of substances of course, the use of substances often
for a long time that develop the brain disease.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
More and more it seems that prosecutors and courts are seeking to link defendants with substance abuse issues to
treatment programs. What is the latest research telling us? What do we know now about the addicted brain?

ADINOFF: It appears that what happens over time in the addicted brain is
that the whole even though the drugs may be hitting particular parts of the brain involved in pleasure and reward,
the whole brain becomes hijacked by this reward system. So that all of the parts of the brain particularly the prefrontal
cortex that’s involved in who we are, the way we plan things, the way we think about things. This part of the
brain is hijacked by the reward system. We see many differences in people with addiction in their brain. We can certainly
tell that, for instance, the brain is far more reactive to certain cues that remind them about using. That there’s
memories of use of things that they associate with using, whether it’s a bottle of beer or a cocaine pipe or
joint that become hardwired into the brain of people with addiction. It can be very difficult to put these memories
away or make them quiet.

We found networks that work
in the brain. All of our brains, we have networks of brain regions that talk to one another and that there’s
impairments, for instance, in these networks in the addicted brain. For instance the brain areas just at rest called
the default mode network. These brain regions are active when we’re not doing anything, we’re just lying
there thinking. This activity in people with addiction in this default mode network appear to be hyperactive. Maybe
there’s a loop of craving that they’re not even aware of that is hyper-activated in addicts. Maybe they’re
scanning the environment without even thinking about it for addiction-related cues.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: You mentioned in your talk pharmacological treatment? One buzzword
seems to be medication-assisted treatment. Are those two the same things?

ADINOFF:
They are the same thing. I prefer not to use the term medication-assisted. We do not talk about insulin being medication-assisted
treatment for diabetes even though the diabetic in addition to taking insulin needs to be watching their diet and
exercise and also some other things, losing weight but they’re all essential parts of treatment. Schizophrenia
we don’t talk about medication-assisted treatment when they’re taking anti-psychotic. I think in the same
way, for addiction disorders, we have medications that’s very useful. We have talk therapies that are very useful.
We have 12-step support groups that are very useful. They’re all important treatments or interventions.

It can be very successfully used in the treatment of addiction. The pharmacologic
approaches are medications that are helpful for the treatment of addiction.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Can you expand on pharmacological treatments?

ADINOFF:
There are many different good medications now for addictive disorders. For opiate disorders when opiates are drugs
like heroin or Percocet or codeine, Oxycontin, Vicodin. These substances all hit opiate receptors in the brain. There’s
two major pharmacologic approaches. One is to use what’s called an opiate agonist, where it replaces the effects
of these other drugs on the brain. So instead of taking heroin in you would take methadone or suboxone or buprenorphine.
What these medications do, they’re also opiates and they hit the opiate receptor in the same way, that say,
heroin might that replaces it, so the brain is no longer crying out demanding that it gets heroin. It’s been
satisfied or satiated with this other opiate agonist like suboxone or methadone.

Even
though they’re opiates and if you stop them suddenly you’d have withdrawal symptoms. They’re legal.
They take them once a day and they last for the full day and they take them by mouth so they can actually go on and
function with regular life so they don’t get in trouble with the law. They’re not using needles. There’s
doctors I know who are on suboxone. There’s a wide range of people that do very well on these medications.

Another approach is blocking the opiate receptors and there’s a shot
called Vivitrol and it has a drug in it called naltrexone that blocks these receptors for a month. Once you get that
shot you no longer can use. If you use, say heroin, you won’t get high. You’re throwing your money down
the drain and it’s all that work to get the heroin for nothing. What that month does, it seems to get people
the opportunity then to do their treatments so they have a whole month ahead of them for that treatment to kick in,
and then they just have to make a commitment once a month to get that shot.

For
alcohol, we have several other medications that hit different brain receptors or brain neurons that people that take
these medications do better than people that take a placebo or don’t take a medication at all.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: You would say that these are effective?

ADINOFF: They are. There’s substantial literature on these medications.
They’re not cure-alls. They’re not magic pills. We certainly always recommend that somebody taking these
medications get their other therapy as well, but they do help.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
As someone who has done such extensive research on the subject, how do you address skepticism of pharmacological
treatment that suggests that it merely replaces one drug for another?

ADINOFF:
Well, in the case of the opiate agonist I mentioned like methadone and buprenorphine, they’re opiate replacement
therapy. They do in fact replace one drug with another. The difference is you’re not getting high and that all
the symptoms of addiction, the craving, the lost control, the consequences of use, the compulsive use, all those
things if you take it every day as prescribed, they go away. So you don’t have all the symptoms that make up
an addiction. They work. I understand the philosophy of not wanting to replace one drug with another but in this
position my goal is to help people get better. Other medications like I mentioned, the Vivitrol, are just medications.
They don’t replace the drug in the sense that we usually think about it. All other diseases that we think of,
we use medications. It’s not all we use but most diseases they’re physiologic illnesses and we use medications
with great success. Addictions are just another disease. They’re chronic. They’re marked by relapse. Again,
just like all other chronic diseases, so it makes sense. Again, the biggest thing is people do better on them–and
that’s the ultimate goal.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: There
was an interesting question that came up from an audience member in your talk about affordability and I was wondering
whether you could talk about that a little bit. How accessible is pharmacological treatment to the average person?

ADINOFF: It’s a great question and it certainly one concern in the
addiction field as well as all other fields, whether it’s chemotherapy or medication for schizophrenia or depression.
The newer drugs are always way more expensive. The methadone is very inexpensive. It can be a pain to get. You have
to go to special clinics but that’s been around a long time and it’s not expensive. Vivitrol is a shot
and it is expensive. My understanding is the company that makes Vivitrol has actually given grants or given a lot
of free Vivitrol to people that are in court systems. There’s ways around it. For alcohol dependence, many of
the medications are really old medications and are not that expensive.

When
you consider how much an addiction, even if you’re drinking, it really adds up very quickly and people put that
money into getting the medication and other treatment–they probably come way out ahead in the long run.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: How can some of the research that you’ve been doing
and citing inform and change the way the criminal justice system adjudicates addiction?

ADINOFF: I don’t know that it can change it because I think the reasons for
the drug laws that we presently have are political, social, cultural decisions that people have made and the government
has made. Many of our laws for better or worse are not necessarily based on the science and it can take a long time
for laws on the books to respond to the science. As a emotional issue, even though I believe, and I think many people
now believe, addiction is a brain disease. There’s something about people seemingly voluntarily taking drugs
that is hard for us to really think of as a brain disease. I think that’s changing is more and more people come
out and say, “You know I’ve been addicted.” I think gradually we’re changing but it’s very
slow and not only in the community but in the field of medicine. Doctors are sometimes extremely slow to prescribe
these medications that we were talking about.

It
will take a while. As I mentioned in my talk in DSM IV–DSM is our psychiatric bible–legal problems was one of the
ways we use to diagnose a substance disorder order, an addiction. And that was taken out for DSM V because they found
being arrested for a substance use justice disorder had more to do with your race and your economic standing and
your social standing than it did whether you were using or not. It really wasn’t very good at helping you diagnose–it
wouldn’t good at all at helping you diagnose somebody with addiction or not. The laws that we’ve been using
have not been effective in treating people with addiction or in decreasing the amount of use. We’ve certainly spent
a lot of money on this country on the drug war. Again, it was understandable because these drugs can cause a great
deal of harm to people and societies, but they haven’t been effective. So this conference, it’s been great in
trying to look at better ways to approach these problems other than incarcerating people.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: That brings us to the end of our conversation. Dr. Adinoff,
thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me.

ADINOFF:
It’s been my pleasure.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I’m
MAJITHIA-SEJPALejpal and you’ve been listening to Dr. Bryon Adinoff about the latest research in the neuroscience
of addiction and what it means for prosecuting drug crimes. To listen to more New Thinking Podcasts or to learn more
about our work, you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

With an Evidence-based Curriculum, Improving Outcomes for Minority Male Youth Dec 10, 2015

This podcast is part of a series highlighting innovative approaches
to reducing violence and improving health outcomes among at-risk minority youth at the nine demonstration sites of
the Minority
Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. One of these demonstrations sites is Cabarrus Students Taking
a Right Stand (STARS), a school-based male youth leadership program based in Cabarrus County, North Carolina, that
seeks to create a healthy, positive school community through mentorship and positive role modeling.

Katie Dight and Rolanda Patrick, program managers at Cabarrus STARS,
and Sue Yates, chief financial officer for the Cabarrus Health Alliance, joined this week’s podcast to discuss Cabarrus
STARS’ evidence-based curriculum and program results, and why STARS believes strong male role models are critical
for program participants.

The following is a transcript

RAPHAEL
POPE-SUSSMAN: Hi. This is Raphael Pope-Sussman of the Center for Court Innovation. This podcast is part of series
we are doing with people seeking to curb violence and improve access to public health for at-risk minority youth
as part of the Minority Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. The Initiative is a partnership of the Office of Minority
Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services
at the U.S. Department of Justice that encourages collaboration among public health organizations, law enforcement
agencies, and community-based groups. Our podcast series highlights innovative approaches at the nine demonstration
sites that have received funding under the program.

In
this week’s podcasts, we’re looking at Cabarrus Students Taking a Right Stand or STARS in Cabarrus County,
North Carolina. STARS is a school-based youth leadership program for males aimed at creating a healthy, positive
school community through mentorship and positive role modeling. Key activities for this initiative include youth
development, academic enrichment activities, service learning, tutoring, case management, and in-home parent resources.
Through Cabarrus STARS’ partnership with local law enforcement, the police department’s student resource officers
serve as mentors and assist with youth programming.

We’re
focusing this podcast on the specialized curriculum Cabarrus STARS uses with its youth, as well as the program’s
use of a range of evidence-based tools.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Hi. This is Raphael Pope-Sussman of the Center for Court Innovation. In today’s podcast we’re looking at
the Cabarrus STARS, or Students Taking a Right Stand, program in Cabarrus County, North Carolina. Joining us today
are Katie Dight and Rolanda Patrick, program managers at Cabarrus STARS, and Sue Yates, chief financial officer for
the Cabarrus Health Alliance. Katie, Rolanda, and Sue, thank you for speaking with me today and welcome.

ALL: Thank you.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
It’s great to have you here. To start out, can you describe how Cabarrus STARS works?

KATIE DIGHT: This is Katie Dight. We are a three-tiered program. We have
tier one, which is systems level training and change within the schools. Tier two, which is our positive youth development
piece of it where we have a group-level intervention. Then tier three, where we have intensive individual services
both for the students, and then a parental engagement piece.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
The program partners with four schools. Can you talk me through those partnerships a bit? I know you focus on school
climate and bullying as part of that.

PATRICK: Yes,
sir. In regards to the four schools that we currently work with, two are located in Kannapolis City, so we actually
work with two different school systems. The first being Kannapolis City and the second being Cabarrus County Schools.
The schools in general are Kannapolis Middle School and A.L. Brown High School, both in Kannapolis, and Concord High
School and Concord Middle School in Cabarrus County. We’re able to work with a minimum of 15 students, 15 to
17 students, at each school for 15 weeks. We begin in September, our first session will end in January. Our second
semester will begin in January and end in May. During that time, we’re able to implement an evidence-based curriculum
called Too Good for Violence at the middle school level and Too Good for Drugs and Violence on the high school level.
At every school, we’re able to work with them for 15 weeks, a minimum of two hours.

Our other partners include our local law enforcement agencies, so that would be
Kannapolis City Police Department, as well as the Cabarrus County Police Department. We also have partnerships with
the Youth Educational Services Society in Charlotte. They actually serve as our facilitators for our program. We
also have a facilitator that comes from the Boys and Girls Club.

DIGHT:
In addition to that, each of the four schools also receives case management services. I’m sorry, this is Katie
Dight. They are given to about eight students per year at each of the four sites. Those students are selected from
our group and they might receive something like an interactive journaling program, some of them get a mentor. We
try to team them up with mentors who are either connected to their school or local public servants, either firefighters
or police officers. This year we expanded our mentoring program a little bit. We now work with more teachers and
coaches than we did last year.

PATRICK: We have a
total of 13 mentors.

POPE-SUSSMAN: I’d love
to hear a little bit more about interactive journaling and the mechanism behind that part of the curriculum.

DIGHT: Sure. This is Katie Dight and I oversee the case manager who uses
the interactive journaling program. It’s called Keep It Direct and Simple, or KIDS for short. It’s a series
that’s divided up into different needs that the student might identify. We first meet with the student before
we select a journal. Once we kind of get to know them, talk about what they see as some of their biggest challenges,
we help them select a journal that might be most useful. For instance, a lot of our students select the one that
is called Anger and Other Feelings, other students opt for the one called Personal Relationships. It’s really
a great system that walks the student through each of these problems that are really in-depth but in an easy to understand
way.

Our middle and high schoolers both use it. We’ve
seen some pretty good results. There’s a pre- and post-test for each of the journals. They ask things–for instance,
for the Anger and Other Feelings, they’ll ask students to name five major feelings that they’ve experienced.
For a lot of our students, it’s difficult to name anything other than maybe angry or sad when we first start,
but by the end of it they’re able to identify other ones such as grief or shame or guilt, which just helps the
students really expand their vocabulary and put words to what they’re feeling rather than just always resorting
back to anger as their number one. We really aim to have each student who’s in case management complete one
journal at least. Most of them I can at least get onto the second one and like we said, we let the students kind
of guide which one they’re interested in, which one they think will benefit the most.

In addition to the KIDS series, we have another one we pull a few different
extra assignments from. They’re totally up to the student but we find that they kind of complement one another.
It’s aimed towards an older crowd, particularly a crowd that might be in the juvenile justice system. Most of
our kids don’t have that involvement but we do find that some of those different activities have been helpful
for the students to kind of go over in depth with our case manager.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Are there other evidence-based tools that you have in use right now or that you plan to use?

PATRICK: This is Rolanda. For the program, yes. Again, the evidence-based
curriculum that we utilize for the group-level component of our program, Too Good for Drugs and Too Good for Drugs
and Violence. They were both created by
the Mendez Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
How do those operate?

PATRICK: Each curriculum has
ten weeks of sessions. The topics include: conflict resolution, healthy relationships, goal setting, decision making,
identifying and managing emotions, bullying, peer violence, dating, drugs, media, and influence. Each curriculum
activity lasts about 55 minutes in general. Immediately following our curriculum lesson, we conduct positive development-type
activities with our youth that reflect team building and respect with a local partner, Capstone Climbing and Adventure.
That guides the young men through activities like low ropes course, working together, and making the right decisions.
We also include positive youth development activities as hip-hop workshops as well as inviting local law enforcement
officers in to talk to the youth about current events.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
So the facilitators are all black men and the population of youth, they’re all young men. I’m curious about
the philosophy behind that.

PATRICK: This is Rolanda.
In regards to your question, we believe that our participants will respond best by identifying with a person that
looks like them. So in regards to our facilitators, we do have three African-American male facilitators. While the
young men do work well with myself and Ms. Katie Dight, when it comes to personal topics and just sharing what it
means to be a young man, what it means to be a young man in America, how to conquer some of the challenges that males
face, it’s easier for them to build this relationship and have that dialogue with a male facilitator versus
a female facilitator.

DIGHT: This is Katie Dight.
In addition to the facilitators, we also have all of our mentors. It is a requirement that all the mentors are male.
They don’t have to be specifically men of color but we do, like Rolanda mentioned, find it most helpful when
the students can see in either the facilitators or the mentors a positive male role model.

POPE-SUSSMAN: How do young people respond to that?

PATRICK: This is Rolanda. They absolutely love it. In regards to our attendance,
we have about a 93 percent retention rate throughout all 15 weeks. I would say that our young men are actually enjoying
the program and they are actually suggesting that their friends request to participate in the upcoming semesters.

POPE-SUSSMAN: I’m wondering if you might have a story of a young man
who came into the program and the outcome for him when he came out of the program.

PATRICK:
This is Rolanda. Last year it was brought to our attention that a young man, he was a 7th grader at one of our middle
schools, he did not respect teachers, he did not respect the administration. He received about 15 disciplinary write-ups
last year. This year he’s in our STARS program at one of our middle schools. This young man shared about two
weeks ago that he did not like the police. He did not like police officers. It didn’t matter whether they were
male, if they were female, regardless of their race or ethnicity. We also have an activity called Pizza with Police
that we host at our four schools. This young man, he participated. He didn’t say anything but he was definitely
observing what was going on. Immediately following that session, he shared with myself that he was interested in
receiving a mentor and that he wanted the mentor to be a police officer. That just goes to show how our activities
are actually able to change the mindset of some of our participants.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
On a more macro scale, I’m wondering how you’re measuring outcomes across the program.

DIGHT: Sure, this is Katie. We have a couple different ways that we’ve
been measuring it. First of all, we do without group-level individuals, we do a pre- and post-test. The very first
day of the program they receive two different evaluations. One is focusing on student knowledge and that could be
about bullying behavior, that could be about substance abuse. Then the other one is student attitudes and that’s
just towards their general attitudes on violence in general. They take that on the first day of the program and then
they complete the same two surveys on the last day of the program. So they have a semester of learning between the
two. We contract with an evaluator from UNC Charlotte. He’ll help us determine if there’s significant differences
in between those two pre- and post-.

In addition
to that, we have a group of control students at each of our four schools, so that’s about 15 students, who have
been matched with the STARS participants in terms of age, race, and their different behaviors at school. Some of
them have actually then gone on to be referred for their program for the second semester. They are also given the
pre- and post- test at the start and end of the semester. We compare whether or not the intervention group has improved
in comparison to the control group. So that’s one set that we do.

Another
one is a school climate survey. That’s conducted in April. We did one last April, we’ll do one in 2016,
and we’ll do one more in 2017. We do that at our four target sites as well as two control schools. They have
schools that have been matched in terms of just general demographics, poverty levels in regards to free and reduced
lunch, the different ethnic makeup of the schools. We try to match them as closely as possible. They receive a school
climate survey that’s about 60 questions. We’ve added a few additional ones in terms of their relation
with their police departments in their neighborhood to gauge how students and staff are feeling on that. Then 10
percent of the school takes that. So it’s not just one grade, but rather all four grades in high school they’re
asked to take it or both of the grades in the middle school has to take it. That way we get a wide representation
about what school climate is in regards to “Is my school a safe place? Is my school clean? Do I feel welcomed?”
Then staff is asked to take a very similar school climate. Then we compare our target schools with our control schools
to see how school climate as a whole is being impacted.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Do you have some of those earlier results?

DIGHT:
We do. We have our first semester. We did see improvements, particularly within our intervention groups in terms
of their student attitude and student knowledge prior to the start of the program compared to the end of it. The
school climate, since it was a baseline, we don’t have any real data about how we’re doing in terms of
improving that. When we started, our control schools were actually doing well in terms of their school climate as
compared to our intervention schools. So there’s definitely room for improvement but we did see a lot of positive
feedback from the staff and students in terms of what areas they’d like to see improved upon.

POPE-SUSSMAN: What’s next?

DIGHT:
We are working on this second semester, we have three more … I’m sorry, this is Katie again. We have three
more semesters following this so the spring, then the next year will be fall 2016 and spring 2017. We’ll continue
to monitor school climate for the next two spring surveys. We’ll continue to work with three more groups of
students. Right now we’re just focused on the students that we have, both in our group-level intervention as
well as case management. We’ll start to think a little bit about our summer enrichment activities. Over the
next few weeks those ideas will really start to come together as we plan for the summer.

PATRICK: This is Rolanda. Also, building on our tutoring program at our middle
schools, increasing the number of mentors that we have, as well as the number of programs and participation that
our local law enforcement agencies provide.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Wonderful. Do you have anything else to add?

PATRICK:
This is Rolanda. I would like to add that it is a pleasure working with our four schools. We’ve had the opportunity
to reach over 120 students thus far. Katie and I are definitely looking forward to the upcoming semesters as well
as the summer. It’s a pleasure to work with the parents, the teachers, the administrators of course as we’re
building and encouraging our young men to be as successful as possible.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Well, thank you so much for taking the time out to speak with me today.

PATRICK:
It’s our pleasure.

DIGHT: Absolutely.

POPE-SUSSMAN: This has been Raphael Pope-Sussman of the Center for Court
Innovation. We’ve been speaking with Katie Dight and Rolanda Patrick, program managers at Cabarrus STARS, and
Sue Yates, Chief Financial Officer for the Cabarrus Health Alliance. For more information on the Center for Court
Innovation, visit www.courtinnovation.org.

Working With Unlikely Allies: A Conversation With Marc Levin Dec 02, 2015

At Reinvesting
in Justice, Marc Levin, policy
director of the Texas-based conservative group Right
on Crime, talks about the need to work
towards criminal justice reform with stakeholders from across the ideological spectrum, both in Texas and nationwide.

A Policing Approach That Improves Health and Wellness of Youth Nov 18, 2015

This podcast is part of a series highlighting innovative approaches to reducing violence and improving
health outcomes among at-risk minority youth at the nine demonstration sites of the Minority
Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. One of these demonstrations sites is Policing
Approach Through Health, Wellness and Youth (PATHWAY) in West Palm Beach, Fla., an
initiative led by the City of West Palm Beach that seeks to promote healthy adolescent development, discourage harmful
and violent behavior, and provide youth with opportunities for positive social involvement.

Reed Daniel, campus manager for the Youth Empowerment
Division of the City of West Palm Beach Department of Recreation & Strategic Innovations and Special Agent
James Lewis and Assistant Chief Sarah Mooney of the West Palm Beach Police Department joined this week’s podcast
to discuss the role of law enforcement in PATHWAY, which includes offering critical mentorship and role modeling
for program participants and creating meaningful diversion opportunities for low-level youth offenders.

The
following is a transcript

RAPHAEL POPE-SUSSMAN:
Hi. This is Raphael Pope-Sussman of the Center for Court Innovation. This podcast is part
of a series we are doing with people seeking to curb violence and improve access to public health for at-risk minority
youth, as part of the Minority Youth Violence Prevention initiative. The initiative is a partnership of the Office
of Minority Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Community Oriented Policing
Services at the U.S. Department of Justice that encourages collaboration among public health organizations, law enforcement
agencies, and community-based groups.

Our podcast series
highlights innovative approaches at the nine demonstration sites that have received funding under the program. Policing
Approach Through Health, Wellness, and Youth, or PATHWAY, is an initiative led by the city of West Palm Beach that
seeks to promote healthy adolescent development, discourage harmful and violent behavior, and provide youth with
opportunities for positive social involvement. Through the program, police officers serve as mentors and instructors,
and work alongside participants in community service projects.

In
October, I spoke with R. Reed Daniel, Campus Manager for the Youth Empowerment Division of the City of West Palm
Beach, Department of Recreation and Strategic Innovations, Special Agent James Lewis of the West Palm Beach Police
Department, and Assistant Chief Sarah Mooney, of the West Palm Beach Police Department. Our conversation focused
on the role of law enforcement in PATHWAY, which includes critical mentorship and role modeling for program participants,
and offering meaningful diversion to low level youth offenders.

Hi,
I’m Raphael Pope-Sussman with the Center for Court Innovation. Today we’re speaking with R. Reed Daniel,
Campus Manager, Youth Empowerment Division for the City of West Palm Beach, Department of Recreation and Strategic
Innovations, Agent Lewis of the West Palm Beach Police Department and Assistant Chief Sarah Mooney of the West Palm
Beach Police Department. Reed, Agent Lewis, and Assistant Chief Mooney, thank you for speaking with me today and
welcome.

ALL: Thank you.

POPE-SUSSMAN: First of all, can you describe the PATHWAY program?

REED DANIEL: My name is Reed Daniel. I’m the manager of the Youth Empowerment
Center here in West Palm Beach. The PATHWAY Program came about about a year ago from a grant that we were seeking
from the US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Minority Health and the Department of Justice COPS
office, through which we implemented the city’s Policing Approach Through Health, Wellness, and Youth–PATHWAY.

PATHWAY expanded the city’s current crime prevention based programs
and activities which include diversion and restorative justice efforts to integrate health and wellness education
and services.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Can you talk about what
that looks like specifically?

DANIEL: We’ve
formed a number of relationships with what we call key partners. On the health side we have the Board of Department
of Health, Palm Beach County, the Health Care District of Palm Beach County, Mental Health Association of Palm Beach
County, and on the crime prevention side, our key partner is the City of West Palm Beach Police Department. We integrate
all those resources together in an effort to combat crime, and specifically juvenile crime, which really targets
and focuses on juvenile crime involving black males.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
What kind of activities are involved?

DANIEL: The
program sends a lot of activities. All these programs are umbrellaed at the Youth Empowerment Center. We have programs
in restorative justice, we have programs in crime prevention, we have programs in health and wellness, we have nutrition
programs. All of these programs are joined together at the Youth Empowerment Center and offered to our teenagers,
our youth who attend here, free of charge.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
What is the role of law enforcement in these programs?

DANIEL:
The police department actually is the component that drives the crime prevention initiative. West Palm Beach Police
works closely with the Youth Empowerment Center and other key partners to find solutions that will divert our youth
away from the criminal justice system.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
The police in the program work with the youth in what context?

AGENT
LEWIS: Basically it would be the law enforcement part of it. We do have an officer that works at the Youth Empowerment
Center during the hours of the day and then also basically provides mentoring, give the kids an opportunity to have
someone that they can talk to, with a law enforcement background. Some of the other programs we also offer as Reed
mentioned earlier is the NAB–Neighborhood Accountability Board.

The
county itself has been experiencing an increase in juvenile that are entering the criminal justice system for misdemeanor
crimes. In efforts to reduce the number of juveniles going into the systems for crimes that are not felonies, we
created the Neighborhood Accountability Board and that gives our first time juvenile the opportunity to be diverted
from the juvenile justice system at the program where they can basically take responsibility for their actions or
the crime that they committed, but also it provides the community an opportunity to address the issue together. It
instills some community feelings to these kids so they understand the impact of crimes that they’ve committed.

We also have a great program that’s for gang prevention that’s
offered here at the Youth Empowerment Center and that gives kids– middle school and elementary kids–the opportunity
to learn and gang prevention before they get to into high school where they are kind of susceptible to be brought
into gangs. We also have our Operation Youth Violence, which addresses issue with offenders between the ages of 14
to 24 who committed a felony crimes within a certain area in our city. That program, when kids commit a crime, we
have a task force including members of our Youth Empowerment Center, the Urban League of Palm Beach County, and some
other partners that we have.

We give these kids an
opportunity to basically take ownership of what they did. It’s a voluntary program but when it’s time to go to court,
as long as they’ve successfully completed one of these programs offered here at the Youth Empowerment Center, we’ll
go in on their behalf and let the judge know that while they were awaiting trial they did some positive stuff, whether
it’s obtaining a GED, coming here for tutoring, or participating in one of the other programs we

POPE-SUSSMAN: Assistant Chief Mooney, do you have anything to add to that?

ASSISTANT CHIEF MOONEY: I would say, we’ve gone into the second year
of this grant. We have an opportunity to kind of expand what we did last year. Last year the officers definitely
had more presence at the Youth Empowerment Center, but this year we’re going to have the opportunity to have
some of the officers that come in typically present some of their own types of programs that they want to initiate.

We’re trying to encourage the start up of a
couple of different initiatives that haven’t been laid out yet, that if we give the officer some time and have
some autonomy to develop things that they are already good at, whether it’s a sports program, it might be some
sort of hobby that they have that they could teach to the kids who come out to the center.

Something that’s totally different, outside of the typical police interaction
with the youth. They let the kids see that the officers aren’t just officers. They are just like everybody else.
This year, that’s going to be our goal. To expand what we did last year instead of just having a presence and
just interacting, that we actually develop new programs that will be specific to officer-initiated type of events.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Do you have a sense of any specific programs that you have
in mind?

ASSISTANT CHIEF MOONEY: We were talking
about even having like maybe a basketball three-on-three competition where you have some officers come in, play against
the kids or play with the kids. They have a tennis court and we have a couple of officers that are tennis players.
We’re going to try and initiate something with that this year. We also are involved in doing kids-and-cops meetings
where basically some can sit down, sort of a chat session where you have a couple of officers come in and the kids
have the opportunity to ask any questions they want and have a one-on one or a group setting so that they have access
to the officers and get a feel for where we’re coming from and we get a feel for where they’re coming from
too.

POPE-SUSSMAN: What has been their response?

ASSISTANT CHIEF MOONEY: I’ll leave that to you.

DANIEL: It’s been phenomenal. We have officers who actually come here
and I want to say they become like a surrogate parent in a way. They really attach and bond to some of these kids.
Many of our kids who come to our center come from low-income, at-risk homes. Single parent homes, where the mom is
working most likely, in most cases, the dad’s away.

These
kids come here and we provide to them that community culture of safety, first of all, but we also, through these
officers, are able to provide mentoring and really those relationships that start to grow beyond the Youth Empowerment
Center and into the community. We’re excited about that. I’ve seen that happen and it’s a tremendous
way of impacting a child’s life when you see these officers and these kids engage in different activities and
conversations. I think that’s one of the greatest opportunities we provide here at the Youth Empowerment Program.

AGENT LEWIS: When Reed first approached us with the grant, he mentioned
that there was a health component and policing. Myself, Detective Mooney, and Sergeant Neely, we basically did not
understand where the health part and the police came into play, but after we sat down and we realized that the health
part includes mental health, we saw a true definition, a true connection between the police department and the Youth
Empowerment Center.

Because a lot of our offenders,
a lot of crimes that they commit are crimes that at the end of it you realize that there’s a mental aspect to
it, whether it’s the behavioral part or it’s some issues that are deep embedded in the youth that we’re
dealing with. Before, we brought out this kids saying, “We can get you a job. We can get you a GED,” but
then, we don’t realize there’s a lot more that they’re going through. Whether it’s broken homes,
just needing someone to talk to. Mental health folks that we have as partners, have really been instrumental in helping
these kids with some of the things that they need or that they have. So this grant has worked great for us. We’re
seeing reduction in crimes that are being committed by some of our youth because now they have an avenue, they someone
they can talk to. If they have some anger issues, they know they can call over at the Youth Empowerment Center or
the staff members and they can get to talk with some of our partners on the mental health side.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Do you have any plans to measure results, whether it’s
community survey …

DANIEL: Of course during the first
year of the grant, the Center for Court Innovation provided what they call a process evaluation. We’ve just
been in touch with our local criminal justice commission and they will probably do our outcome evaluation over the
three years. Document registrations, document assessments, pre-assessments, post assessments, document how many kids
come in the program, where they go. We’re going to track these kids up to six months after they even leave our
program to just see how it’s going and what the results are.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
On the police department side?

AGENT LEWIS: On the
police department side, the kids who went through our program we also keep track of them, especially those who went
through Operation Youth Violence–reduction, prevention, and intervention. Those kids that go through this program
who have an active court case, we document them or observe them throughout the process. After they complete our program,
we do a six months evaluation and we stay in contact with them and also the providers, the service providers, that
they reached out to.

For the NAB, we’ve got
to do a six months evaluation basically to make sure that they’re still using the principles of restorative
justice and then a one year assessment to see where they are in live to make sure they are still on track. Also,
one thing that we do give all our participants, they have all our contact information so they can during the course
of six months or a year they have any issues or any obstacles, we encourage them to give us a call so that we can
help them along the way.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Great. Thank
you so much for speaking with me today.

ALL: You’re
welcome.

POPE-SUSSMAN: This is Raphael Pope-Sussman
and I’ve been speaking with Reed Daniel, Campus Manager for the Youth Empowerment division of the City of West
Palm Beach, Department of Recreation and Strategic Innovations, Agent James Lewis of the West Palm Beach Police Department,
and Assistant Chief Sarah Mooney of the West Palm Beach Police Department. For more information about the Center
for Court Innovation visit www.courtinnovation.org.

“They’re Not Talking About Me”: Race, Cultural Responsivity, and Domestic Violence Nov 10, 2015

In this New Thinking podcast, Dr. Oliver Williams brings questions of
race, faith, and incarceration into a conversation on domestic violence. Drawing on his work with both victims and
perpetrators from African-American, Latina, and other immigrant and diasporic communities, Dr. Williams examines
the import of cultural responsivity in the justice system’s response to domestic violence.

This product was supported by Grant No. 2013-TA-AX-K042 awarded by the Office on
Violence Against Women, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, or recommendations expressed in this
podcast are those of the speaker(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Department of Justice, Office
on Violence Against Women.

The
following is a transcript.

AVNI
MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Hello, this is Avni Majithia-Sejpal at the Center for Court Innovation.
You’re listening to the New Thinking podcast. I’m here today with Dr. Oliver Williams. Dr. Williams has
been working in the field of domestic violence for over 30 years. He is a professor at the University of Minnesota
School of Social Work and the Executive Director of the Institute on Domestic Violence in the African-American Community.
In addition to authoring numerous research papers and a book on the subject, he was invited to the National Advisory
Council on Domestic Violence in 2000 and has provided technical assistance and trainings on the subject, both in
the US and internationally. Dr. Williams, welcome.

DR. OLIVER
WILLIAMS: Thank you for having me, Avni.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:You
have written extensively about the need to understand domestic violence through the lens of race. Can you explain
why race is significant?

WILLIAMS: When I started
working in the movements, you didn’t see a lot of men of color coming into batterers’ intervention programs.
You didn’t see much outreach to get them to come into the programs. When we were beginning to talk about domestic
violence, largely they were talking about mainstream populations, but also the way that we talked about solving the
problems. Early studies talked about the disproportionate rates of domestic violence in African-American communities.
Dr. Lettie Lockhart and Dr. Robert Hampton and Dr. Richard Gelles ended up redoing some of the studies and found
out the rates were still challenging with regard to the African-American community.

If
you go about doing the work without hearing the challenges that exist within different communities, you miss something.
I think that you also see a reluctance to participate or what I’ve heard people say over the years, “They’re
not talking about me. It’s not my voice in the discussion,” or, “That’s not the way that I experience
it.”

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: What are some of the
challenges that people from minority communities face when they go through the domestic violence court process?

WILLIAMS: That’s an interesting question. We did a
project for the Office on Violence Against Women that looked at that. We did focus groups with Latinas, that were
both national and immigrant-refugee. We also had African-American women and then we had African women. For the African-American
women, they felt that there was little empathy for their experience. They had some concerns with how the judge made
decisions. They felt like some more of the challenges, in terms of dealing with things, were put on their shoulders.
The thing that was interesting with Latinas was the fact that sometimes what the court would do, particularly if
their partner could go to the country of origin, if the judges could get them out of the courtroom, then they felt
like justice was served. The women tended to feel as though that gave him an upper-hand because he can sneak in the
country or he could go back home and then harm family members. There was a lot of discomfort associated with that.

The other thing too was the fact that they wanted to see justice served to the person
that had done the harm and they felt like there was a challenge in terms of making that happen. I think there’s
also issues with regard to language. Is somebody translating things accurately? Those are some things that courts
need to be informed about.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: This
project that you’re referring to is the cultural responsiveness project that you did in collaboration with the
Office of Violence Against Women and the Center for Court Innovation. Can you tell us a little bit about that project?

WILLIAMS: We went to the Latina shelter program and they
helped us to organize a group of Latinas to have a conversation with. The people who were the interviewers were fluent
in Spanish, and the women spoke in English and in Spanish. It was very powerful because the women were very emotional
about their experiences. The same thing with African women, were expressing the challenges that they were experiencing
in the court and how difficult it could be for them, the injustices that they experienced, same thing with the African-American
women. That’s where we started. Next, we ended up doing data analysis on the responses. Next, we ended up going
to judges who represented various cultural communities. Some were African-American, some were Asian, in particular
Korean, and the others were Latino, and had a chance to pick their brain in terms of the things that they saw and
what they thought they could do and that the court systems could do generally, in terms of improving those circumstances.

They reported on the fact that there were judges whose intentions were good, but were
uninformed, and so they also offered recommendations on what to do and how they could become more culturally responsive.
Then we put those things together. We asked each group to come up with stories about what they experienced and we
put those things into scripts and we had it acted out and then what we tried to do is to come up with alternative
responses. What could a judge do differently? What could they do in terms of thinking about the challenges of the
population? What could create a better outcome where justice is served, but at the same time where you don’t
subject the woman that comes to you to a situation where she has to deal with such injustice? We were able to pull
together the stories of the women, the judges’ recommendations, but also key informants from each one of the communities.
That will be on Vimeo.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: What
does it mean to be culturally competent?

WILLIAMS:
How I think about it is that you’re informed enough about the community to know what things you need to confront,
but also what things that you need to respond to. You have to hear the stories of the community that you’re
serving. If it’s LGBT communities that deal with different challenges around violence, if you’re dealing
with Asian or South Asian communities, to hear stories of Native American women who have challenges both in the Native
American court but also in mainstream courts in the United States. Each one has a set of challenges.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: You have worked with both victims and perpetrators.
How does it differ?

WILLIAMS: In working with
men, the voice of the victim is always in the back of my head. When I see issues with regard to victims, I just wonder
a few things. One is the trauma that she goes through, but also and I’ve heard this from women over the years,
is they really want to know how to heal. They want to figure out how they can move beyond these experiences to a
level of balance and peace.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
I want to talk now about the Safe Return Initiative. As I understand it, the initiative addresses the challenges
faced by African-American men returning to their families after incarceration with the aim of preventing domestic
violence and strengthening the family. Can you tell us a little bit about the need to work with men returning from
prison?

WILLIAMS: Between one-third to one-half
of the men going to prison had some experience with domestic violence in their life. We broadened it, not to just
focus on men that went to prison because of domestic violence, there were men that went to prison for a range of
issues and they come out. Some of the men, we know, who have been violent and abusive, won’t change, but we
know that some men can. The other portion of that was we weren’t clear that battered women’s organizations
knew the narratives of the women whose partners or former partners went to jail and what their challenges and what
their experiences were. Another area was really understanding her story and trying to figure out how do you end up
supporting her if he comes out, whether she wants to be with him or whether she doesn’t want to be with him?
What we tried to do is come up with a range of issues to take a look at. One, most prison programs didn’t really
have any focus on batterer’s intervention. They had what they call “victim impact statements.” Victim
impact statements were not a program to talk to them about changing their violent behavior.

Secondly,
we realized that even if you did have a prison program, it didn’t mean that people had a connection in the community
that they were returning to. For women who were in relationships with these men, they didn’t have a connection
to battered women’s programs, they didn’t have insight about whether or not they would even identify themselves
as a victim of abuse, but also exploring questions to challenge what it means to be in a violence-free relationship.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I’m also interested in the intersections
of domestic violence and religion. You have said that the black church is a crucial space through which domestic
violence interventions can happen. Can you elaborate on that for us?

WILLIAMS:
One of the things that needs to occur is that we need to have primary and secondary prevention in communities, but
not law enforcement as the only consideration. What we ended up doing was making connections with churches that did
programming around the issues of domestic violence. They can provide proper guidance to men about the way that they
should behave, but they also should be able to respond to women who have a crisis of faith as a consequence of their
victimization. We found churches that have a rape crisis line at the church, a shelter program that they’re
connected with. They’ll work with men who batter and then the men come back and start working with you. We’ve
also tried to have a conversation with imams and so Islam is another part of our effort to speak with faith communities.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: In your view, what are the most urgent
concerns of the field of domestic violence today and what do you think the next steps should be?

WILLIAMS: One thing, I think, is to understand from the perspective
of people who represent those communities. I think more research by people who come from the various communities
and then more discussion about that. I think that cultural diversity in different communities also are evolving and
so what will be useful for them in terms of the way that they see the world and engage in our community? The question
becomes, has our knowledge and the way that we look at serving them expanded? I think recognition that knowledge
isn’t static, that it’s evolving.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Thank you so much. That has been a very instructive conversation.

WILLIAMS:
I hope so.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I’m Avni Majithia-Sejpal
and I’ve been talking to Dr. Oliver Williams about the field of domestic violence and the need to address the
concerns of minority communities. To learn more about our various projects and those of Dr. Williams, you can visit
our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks so much for listening.

Red Hook Community Justice Center 15th Anniversary Nov 04, 2015

This podcast covers the celebration of the 15th anniversary of the Red Hook Community Justice Center, with highlights
including speeches from New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson,
and honoree Stuart Gold, of Cravath, Swain, and Moore.

The following is a transcript

RAPHAEL POPE-SUSSMAN: Hi. This is Raphael Pope-Sussman of the Center for
Court Innovation. Tonight we are here at the Brooklyn Museum, celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Red Hook Community
Justice Center. The Justice Center has been documented to reduce crime, increase public safety, and improve public
trust in justice. Judge Alex Calabrese, who has presided over the courtroom at Red Hook since the Justice Center
opened in 2000, said defendants who come to the Justice Center know this is a special place from the moment they
walk in the door.

JUDGE ALEX CALABRESE: Justice starts
at our front door. Our clerks and court officers treat everyone who comes through our doors and throughout the building
with respect. Our community feels welcome to come to the Justice Center, and they feel it’s their Justice Center
due to their efforts. They know they’re in a different place.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
New York 1 anchor Errol Louis, who emceed the event, said that for him, the work of the Justice Center means something
personal.

ERROL LOUIS: I live here in Brooklyn, and
one of the things that I’ve learned is the importance of neighborhood trust, and events like this are what I
think of as the making of the glue that holds our communities together. At the end of the day, neighborhood trust
is what makes us safe.

POPE-SUSSMAN: The event honored
Stu Gold, of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, for his long-time support of the Center for Court innovation and the
Red Hook Community Justice Center. Gold, who first got involved with the Center for Court Innovation through his
work with the Midtown Community Court, was an instrumental member of the planning team that launched the Red Hook
Community Justice Center. Gold spoke about the key role the Justice Center plays in the community in Red Hook.

STUART GOLD: I grew up in Brooklyn, and as many teenagers do, I got into
trouble from time to time. I remember I had an array of adults, my parents, my teachers, to help me figure out how
to rehabilitate myself and get on a better trajectory. Many teenagers and young adults, for a variety of reasons,
don’t have those support structures ready at hand. The Red Hook Community Justice Center now supplies that support
for a significant part of its community. For that, it deserves to be lauded, and I’m grateful that I’ve
had the opportunity to help.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Pauline
Nevins, a former client of the Justice Center, was also honored.

PAULINE
NEVINS: I struggled with addiction for more than a decade of my life. Throughout that time, I cycled in and out of
the system, appearing before countless judges in countless courtrooms, where I was just a number: a criminal charge,
a docket number, a body that had to be moved swiftly through the system so they could make room for the next one.

But in 2010, I was fortunate enough to end up at the Justice Center in Red
Hook. Coming to the Justice Center was a whole new experience. When I went before the judge I expected what I was
used to: a quick interaction, a bail or a short jail sentence. But instead, Judge Calabrese wanted to know why I
was there and if I wanted help.

POPE-SUSSMAN: New
York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman offered a call to arms.

CHIEF
JUDGE JONATHAN LIPPMAN: It is easy in a justice system as large as we have in New York, to just count the cases coming
through, one in, one out. But that’s not enough. Every single case we hear is a test of the system. A test of
our commitment to equal justice. It doesn’t matter who is standing before the judge–young or old, rich or poor,
black or white–justice is equal justice.

You see
this kind of justice in action when you visit the Red Hook Community Justice Center. Judge Alex Calabrese doesn’t
sit up on a bench at Red Hook, high above everybody else. He sits on the same level as everyone else in the courtroom.
He listens to the people who come before him. He explains the procedures and the protocols. Each person is treated
as an individual, each case given equal importance. This is the justice we aspire to, and this is the justice that
works.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Kings County District Attorney
Ken Thompson praised the Justice Center for building ties between the community in Red Hook and the justice system.
He also spoke about the need to bring the principles of the Justice Center to other neighborhoods in Brooklyn, particularly
Brownsville.

DA KENNETH THOMPSON: We need to make
sure that the people of Brownsville see that we’re invested in their safety. We must show them that we’re
there to keep them safe and that we’re determined to do justice in partnership with them. I’m determined
to make sure that we get all the great things that we’ve done in Red Hook, that we take it to the people of
Brownsville.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Nevins, who spoke last,
left the audience with some powerful words.

NEVINS:
The judge always tells me that I did all the work, and I did. But I would not be here today if I had never been given
the opportunities, the encouragement, and the support that I needed. That is what the Justice Center did for me.

POPE-SUSSMAN: This is Raphael Pope-Sussman for the Center for Court Innovation.
For more information about the Center for Court Innovation, visit www.courtinnovation.org.

Hospital-based Violence Intervention and a New Approach to Trauma Oct 22, 2015

This podcast is part of a series highlighting innovative approaches to reducing violence and improving health
outcomes among at-risk minority youth at the nine demonstration sites of the Minority
Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. One of these demonstrations sites is the Youth
ALIVE! anti-violence program in Oakland, Calif. Rafael Vasquez of Youth ALIVE!’s
hospital-based violence intervention program, Caught in the Crossfire, joins the Center in this podcast to discuss
Caught in the Crossfire and Youth ALIVE!’s novel approach to treating trauma.

The following
is a transcript

RAPHAEL POPE-SUSSMAN :
Hi, this is Raphael Pope-Sussman for the Center for Court Innovation. This podcast is part of a series we are doing
with people seeking to curb violence and improve access to public health for at-risk minority youth as part of the
Minority Youth Violence Prevention initiative. The initiative is a partnership of the Office of Minority Health at
the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services at the U.S.
Department of Justice that encourages collaboration among public health organizations, law enforcement agencies,
and community-based groups.

Our podcast series highlights
innovative approaches at the nine demonstration sites that have received funding under the program. Youth ALIVE!,
which is based in Oakland, is an anti-violence program that serves youth injured by violence or exposed to violence,
youth who have a close relationship with murder victims, and formerly incarcerated youth. In August, I spoke with
Rafael Vasquez, program coordinator at Youth ALIVE!’s “Caught in the Crossfire” hospital-based violence
intervention program, about “Caught in the Crossfire” and Youth ALIVE!’s new trauma screening tool:
The Screening Tool for Awareness and Relief of Trauma, also known as START. This interview was recorded at Youth
ALIVE! headquarters.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Hi, I’m Raphael
Pope-Sussman and today we’re speaking with Rafael Vasquez, program coordinator at “Caught in the Crossfire”
at the Youth ALIVE! program. Rafael, thank you for speaking with me.

RAFAEL
VASQUEZ: You’re welcome. Thank you.

POPE-SUSSMAN
: So … “Caught in the Crossfire.”

VASQUEZ:
“Caught in the Crossfire” is a hospital-based intervention program. It’s been around for over 20 years.
It was started at Highland Hospital. We service young men who have been victims of crime. We provide wraparound management
services and we meet them at the hospital, which we believe, it’s a crucial place to meet them at. We try to
build the trust and a relationship with them, so that we can follow them out once they are discharged from the hospital.

POPE-SUSSMAN : Can you talk about how that happens logistically?

VASQUEZ: If someone comes into the hospital, we have an injury prevention
coordinator at the hospital, she works for the hospital. She is the actually first interviewer of the client. She
tells them a little bit about the program. She lets them know what sort of services we provide. She will then make
a referral out to the program manager and then I actually go and meet with the client, in person, at the hospital.
From there on, we match them up with an interventions specialist.

POPE-SUSSMAN
: Can you tell me a little bit about the first visit?

VASQUEZ:
The first visit can go in a lot of different ways. Generally, what should happen is you go in, make introductions,
you introduce the program yourself, explain the program, you also let them know, depending on the severity of the
injury, what sort of things they can expect from the doctors, what questions they may have. You can sometimes answer
some of those questions for them, give them advice in terms of what they can do to feel better. Sometimes they’re
in a lot of pain and the interactions that they’re having are not necessarily positive at that time. They’re
scared, so you try to gain as much information as you can. Do they have legal problems, or that kind of thing? Are
they okay at home? Do they have children? Are the kids okay? Are there any safety issues where they’re going?

Often times, we’ve had to move families out of where they’re at
just for their own safety. That’s what tends to happen in the first visit. That’s what you want to do.
The idea is that you want to make sure they’re not going to retaliate, go after somebody. Make sure that they’re
safe once they exit the hospital and someone isn’t going to come after them or their family members.

POPE-SUSSMAN : You’re coming in at an incredibly sensitive time.

VASQUEZ: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

POPE-SUSSMAN
: How do you build trust?

VASQUEZ: It depends a lot
on the individual. You have to be genuine and actually talk about things, so that they get a sense for you and they
know that you understand. You don’t want to necessarily self-divulge personal things, but the idea is that most
of us have overcome violence in our own lives. We have experienced, whether it’s a family loss, or a friend.
You talk on that level with them. You also show them that their concern goes beyond, “Hey, you’re going
to be okay. We’re going to ship you out and that’ll be it. We’re going to track you. We’re going
to be with you. We’re going to be there to support you. Anything you may need, give us a call. We may not be
able to do it, but we’ll never lie to you. We’ll tell you what we can and can’t do.” We try to
meet them where they’re at.

A lot of times,
it may not be the first time you get there. By the time they have a feel for you … By the time their visit is over,
they have a feel for you that you’re actually in their corner. That’s what you want to try to establish
with them.

POPE-SUSSMAN : What is the rule of law
enforcement?

VASQUEZ: We let them know if … for
example, you’re my client and you have a warrant. You’re on probation, so we let them know, “We’ll
support you. Is there anyone we can contact? Do you have a PO? That kind of thing.” We also let them know that
any time that there’s law enforcement contact, you’re always going to know first. It’s something that
you’re going to request for us to do. We’re never going to go behind your back, do something, and talk
to law enforcement without your knowledge. Everything is confidential in that, for the most part, any conversation
that happens with law enforcement is on their behalf and for their benefit.

POPE-SUSSMAN
: Is there apprehension sometimes when you are coming in about whether you’re representing more of an institutional
angle?

VASQUEZ: Always. That’s the thing that
we always try to address from the beginning. “We’re actually here for you. We’re in your corner and
we’re going to help you navigate through all these different systems.” We like to make sure that they understand
that even though we are at the hospital, we’re not the hospital. Sometimes, unfortunately, they have negative
interactions with hospital staff, so we want to separate that. “Hey, we’re going to try to broker a better
relationship between you and the nurse, between you and the doctors, whatever is going on, and we’re working
for you.” The idea is that we’re not going to place judgement on the client because we don’t actually
know what the full story is.

There are often times
where you have medical staff who do place judgments, or they have their own ideas about why a certain person is in
there, whether they way they speak, or the way they look, whatever the case may be. We try to advocate on their end
that there could’ve been a number of historical things that led up to that shooting. That doesn’t necessarily,
or shouldn’t necessarily make a difference on what kind of treatment they receive at the hospital.

POPE-SUSSMAN : Have you seen changes with your partners in terms of how
they do treat the people who are coming in?

VASQUEZ:
Yeah, there are some wonderful staff people at Highland. Over the years, I have seen they’ve grown more empathetic,
I would say, towards young people and there’s still a lot of hold-outs that are like, “Something’s wrong
with the parenting, these kids didn’t get enough parenting, or their behavior,” or whatever the case may be
that they will point the finger or the blame. I’m not saying that all youth are completely innocent from why
they’re there, but we’re there to provide medical care for them. The word “care” needs to be
in there. It’s not about placing judgement, or making someone feel like, “You’re in here because it’s
your fault. You need to shape up, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and get over it.”

POPE-SUSSMAN : Can you talk me through a case that you felt was a successful
outcome?

VASQUEZ: Success can have many faces. Success
can be simply not retaliating and not putting another body in the hospital or the morgue. It can also mean that the
client, himself or herself, continues to move on and have a positive life, they have a family going, get jobs, go
to college, or whatever their journey is. That’s the ideal. Many times, depending on how severe the injury is,
you can have a kid who ends up in a wheelchair. Getting him through not giving up on his own life, moving through,
functioning somehow in society, and that sort of thing can also be a success. That’s why we say, “We meet
them where they’re at,” because you don’t actually know where they’re going to end up at, depending
on how severe the injury is.

If they’re already
bringing a lot of historical factors that affect them, you want to see if you can get them the help, one–if you
do get them around a whole stigma of getting mental health services, they actually sign up to mental health services,
you move them past that, and they get something from the mental health, that’s also a type of success. Success
can vary, depending on what you’re looking for.

POPE-SUSSMAN
: If you can, tell me a recent story that sticks in your mind.

VASQUEZ:
Let’s see. One of the recent stories is two sisters that were shot together, in front of their home, trying to stop
a fight. They apparently got into a fight over the dogs with the neighbors. The neighbors called somebody up and
said, “I have a problem with my neighbor. Come over here.” Things escalated, they ended up shot. They have
to go back into their neighborhood, into that same house. Luckily, we partnered with another agency that was able
to get them safety relocation and got them out of the immediate area for a few days. Part of their other program
is to come in and make peace between different people having different kinds of issues and we were able to calm things
down through that.

Now, we’re still working
with both of the sisters. They’re going to be moving out and being relocated. They have kids in their home,
so we, for the most part, stopped the violence. We’re ensuring that it doesn’t keep going. The idea is
that once they exit the immediate area where they’re at, that danger will be gone for both sides. That’s
one that sticks out in my mind.

POPE-SUSSMAN : What
is the follow-up there?

VASQUEZ: The follow-up would
be making sure they’re all right because they’re still freshly out of the hospital. The danger is that
they get re-injured, they’re back in the hospital, now the injury is worse, or they can be killed, depending
how serious it gets. The follow-up is that once you get them out of there, now you’ve focused them on getting
the medical attention, then getting mental health, if the kids … there’s a total of four kids in the home,
little kids. If they need assistance, getting them the assistance that they need, and then moving them past as a
unit because there’s two families that are being affected, then seeing where they end up in support. It could
be getting them jobs wherever they’re going to move to, making sure that they’re okay, and they have some
support group. Whether it’s another agency, family members, churches, whatever it is that we need to hook them
up with once they are wherever area they end up at.

That’s
the follow-up and then we just track them to see what kind of things come up as they go.

POPE-SUSSMAN : What is the role that this new trauma screening tool is playing?

VASQUEZ: The START program … The cool thing about the START program for
the kids, the really nice thing, is that they actually get techniques that really help them deal with the stress
from day to day. The questions that are already there help them to open up, to talk about it, so they don’t
feel like when they’re coming in, “Oh, somebody’s going to lay me down on the couch and they’re
going to want me to talk about my feelings.” Most of the young men we deal with don’t react well to that.
The major role that it’s playing is that it’s opening the kids up and prepping them for actually meeting
one-on-one with their therapists. Knowing that the therapy is … The way that we do it here is make sure that it’s
about your current injury and not about all your historic … They can do that, too. Once they get a feel for the
therapists and the trust is there, they tend to open up even more. That’s the main impact that I’ve had.

POPE-SUSSMAN : Wonderful.

VASQUEZ:
No, you got me before coffee. I hope I did all right.

POPE-SUSSMAN
: Fantastic. This is Raphael Pope-Sussman, speaking with Raphael Vasquez, program coordinator at Youth ALIVE. For
more information on the Center for Court Innovation, visit www.courtinnovation.org.

Coming Home to Harlem: Understanding the Impact of a Reentry Court Oct 02, 2015

Lama Hassoun Ayoub, researcher and co-author of Coming Home to Harlem, discusses the impact of the Harlem
Parole Reentry Court on the lives of parolees returning to Harlem after incarceration.

The
following is a transcript

AVNI MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Hi. I’m Avni Majithia-Sejpal, Senior Writer at the Center for Court Innovation. In today’s New Thinking
podcast we’re talking about reentry courts, specifically, the Harlem Parole Reentry Court in New York City operated
by the Harlem Community Justice Center. Researchers from the Center for Court Innovation recently completed
a comprehensive study that explores the reentry court’s impact on the lives of its participants, comparing their
experiences and outcomes to those of individuals on traditional parole. Their report, titled “Coming Home to
Harlem,” has yielded some interesting results and can be accessed at courtinnovation.org. Here with me today
is one of the report’s authors, Lama Hassoun Ayoub, Senior Research Associate with the Center. Welcome, Lama.

LAMA HASSOUN AYOUB: It’s great to be here.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: My first question is what is a reentry court and what does it
do?

HASSOUN AYOUB: Reentry courts are specialized
courts that work to reduce the recidivism of ex-offenders and improve public safety. They work with people coming
home, usually from prison, to help them reintegrate into society. They’re considered to be a problem-solving
court and they’re really built off the drug court model that we know is successful.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: For the record, what recidivism entail?

HASSOUN AYOUB: Recidivism is the rate at which people who have returned
home from prison after incarceration re-offend. We measure recidivism by looking at a variety of different factors.
We look at rearrest, reconviction, and what we call revocations. Revocations are returns to prisons, usually related
to violating parole. Of the people who are released nationally, we know that about two-thirds of them will be rearrested
within five years of their release. Over half of them will be returned to prison on a new conviction or a violation
within five years of their release.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
I see. When people return home from prison, what kinds of challenges do they face as they attempt to transition back
into their communities?

HASSOUN AYOUB: There are
a lot of challenges associated with reentry. One of the biggest ones is employment. It’s very hard to find a
job after you come home from prison, especially with a record, a criminal record. Another challenges is housing.
People have trouble finding stable housing, and research shows that housing is actually really important to be successful
in your reentry. There are also many other challenges such as substance use, getting appropriate services and treatment,
and reintegrating with families and children.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Can you talk a little bit about the Harlem Parole Reentry Court. How does it work?

HASSOUN
AYOUB: The Harlem Parole Reentry Court works specifically with parolees. Those are people who are coming home from
prison to be supervised in the community by parole officers. For a typical parolee, they interact with the staff
from the reentry court even before their release. They receive pre-release services that often involve risk and needs
assessment and some planning. Sometimes that risk and needs assessment occurs once they’re released. The first thing
that really happens with them is that they report to the reentry court, they see their parole officer, they see a
dedicated case manager, and they also meet the reentry court judge for the first time.

That’s the real center of the reentry court that makes it very different
from parole, the fact that they have to report regularly to a judge and have judicial oversight during the time that
they’re there. The reentry court team works closely together; the judge, the parole officer, the case manager,
and other staff to coordinate support services for the client. They also use a schedule of rewards or sanctions,
so that means that people get sanctioned based on their behavior, and they also get rewards based on positive behavior.
Those are really the elements that are central to the operations of the reentry court.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Who are the participants that go through this court and what
kinds of offenses are we talking about here?

HASSOUN
AYOUB: The reentry court works with clients who have felony offenses, for the most part. About half of them were
in prison for violent offense and another half were in prison for drug offenses. There are also small percentages
of property offenses. Most of the reentry court participants have been in prison for quite some time. They were in
state prison, which means they’ve served at least one year. For many of them, it been many, many years since
they were home in Harlem. The reentry court does exclude a few people. They exclude sex offenders, arsonists, and
people with diagnosed Axis I mental health issues. Just so you know, this population is predominantly male, it’s
only about two or three percent female, and it’s mostly black or Hispanic. Around 97 percent of the population
identifies as either black or Hispanic, or both.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Let’s turn our attention to the study that you recently completed: “Coming Home to Harlem.”How do
you go about your research?

HASSOUN AYOUB: The study
had four major components. The first component was what we call a randomized control trial. That basically involves
randomly assigning parolees to either Harlem Reentry Court or traditional parole. The second component was looking
at the official records of those randomly assigned parolees. The third component was in-depth interviews with a subset
of the parolees that were randomly assigned. The fourth component was interviews with the reentry court judges. We
were actually able to interview six reentry court judges who served on the court over the last ten years.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Based on your research, what kind of impact does the Harlem
Parole Reentry Court have on recidivism rates? Can you break down the numbers for us.

HASSOUN AYOUB: Sure. When we looked at recidivism we looked at rearrest, reconviction,
and revocation. By revocation, I mean, returns to prison that are associated with violations of parole, specifically,
not necessarily new arrest. With rearrest we really didn’t see a big difference. About half of the population
of the reentry court and half of the parolees are regular parole were rearrested within 18 months of their release.
We believe that we didn’t see a big difference because this population has a high exposure to arrest. They live
in Harlem and they’re a minority community.

However,
when we looked at reconviction and revocation we did see significant differences. Reentry court parolees were significantly
less likely than the control group to be reconvicted within 18 months and we saw a 22 percent reduction in reconviction.
When we looked specifically at felony reconviction, we saw a 60 percent reduction in felonies. We also looked at
revocations. It’s important to know that the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision has been working
to reduce revocations, generally, so even the parolees on regular parole had lower revocations than they would’ve
had historically. But then we also saw a statistically significant difference, in fact, there was a 45 percent reduction
in revocations when we compared the reentry court group to the traditional parole group.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: What about the impact on other aspects of the parolees lives?

HASSOUN AYOUB: By doing the in-depth interviews we were able to explore
the other aspects of their lives because it’s hard to get official data on things like education or family relationships.
Our interviews really provided us with information we wouldn’t have gotten elsewhere. We saw significant differences
when we looked at employment. The reentry court parolees were more likely to report being in school or having a job
at one year after their release. In fact, 75 percent of them said they were in school or had a job compared to only
45 percent of the parolees on regular parole. They also had higher quality jobs. By that, I mean, jobs that give
you paid days off or provide you with health insurance. They also worked more hours per week than the parolees on
regular parole and they also worked more months in the past year. Because they worked more hours they also had a
slightly higher income than the parolees on regular parole.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Were there any other differences that you found between the experiences of participants of the reentry program and
those that had a more traditional experience of parole?

HASSOUN
AYOUB: We saw some big differences when it came to their supervision experiences. We asked people in interviews about
how many times they saw their parole officer, but we also asked them about their perceptions of the criminal justice
system, an area that we call procedural justice. In that, we saw statistically significant differences. The reentry
court parolees had much more positive perceptions of the criminal justice system. They also had more positive attitudes
about the judge that they last interacted with. They also even had better attitudes toward their parole officer.
Those were statistically significant differences that we think may also be connected recidivism. I also want to add
that the reentry court parolees were also more likely to receive a reward during their parole and less likely to
receive a sanction, so only 30 percent of them said they had received any kind of sanction or consequence to their
bad behavior compared to nearly 70 percent of the regular parolees.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
By reward, you mean?

HASSOUN AYOUB: Reward could
be something as simple as praise from your parole officer, like getting a pat on the back, but could also mean things
like gift cards or actual gifts.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
To conclude, what are some of the challenges that the court faces today, and what are the next steps for the Harlem
Parole Reentry Court?

HASSOUN AYOUB: The evaluation
showed that reentry court model, as implemented in Harlem, is successful. They were successfully able to reduce recidivism
and have an impact of the lives of parolees. Many of their challenges today are associated with things like sustainability
and expanding the court, making sure that the lessons we’ve learned from this evaluation and from the work they’ve
done can be used in other areas, and that they can continue to sustain this work and help parolees coming home to
Harlem.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Lama, thanks for sitting
down with me today.

HASSOUN AYOUB: Thank you, I appreciate
it. It’s really important for us to share the findings of this evaluation.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
I’m Avni Majithia-Sejpal, and I’ve been talking to Lama Hassoun Ayoub about the Center for Court Innovation’s
report “Coming Home to Harlem,” which examines the impact of the Harlem Parole Reentry Court on the lives
of participants who are returning home from prison. To read and download the report, go to research
on courtinnovation.org. Thanks for joining us today.

‘An Obligation To Solve Problems in the Community’: A Conversation With Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm Sep 24, 2015

John Chisholm, district attorney of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, joins the New Thinking podcast
to discuss community prosecution, diversion, and his
work to reduce mass incarceration and racial inequities in the justice system.

A Hospital-based Approach to Stopping Youth Violence Aug 25, 2015

In this podcast, Anne Marks, executive director of the Youth
ALIVE! hospital-based anti-violence program in Oakland, discusses the history and mission of Youth ALIVE!,
its partnerships with local public health and law enforcement agencies, and how funding under the Minority Youth
Violence Prevention Initiative is increasing the organization’s capacity to serve high-risk minority youth.

The
following is a transcript

RAPHAEL POPE-SUSSMAN:
Hi, this is Raphael Pope-Sussman with the Center for Court Innovation. Today we’re speaking with Anne Marks,
executive director of Youth ALIVE!, and training director for the National Network of Hospital-based Violence Intervention
Programs. Anne, thank you for speaking with us today, and welcome.

ANNE MARKS:
Thanks.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Tell me a bit about Youth Alive.

MARKS: Youth ALIVE! is an almost 25-year-old violence prevention intervention
and youth leadership organization. We are a home-grown organization. We began with a group of students 25 years ago
in East Oakland who were dealing with violence in and around their school, and in their community who wanted to do
something about it, and they developed a series of workshops, which they peer lead to this day, to talk to young
people about gang, gun, family, and dating violence and what people can do to make themselves safer and to make choices
that are healthier.

Starting with those young people is how we began. We incorporated it to support
their vision and their work. They also do a number of community engagement and organizing and advocacy activities,
and from there, we actually had a staff person working in that program, who founded our Caught in the Crossfire program.

Sherman Spears was, as a young man, a victim of violence. He was a gunshot victim and found that that moment
was pivotal in his life, and he wanted to make sure that he was there for people who dealt with that in the future.
Whereas his options at the time were to retaliate or to just die, he wanted to find another way out, and so he found
a way to start working in violence prevention, so he started the Caught in the Crossfire program to help respond
immediately after a young person has experienced trauma, gunshot, stabbing, assault, to help them get on a different
path with a peer who can relate to them to support them.

That program then later incorporated
not just people who had been recently assaulted, but also people who had recently experienced the trauma of incarceration,
so we’ve been working with youth and young adults for some time through that program. That program has actually
been replicated in dozens of communities, and we support those programs through our National Network of Hospital-based
Violence Intervention Programs.

The last thing that we do at Youth ALIVE! is, we work not just
with young people who have been injured, but we work with the families and friends left behind when someone has been
killed by violence. We respond to every single homicide in the city of Oakland to provide the family and friends
with support. We do that work in the memory of Khadafy Washington, who was the murdered son of the founder of that
project, the Khadafy Washington project.

POPE-SUSSMAN: A lot of your
work really focuses on trauma and responding to trauma.

MARKS: Absolutely.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Can you tell me a bit about the Screening Tool for Awareness
and Relief of Trauma, and what the origin of that is?

MARKS: So START,
we call it the Screening Tool for Awareness and Relief of Trauma. It’s really just that. It’s a start for
addressing trauma. The metaphor that we think to look at this is that, trauma is something that hurts, and START
is not a cure. START is aspirin that helps relieve the pain of trauma. It doesn’t make it go away. It’s
not the same thing as engaging in long-term therapy or other support, but it’s something that can help people
feel better and get some relief. How it works is we do a brief screening with someone around different symptoms of
trauma, how it may actually be affecting their life. What their actual experiences of trauma are are actually irrelevant
to how we do this, so we don’t need to know the details of what happened to them to be able to say, “are
these things affecting your life?”

For example, issues with focusing, issues with sleep,
things that can really impact how you live. Then, based on how the respondent answers these questions, we give them
a series of one to three different tools that are brief. We can usually get through this interview in 10-25 minutes,
and give them tools they can walk away with, things they can take home. Maybe it’s a plan on how to sleep better,
maybe it’s a relaxation exercise they didn’t have before, so when they leave, they’ll have something
that will make their lives better.

The goal with START is two things. One, give people some relief,
but the other is that when they have this relief, either they will go home, and because they have some relief, they’ll
be able to kick in their own resilience and their own coping skills and strategies, and turn their life into a better
direction. And, the second thing is, maybe the experience of something actually being beneficial to them, that positive
experience will actually make them want to continue to get care and believe that change and improvement is possible
in their lives.

There have been a lot of tools out there that address trauma, and trauma is something
that, historically there have been three groups that have been treated for trauma: veterans of wars, refugees, and
survivors of domestic violence. What is in fact true right here, in America, and particularly here in Oakland, is
that the vast majority of people who are affected by violence are actually young men of color who are affected by
street violence. They are overwhelmingly the victims of street violence, community violence, and yet none of these
tools have ever been developed with their needs in mind, and none of them had ever been developed understanding that,
given the poor treatment they had had at the hands of a lot of institutions that are set up to “care for them,”
that the likelihood of someone attaching to long-term services was not necessarily something you could count on. So, how to give someone something when you, maybe this might be the only
time you interact with them that can actually help them, was really important to us.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
What’s the strategy for evaluating the efficacy of this tool?

MARKS:
This tool we use internally, and then we have a couple community partners that use it as well. Because there’s
a screen that is part of the tool, what we’re able to do is, 30-45 days after we’ve given them the tool,
we can do follow-up phone calls where we ask them again, questions about their symptoms that they’re having
and then also ask them questions about qualitatively, have they used any of the tools since then and has it helped
them in any way.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Are there plans to study that on a
larger level?

MARKS: Yes, we’re working right now with a couple
of clinics. One operated by Kaiser Permanente Vallejo and another operated by the county Alameda Health System in
East Oakland, as sites to do a randomized control trial to compare and show the efficacy of this, not just sort of
in people’s symptoms but potentially how it affects their other health concerns. We think that will be important
for the science for how this goes down. So we can really show the effectiveness of it. I will say, internally it’s
been very surprisingly dramatic just the responses that we’ve gotten from individuals who have received this.
We developed this over two years through a series of focus groups with young men who were gunshot victims, and then
a series of 69 structured interviews with young men who we didn’t know, who came in just from all parts of Oakland
to do an interview, and it was profound, the impact it had.

We feel very hopeful that this is
going to be something that we can publish and show the efficacy of so that other people can use it, but we have lots
of partners who are involved in the development of it who are going to use it right now.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
So, Minority Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. Can you talk about how that is allowing you to expand the work
that you do?

MARKS: Yeah, absolutely. Minority Youth Violence Prevention
was a way for us to do two things. One, pay for a community health advocate who can then do County Alameda Health
System interviews, so use this Screening Tool for Awareness and Relief of Trauma with young people that we work with,
and then it also helps pay for mental health services. For a long time, all of our services that we offered were
peer-based, and all of our intervention specialists were community members that didn’t have clinical training,
and we would always refer to mental health services when needed.

What we found was that people
didn’t stick. But when a mental health therapist was introduced as a counselor, or someone you might want to
talk to, and came along with them in the car, to someone’s house, to someone’s school, spent time with
them in a more casual setting, that people were able to feel more comfortable with starting to engage in mental health
services.

In any case, in the process of doing the County Alameda Health System interviews, some
people are going to be flagged, because they present as needing an assessment for PTSD, right? Trauma can affect
your life, and it can make your life unpleasant even without a full-blown PTSD diagnosis. We believe that people
deserve help no matter where they are, but some people will actually have severe symptoms that require an assessment
and it would be helpful to do, so that’s also why we brought mental health services on through this grant.

POPE-SUSSMAN: What are your hopes for START?

MARKS:
Our hopes for START is that it has a catalytic effect on how people in our community talk about trauma, and in the
process of doing that, changes how the institutions that are incorporating START into their settings treat these
young men. We have a culture that treats young men of color as if they are potential perpetrators when in fact, a
young man of color is much more likely to be a victim.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
What are the biggest challenges that you think Youth ALIVE! is facing right now?

MARKS:
I guess I would say the biggest challenges that Youth ALIVE! faces are the same challenges that the people we serve
face. Locally, that can mean the challenges of gentrification and equity. Largely, it means the challenges of the
systems that interact with our young people that are also the systems we have to interact with. We pride ourselves
on having worked a great deal with institutional partners that have not always best served the interests of our young
people, from probation to police to health care systems, to the school district, but these are large systems, and
helping these systems move along is always going to be a challenge.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Where do you see your relationship with law enforcement right now?

MARKS:
Youth ALIVE! has an excellent relationship for example, with the police department. Our work with homicide victims
we could not do without a strong partnership with the Oakland Police Department, who pass along next-of-kin notification
to us, so we can reach out to these families. It works out really well because for them, having us work with the
family actually de-escalates the tension that that family is dealing with, so that we’re able to make them more
calm and ready to deal with whatever the next steps are. They might have to deal with law enforcement, and it works
out for us, obviously, because we get access to these families and can give them help. And it wasn’t quick,
but we’re at a point now where the police never ask us for information about any of the incidents that led to
the violence that we’re dealing with, so that’s been a great thing for us. I think for them it’s been
a really excellent relationship.

POPE-SUSSMAN: And the DA?

MARKS: Well we work a lot with the DA because we work with Victims of Crime.
So we have a relationship with Victims of Crime that’s such that they will let us know, for example, if a family
of a homicide victim is coming in to the office, in case we haven’t gotten the notification yet that the family
has contacted them. We’re able to actually meet them there in the office. They’ll bring us in to actually
meet with the family with them to help explain what the VOC process is. With that, we’ve had an excellent relationship
with the DA.
Our board president for Youth ALIVE! is actually a deputy district attorney. I guess I would
say this, I think one of the things that’s unique about, for example, our board president, Mike Nieto, and our
relationship with police and with the district attorney’s office is that, given the work that we do, and given
how the cycle of violence works, it is not helpful to draw a line between victim and perpetrator. That distinction
makes a lot of sense in certain settings, like the criminal justice setting, but it makes no sense in the lives of
the people that we work with.

Helping people think about breaking cycles of violence, helping
people understand that someone may be in a system as a perpetrator but their actual history of trauma is much different
than that is something that we’ve had some real traction in doing here, and I think that before the concept,
the word of trauma-informed was out there, that was something that we’ve been working on here locally for some
time–is helping really look at violent incidents and not as, who did what, but as, how do we respond to this eruption
in way that helps all the parties not further hurt themselves or anyone else.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Wonderful. That’s it.

MARKS: Thanks!

POPE-SUSSMAN:
I am Raphael Pope-Sussman, of the Center for Court Innovation, and I’ve been speaking with Anne Marks, executive
director of Youth ALIVE! For more information on the Center for Court Innovation, visit www.courtinnovation.org.

Safer Tomorrows: The Grand Forks Defending Childhood Initiative Jul 23, 2015

In this podcast, Kari Kerr and Kristi Hall-Jiran talk about Safer Tomorrows, Grand
Forks, North Dakota’s Defending Childhood Initiative. Safer Tomorrows implemented universal violence prevention programming in public, private, and rural schools across
Grand Forks County, beginning with pre-kindergarten and extending to high school. The initative is part
of the Department of Justice’s Defending Childhood Demonstration Program, which funded eight sites
across the country to respond to the problem of children’s exposure to violence. The Center
for Court Innovation has produced a report on Safer Tomorrows, a series of reports on five other sites, and a report that condenses lessons learned across the sites.

Resources
mentioned in this podcast:

Safer
Tomorrows

The Community Violence
Intervention Center

Al’s
Pals

Friendships at Work

Lessons
from Literature

Digital
Citizenship

Coaching
Boys into Men

Lutheran Social Services Restorative Justice

Healthy Families

The
Fourth R

The following is a transcript

AVNI MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Hi. I’m Avni Majithia-Sejpal, senior writer at the
Center for Court Innovation. Welcome to another episode of our New Thinking Podcast. Today, we’re here to talk
about Safer Tomorrows. Safer Tomorrows was established in Grand Forks County, North Dakota, as part of the Department
of Justice-funded Defending Childhood Demonstration Project, which was designed to address children’s exposure
to violence through eight demonstration sites across the country.

We,
at the Center for Court Innovation, have just released individual process evaluation reports on six of these eight
sites, as well as a multi-site report that condenses the lessons learned through our research. Today, from Safer
Tomorrows, we are talking to: Kari Kerr, director of community innovations at the Community Violence Intervention
Center and leadership team member of the Safer Tomorrows project, amongst others; and Kristi Hall-Jiran, executive
director of the Community Violence Intervention Center. Kari and Kristi, welcome to our podcast.

KARI KERR: Thank you for having us.

KRISTI
HALL-JIRAN: Thanks. We’re glad to be here.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Let’s begin by talking a little bit about the project itself. Safer Tomorrows aimed to implement universal prevention
programming in Grand Forks County. My question is, what made you decide to focus on school-based prevention programming?

KERR: I think there are a couple of factors that went into our decision.
The main one was, our state had just actually passed anti-bullying laws requiring schools to develop some type of
a policy or a response, and so the timing was really good in terms of approaching the school system.

Then, we also know that, obviously, for our school system, we can have a
wide reach of youth that are attending school. Certainly, from kindergarten all the way up to 12th grade, and we
went beyond that and looked at some of the pre-schools in our community as well.

HALL-JIRAN:
I think just to add to that, too. We also had really spent some time developing a good, strong working relationship
with the schools in several years before the project. We really felt like we already had the leadership of the school
system on board, the superintendent served on our agency’s board of directors, and so really felt that the timing
was right. We already have the collaborative relationship and so the natural outcome was to focus on that way.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: When we talk about violence, what are some of the forms
of violence, specifically pertaining to children and teenagers, that need to be addressed urgently in your county?

KERR: When we first developed our Safer Tomorrows project, we, of course,
wanted to be very inclusive of all types of violence and really make sure that we were addressing anything that could
affect the child, and we also wanted to look at how to prevent violence and not just to intervene. We did want to
also look at the things that were most impacting our children. What we did before we even started developing our
programming was really to do a needs assessment as to what the most prevalent forms of violence were.

As we looked at existing statistics and then gathered additional data, what
we found was that the kinds of violence that we saw the most in our county was pertaining mostly to bullying in the
school system, or just anywhere, and then also children exposed to domestic violence at home. Though we had pure
statistics on dating violence, we heard from a lot of our stakeholders that they felt that that was a pretty primary
issue as well.

Though we tried to address all of
the issues, those are the areas that we’re really focusing on.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Can you talk to us a little bit about the different features or highlights of the project?

HALL-JIRAN: We’ve looked at it in three different areas. We designed
the program around intervention effort, so any child age 0 to 17 that is being impacted in some way by violence,
we wanted to make sure we were finding a way to intervene. Then, we also looked at prevention. How could we start
building the kind of programming in our community that would prevent this type of violence from happening so that
two generations from now we don’t even have to have these conversations anymore?

Then, the third piece, we really tried to build a very strong data and evaluation
component because we really wanted to base our decisions on available data and then ongoing evaluation so that we
could treat what we implemented as we found out if that was working or not, or as different types of violence change
and, hopefully, if we were seeing good results we could start making some of those adjustments.

As far as specific things that are under each of those areas, maybe I’ll
have Kari talk about that a little bit.

KERR: Sure.
We were able to implement a variety of different prevention programs, many of which are evidence-based. Some of those
included Al’s Pals, which is for our youngest population, that’s bullying prevention program. We also implemented
“The Fourth R” for health classes, Friendships at Work, which is a positive friendship curriculum.

A couple of different programs looking at some of the online issues that
can happen with students, that would be Digital Citizenship. Then, we also have one of our schools implement Lessons
from Literature. Then we did Coaching Boys into Men.

We
really had a variety of prevention programming starting from, again the early years all the way up to 12th grade.
As Kristi mentioned, we had a lot of intervention services offered as far as specialized therapy services and the
Lutheran Social Services of North Dakota has provided restorative justice programming and Healthy Families. We’ve
also been able to work with some of our families …

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Given that you’re targeting children and teenagers in such a wide age
range, from 0 through 17, how did you adapt your methods to different ages and specifically to the youngest children?

HALL-JIRAN: You’re right. That’s a very wide age range for, not
just prevention, but also for area of intervention as well. As Kari mentioned, for the youngest kid, we implemented
Al’s Pals. It’s a puppet program. It’s basically working with kids as they’re playing, so we
really try to adapt to what would be age-appropriate.

As
we got more into elementary school, the curriculum focuses more on respect and being kind to each other and all those
kinds of things. Then as we moved in the middle school age, we looked a little bit more at anti-bullying and respectful
friendship, and what would healthy friendship look like, how do we treat each other, those kinds of things. Then,
of course, as we got to the high school level, we looked more at dating violence and healthy relationships.

Really just trying to adapt the programming that we picked to really sit
with these age groups and what would be most primary for that group.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
How did you adapt evidence-based and promising practices and tools, especially given that your target audience spans
such a wide age range?

KERR: I think one of the ones
that we ended up having to adapt a little bit the most was our Friendships at Work curriculum, which is more of a
promising practice. It was initially designed for seventh grade classes. As we were implementing, we were receiving
feedback from some of the teachers, for a variety of reasons that they felt it would be better suited for fifth grade.

Again, the author of that curriculum went back in to adjust some of the
language that we used as we’re teaching it, some of the videos that she used, some of the examples that she
would give just to adjust that down to fifth grade level because, again, you’re going down three levels from
what it was initially designed for. We’re finding that it’s working really well in the fifth grade right
now.

HALL-JIRAN: One of the other adjustments that
we made was Lessons from Literature. That was something that we were originally going to do in our high school English
classes, but the curriculum was just designed in Canada and the literature that they used in Canada was not going
to work for our high schools here in Grand Forks. We basically did some research and decided to implement “The Fourth
R” in our health classes rather than Lessons from Literature.

It
was just some of the speed bumps along the way, just look at what else you can do instead and just always try to
adapt to your population.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: That’s
really interesting. What were some of the challenges you encountered as you went about implementing your various
programs?

KERR: I think anytime you are involved
in a whole county of people, which involves seven different school districts and thousands of kids, it’s really
hard to just make sure that it’s all being well-taught uniformly. We know that all the curriculum that we implemented
is only as good as it actually is at the level of the teacher implementing it or the staff person implementing it.
I think it’s always a challenge just to make sure that everybody is doing it and doing it in a consistent way.

HALL-JIRAN: I would just add to that, as Kari mentioned, just when you’ve
got seven different initiatives that are all trying to implement on a whole spectrum of ages 0 to 17, all the way
from intervention through prevention, you have got a lot of moving parts and I think you absolutely cannot over-communicate
at that point. Just trying to make sure everybody knew what each other was doing and that we were all keeping that
common vision in front of us was really a constant challenge.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
What are some of the lessons learned that you can pass on to other counties that might be interested in implementing
prevention programming that is similar to yours.

HALL-JIRAN:
I think one of the biggest lessons that we learned is to just plan for more time than you think you’re going
to need. I think, especially if it is involving federal funds, it’s really important to have adequate time to
have the review process that you need in place for different publications and things like that. That was one of the
things that sometimes the schools have found a little bit.

KERR:
I think in addition to that, just having good communication that’s ongoing with your collaborative partners
is important. We had lots of committees that we’ve set up to make sure that everyone stayed on top of what was
happening in our project. We did that through actual face-to-face meetings, as well as email and phone conversations,
and then being flexible as the project continues to make adaptations as they’re needed.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: What are some of the results that you have been witnessing.

HALL-JIRAN: We will be continuing to monitor this on an ongoing basis. Some
of the most exciting results that we’ve seen thus far is that, at the elementary level, we’ve seen 42 percent
fewer fourth and fifth grade students who are reporting being bullied. We’ve also had 46 percent fewer high
school students who have reported that during the past six months someone has forced them to do something sexual
that they did not want to do. We’ve had 28 percent fewer fourth through 12th grade students reporting that they
witnessed violence in their home.

We’re very
excited about the preliminary results and really are interested to see where this will go in the future.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Wonderful! Thanks so much for speaking to me. That was
really interesting.

KERR: Thank you so much. We really
appreciate it.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I’m Avni Majithia-Sejpal
from the Center of Court Innovation and I’ve been speaking to Kari Kerr and Kristi Hall-Jiran about the Grand
Forks, North Dakota Defending Childhood Initiative, Safer Tomorrows. Visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org
to download other podcasts and reports on Defending Childhood Demonstration project. Thanks so much for listening.

The Cuyahoga County Defending Childhood Initiative Jul 16, 2015

Jill Smialek and Dr. Jeff Kretschmar discuss the Cuyahoga
County Defending Childhood Initative, which seeks to address violence against children in one
of the country’s most violent areas – Cuyahoga County, Ohio. Their
unique approach includes the creation of an integrated, county-wide screening, assessment, and service system for children ages
0-18 who have experienced violence and trauma. The initative is part of the Department of Justice’s Defending Childhood Demonstration
Program, which funded eight sites across the country to respond to the
problem of children’s exposure to violence. The Center for Court Innovation has produced a report on the Cuyahoga County Defending Childhood Initative,
a series of reports on five other sites, and a report that condenses
lessons learned across the sites.

The
following is a transcript

AVNI MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Hi,
I’m Avni Majithia-SejpaL, senior writer at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome to another episode of our
New Thinking Podcast. Today, we’re here to talk about the Cuyahoga County Defending Childhood Initiative. Cuyahoga
County, in Ohio, which includes the Cleveland Metropolitan Area, was one of eight sites across the country to be
funded by the Department of Justice to address and raise awareness about children’s exposure to violence. We,
at the Center for Court Innovation, have just released our process evaluation on six of those sites, which includes
individual reports on each site and a report that condenses lessons learned across them. Today, from Cuyahoga County,
we’re talking to Jill Smialek, manager of the Family Justice Center and of the Witness Victim’s Service
Center, and to Dr. Jeff Kretschmar, research assistant professor at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences
at Case Western Reserve University, and senior research developer at the Gun Center for Violence Prevention, Research,
and Education. Jill and Jeff, welcome to our podcast.

DR. JEFF KRETSCHMAR:
Thanks, Avni.

JILL SMIALEK: Thank you.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
I want to start by talking about violence. I understand that the county, and Cleveland in particular, has one of
the highest violent crime rates in the country. What kinds of violence are kids exposed to?

KRETSCHMAR:
You’re right that the kids in Cuyahoga County witness and experience pretty high rates of violence. The kinds
of violence they’re experiencing or witnessing are similar to other kids in other communities. We have a lot
of kids saying that they are hit and attacked. They witness a lot of shootings. There’s lots of verbal abuse,
physical abuse. Our kids report high rates of bullying. I will say that of the kids who have been in our Defending
Childhood system and who have been assessed for violence exposure, 96% of those kids report at least one past year
victimization and 87% report as least two past year victimizations. Those numbers are really, really high.

SMIALEK: We also know that a lot of children who are coming through the Defending
Childhood system have witnessed domestic violence in their homes. From our most recent report, it looks like about
50% of our cases are kids who are dealing with domestic violence in the home.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
The Defending Childhood initiative created a streamlined county-wide screening assessment and service system up to
the age of eighteen who have exhibited symptoms of exposure to violence or trauma. Can you walk us through that process?

SMIALEK: When we were first starting the Defending Childhood initiative, we
wanted to make sure that we were implementing something that was not a new program, not a standalone program, but
rather something that was embedded within the very robust social service menu, or environment that we have here in
Cuyahoga County. We made the determination that we would work with our agencies and organizations that were already
serving a large proportion of kids who were exposed to violence but at the same time, not necessarily focusing on
that as the number one issue. We determined that we would work with our Children and Family Services, Juvenile Court,
and a number of our community based mental health service providers. We worked with Jeff and others to develop a
screening tool. We used that screening tool in those existing agencies. They screen very quickly for trauma symptoms
and trauma behaviors. Then, once they reach a specific threshold, they move on to a central intake and assessment
agency where they receive a full blown, roughly four-hour mental health assessment.

From there,
the mental health professional makes the determination as to any diagnoses that may apply and also makes a decision
as to an appropriate therapeutic intervention. From there, the child is referred into services.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Jeff, do you want to talk about the tool that you developed?

KRETSCHMAR:
Sure. Very early on in the process, when we were first awarded the grant, one of the things that we quickly discovered
that while there was some screening going on for violence exposure and trauma in our child-serving systems, it wasn’t
consistent, it wasn’t uniform, and a lot of times, when kids were screened, nothing happened as a result of
those scores or that information. They knew that kids were exposed but they didn’t really have much unique services
to put these kids into. What we thought was it would be really beneficial if our entire system used the same screening
tool and had some training on how to use it. Then, that tool, the results of the information from that tool, could
then be used to refer children to fuller assessments and then if necessary, into trauma-focused CBT or other trauma
informed services designed specifically for cases like this.

We first thought to use an existing
tool that would look at trauma and violence exposure but confine any that were really short and free and that would
span kids from zero to eighteen. We created our own. We came up with two screeners. One’s for the younger kids,
zero to seven. One is for the older kids, eight and older. We ask them or their caregiver about what kind of violence
they’ve seen and what trauma symptoms are also co-occurring at that time. If kids score a certain level in that
screener, they are referred in for a fuller assessment, to really get a handle on what they’re experiencing
and if that’s had some mental health consequences for them.

The worker who’s administering
the screening, regardless of the score on the screener, can also decide to refer that child for additional assessment
if they feel like they need it.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I understand that
research was integral to the initiative from the very beginning of the planning process. How did you and your colleagues
go about this research? What were some of your insights?

KRETSCHMAR:
The most important thing we learned in the beginning was that there was just a lack of uniform screening for childhood
exposure to violence and trauma. We put a lot of effort into the development of the screener. We took information
from existing screeners, took data that we had collected previously on thousands and thousands of kids who have been
exposed to violence and trauma, and identified the questions that we could ask that best predicted how kids would
answer a much longer assessment. We were able to create these very short screeners. There are about fifteen questions,
they take on average four, five minutes, and essentially what we’re finding out is that these screeners are
really good at predicting who really has seen a lot of violence, who is experiencing trauma associated with that
violence. I think we’re probably close, at this point, to twenty thousand kids who have been screened since
July of 2012.

A lot of our research effort has focused on understanding what the kids in our community
were seeing and experiencing, figuring out how best to measure that in a consistent and uniform way, and then understanding
after the screening what needs to happen. What does a full assessment need to look like? What are the best treatments
for these kids? These kids, as you said, we’re talking about zero to eighteen. What might work in terms of a
therapy for an eight year old might not be appropriate for a seventeen year old.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
That leads me to another question. Given that you address the needs of children and teenagers in such a wide age
range, zero through eighteen, how did you adapt your methods to different age groups, and specifically to the youngest
children?

SMIALEK: I think in addition to the screening methods that
we use, we made sure when we were selecting the various evidence-based treatment modalities, that we were encompassing
some or selecting some that were appropriate for younger children. One of those that we selected was PCIT, the Parent-Child
Interactive Therapy, which we know is especially effective for younger children, and we also are able to use trauma-focused
cognitive behavioral therapy for younger children.

We also recognize that this is a really tough
area. It’s hard to find an appropriate way to intervene with children who are so young, because of the age that
they’re in in development. Here in Cuyahoga County, in addition to Defending Childhood, we have a number of
social service agencies and initiatives at the large scale level that deal with child well-being. One of those is
an initiative that’s dedicated to early childhood mental health. We do have the ability to refer into one of
the early childhood mental health services, which are separate and apart from Defending Childhood but again, I think
it kind of illustrates how we have fit Defending Childhood into the existing system and the existing infrastructure
that we have in Cuyahoga County so that if we come across a child who we can’t fit into PCIT or TFCBT, we know
that we have this additional referral source that we can tap into.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
How did you adapt and make use of evidence-based and promising practice into–

SMIALEK:
we worked a lot with a number of community based partners who have far more expertise than I do and that anybody
in my office has. When we were planning for the Defending Childhood initiative, there was a sub-committee that was
put together to specifically look at various services or various trauma modalities that would be appropriate for
Defending Childhood. We tapped into their brain power, their experience, their expertise, in order to come up with
some options that really made sense. We reviewed a number of different programs. We looked at not just therapies,
but also some community based group interventions, like the Families and Schools Together program, to make sure that
we were making smart decisions that would lead to good outcomes for us.

KRETSCHMAR:
In terms of the tools, we did a lot of work in establishing the screeners. Then, in the assessment process, we’re
using validated assessments, using validated and previously used questionnaires like the Child Behavior Checklist,
the Trauma Symptom Checklist for Children, to make sure we’re really measuring what we need to measure to best
be able to then refer kids into the appropriate services for them.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
In addition to providing direct services, you also focused on creating an infrastructure that would span the entire
county. Can you talk a little bit about that?

SMIALEK: What we wanted
to do was ensure that whatever we started was first of all, taken to scale, because as you said earlier, we have
a lot of crime in Cuyahoga County, and particularly in the city of Cleveland. I think that we are very well aware
of the number of kids who are exposed to violence. We want to be able to make a difference for as many of those children
as possible. If we’re going to take it to scale given the resources that we have, we knew that we had to work
with what’s already in place. It just made sense, as we were thinking through how to make the biggest impact
with the amount of resources that we had, how exactly would we do that. The answer to that was to build on top of
what we already have so that we can sustain it long term and make the biggest difference possible.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
What are some of the lessons for other counties that want to make changes on the level of infrastructure?

SMIALEK: I think there are several that kind Cuyahoga County can bring to the
table. The first is just to make sure that you take your time and do a thoughtful and thorough planning process.
I think that starts with doing a full environmental scan of the groups that are already in the neighborhood or in
the county or in the community, both groups who are interested in this issue, and who have the desire to be at the
table, and bringing them in and making sure that they have a relevant and meaningful role to play while they’re
engaged with the process.

I also think probably one of the most important lessons that we learned
here locally is that planning takes time and over time, things change. You have to make a promise to one another
that you will be flexible because the plan you write today, you may need to implement it a little differently tomorrow
when you’re finally ready to implement.

KRETSCHMAR: Something
else that we knew but was confirmed is that while you can have service providers and county employees and research
folks at the table, we’re talking about a program for and about kids. You need to have the involvement of the
kids. You need to understand what they’re experiencing, what their comfort level is with what we’re planning.
If you don’t have it, we can have a really, really great plan but if it’s not something that kids and families
are comfortable with, then it’s not going to work. Having that level of consumer involvement in the planning
process is really important. Also important is from day one, planning for sustainability of whatever it is you want
to implement, so thinking out a year or two years or three years ahead and say, “How are we going to make this
sustainable?” Which goes back to an earlier question around why we also focused on system issues in our project
is because if we can change the system, that’s a sustainable change. It doesn’t necessarily cost anything
to change the system like we’ve started to change it, but it can be really lasting.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
That’s really interesting. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me.

KRETSCHMAR:
Sure.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I’m Avni Majithia-Sejpal, from the Center
for Court Innovation and I’ve been speaking to Jill Smialek and Dr. Jeff Kretschmar about The Cuyahoga County
Defending Childhood Initiative. To read our report on the initiative, as well as our multi-site report, you can visit
our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks very much for listening.

The Defending Childhood Demonstration Project Jun 26, 2015

In this podcast, Center for Court Innovation researchers Rachel
Swaner, Lama Ayoub, and Elise Jensen discuss their National Institute of Justice funded report on the United
States Department of Justice’s Defending Childhood Demonstration Program. The
program, which began in 2010, funded eight pilot sites across the country to address children’s exposure to
violence. The Center produced a series of reports on six of the eight sites, as well as a report that
condenses lessons learned across the sites.

Supervised Visitation: The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children’s Unique Approach Jun 12, 2015

Katheryn Lotsos and Stephen Forrester from the New York Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children discuss their organization’s approach to supervised
visitation. Supervised visitation is frequently required by courts in child welfare or domestic violence cases and
allows children to meet with non-custodial parents in a secure and controlled environment. The Society’s therapeutic
model includes safety planning, parent education classes, special training for the professionals supervising the
visits, and close collaboration with the courts.

Using Evidence-Based Assessment To Create Problem-Solving Interventions Apr 17, 2015

Center for Court Innovation researcher Sarah Picard-Fritsche discusses the risk-need-responsivity model for
working with offenders and the Center’s efforts to develop a screening tool for misdemeanor offenders.

The following is a transcript

Raphael:
Hi. I’m Raphael Pope-Sussman at the Center for Court Innovation and in today’s podcast, we’re looking
at risk-need assessment tools for offenders. Our guest is Sarah Fritsche, associate director of research here at
the Center. Sarah, thank you for speaking with me today and welcome.

SARAH
FRITSCHE: Thanks. Happy to be here.

RAPHAEL POPE-SUSSMAN: Wonderful. What
is risk-need?

FRITSCHE: Well, risk-need-responsivity theory is essentially
a theory of crime prevention which has three core components. The risk principle, which suggests that courts and
treatment programs that are interested in reducing the risk of offenders should focus on those individuals coming
through the system who are at the highest risk for re-offense–as opposed to what we sometimes see happening, which
is lower risk offenders, we focus our resources on them based on an idea that they deserve a second chance or that
the higher risk offender is a lost cause.

All of those ideas are quite intuitive
but actually research evidence shows us that when we focus our resources on treating and intervening with and supervising
the higher risk group, that is when we achieve risk reductions and when we are able to get people out of the revolving
door where they keep coming through the jails over and over again.

When
we focus our resources on lower risk offenders, ironically enough or perhaps it’s not really an irony, I don’t
know, but unfortunately when we do that, what happens is that we sometimes increase risk because we put folks who
have pro-social networks and not very serious drug problems who just were in the wrong place at the wrong time. We
put them into intensive treatment and that exposes them to anti-social networks, that takes them away from their
job, that takes them away from their family, and this increases their risk for future offense and future involvement
in the justice system.

POPE-SUSSMAN: What’s the origin of
this theory?

FRITSCHE: The theory originates with two Canadian psychologists
in the late ’80s, early ’90s, James Bonta and his partner’s name was Andrews. They were actually developing
an assessment tool which is now one of the longest-used assessment tools in the field, called the “Level of Services
Inventory.” Their theories of criminal conduct are essentially psychological. Individual theories of criminal conduct
were what undergirded the assessment tool that they created. They came up with a theory– the main and most tested
principle in the theory is the risk principle, but there’s also two other components. One is the need principle,
which tells us that we should try to understand the specific needs of each individual person coming through the justice
system in order to give them the correct targeted treatment. It’s that part that is intuitive.

But without the correct assessment tools, we can’t figure out what that is. The third
component is responsivity, which means that we should develop treatment programs or therapeutic intervention programs
that respond to people’s learning styles and some clinical needs that might interfere with their ability to
recover, such as mental illness or trauma.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Can you talk a little
bit about what you’re working on in the Center and what is the Center’s focus right now in terms of risk-need
assessment?

FRITSCHE: Sure. I started working in this area about five years
ago and my interest in it grew out of one of the first studies that I did here at the Center, which was a study of
Brooklyn’s program, which they call the Universal Screening for Drug Court, for people in the criminal court
who might have the need for drug treatment. They were trying to find as many people as they could and send them into
drug court as an alternative to maybe a short-term jail sentence that they might get. They had a screening system
that was effectively just based on present charge. I guess my response to the system was that it was well intentioned
but that based on the research that I did that they probably needed a little more information to identify the individuals
that were most appropriate for drug court programming. A little more clinical information, maybe a little more criminal
history information.

I started looking around to see if anybody else had had
that idea and that’s where I ran into risk-need-responsivity theory. One of our first projects here that’s
really about this theory is testing the LSI-R, which I just described to you as one of the earliest tools in …

POPE-SUSSMAN: Just for listeners who aren’t so savvy, what does LSI-R stand for?

FRITSCHE: Oh, it stands for the Level of Services Inventory and it’s just a 54-item
assessment tool that they developed to assess individual offenders along the areas that we know may be related to
re-offense. We wrote a proposal to the National Institute of Justice to do a randomized controlled trial where we
looked at whether … we’re looking, we’re actually now analyzing and writing up the data, at whether the
treatment plans and outcomes of a drug court participant that was assessed using the LSI-R would be any different
than those where they didn’t get a standardized or RNR-based assessment. That was our first project that began
in 2010 and is ongoing and will be reported on soon.

Then shortly following
that project, the world of evidence-based assessment, evidence-based practice just however coincidentally really
exploded and a lot of the federal government agencies that we worked with and other non-profit organizations that
work in the justice system became very interested in some of these concepts– whether we could use evidence-based
validated assessments to learn more about what keeps offenders caught in this revolving door of being incarcerated
and re-offending very quickly. And whether we could then use that information or evidence to develop better programs
that are therapeutic interventions. The Center has a long history of trying to create therapeutic or problem-solving
interventions for offenders. This foray into this field was very natural for us.

Since
the evidence-based assessment research in the drug court started, we have picked up several new projects that are
in this area. At the moment, we are looking at a different assessment tool that’s similar to the LSI-R called
the COMPAS. Don’t ask me what that stands for because nobody really knows, but it’s a similar tool and
we’re looking at that specifically in a sub-population of mentally ill offenders because there’s a lot
of questions in the field as to whether these validated assessments that have been historically used to predict outcomes
for general felony populations will work in some of the sub-populations that are important in the justice system,
mentally ill offenders being one of them.

Then the other project that’s
very important in this field that we’re doing right now began specifically from misdemeanor offenders, which
is another important and understudied subgroup. We have, nationally in our justice system, about 10 million individuals
per year that come through our criminal courts on misdemeanor charges. We have a very underdeveloped understanding
or comprehension of what the clinical and social service needs and criminal risk of these individuals is. That gap
in the research is what brought us to develop and seek funding for the Misdemeanor Assessment Project, which is a
two-part project. First, to develop an assessment tool that can accurately give us a profile of the risk and needs
of misdemeanor offenders rooted in risk-need-responsivity theory, and secondly to develop an intervention that we
hope will effectively reduce risk for re-arrest in this population. Because the misdemeanor population is also quite
tricky in terms of therapeutic intervention because they may have very high needs. They may have very serious drug
problems. They may have mental illness. They may be traumatized. They may have long rap sheets. Their current charge
will not allow you to put them in a two-year drug treatment program such as a drug court no matter how badly they
may need it. We have to maintain legal proportionality.

The second part of
the Misdemeanor Assessment Project is specifically to develop short-term interventions including evidence-based cognitive
behavioral treatments for this population that we hope will at least advance the ball for them somewhat in terms
of reducing the clinical and social structural factors that cause them to come back into the system so quickly.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Are there specific projects that we’re rolling out?

FRITSCHE:Yes.
The Misdemeanor Assessment Project is a specific project. We’re at a stage now where we have developed a short
screening tool that we feel is feasible for people in criminal courts here in New York City and nationally to try
to get an idea of what the profile of their low-level offender population is in terms of risk and needs. This short
screening tool is currently being used in Cook County, which is essentially Chicago, with a pilot test of a program
they have for misdemeanor offenders who have been diverted from jail from traditional processing, court processing,
and are given some level of treatment. Based on our screening tool, they’re going to make an assessment of whether
to give them a high level of treatment because they’re high risk, or something a little less if they’re
a moderate risk, or basically just refer them to services if they’re low risk. In Cook County, we’re using
this tool as a test of the risk principle, basically.

The same short assessment
tool is being rolled out in New York City, in Brooklyn and Manhattan criminal courts as a part of a larger research
study to re-validate whether the items and domains that we think are predicting re-arrest in this population in New
York City … we’re going to test them again. We tested them once last year and we’re going to test them
again. That’s one product that we have that we’re refining but we’re also giving to the field to use
and test and then at the same time, we’re developing a short-term intervention for misdemeanor offenders that
we’re going to pilot test in the community courts in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn over the next six months.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Great. Longer term on the horizon, are there any further plans?

FRITSCHE: Yes. I think it’s sometimes a little hard to see past the next six months
especially for those of us who do research because we’re oftentimes quite reticent to make claims. I think that
there’s definitely a demand on the ground for concrete tools, curriculums, assessment instruments that can help
people move the needle from their default response to a lot of criminal behavior and overloaded criminal dockets–which
is to put people into short-term stays and detention–to having more evidence-based responses to this kind of crime
that have the potential to reduce risk.

I think that it’s a very timely
field not just for practitioners but politically and especially socially here in the United States, that there’s
currently a public debate about whether incarceration is an effective response to crime, especially low-level crime.
I think that our focus on these issues is really going to become … I hope it will become a part of practical solutions
and a part of the national conversation on alternatives to incarceration.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
That’s very exciting. Well, thank you so much for talking to me today. I’m Raphael Pope-Sussman. I’ve
been speaking with Sarah Fritsche, associate director of research at the Center for Court Innovation about risk/need
assessment tools. To learn more about the Center for Court Innovation, please visit www.courtinnovation.org. Thank
you for listening.

FRITSCHE: Thanks.

Babies in the Child Welfare System to Get More Help in the Bronx, Along with Their Families Apr 03, 2015

Dr. Susan Chinitz, a psychologist with specialties in the areas of infant mental health and developmental disabilities
in infancy and early childhood, and a Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine,
discusses the new Strong Starts Court Initiative, which will enhance the capacity of Family Court to bring positive
changes to court-involved babies and their families. (April 2015)

The
following is a transcript

SARAH SCHWEIG:
Hi, I’m Sarah Schweig of the Center for Court Innovation and today I’m speaking with Dr. Susan Chinitz,
a psychologist with specialties in the areas of infant mental health and developmental disabilities in infancy and
early childhood. Professor of clinical pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of

Medicine
here in New York, she has extensive experience in child and infant mental health and recently she teamed up with
the Center for Court Innovation to craft what’s called the Bronx Infant Court, which aims to enhance the capacity
of Family Court to bring positive changes to court-involved babies and their families. Thanks for speaking with me
today and welcome.

SUSAN CHINITZ: Thank
you, Sarah. Thank you.

SCHWEIG: First off, you’re
a psychologist and an expert in infancy studies. What made you start thinking about the justice system and infants?
Can you talk a bit about what drove you to look at how court cases handle infants–cases involving infants or families
with infants.

CHINITZ: I direct a center up at
Einstein, as you said. It’s a therapy program for children under five years of age and many of the children
that we work with, a very large proportion of them are child welfare system involved. Children come to attention
at such a young age when something pretty significant or dramatic has happened to them and, certainly, that’s
the story of young children in the child welfare system. Our clinical population at Einstein has always had a very
robust number of children who have had allegations of neglect or abuse, who are in foster care, or otherwise under
court supervision. I’ve just had lots and lots of day-to-day experience with these children and their birth
parents and their foster parents.

Though the children struggle in their home
environments, which I guess by definition is true when they’re child welfare system involved, it also seemed
that the courts and the foster care agencies could be more protective of these children if they knew more about babies.
Sometimes in the absence of that knowledge, and totally inadvertently of course, the courts or the child welfare
system can inflict more harm on the children. So it seemed very important while we were working with the children
clinically, to also bring expertise to the systems that are making decisions about them every day.

SCHWEIG: Of course Family Court sees children of all ages. Could
you talk a little bit about what makes cases involving infants particularly different or difficult for courts to
handle?

CHINITZ: A lot of things–hard to know
even where to start but I’ll start with the fact that brain development is happening very, very rapidly during
these early stages of development, and we’ve learned through recent developmental neuroscience that children’s
brains’ development is very influenced by the environment and the context in which they live. In fact, in the field
we say that the brain recruits experience into its developing architecture. Children who have been removed from their
parents lose the biggest protection that children have; that bond with a committed and available caregiver. And we
know that that loss of a primary caregiver brings with it all kinds of risks to brain development.

It’s really out of nurture and security and engagement of a committed caregiver that
we see the brain develops. These children are struggling with attachment disruptions. Sometimes they’re struggling
with attachment disorders. If the interaction has been problematic, then they’re subject to exposure to violence
very often, instability in their care-giving as they move from caregiver to caregiver. There are just many, many
things that go on in the life of a young child during the stage of development of critical capacities; mediated by
brain development. It’s also a very important time for the consolidation of a secure attachment, so the whole
process of removing babies and moving them around in care is very detrimental to their development.

SCHWEIG: Maybe you can describe the traditional options available
for the court and dealing with cases involving infants and then how this new project is aiming to fill the gaps.

CHINITZ: Very interestingly, despite the fact that most
children become known to the courts because of abuse or neglect, or exposure to violence, there’s often very
little recommendation for relational parent-infant repair work. The typical interventions available through the courts
have been parenting classes, which means the parents attend a series of lectures about child development. But we’re
not identifying what went wrong in this particular dyad. Was it maternal depression? Was the child just so difficult
to manage that a parent just didn’t have enough support?

We have to really
understand what was the cause of the need to intervene with child welfare system intervention and then try to remediate
that, or even if we can’t remediate all of it, help the parent develop more safe and nurturing parenting skills
and help them learn to be with each other in ways that are healing to the child. We remove children but we don’t
do the critical work to repair what exactly went wrong. We’re trying to do that. We’re trying to evaluate
babies and parents and their relationship through this new project, so that the interventions that are court-mandated
will address the particular problems.

Not every family becomes child welfare
involved for the same reason, yet we’ve had one intervention of parenting classes. We want to tailor the interventions
to much better meet the needs of the babies and the parents. We have to help monitor these babies; there’s a
very high level of developmental delay and disability in children known to the foster care system and the courts
haven’t always known how to perform developmental surveillance, watching children’s development. What systems
are available to remediate that. You have to bring all kinds of expertise to the court in order for the court to
be a therapeutic agent that we think it can be through its authority and its involvement with the kids and families.

SCHWEIG: Wonderful. I hear you saying that we’re moving
towards looking at the individual relationships between the infant and the parent, instead of just a catch-all approach.

CHINITZ: Right, exactly. Even babies have their own parenting
load. There are some easy babies and there are some very, very hard babies. We have to help identify what the baby
brings into the interaction in addition to what the parent does.

SCHWEIG:
Right. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the mechanism that’s being introduced here to Family Court and
how that’s going to work.

CHINITZ: The referrals
are going to, at least at the beginning until we are really up and running and see how this all works, the referrals
are going to come just through the particular judge who’s been selected through her usual intake process. As
she picks up new cases, we will look for the babies under three. In this project we’re going to target children
under three. We’ve been asked by our various stakeholders to work with babies who are in foster care but also
babies who have not been removed from their parents but are under court supervision due to concerns. We will be looking
for children under three whether or not they’re still home with their parents.

Then,
we’re going to have an Infant Court team coordinator. A full-time infant practitioner who’s going to work
in the Family Court in partnership with the judge. So there will then be already in-house expertise full-time on
infant development. This clinician or practitioner will help with the assessments of the babies and the parents,
and I should use this opportunity to say that we have very two generational focus in this project. We’re looking
to help the life trajectory and life outcomes of the parents as well as the children because children will only do
as well as their parents are able to do.

The infant practitioner will help
with the evaluation of the parent and the child and will assist the other people planning on the case; the foster
agency case worker, and others who do some planning in recommending particular interventions that the court and child
welfare system may not be as cognizant of as infant practitioners are. As examples, we have early Head Sart programs
that are very, very rich in child development resources. We have home visiting programs, which we know improve the
life trajectory of vulnerable children, yet we don’t see courts or foster agencies getting children involved
in a early Head Start or involved in home visiting, but an infant practitioner will have a broader array of the knowledge
of what’s out there for babies.

The infant coordinator will help with
assessment. She will help with referrals. Then we hope to have very frequent team conferences about these children
and families that will include the lawyers but will also include the community providers that were working with the
families. We’re hoping to get everybody together on a monthly basis to help monitor progress; particularly,
to help solve problems so that families are really getting what they need to get. There are no barriers to their
getting what they get. That we can keep a close eye on the case and hopefully move a little bit more quickly than
usual towards permanency because we’re really front-loading services and we’re giving a lot of attention
to the cases early on.

We’re hoping, also, to develop a more collaborative
approach and to try to leave some of the adversarial approach behind as everybody puts their heads together to think
about how to better serve babies and their families.

SCHWEIG:
As a last takeaway, what would you hope to see a few years down the line with this project? Would you like to see
it replicated, would you like to see it expanded outside of the Bronx? What’s your vision?

CHINITZ:
Babies are such a large presence in the child welfare system and in the courts. In 2013, which is the last year that
we’ve got numbers for, there was 711 just in the Bronx alone; babies under two, just in the Bronx alone. That’s
a lot of children who are living in very vulnerable situations. Young children remain the largest cohort of kids
who become court-involved every year. Yeah, we’d like to see infant expertise in all of the Family Courts. It’s
a system that does intervene every day in the life of these children and they should be imbued with expertise.

It should be a place where judges have access to the best information they can have
about babies. Yeah, my dream is that we’re in every borough of the city bringing infant expertise to judges
and helping evaluate babies so that they get the right service. Like we said, keeping a close eye on cases, moving
children to permanency as quickly as possible. That’s really important. A child has to have security with at
least one ongoing primary caregiver. We see enormous pain and suffering when children are in limbo. Year after year
if they start to have behavior problems, they can’t catch up with their learning problems, we need to bring
permanency and security.

Those things; bringing expertise, so decisions are
good decisions. Bringing resources to these families as soon as the case becomes identified, so the court can be
an agent in positive change and resolving the permanency as early as possible.

SCHWEIG:
Wonderful. Well, thanks so much for speaking with me today.

CHINITZ:
Thank you.

SCHWEIG: I’m Sarah Schweig of the Center for Court
Innovation, and I’ve been speaking with Dr. Susan Chinitz about the complexities of infancy and infants who
become involved in family court cases. To learn more about the Bronx Infant Court or the Center for Court Innovation,
visit www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

How Electronic Records Are Transforming The Justice System Mar 09, 2015

New York University Law School Professor James Jacobs, author of “The
Eternal Criminal Record” (Harvard University Press), discusses the proliferation of electronic criminal
records and the challenges they pose for a free society. (March 2015)

The following is a transcript

RAPHAEL POPE-SUSSMAN: Hi, I’m Raphael Pope Sussman of the Center for Court Innovation,
and today I am speaking with James Jacobs, professor of criminal law at New York University and the director of NYU
Center for Research in Crime and Justice. Jacobs is the author of the new book, “The Eternal Criminal Record,”
which examines the public nature of criminal records and the impact they can have on everything from voting rights
to employability for 16 million Americans.

Professor Jacobs, thank you for
speaking with me today and welcome.

JAMES JACOBS: Thank you. It’s my
pleasure.

POPE-SUSSMAN: So starting out, why do you write this book now?

JACOBS: I got interested in criminal records really in the early 2000s when I was working
on a book about gun control and the Brady Law and the creation of the national instant check system, which enables
federally licensed firearms dealers to determine instantaneously whether a prospective firearms purchaser has a criminal
record. So I came at this from that kind of law enforcement perspective thinking that was truly an amazing accomplishment.
Most people that work on criminal records come at it out of concern about collateral consequences. I too am concerned
about collateral consequences. I deal with that in my courses and in some writing, but that was not my first impulse,
and the book itself is not a book about collateral consequences. It’s a book about the information infrastructure
of the criminal justice system.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Let’s talk about the 60
million Americans with criminal records. What does that include?

JACOBS: What
triggers a criminal record is dependent upon the law of each state, and so states differ to some extent on the lowest
level crimes. Here in New York we have a lot of crimes that have been redefined as violations and not all of those
end up on your criminal record. Traffic offenses do not. Juvenile offenses also differ from one state to another.
But a very interesting question is whether a criminal record includes arrests as well as convictions, and the general
answer to that is, “Yes,” because our criminal records system is arrest-based. So once you are fingerprinted
and booked, that establishes an arrest record and it is not normally erased even if you are not convicted.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Something that really stood out to me in the book is the difference between
the American justice system, in which the right to know is privileged above all else, and the European system, where
there’s more of a focus on the right to privacy. Can you talk about that?

JACOBS:
Well, it’s a great example of American exceptionalism. I don’t think there are many if any other countries
in the world in which criminal records are as public as they are in the United States, and I think that brings out
our commitment to both free speech and to the transparency of governmental operations. Our court records have always
been open to the public, to anyone who wants to see them.

In European countries,
that’s not the case. You have to have a reason and convince the court you have a reason to look at a court record.
Our police records are not open to anyone who wants to see them, but our state legislatures have passed many laws
which give permission, authorization, to various industries and businesses and voluntary associations to obtain police
records. There’s a big difference. In Europe they consider a criminal record to be personal information. Here
we consider it to be quintessentially public information.

These are two different
systems with different values. I don’t want to say one is right. There is a value to an open society. There
is a value to open courts. But that also means that there’s negatives, and people are stigmatized by their criminal
records, and they can’t be kept confidential.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Do you believe
in a right to be forgotten?

JACOBS: I don’t really believe in a right
to be forgotten. I don’t like the idea of changing history. To me it conjures up one of those movies about Eastern
European dictatorships, and people going in and changing the historical record, and was this guy ever arrested or
was he ever convicted for corruption. People have a right to know.

In general,
I believe that we are better off with more information rather than less information. I’m one of these old fashioned
guys who really has a strong commitment to First Amendment rights. I believe people have a right to speak and to
convey information that they have. It’s also very difficult in the information age that we live in now to bury information.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Here in New York, low-level offenders are theoretically eligible to apply
for a certification of rehabilitation, which pending completion of a sentence restores a range of rights and removes
for example, legal barriers to employment. Why do you prefer this policy to the expungement or sealing of records?

JACOBS: Well, I think I do prefer certifications of rehabilitation to expungement. I
don’t like changing history. There’s all kinds of confusions about changing history. A libel suit could
come up. A newspaper could say this person now running for office, or such and such was once convicted of a crime.
The person could sue the newspaper and say, “I’ve never been convicted of a crime because it was expunged;
therefore it doesn’t exist.” You know, it doesn’t change.

We
shouldn’t be thinking of changing history. History is what it is. I have no objection, in fact, I think it’s
a sensible idea to try to help people overcome the bad and dangerous things they’ve done in their past. People
do change. They can demonstrate that change. So maybe we should have more information rather than less, and this
certification of rehabilitation is a step in the right direction. If the state recognizes that you have acted honorably
and credibly and in a law abiding way since the time of your conviction, giving you the certificate to recognize
that, I think is a very sound policy.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Homing in on the employability
of former offenders. What is “Ban the Box”?

JACOBS: “Ban the Box” is a movement
that started out in California, maybe a decade or more ago. A group of activists were lobbying to have the city of,
I believe it was in San Francisco or Oakland, to stop putting on their employment applications, “Have you ever
been convicted of a crime?” They said, “Eliminate that question because it screens out people to early
in the employment process.” It can be used as an automatic screen so that anyone who puts, “Yes, I have been convicted”
isn’t even considered regardless of the circumstances.

But the way that
it was, and this isn’t always understood, the way that it was lobbied for in the beginning, anyway, and the
way that it’s been enacted in many, many cities now and some states, is that it doesn’t mean that you’re
never asked. It means that you’re not asked in the initial employment application, and so it gives the public
employer a chance to look at you as an individual, and if they get to the point where they’re ready to make
an offer, or you get fairly far down in the hiring process, then they ask the question, and they get the answer,
and they’re looking at the answer in the context of someone for whom they’ve already developed a positive
impression. So that arguably should be helpful.

POPE-SUSSMAN: You worry about
the proliferation of intelligence databases that track persons who have not committed criminal acts, but are identified
as likely offenders. Those labeled dangerously mentally ill or alleged gang members. What does it mean for American
democracy that we’re becoming more and more reliant on these kinds of deterministic tools?

JACOBS:
Well, part of this is the information revolution washing right across policing and law enforcement and courts. So
we have the capacity to keep and create far more records than ever in our history. We can compile all kinds of databases
and those databases can have all kinds of consequences. So if we keep a database, as I talk about in the book, on
gang membership for example, there is some legitimacy to that. But people don’t get a hearing on whether they’re
in the gang. They wouldn’t know whether they’re in the gang database.

We
don’t know who has access to the gang database. For a gang database to make sense it has to be available to
a lot of police officers who may come into contact with someone and have some legitimate reason to be interested
in whether they are a member of a gang or not, as well as prosecutors. But that kind of information could be very
detrimental to somebody, and it could also be inaccurate.

You know, it’s
not all that clear what it means to be a gang member. So I mean we have to be very careful about putting those kinds
of labels on people, and then doubly careful about who has access to that information. Because we don’t even
know how accurate it is, and in fact as I talk about in the book and in some articles I’ve written, these gang
databases have proliferated all over the place. So I mean, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people are
listed as gang members. It’s very hard to get off these databases once you’re in them. So I worry about
that.

The issue of the dangerous mentally ill is very interesting because
after the Sandy Hooks and some of the other mass shootings, there’s been a lot of calls for getting better intelligence
databases on people who are mentally ill and dangerous so that they cannot purchase a firearm. Right? We don’t
want people who are dangerous to have–so we create databases. Once we create a database and we insert somebody’s
name and we populate the database with people’s names, we are labeling them as “mentally ill and dangerous.”
Well, if I was an employer and, you know, the government has you on a list as “mentally ill and dangerous.” You know,
and they won’t sell you a firearm, I’m not so thrilled about inviting you into my organization when there
are hundreds of people who are applying for these jobs who are not mentally ill and dangerous.

Most
people, the vast majority of people who have mental illness in their history are not dangerous. So if you can label
people, whimsically label them, and they get onto databases as “mentally ill and dangerous’ without a hearing, without
a way off, without knowing how they got on, I think that’s something to be very concerned about. And interestingly
enough a lot of people in the mental health community have resisted cooperating with the government’s efforts
to compile lists of people who are mentally ill and dangerous.

So now we have
two groups competing. We have the people concerned about mass killings. They say, “What’s wrong with you?
You should be giving us all this information so that we can prevent the next mass killing.” And then you have
people in the mental health community saying, “This is so unlikely to prevent a mass killing, but what it is
likely to do is to stigmatize hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of people and maybe even deter them from
seeking out assistance with problems of mental illness.”

So life is complicated.

POPE-SUSSMAN: I am Raphael Pope Sussman , and that was James Jacobs, professor of criminal
law at New York University and the author of the new book, “The Eternal Criminal Record” from Harvard University
Press. To learn more about the Center for Court Innovation please visit www.courtinnovation.org.
Thank you for listening.

**Understanding Youth Violence: A Conversation with Dr. Joel Fein** Feb 17, 2015
At the kick-off summit for the Minority Youth Violence Prevention
initiative, Dr. Joel Fein, a pediatrician and emergency medicine physician at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia,
discusses youth relationships with authority, family dynamics, and how trauma and stress affect the developing brain.
(February 2015)

Criminal Justice at the Crossroads: Transforming Crime and Punishment Jan 24, 2015

William R. Kelly, professor of sociology
and director of the Center for Criminology and Criminal Justice Research at the University of Texas at Austin, discusses
his new book, “Criminal
Justice at the Crossroads: Transforming Crime and Punishment,” and the costs of mass incarceration.

The following is
a transcript

RAPHAEL POPE-SUSSMAN:
Hi. This is Raphael Pope-Sussman for the Center for Court Innovation. Today I’m speaking with William Kelly,
professor of sociology at the University of Texas, Austin, and the author of the new book, Criminal Justice at the
Crossroads: Transforming Crime and Punishment, from Columbia University Press. Professor Kelly, thank you for speaking
with me today, and welcome.

WILLIAM KELLY: It
is my pleasure.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Why is this a crossroads
in the American criminal justice system?

KELLY:
I believe we’re at a decision point that was triggered from the recession that began in 2008, that caused states
to start taking a hard look at how they spend money. They began to realize that crime control was a very expensive
proposition, and that began the discussion affecting about how might we go about doing this differently, primarily
motivated by trying to save public revenue. That seems to have begun to evolve into a broader discussion of, not
only saving money, but trying to be more effective in how we go about the business of administering criminal justice.

It’s a crossroads because of the opportunities that have been presented by economic
considerations, really a fair amount of lead from the U.S. Justice Department. Eric Holder, when he was the attorney
general, launched a discussion about being “smart on crime.” And those types of phrases and that type of thinking
has really begun to take hold.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Your book explores the origins and evolution of America’s fixation on this idea of being “tough on crime.” Can
you give our audience a sense of what that’s translated into in terms of policy?

KELLY:
Beginning in the early 1970s, we shifted policy rather dramatically from focusing more on rehabilitation than on
punishment. The events of the 1960s, 1970s–high crime rates, race riots, campus protests, led to the evolution of
a focus on controlling crime primarily through the mechanism of punishment. That policy, at the time, made really
quite perfect intuitive sense. The problem is disorder; the remedy is punishment. Policymakers got it; the public
got it. That launched decades of what we call “crime control,” or “tough on crime” policies that led to, among other
things, a really substantial capital investment in things like prisons, extraordinary expansion of the criminal justice
system, fundamental changes in statutes like sentencing laws that shift discretion away from judges to more determinate
sentences that, in the end, are more severe, changes in parole policies and laws that keep inmates in prison longer
and longer.

As the dust has settled on 45 plus years of tough on crime policy,
we see the largest prison system in the world. We are the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world.
I think the public is getting to be familiar with the statistics that we have 5 percent of the world’s population,
but 25 percent of the world’s inmates. The image that the world has about the U.S., is the use of incarceration,
which is certainly a distinguishing point, but that’s not the end result of the reach of the American criminal
justice system. It is much bigger, much broader, and deeper than that. Jails serve to incarcerate huge numbers of
individuals on a day-to-day basis. Probation and parole, versions of community supervision, also have very extensive
reaches in terms of supervising and trying to control criminal offenders.

The
end result of this has been a fairly deliberate march, decade after decade, into developing a fairly efficient system
of punishment. Unfortunately, as it turns out, punishment doesn’t work. It’s legitimate to want to punish somebody
for punishment’s sake. That’s fine, but I think part of the bigger picture here is we need to appreciate
that retribution as a motivation for punishment has no utility other than some emotional satisfaction or emotional
release that we get from an eye-for-an-eye type of approach.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
What was the biggest revelation for you in researching and writing your book?

KELLY:
Now that is a really good question. I would say the greatest revelation is that a fairly comprehensive package of
reforms that I talk about in the book, that are evidence-based, for which we have sufficient scientific research
indicating that these are effective mechanisms, that that package of reform is feasible. It is doable. It is cost-effective,
and it can accomplish the goal of enhancing public safety, reducing victimization, and saving money.

I think the thing that’s the most troubling thing about it, about the path forward, is not
so much the mechanics of what reform should look like. In my mind, the most concerning challenge is changing how
we think about crime and punishment, changing the culture, not so much of the public, but the culture of the administration
of criminal justice. We’ve all been pretty much focused on trying to punish people, and it’s difficult
to change the environment, the day-to-day working environment of probation officers, of law enforcement officials,
of, in-particular, prosecutors. Some individuals will embrace some reform more than others, pretty much as we saw
what happened with crime control decades ago.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
What are the most promising reforms or proposed reforms out there?

KELLY:
Diversion is the key in terms of overall umbrella policy going forward. We should reserve prison, which all evidence
indicates is criminogenic in and of itself–we should reserve incarceration for those people, those offenders, that
we reasonably, truly, fear, violent offenders, clearly habitual offenders, not just somebody who has a third strike.
Those are the individuals that we need to incarcerate. That should reduce the prison population dramatically. Everybody
else should have some version of a balance between control, compliance, accountability on the one hand, and rehabilitation,
behavioral change, on the other.

Another major challenge is the scope and
scale of the criminogenic circumstances that bring criminal offenders into the justice system in the first place.
We know that poverty and crime are linked, but today we know that it’s much more than just, “I don’t
have money because I’m poor. I’m going to have to go out and commit a crime.”

There
are clear neurodevelopmental implications of living in poverty. There are clear neurocognitive implications of being
in an environment of violence, and all the factors that are correlated with poverty play out in a variety of different
ways, including mental illness, substance abuse, things like that, but a much bigger and ever-evolving list of implications
in terms of the less-visible neurodevelopmental problems. If you ask the basic question, “Why didn’t punishment
work?” The answer is, “Because punishment doesn’t change somebody’s mental illness. Punishment
doesn’t address addiction recovery. Punishment doesn’t fix somebody who has a neurocognitive deficit or
impairment.” Punishment doesn’t address why many people commit crime.

Now,
this is not an excuse for crime. Criminals commit bad acts and they need to be held accountable, and we need to keep
the public safe as we attempt to change their behavior. In my mind, and I believe the evidence pretty clearly supports
this, that environment of behavioral change is not prison, but rather a balance of supervision and control in the
community, and vigorous efforts at behavioral change.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
I’m wondering what you think the ultimate goal of reform is. Is all policy dictated by the bottom line?

KELLY: You know, I think the thing that’s going to
move the public and policymakers in the direction of serious criminal justice reform is precisely that, the money
issue. We can debate until the end of time what is morally correct, what is ethically correct, what is fair, and
what is just, but if we want to attract attention from a variety of different perspectives, and I think that’s
precisely what has happened here, the reason that the Koch brothers and Right on Crime are at the same table as the
ACLU is the same reason that we had sentencing reform in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. We had both political
parties concerned with different things, but with the same solution.

Republicans,
the conservatives, were concerned about judges being too lenient. Liberals were concerned about unfairness and discrimination.
The remedy was, get judges out of the picture. I think it’s the same thing here. What brings the Koch brothers
and Right on Crime to the table, at least initially, is the financial issue. What brings the ACLU and liberals to
the table is that we can do a better job of this. We can make it a fairer system, but also, perhaps, a more effective
system.

I think they’re at the table and I think they’re
heading down the same road. That road is one that appreciates the fact that, while behavioral change may be expensive,
it is not nearly as expensive as what we have been doing in terms of simply incarcerating individuals. The evidence
indicates that, in the moment, using interventions to change behavior is generally cheaper than incarceration, and
I think what policymakers sometimes fail to appreciate is that, for every offender that we can effectively change
behavior, every time they don’t reoffend, the cash register doesn’t ring. The cost savings we can incur
now will reap benefits longer term if we can reduce recidivism.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
How should we define success?

KELLY: I think
success is multidimensional. After a period of serious reform effort, can we look back and say, “We have really
developed a system that is more cost-effective”? That’s important, but that is not the end game. The end
game, really, is public safety. Can we then, at some point, say, “We have effectively by whatever amount reduced
recidivism”? Can we say that we have a system that does not unnecessarily place all the rest of us who are not
involved in crime at the risk of being a victim?

Public support–does the
public believe that justice is being done? Reducing inequity in terms of race and ethnic concentrations of individuals
in the justice system, and, ultimately, the extent of which we can take individuals who grow up in circumstances
many of us would find foreign and horrific, can engage them in sufficient behavioral change to become productive
members of society.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Thank you.

KELLY: My pleasure.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
This has been Raphael Pope-Sussman for the Center for Court Innovation, and I have been speaking with William Kelly,
author of the new book, Criminal Justice at the Crossroads: Transforming Crime and Punishment from Columbia University
Press. For more information on the Center for Court Innovation, visit www.courtinnovation.org.

Hospital Seeks to Halt Violence Among Minority Youth Jan 20, 2015

Our Lady of Lourdes Memorial Hospital in Binghamton, New York is working with community partners to develop
a restorative, strength-based program that will divert high-risk youth from gang involvement as well as violent behavior.
At the kick-off summit for the Minority
Youth Violence Prevention initiative, Nancy Frank and Ralphalla Richardson discuss how they became interested
in partnering with police to help stop the cycle of harm in some of Binghamton’s struggling neighborhoods.

The following is a transcript

SARAH
SCHWEIG: Hi, I’m Sarah Schweig of the Center for Court Innovation, and today, I am just outside Atlanta, Georgia,
for the first summit for the Minority Youth Violence Prevention Initiative out of the Office of Minority Health at
the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who partnered with the Office of Community Oriented Policing at
the U.S. Department of Justice. Today, I’m here with Ralphalla Richardson and Nancy Frank from Lourdes Memorial
Hospital in Binghamton. Just to start off, Nancy, who is the director, will just talk a little bit about why you
guys got interested in Minority Youth Violence Prevention.

NANCY FRANK: As
a hospital system, we are part of a department called Youth Services Department, and we’ve been running programs,
youth development programs, since 1996. We have been running juvenile justice programs for youth, juvenile justice
prevention programs, and being a hospital system, we also are looking at mitigating some of the risk factors for
the social determinants of health. One area that we’ve really wanted to get into is the restorative justice
area of being able to look at youth violence with a different kind of lens. One of the programs we currently run
is a detention alternative after school program, but these kids are already in the juvenile justice system. We’ve
talked about wanting to get kids before they enter the system and use more of a preventative approach. We have, for
many years, been providing youth services in our county–in Broome County–and also in Binghamton. That was our interest
in getting this program together.

SCHWEIG: Wonderful. Maybe Ralphalla can
talk a little bit about some of the things you’ve been doing with the youth. I know we had a conversation before
about some trips you guys take and what you see that affecting with the kids you’re working with.

RALPHALLA RICHARDSON: Because we’ve been doing the detention alternative
after school program for so long, we’ve learned some really cool things. Like by taking the kids and exposing
them to just different situations, different environments, you get a very immediate and visceral reaction, so we
implemented a lot of that into our, we’re calling it BCAST in our area, Binghamton Community and Schools Together.
What we’re hoping to do is do some team-building trips. Like our local ski resort has a ropes course, so one
of our first big trips is all the kids in the program are going to go out, do some ropes course, do some team-building.
But we’re also going to do trips to science museums as incentives to keep them going but also then do other
trips to NICUs, kind of show them the adverse effects of getting involved in risky behaviors.

SCHWEIG:
NICUs is…

RICHARDSON: Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

SCHWEIG:
Oh, okay.

RICHARDSON: Also doing maybe interacting with some parolees recently
that are their own age. But also maybe going into what it’s actually like in jail because there’s this
very glamorized version of it but actually let them see what it really is. You get more of an immediate switch in
behavior, and then doing the follow-up work with our in-school groups, working with the SROs there, doing structured
recreation activities after school where the SROs can also be involved and build those positive relationships. We
also—

FRANK: SRO being the School Resource Officer.

SCHWEIG:
Okay.

RICHARDSON: That’s our police component to build that healthy relationship
with the local law enforcement but also to address some of the parent behaviors. They have their own negative impression
of the police force so to work with them to improve that but also to address their own immediate needs to improve
the home environment, so that some of the changes the kids are working on have a better chance of sticking. So the
entire family can improve.

SCHWEIG: One thing that either of you could answer
it sounds like is that partnership with police. How did you guys really establish that? I feel like every city is
very different in terms of the relationship the police have with other agencies. Sometimes they tend to be more siloed,
sometimes they’re more out in the community, so maybe you can give a little bit of a sense of what that was
like.

FRANK: Well, we started this process by reaching out to the mayor of
the city of Binghamton who, ultimately, oversees the police department for Binghamton. He was very interested in
doing this program, so he’s on board. They’ve started a Youth Success initiative through the city of Binghamton,
and the police also sit on that. It’s a Community Youth Services Board. They’re going to be acting as our
advisory board in a sense. That’s one area that we have to start focusing a little bit more on is the police
involvement.

However, with partnering with the BOCES programs, there are kids
from Binghamton who are attending BOCES schools, so there are two different they’re called learning centers,
east and west. Each of those buildings have School Resource Officers who some are from the Binghamton Police, some
are also from our Broome County Sheriff’s Department. Our kids are pretty transient, so many times they move
from Binghamton to other parts of the county. To be able to have that good relationship not only with the city police
force but with the county sheriff’s department is not a bad thing as well. We’re still working on that
aspect of it, but it’s a new development. It’s not really something we’ve done before. We’ve
had a lot of interaction with the county attorney’s office, probation, but not so much law enforcement. That’s
the piece that we really are excited about adding to our existing program.

SCHWEIG:
Yeah. That’s what this whole summit is about is ways of partnering…

FRANK:
Right.

SCHWEIG: … across health and policing.

FRANK:
One thing we’re real excited about is we’re having a community-wide restorative justice training. We’ve
been able to use the funds through this grant to bring in a gentleman by the name of Duke Fisher who is a nationally
renowned expert on restorative justice models. He’s had a lot of success working in schools, college campuses,
communities, and he’s going to be coming in and doing a free training for our community stakeholders. From that
training, we’re going to identify facilitators to actually be able to perform restorative justice activities.
It’s something that’s not being done in our community, and we’re really excited that this grant’s
going to allow us to bring that. That’s a sustainability piece because when this funding goes away, to have
people that are trained to continue a different way of looking at juvenile justice and youth offenders. We’re
excited about that.

SCHWEIG: That’s wonderful. Maybe a last question
to add is just from your experience and starting this process, do you have any takeaways, any lessons for any of
the other sites however anecdotal it might be just because you’re in a very unique situation where you’re
in a hospital, you have this program already in place? Any sort of suggestions?

RICHARDSON:
I would say just don’t be afraid to think of unique ways of doing them. Just because you haven’t done it
before doesn’t mean you can’t, and it’s people that you maybe are hesitant to think of that would
want to partner with you are more than willing to because that was one of the things when we started letting in our
community, letting other agencies that we hadn’t even approached when we were writing it, writing the proposal.
You know, “We got this,” and telling them what we were doing. They were so supportive, and they’re
all like, “What can we do?” Once you actually tell people what you’re doing, you’d be surprised
how many people actually want to help you and want to be involved in the process.

FRANK:
One example of that is there’s the Healthy Lifestyles Coalition that was funded by a private not-for-profit
foundation, and they’re running out of money. But they have established great connections in a particular neighborhood
in Binghamton with the parents of the kids in that community, and they do a lot of cooking classes and things like
that. We’re sort of starting a discussion with them to say, “Well, how can we go in then with this established
group and do some of the things that we want to do? We can pay for the food…” Just those connections, and
we’re a small community. Everybody kind of knows everybody, so it’s been …

SCHWEIG:
Using other organization’s knowledge or populations-

FRANK: Yes.

SCHWEIG: Seems really helpful.

RICHARDSON: Their
connections, especially with what Nancy was saying with the parents. That’s a really hard group to break into,
but this particular agency, they’ve had some great success in engaging these parents–

FRANK:
And neighborhood.

RICHARDSON: Yeah. It’s a neighborhood that really could
benefit from this violence prevention because it’s a rougher neighborhood, and it’s a generational: generations
of poverty, generations of high school dropouts. That we can actually use their connections, and they’ll almost
vouch for us. They’ll be like, “These people are okay. You can”–

FRANK: Right.
Trust them.

RICHARDSON: It’s giving us access to people we hadn’t
even–

FRANK: Thought about. Right.

SCHWEIG:
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for speaking with me today. Hopefully you enjoy the rest of the visit. I’m
Sarah Schweig, and I’ve been speaking with Nancy Frank and Ralphalla Richardson of Lourdes Memorial Hospital
in Binghamton, New York, about gaining trust within communities and partnering with people you might not have normally
thought of. To learn more about the Minority Youth Violence Prevention initiative, visit www.courtinnovation.org.
Thanks for listening.

To Help Teens Experiencing Dating Violence, Meet Young People Where They’re At Dec 02, 2014

Some people mistakenly think that when teenagers experience intimate partner violence, it’s less serious
than when adults experience it, explains Andrew Sta. Ana, supervising attorney of Day One, which seeks to end teen dating violence. “There’s this
idea, ‘Oh, teen DV. That must mean domestic violence or intimate-partner violence ‘lite’… I think
that what’s important to recognize about teen dating violence, particularly as it affects young women, is that
[the age group of 18 to 24 has] the highest rates of dating violence” among any group, Sta. Ana says in this
New Thinking podcast. He also explains what services Day One offers clients and how it works with the Brooklyn Youthful Offender Domestic Violence Court, and he discusses some
of the factors that distinguish cases of teen intimate-partner violence from adult cases, including differences in
law, the use of technology, and adolescent brain development.

The
following is a transcript:

Intro
clip: “When I started doing this work, one of the most important lessons I learned was people said the opposite of
domestic violence isn’t safety. The opposite of domestic violence is self determination.”

ROB WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications
at the Center for Court Innovation. Today I am in the office of Andrew Santa Ana, who is the supervising attorney
at Day One, which is a legal services program that works with teenagers and young people who are experiencing or
are survivors of intimate partner violence. Welcome to the podcast.

ANDREW
SANTA ANA: Thank you so much for having me. I’m glad we’re able to do this.

WOLF: Your work involves many things. I thought maybe we could
start with a program that the Center for Court Innovation has been involved in and helped develop, the Youth Offender
Domestic Violence Court in Brooklyn, which works with young people ages 16 to 19 who have been involved in intimate
partner domestic violence, misdemeanor criminal cases. Now, your role is representing the victims in civil cases.
Is that correct?

SANTA ANA: Yeah, when there’s
a case going on in the YODVC, many of the young people who are victims in that case have questions about family court,
custody of their kids, or orders of protection in the civil process. We have a pretty close relationship with the
Brooklyn district attorney’s office. They make referrals to us and we see how we can help.

WOLF:
Let’s talk about your clients and being a teenager in an intimate partner violence situation. Are there different
characteristics? Are there different issues and concerns that teenagers have and that you have representing teenagers
than an adult might have?

SANTA ANA: Sure. Young
people are obviously a different population with respect to their age. That plays out in a few different ways. There
are things about it that are similar to cases involving adults and things about it that are significantly different.
When I think about the differences, I break them into a few different categories. First and foremost is the law,
right? When we talk about working with young people, the law treats young people and minors differently, right? A
young person under the age of 18 is considered an infant of the laws, considered a minor or someone with diminished
capacity. From the get go you have someone for whom the standard is a little bit different and that requires more
from an attorney and from the court to think about where that young person is. There’s definitely the legal
aspect of that.

Then, secondly, there’s the culture aspect of that, which
means that young people who are teenagers in the 2014 time are different in some ways because of their access to
technology than young people even just 10 years ago. We’re talking about manifestations of intimate partner
violence or ways that power and control manifest. They’re taking along on a huge technological component. Then,
I would say the last piece about this is that as studies and research develops, we know that we’re interacting
with young people at a certain developmental stage in their lives. Whether it be normal teenage brain development
to hormones to relationships with their parents, we know more information about how young people are processing information.
That helps inform what services they need, what they seek, and what remedies are appropriate.

WOLF:
The Youth Offender Domestic Violence Court takes care of or works with the criminal side of things. Then, what happens
if you get a referral from the court? What are some of the issues that, some of the civil remedies or issues that
you’re dealing with when you represent the young victims in a civil setting?

SANTA
ANA: Sure. When people contact Day One, they might have questions about a civil case. We work with
a lot of teen mothers who have questions about whether it be paternity or child support or custody and visitation,
the clients we work with also have a right to file for an order of protection from the civil process. Those are often
some pretty typical questions but also because of the lives of our clients are complicated and they have many different
identities. Sometimes there’s questions about benefits, about young people and teenagers accessing public benefits.
There’s sometimes immigration questions. If we’re talking about young people in violent relationships,
there’s also the need for them to just to connect with someone and to talk to someone.

We
have legal services, but we also have one-on-one and group counseling services. We also have a survivors group that
does advocacy. Thinking about where that young person is and being responsible for that is where we come from because
while it’s great and I can talk to someone about their legal options, sometimes they just want to talk to someone
about this relationship where it might have been their first time they were in love or the parent to their child
with whom they might have a complicated relationship. It’s important for young people to have people that they
can talk to and reach out.

WOLF: Let’s put
this in a little bit maybe in historical context. Domestic violence itself has been an issue that has taken historically
many years for advocates to bring to the attention of the justice system and take it as seriously as any violence
and also look at the complexities that are involved when it involves intimate partners. Now for teenagers, is that
taking another level of awareness and more time to bring attention to the fact that teenagers too can experience
this kind of …

SANTA ANA: Yeah. Thank you for
asking that question because that in some ways gets to the real heart of it. Part of this is talking about young
people and teenagers as people who have intimate relationships, as young people who will be having sex, as young
people that will be engaged in a lot of behaviors that their parents or adults would rather not touch, right? We’re
talking about domestic violence. We are certainly working with young people who are parents or young people that
are having sex and unprotected sex or sex that’s coerced.

We’re
also talking about young people who wouldn’t necessarily talk about these things with their parents. As I was
saying before, there are developmental things going on with young people, so maybe they don’t want to talk to
their parents or their counselors or their teachers or people that they trust about what’s going on in their
lives or at least adults because they’re developing a sense of themselves. That’s one piece of it. A second
piece of it is a cultural misconception about young people in intimate relationships. There’s this idea, oh,
teen TV. That must mean domestic violence or intimate partner violence light or it’s not as serious. This is
maybe slapping or some constant phone calls.

What’s important to recognize
about teen dating violence particularly as it affects young women, is that these are actually the highest rates of
intimate partner violence, young women between ages say 18 and 24, right? There’s the highest rate. There’s
also a lot of physical violence. With thinking about these relationships, it’s important to recognize what exists
culturally, which is a minimization of this experience but also recognizing that these young people at a particularly
high amount of risk in this age group.

WOLF:
Do the teenagers themselves sometimes have trouble as anyone perhaps does recognizing that they’re in a situation
that’s perhaps becoming dangerous or abusive because when someone’s been in a relationship for a long time,
that’s when those patterns maybe become the most unmanageable and the most evident, sometimes even to the victim.
If someone’s very young and less experienced in the world and perhaps being told that this is normal or this
is what they’re to expect, is that a challenge?

SANTA ANA:
Sure. That challenge comes from all sides. On one hand, you have someone who’s navigating their first intimate
relationships. Constant phone calls, checking in, stalking, possessiveness might feel like it means that they really
care about me, but if you’re looking at it objectively, in some cases that might mean stalking. There’s
definitely that piece. Of course, there’s a lot of, whether it be hormonal or cultural influences in which young
people are thought to be in these really amazing, romantic relationships by the age of 16, there’s also not
necessarily the healthiest images out there in our culture about what young people in relationships are supposed
to be like. It’s really complicated.

WOLF:
What are your goals as an attorney representing the victim? I assume obviously the safety of the victim’s paramount,
but considering your clients have a lifetime of relationships ahead of them, do you have goals also related to helping
them learn how to navigate or change something in their lives so that they have healthy relationships?

SANTA ANA: Sure. Thank you for saying that. What I think
we’re driven by at Day One,is the desire to support that young person’s development and their safety but
most importantly their self determination. When I started doing this work, one of the most important lessons I learned
was people said the opposite of domestic violence isn’t safety. The opposite of domestic violence is self determination.
When I understood that, I took it to mean that safety is important, but when you have a pattern of someone exercising
power and control, stalking them, manipulating them, battering them, abusing them, you’re taking away that person’s
agency, right?

When we talk about the opposite of domestic violence, it’s
empowering a young person, giving that person information, allowing them to make choices for themselves. Now, as
someone who’s not a teenager anymore, some of those choices may be choices I agree with and some of them might
be things that I’m a little bit more concerned about. My role as an attorney is to advise them of the consequences
of those choices but ultimately support them in their own growth about where that’s going, right? When we talk
about with adults or whoever are living abusive relationships they say it takes, what is that? The stat is 7 to 10
times for someone to leave an abusive relationship.

At Day One, we recognize
that young people in abusive relationships, we’re going to meet them whether it be that first time, that third
time, that fifth time, or that seventh time when they’re ready to leave or they might not be ready to leave
and they want to switch something up. Our role is to give them legal advice, represent them where we can and just
support their self determination. Part of that means safety and safety planning. Sometimes that means getting access
to immigration remedies. That means talking to their teachers. That means talking to them about their home. Sometimes
that involves litigation but really having that person’s experience centered and affirming their choices is
where we come from.

WOLF: Tell me a little bit
about yourself, how you ended up in this role and doing this work.

SANTA
ANA: Yeah. As a supervising attorney, I oversee our programs. I’ve been here for a couple of
years. I found myself in this role because I was interested in working with young people and trying to figure out,
for me it was thinking about what the end of domestic violence looked like, right? The end of domestic violence is
a community and a legal system in a society where this isn’t happening. For me, it happens from a young age.
There are lessons that you learn from a young age. I’m excited to be a part of this work because I’m doing
really interesting legal advocacy, but it’s combined with prevention work and counseling in a way that isn’t
just isn’t only interventionist, doesn’t only intersect or intervene or become a part of this process when
something is done wrong.

I’m a part of team that people that try to address
it before. In the past I worked at an organization and worked specifically with LGBTQ clients. In that work, it was
also working with a marginalized or historically under represented community at least in this arena. Working with
marginalized communities and those contacts really think about me provide a lens on how our system needs to have
nuanced responses to individuals and have these blanket statements on how we address this work cannot be seen outside
of the lens or talking about age and gender and sexual orientation and race and poverty and ability and education
and all of these other things.

For me, I got into this work because I like
being in that complexity. Sometimes it’s messy, but it’s more authentic that way. Does that make sense?

WOLF: Sure. It sounds like you feel maybe you can have
more of an impact if you work with a younger population. You’re sort of …

SANTA
ANA: Yeah. I’m always learning things from the young people I work with. I did a workshop last
week at a high school here in New York City. Whether it be young people’s vocabulary to understanding what apps
they’re using to how they talk about their relationships, there’s obviously very serious and intensive
litigation that happens, but there’s also can be a lighter side when we get to connect with young people who
are exploring relationships and love.

WOLF: Let
me ask you one more thing because you mentioned technology before. How does that play a role in your young people’s
lives in terms of making them perhaps more open to being victims? I don’t know, in terms of your being working
as an attorney, maybe gathering evidence and such.

SANTA ANA:
Yeah. When we work with young people, their access to technology and communication through social media, through
apps, through cell phones, through online interactions are so embedded in how they have relationships that it’s
a double edged sword because on one hand there can be a lot of documentation about text messages and emails and Facebook
messages and tweets and Instagrams, but at the same time, what’s challenging about it is that there are a lot
of risks when you put that information out there. A lot of young people experience technology abuse. There’s
a lot of things that are going on with, say, sexting where the exchange of sexually explicit or intimate messages
amongst young people.

What happens is is that young people, because they’re
so connected, have a sense of privacy or intimacy in exchanges with other people online. I would say that those exchanges
and that intimacy is entirely real because those connections are real. However, that sense of privacy is entirely
false. While you can create these intimate connections, those messages can be sent to your partner’s friends,
their friends, your teachers, your parents and can be put on the internet. We’re in this stage where while these
connections are real, that privacy is entirely fake and runs into a bunch of risks around that.

The
only other thing that I would say around that is that as an attorney it can be hard to litigate these things because
in some cases the technology is a couple of steps ahead of the law. Many of these apps are based out of Canada or
it’s not so easy to get information from them. Litigation around this stuff can be also really difficult.

WOLF: It doesn’t make it easier necessarily that you
have evidence recorded somewhere.

SANTA ANA:
I would love to talk to someone who’s doing this work 20 years ago because I bet they probably have a different
set of challenges. While there is an opportunity for evidence I would just say there’s other challenges. One
other things that I would say is that I recently worked with a young person who told me that they didn’t have
voice mail. The only way to contact them was through text. Again, it’s like flipping modifying understanding
of how people interact in order to meet where a young person’s at. That’s probably going to change in another
5 years. It might be some, I don’t know, more immediate way to connect with someone other than text.

WOLF: Through implants in our heads.

SANTA
ANA: Right, exactly.

WOLF: Listen,
thank you so much. This has been fascinating. Good luck with your continued work.

SANTA
ANA: Thanks, anytime.

WOLF: I’ve
been speaking with SANTA ANA Santa Ana, who is the supervising attorney at Day One based here in Manhattan. To find
out more about Day One, you can visit their website which is …

SANTA
ANA: www.Dayoneny.org.

WOLF: To
find out more about the Youth Offender Domestic Violence Court, you can visit www.courtinnovation.org. You can also
visit that website to hear more podcasts. You can also subscribe to our podcast on iTunes. You can also leave a review
there. You can also visit Court Innovation on our Facebook page. Thank you very much for listening. I am Rob Wolf.
Stay tuned for more podcasts in the future.

The International Rule of Law Movement: David Marshall on the Need for Reform Sep 09, 2014

David Marshall, editor of The
International Rule of Law Movement: A Crisis of Legitimacy and the Way Forward, discusses the
international rule of law as an industry–one that has been promoted as offering solutions in post-conflict and fragile
states and that too often fails. Marshall discusses some of the reasons for these failures and outlines some alternative
approaches to interventions in fragile states. (September 2014)

The following is a transcript

SARAH SCHWEIG:
Hi, I’m Sarah Schweig of the Center for Court Innovation and today I’m
speaking with David Marshall, who has just edited and released a new book called “The International Rule of Law Movement:
A Crisis of Legitimacy and the Way Forward.” David Marshall is a senior law and policy advisor at the U.N. Office
for Human Rights. His background is in trial work, mainly in criminal defense and death penalty cases. He has extensive
field experience in post-conflict states including Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, Nepal, and South Sudan. Thanks for
speaking with me today, David.

DAVID MARSHALL:
Great, thank you for the invitation.

SCHWEIG:
Rule of law, very, very basically, as I understand it means that individuals, institutions, and even the government
itself agree to be held accountable to a code of rules, correct?

MARSHALL:
That’s about right. There’s a equality of arms. There’s equity in the process however the process
is defined, non-discrimination. There are some sort of core principles: supremacy of law is one of them. But one
thing, which we’ll get to, which is–why the book–is, the content of the Rule of Law was much discussed in
2012 by the global community when all member states of the U.N., as the world countries, got together to discuss
the rule of law and its content.

SCHWEIG: The new
book is on the International rule of law movement, so maybe you could talk about what this movement really means,
sort of what you just mentioned, and why, as your title says, it’s currently in a crisis of legitimacy.

MARSHALL: Just to make clear on the outset that obviously these are my views.
These views may or not represent the organization I work for, the U.N. as a whole. The rule of law movement has been
around forever and thus. It has probably been around for 60 years. It’s an attempt initiated by the West to
help emerging states, those states moving away from communism, those states coming out of former Yugoslavia in the
80s, in the 90s, fragile states: Congo, Afghanistan.

The
last 40 or 50 years has been a huge endeavor to help states reform, repair, rebuild justice systems; it’s been predominately
focused on criminal justice reform and it’s been an endeavor that has had modest success, at best. The movement has
become an industry. Up until 2003, there was some efforts by some countries. This country, the U.S., is a major player
in this movement, but 2003 and beyond, which is sort of one of the reasons for the book, is this being an explosion
of activity. The consequence is you have thousands of NGOs. You have thousands of guidance materials. Thousands of
experts, all mainly from English-speaking countries.

We
have all of this information about the rule of law, but we really understand so little. I wanted to explore in 2013
or 2014, given this being such modest success and this being a mini-industry–exploring why it’s been a failure.
I wanted to explore, why, not the standing the modest success, why has there been this explosion, which
is that coupled with the 2012 declaration by the world’s countries as to the rule of law was sort of the catalyst
for the book.

SCHWEIG: You’ve had experience
on the ground in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, and other more moratoria countries. What were some of the things that
you observed, maybe on the ground, that led you to compile this book?

MARSHALL:
I learned that the international community
has a profound deficit of knowledge, of where it works, where it doesn’t: Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Liberia;
I mean choose your fragile state. Our knowledge around the language, the culture of justice means the deficits are
profound around who we are, and why we’re there, what we’re doing, what we know about what we’re doing.
And that hasn’t changed. That has dogged the industry for decades, the knowledge deficit, and secondly, that
obsession with institutions. We have a lot of rhetoric around supporting national ownership, nationally driven processes,
but generally the international community tends to focus on institutions and persons working therein, as opposed
to the individual. The consequence is that we are focused on institutions, institutions generally around criminal
justice, so an addition to a deficit of knowledge, that is, I would suggest, profound. The other problem
is that our theory of this work, the rule of law, it’s more of a law-and-order narrative.

We generally, the international community, sees the rule of law through
a law-and-order prism, and that is basically supporting police, supporting prison reform. But that’s usually
building prisons and supplying batons to police officers. I’m not suggesting that there isn’t a need in
some stage for security apparatuses and supportive to coercive institutions is clearly needed. But we seem to get
stuck in that for decades. I also think that one thing I’ve learned is that rule of law is, and it’s a bit of
a cliche, but it’s truly indigenous. We have this sense that we arrive with this model called the Rule of the
Law: “If you please build your institutions that look like ours, you are good to go.” The evidence, I suggest, is
in and that’s been a failure. That’s one thing in the book that I think it’s important to recognize,
is that it’s okay to say, “It’s been a comprehensive failure.”

The
international community has an aversion to failure, so we can better understand when we spend $4 billion dollars
in Afghanistan, of American taxpayer money over 12 years on justice reform, and the inspector general says basically
this can come to naught, within a year, we need to sort of really stop and think about why we’re doing this.

SCHWEIG: Obviously, throughout the book there’s some agreement and
some disagreement, some tension in perspective. Can you tell us a bit about the ideas that you think harmonize in
the book and then some of the ideas that conflict across the different essays?

MARSHALL:
I think one of the major ideas I think where there’s a consensus is the deepening of knowledge. I mean it’s
a bit of cliche–it’s been identified as a problem for years, but there’s a great piece on when the rule of
law movement meets Iraq. We meets context where the Islamic law is applied. An increasing issue for the
world community is we’re building the rule of law in Somalia, Mali, and Afghanistan. We don’t really talk enough
about when the movement hits an Islamic state and that chapter by Haider Hamoudi from Pittsburgh is terrific and
also the piece on South Sudan. Sometimes these often indigenous processes, customary processes, are okay. They are
delivering some semblance of justice and have been for decades, so rather than trying to suppress and replace these
customary processes, tribal chiefs or religious shuras in Afghanistan and Iraq, why don’t we learn about them?

The other thing is that we’re a little tired of the rule of law. It
has such baggage–the evidence doesn’t support that rule of law will lead to economic empowerment, more or greater
human rights promotion or protection. So if we can all just lower the rhetoric a bit. Stop the rhetoric around comprehensive
approaches to rule of law reform because modest goals are honestly more achievable. Modesty, humility would be helpful
and Deborah Isser talks starting by identifying injustices and insecurities the population are suffering. Let’s
start there, well that’s the conversation sort of. What’s the major injustice in that country and often
it has nothing to do with criminal justice.

I think
there’s a little bit of tension mainly with Jim Goldston’s piece, which is that the endeavor is a good
faith endeavor by the international community. There have been some modest success and the rhetoric is to some extent
a runaway train, but all it basically needs is a bit of adjusting, more investment, and knowledge, and skills and
capacity of the internationals. That’s not my view for what it’s worth.

The
piece that was done by Todd Foglesong at Harvard is interesting because it’s just a small project with reforming
the prosecutor’s office in Lagos, Nigeria. And I’m coming back to the issue of modesty. Where you have
a concrete example of where there’s a small modest project. The success was about both modesty and about relationships
and how they built over four years a relationship with the prosecutor’s office. That really helped them stress
the issue of arbitrary detention, prolonged detention in Lagos. That’s a really fascinating piece. The question
is whether the international community, which goes big, right, is looking for the Big Bang of success in the rule
of law. It doesn’t exist, stop looking. I don’t know whether the international community can accept modesty
and humility. Time will tell. I mean $4 billion dollars in Afghanistan of taxpayers’ money is a lot of money. And
I’m wondering when our people will say enough?

SCHWEIG:
What do you think the way forward now would be?

MARSHALL:
The way forward is radical change. The way forward is basically stop. The best we can, however improbable that suggestion
is, to stop and digest who this community is, what they’re trying to achieve, so that the objectives of this
endeavor–what the key objectives? Because I say in my chapter that surely the objectives are basically human rights
objectives. We need to sort of stop, take stock of what we’ve done, what we’re learning. I’m suggesting
for the U.N. that we play a more strategic role, helping states think through the strategic direction of a new justice
system and that’s more than law, more than the human rights law. That’s, in my view, the only really leverage
tool we have in our tool box.

I think it’s okay
to ask these deep questions. It’s whether or not the international has the maturity and the patience to do so.

SCHWEIG: Thanks so much for speaking with me today. I’m Sarah Schweig
of the Center for Court Innovation. I’ve been speaking with David Marshall of the U.N. about his work in post-conflict
states and his new book, “The International Rule of Law Movement: A Crisis of Legitimacy and the Way Forward” from
Harvard University Press. To learn more about the Center for Court Innovation, please visit us at www.courtinnovation.org.
Thanks for listening.

Community-Oriented Public Safety Strategies: A Conversation with Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell Aug 12, 2014

Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell discusses how law enforcement leadership can promote new “smart”
strategies–including community engagement and prevention-oriented diversion approaches–that can effectively and efficiently
keep communities safe, address the symptoms and causes of criminal activity, and alleviate prison overcrowding.
(August 2014)

SARAH SCHWEIG: Hi, I’m Sarah Schweig
of the Center for Court Innovation and today I’m speaking with Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell. Chief McDonnell
was appointed to the U.S. Attorney General’s national task force on children exposed to violence, and has served
in executive sessions on law enforcement and public health, and police legitimacy and racial reconciliation. We’re
currently at an executive session in Los Angeles, California, sponsored by the California Endowment, Community Oriented
Policing Services (the COPS Office), and the Center for Court Innovation. We’ve brought together public health
experts and law enforcement representatives for a conversation about public health approaches to public safety. Thanks
for speaking with me today.

JIM MCDONNELL: Thanks for having me.

SCHWEIG: So
just to start off, you know we’re in an environment where crime is relatively low and yet resources are pretty
tight across the country, as well as in California. And community policing, involves as engaging residents to keep
neighborhoods safe. How can police in this sort of climate engage residents to help keep crime low in this kind of
tight budget atmosphere?

MCDONNELL: I think a big part of it is an educational process—it kind
of drove the point home to me last night. I spoke at a public park in Long Beach and there were hundreds of kids
in that park playing every different kind of sport. And I think back, I was impressed with that because I think back
to the late 80’s and early 90’s when you could drive back that park and it would be empty because people were afraid
to go into the park, and a generation of kids missed the opportunity to grow up and exercise in that fashion. And
that’s a giant missing piece, I think. It’s looking at how far we’ve come. I don’t think we give
ourselves enough credit as a society and celebrate where we are today. We finished out the last year, really, in
Los Angeles County with the lowest violent crime numbers in 40 years. We’re down dramatically this year from
last year, and all of us together were able to achieve something that I think was seen as unachievable just a few
short years ago, but yet we’re not taking advantage of that. By that, I mean we’re not reengaging, we’re
not taking back the streets and, and you know the parks public spaces in a way that we should be. We are seeing what
I saw last night, people back in the parks, but we’re not doing it consciously. And I think we really need to
do that and talk to each other about that in our communities, and encourage people to get out and take full advantage
of the cities that we live in. We’re very fortunate to live in this country and be able to have the freedom
that we have. We kind of limit ourselves, I think, by not being aware of what the threat levels actually are versus
what they are perceived to be. So education is a big part of that—creating a dialogue and talking openly about where
we are and what we can do to make it even safer.

SCHWEIG: So how can law enforcement take an active
role in new thinking around how we can make communities safer?

MCDONNELL: Well you know you look
at just basic crime control tips that sound so common sense that we too often, I think, don’t talk about them
because we don’t want to insult people by giving them something so basic. But yet we look at our property crime
in Los Angeles County and when you look at the property crime reports, over and over again, people left iPads, iPods,
computers, laptops, whatever, in an unlocked car because they were only going into a store for a couple of minutes
and they figured that it’s safe there. And over and over again the themes are the same. My house was burglarized.
Was the door left open? Well, yeah because I never lock the door—or the windows were left open because I didn’t
feel there was a threat. And it sounds very basic, but we have the ability to protect ourselves by using the basic
tools that we don’t take advantage of. And so I think we become complacent and, as a result, we become victims.
So by just creating a dialogue around this, those are the little things that don’t cost a dime but really can
change the outcome of what we’re doing. So I think education is a tremendous piece that I think we undervalue.
And just the opportunity to be able to get out in front of a group and be able to talk about, you know, how do you
keep your family safer, is priceless.

SCHWEIG: Speak a bit about prison overcrowding in California
and what you think, from a law enforcement perspective, can be done towards solving this problem.

MCDONNELL:
Right. I’ll talk about both prisons and jails, but I look at the issues that we’ve studied very closely
here in Los Angeles County. In the L.A. County jail, the population is estimated to be between 15 and 20 percent
of the people incarcerated are there because of mental illness, their behavior, not taking their meds or whatever
the issue is that caused them to find themselves in custody. If we have an ability to be able to re-evaluate the
way we treat people in this regard, and to be able to develop community-based mental health clinics, community-based
mental health courts, so an assessment is done and rather than using incarceration as a default treatment plan, we
have options that keep the person in the community where they are more likely to be monitored, and hopefully helped,
and treated as a medical issue as opposed to a criminal issue, I think we’d be in a different position. In addition,
to look at the jail environment, who’s in custody awaiting trial, that could have been bailed out if they only
had the money. And what we find is often times the jail system is not based on a risk assessment, but rather if they
can come up with whatever the prescribed bail is. And we have people sitting in custody at great expense to society,
that would be less of a threat, potentially, back in their community, than somebody who was able to make bail and
is now back out in the community. So in looking at some of, just the different ways we have taken things to just
the way it is, and reevaluate those and say what other opportunities are there to reduce the population of jails
and prison, holding people accountable for their behavior, but at the same time doing it in a way that is least harmful
to society and a more efficient and smarter way of doing the same job we’ve been trying to do for a long time.

SCHWEIG: As you know, crime prevention can start in many different arenas and agencies. What advice would
you give to police departments who may want to reach out to partner with their local public health departments, or
school systems or other agencies to sort of help in, you know, maybe education efforts or you know, innovative initiatives.

MCDONNELL: Yeah. I think that we have to reach out to our partners in different disciplines, to be able
to bring them, the various sectors, into play, to have a tremendous outcome on what the end game will be. It’s
easier to do that where there’s an education piece, where there’s minimal investment, where you just get
in and you work together, and you’re able to put together something for a presentation or so forth. The harder
part is to get people to come together on a daily basis to address the issues that we face, and to see what role
each of us can play in that. And in order to affect that in a positive way, we need to look at it—bring in the various
players at the city level, the county level, the state level, and maybe even the federal level, depending on the
issues we’re dealing with. And that takes a lot of work because everybody’s got their own goals, everybody’s
held accountable for different standards, and what might be a police goal at the end of the day isn’t in alignment
with the health department’s goals or and other of our partner agencies. So we need, as heads of agencies, to
be able to take the initiative and meet—to come up with an alignment as to—we’re dealing with the same audience
over and over again, but we’re not doing it in a way where we each bring some strength to the table to be able
to address their needs. Rather, we’re looking at it through our own lens to see what’s our responsibility
in this? And then moving on. Rather than, in the medical model, to be able to say, this person is our patient. Did
we put them on the road to cure, or did we just address the symptom and send them back on the street. So to be able
to look at it in a more comprehensive, which will ultimately be a smarter, more efficient, and more effective way
of dealing with the problem. I think we need a re-engineering of the way we’ve been doing business, and you
know, when it comes right down to it, I think it will be a more efficient way because when you look at the population
that we’re dealing with in this county, there’s a relatively small number of people coming into contact
with all of the various agencies on a routine basis for care. So if we can triage those individuals and identify
what their needs are, and rather than just symptoms, look at the causes and put together, as a medical model would,
a diagnosis and a plan for getting better, I think we’re on a much better track.

SCHWEIG:
I’m Sarah Schweig and I’ve been speaking with Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell, and we’re currently
at a roundtable session on public health approaches to violence prevention, looking at ways that public health and
law enforcement can partner up to fight crime. To learn more about the Center for Court Innovation please visit www.courtinnovation.org.

Importing Innovation: the Challenges and Rewards of Transplanting a Program from One Nation to Another Jul 15, 2014

Simon Fulford, chief executive of Khulisa
U.K., explains how and why his not-for-profit brought a successful South African prisoner reentry program
to the United Kingdom.

SIMON FULFORD: You walk into an
English prison, you’ve got a group of 10 young offenders. If you hand them anything more than one piece of paper,
they would probably throw it back in your face.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of
communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Today I’m with Simon Fulford, who is the chief executive
of Khulisa U.K., a non-profit started in South Africa and dedicated to breaking the cycle of crime and violence.
Welcome to New York – or maybe I should say welcome back, because I know you used to live here.

FULFORD:
I did. So, I lived in New York from ’92 to the end of 2004 and loved it, it was brilliant.

WOLF:
I was really interested to see that you were also an award winning photographer and that you’ve used your work
as a photographer to engage the disabled community, and that you co-founded and directed a non-profit in New York
called Art Start, that received a president service award from President Clinton in 1997.

FULFORD:
That’s right.

WOLF: I wonder if you could explain how you see art as a way to empower underserved
and disadvantaged communities.

FULFORD: I guess it’s empowering, I guess on multiple levels.
On a personal level, often being given and having the opportunity to express hopes, fears, challenges, needs, in
a way that is creative as opposed to verbal, that feels a bit more accessible, sometimes it’s less personally
challenging, and often kind of from that, it can be very empowering for them to be able to then say – and now I’ve
told you, or now I’ve shared this with you as an organization or you as a policy maker, you as a government
service provider, and this is the – I’ve now expressed my needs, and hopefully you can help meet my needs.

WOLF: So it’s a blend of personal growth and advocacy.

FULFORD: Correct.

WOLF: In your current endeavor at Khulisa, you know its mission is to break the cycle of crime and violence.
That’s a tall order.

FULFORD: It is.

WOLF: How does Khulisa work? And
maybe you could start by explaining the South African connection, or its origin in South Africa.

FULFORD:
So, Khulisa is a Zulu word which means “to nurture”. You know, the freedom had come to South Africa and
the multi-racial elections. There was a huge increase and explosion in violent crime and my understanding from my
colleagues there, is a lot of it sort of took society by surprise, that in a sense, a lot of the black community,
and what they call colored community, kind of almost turned on themselves. So our founder, Leslie Ann van Selm, she
founded the organization and the first program they ran was using traditional African storytelling techniques so
it creates a rehabilitative tool and vehicle, sort of helping violent offenders reconnect with their cultural roots.
A lot of this community has been totally decimated by apartheid and trying to use that as a tool to kind of have
them see themselves as positive contributors to their communities.

WOLF: So these are people who
are currently in prison, or they were returning from prison?

FULFORD: Well, they were currently
in prison. It was part of their sort of pre-release and hopefully re-integration, as they call it in South Africa,
re-integration into their communities. Fast forward 16 years. Colleagues in South Africa in one of the leading crime
prevention NGOs – so they do a lot of work with young people, with children from their late teens to early 30s, gang
diversion programs, getting young people to stay in education, helping them develop community projects. We then brought
one of their program models, Silence the Violence, from South Africa to the U.K. in 2009 and we began to pilot test
that in English prisons, in English schools, and in the community.

WOLF: So you brought one specific
program of many that they have.

FULFORD: Yes, they have a whole raft of different programs and
interventions that they run in various different settings, in schools, in community. When Khulisa was coming to England
and talking about South Africa society, that has 20 times the U.K.s violent crime rate, has communities with 80 percent
unemployment, it’s a very, very extreme – and extreme poverty and depravation. So there was a question posed.
You’ve been very successful in South Africa in quite an extreme environment, a very fragile sort of social economic
environment. Could your success be translated to a more modern, Western, developed society? And with many more resources.

WOLF: That’s an interesting question too, that I don’t think many people ask. because usually
when you think of exporting an idea from one country to another, there seems to be a tendency to think that it would
go from a more developed, supposedly – I don’t know what the proper word to describe it would be – but a country
with more resources, or a so-called first world country, to perhaps a country that in many areas was less developed.
So it’s interesting.

FULFORD: It is an interesting model and I wouldn’t say we’re
unique in that, there are some other examples of it, but it is a new way of looking at it. I think it’s quite
subversive in some way, because the traditional development model is very much the west – America, western Europe,
Japan, whatever, the more “developed” countries, exporting their models of social development to, you know,
the less developed “third world countries”, and saying we’ve developed all the right solutions and
you now go through them. And of course, interestingly, if not ironically, a lot of less developed countries struggle
to implement some of the systems and processes that more developed countries can do. A lot of it has to do with resourcing.
They are very under-resourced environments.

WOLF: So tell me, what is the program and how has
it been working?

FULFORD: So the program is Silence the Violence. We have a youth version that
we call Face It. It’s a very intensive, motivational, behavior change program. It focuses on violent behavior,
but in many ways it’s about motivating participants to really understand themselves, to understand the triggers
to their violent and criminal behavior, to understanding – in a sense – the excuses and the value systems and belief
systems – belief with a small b – that allow them to behave in certain ways or propel them to behave in certain ways,
and beginning to try to challenge those or unpick them, so that they can make better choices for themselves, better
choices for family or community, and certainly better choices for their future. We work on a theory of violence developed
by, actually, an American forensic psychologist, Dr. James Gilligan. His approach is that violence is a learned behavior
for the majority of individuals who don’t have a mental health problem or challenge, or psychosis. If it’s
a learned behavior, then it can be unlearned. It doesn’t mean it can be unlearned overnight, but you have to
star that process and our program is a very intense, short duration, high intensity program to trigger the beginning
of that change process.

WOLF: Is it therapy group? Counseling? Classes?

FULFORD:
That’s a very good question. It’s a group-led process. We use a lot of therapeutic techniques, and so we
use a lot of drama therapy, creative art therapy. It is based on cognitive behavior therapy techniques, and very
much the group, the participants actually, they provide the content. Their stories, their lives, their experiences
become the content that either the group works through as a group and individually, and by doing role play, by making
masks, and making hats that represent violent signs themselves, and making kind of the original self that they would
like to be through those kind of different creative techniques, sharing and having a dialogue around it that moves
them to a place that they would very much understand more of who they are, more of the connection of themselves and
having been victims of abuse and neglect in their own lives, or witnesses of abuse and neglect and violence.

WOLF: So how’s it been going? How’s the implementation, and what have the results been so far?

FULFORD: So, it’s been a really fun journey of meeting, you know, a healthy level of sort of interest
and certainly a healthy level of skepticism. And I would say it’s been a resounding positive opinion of how
it works. In that the participants themselves say it is one of the most profoundly impactful programs they’ve
ever been in, we’ve had academics evaluate and assess, certainly the short term impact on behavior change that
it can have a – when it works well, when the group dynamics work – that it can have a profound impact on propensity
for violence and reducing aggressive tendencies, and improving emotional well-being, that can be built on for individuals
thinking positively about their lives, and engaging in other rehabilitation programs – job training, drug and alcohol,
substance use programs, etc. We haven’t had the ability to do the long-term tracking on recidivism. Mostly we
just haven’t had the resources to do that. We’ve received some high profile grants for innovation in the
justice center, and we’re implementing one of those current projects now.

WOLF: Oh, a new
project.

FULFORD: Yeah, it’s a combination of our Silence the Violence work with Through
the Gate mentoring to hopefully really embed behavior changes and learning of an offender once they’ve been
released into the community.

WOLF: I see. So – because it does sound like Silence the Violence
is sort of laying a foundation that would, perhaps, require continued engagement around other issues and job training
or whatever. So it sounds like that’s what you’re moving – you’re developing now.

FULFORD:
Yes. So we’re adding in a rigorous process of referral from our program onto other service provision, or bringing
in a volunteer mentor who can support that individual, on a more personal way – meeting them once a week, talking
to them on the phone, you know, encouraging them to have goals and sticking to their goals about applying for jobs.

WOLF: And have you encountered any challenges related to translating the model from South Africa? Perhaps
cultural differences? Or have you had to make particular tweaks?

FULFORD: At its core, the program
content and the curriculum design was wholly transferrable. And a lot of that is because it’s not a South Africa
program, it’s universal therapeutic techniques, it’s cognitive behavior therapy, it’s drama therapy,
it’s kind of creative art therapy techniques. What is unique about the program is the way we’ve sequenced
it and our approach with this sort of high intensity, short duration, and then using what are a few more traditional,
indigenous tools such as the mask making, you know? I mean I know in ancient England they wore painted faces and
things like that, but they haven’t done it for about 2,000 years. Whereas in Africa, masks are still very much part
of the culture in rituals and ceremonies. So the mask making is potentially something that came more from South Africa,
but it’s therefore very interesting and novel in England. We use a hat making, which again is a slightly different
approach, and then we have what we call the wisdom circle, which is again a more African tradition of sitting in
a circle at the community, resolving an issue and having a talking piece that they pass around the circle. What we
did remove from the program in its adaptation was obviously a lot of the cultural references. A poem about South
Africa doesn’t translate to London, I have to say, and even less so to Manchester – if anyone knows their English
geography. What was also quite interesting is in South Africa, the prison system is so under-resourced that their
approach to running the program is often quite didactic. So they can go in, there are 20 guys in the program, they
can hand them a program manual to the offenders that was as thick as a phone book, and they would cherish it and
hold it, and they were thankful that someone was coming to do anything. You walk into an English prison, you’ve
got a group of 10 young offenders. If you hand them anything more than one piece of paper, they would probably throw
it back in your face. It was a very different approach.

WOLF: So you have to prove yourself?

FULFORD: You really have to prove yourself. You’ve got to really build and gain the trust of the group,
and it has to be earned, whereas in South Africa there’s more generosity with the group giving you the trust
from the outset, and it’s kind of yours to lose, whereas in England it’s – you’ve got to gain it.
And so we work on gaining it as quickly as possible.

WOLF: Well thank you so much for explaining
your programming at Khulisa U.K. and good luck with your future endeavors.

FULFORD: Thank you
very much.

WOLF: I’ve been speaking with Simon Fulford, who is the chief executive of Khulisa
U.K. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. You’ve been listening
to one of our New Thinking podcasts and you can listen to more at www.courtinnovation.org. You can also listen to
us on iTunes or your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening.

Los Angeles City Attorney Says Listening is Key to Developing Effective Community-Based Programming Jul 02, 2014

In this New Thinking podcast, Los
Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer discusses his plans for community-based solutions to problems like truancy,
gun violence, and prison overcrowding. (July 2014)

MIKE FEUER: For leaders and for elected officials, speaking skills are highly overvalued relative to listening
skills, which are frequently under-valued.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communication
at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome to another New Thinking Podcast. Today I’m speaking with Los Angeles
City Attorney Mike Feuer, who is here today at the Center for Court Innovation, and he’s visited some of our
projects and met with some of our staff. Welcome to New Thinking.

FEUER: Oh, it’s great to
be here and I really appreciate the work of the center.

WOLF: That’s great to hear. Let me
ask a little bit about your role as the city attorney. A lot of municipalities have a City Attorney but usually their
role is a little different in each jurisdiction. So why don’t you tell me what your responsibilities are as
the Los Angeles City Attorney.

FEUER: Sure. In Los Angeles there are three city wide elected officials:
the mayor, the city attorney, and the controller. So I’ve held office since July of last year. Prior to that time,
I’d been a member of the state legislature, a city council member, I used to run a public interest law firm.
The city attorney’s job is very expansive. In addition to writing every law in the city, the City Attorney advises
the mayor, the council, the city’s departments and commissions on every legal issue that has any relationship
to public policy. The City Attorney defends litigation when the city is sued. The City Attorney uses civil litigation
as a sword on behalf of the city or the people of the state of California on a wide array of issues. Environmental
justice, issues of sub-housing or elder abuse, consumer fraud. My role also is a prosecutorial role. The City Attorney
prosecutes every misdemeanor in the city of Los Angeles, tens of thousands of such matters each year. And they might
include issues from drunk driving to domestic violence, to assault and sexual abuse, to vandalism and levels of quality
of life crime in communities that have a significant impact on whether a business chooses to site in a neighborhood
or whether kids can walk safely to school. The City Attorney also can initiate legislation in Los Angeles, and at
the state and federal levels also.

WOLF: Sounds like there’s a huge opportunity to bring
new ideas to the table, to make changes. So I wonder, as somebody who’s relatively newly elected, not even a
year in office, what your vision is for possible reforms.

FEUER: Sure. I view our offices role,
be it on the civil side or the criminal side, or the course of giving advice or counsel to other officials in government,
to the core being the same. And that is, we’re here to solve a problem. I view misdemeanor crimes that way.
Have we found a way to demonstrate to the community that the intervention of the justice system has made a tangible
difference in their quality of life? And through that lens, I view a whole array of potential innovations that I’m
here to explore at the center. It’s important to find ways to divert low level offenders from the traditional
justice system, which formerly—and in fact, in many cases still—

relies on incarceration. But
in real life in California and in Los Angeles, to potential for incarceration is rather nominal. There is a mandate
to diminish prison overcrowding. It’s also true that there’s been a dramatic diminution in resources for
the state court system, and that’s been pronounced in Los Angeles where we’ve seen the closing, not just
of courtrooms, but of courthouses as well. So what I want to find are innovations that include community based justice.
A neighborhood court system is something that I’m hoping to put in place in Los Angeles, under which low level offenders
go through a process where a panel of community mediators, residents who volunteer to participate under the supervision
of experienced staff members, sit with an offender who’s agreed to circumvent the traditional process, and identify
for that offender the sorts of services that offender ought to perform in the neighborhood to help rectify the problems
that he or she has caused, and also to prescribe for that offender the intervention of social services that are likely
to reduce the possibility that the offender is going to repeat the crime, or the crimes later on. I’m concerned
about particular classes of problems. I’ve assigned somebody to be in charge of school safety-related issues
in my office, and I’m looking for the best ideas around the country for how we can create, in Los Angeles, a robust
sense of safety in and around school sites. It’s essential because, among other reasons, we want to encourage
kids to go to school. We have a truancy issue in every major jurisdiction in the country. It’s true in Los Angeles.
I have in mind to pursue a truancy-based court, a truancy court system where we involve peers of the truant child,
along with his or her parents, and perhaps other community adults, all of whom would come together to try to find
solutions to what, traditionally, has been treated with punishment, as opposed to a constructive approach to have
that child return to school. I’m also here to look at preventative approaches. The justice system is a blunt
instrument frequently, and many of us would benefit tremendously if we could prevent crimes in the first place. I’m
very focused on gun violence prevention, dealing with gang activity in neighborhoods in ways that transcend the usual
supression-based model, which is an essential component, but not a sustainable way to deal with the activity in a
neighborhood.

WOLF: What’s your strategy for enlisting all the different partners that you’ll
need, whether it’s police or the court system itself, or the schools, or I can imagine there’s quite a
vast range in each of these areas that you’ve described—whether it’s misdemeanor offending, or around schools,
or it’s addressing prevention of gun violence. Do you have a way in mind to begin to bring about what sounds
like kind of systemic change?

FEUER: Yes, you’ve hit it on the head. It’s important
for us to engage stakeholders at every level in this process. I’m a very neighborhood-based official and I have
had, in my prior jobs, a very strong affinity for working closely with people at the community level to view life
through the lens of their experience, listen carefully to what their priorities are, and try to effectuate those.
And that’s certainly going to be necessary in this process what I’m working on now. So I’ve been present
at multiple community meetings, I’ve held well over a hundred such sessions in neighborhoods throughout the
city of Los Angeles in just the first nine months or so of being in office, in audiences large and small, most of
which were devoted to trying to find what matters most to constituents and match those issues up with the resources
of my office. There are institutional partner needs as well. The mayor’s office, the city council, the police
department, the court system are just a few among the many partnerships that are necessary for us to effectuate the
goals that I’ve articulated here. There are also different levels of government besides the local level. I’m
working with state officials on some of these issues. I can see the prospect for engaging at the federal level because
there’s an interest in being a catalyst for innovation at the justice department level, and I’m hoping that
we can try to find some resources that (Inaudible) that can be helpful to us. Private foundations can be instrumental
to affecting some of the change we’re looking to implement here.

WOLF: Is there a possibility
of legislative responses to some of these issues, as opposed to just implementing programmatic response?

FEUER: There sometimes can be. I will say that the innovations that we’re talking about here, neighborhood
courts, focuses on truancy and gun violence prevention, and so forth. One is unlikely to need much new legislation
to accomplish these goals. What we need is a can-do attitude, a spirit of innovation, a sense of creativity and imagination,
a very practical event because ideas are only as good as implementation if you’re in public service, and we
need to be sure that we’re taking advantage of the best of what each of our partners has to offer. I often have
said, you know, for lawyers and for elected officials, speaking skills are highly overvalued relative to listening
skills, which are frequently under-valued. Much of the effectiveness of our exercise is going to be contingent on
our capacity to listen carefully to other stakeholders, to good ideas that emanate from others.

WOLF:
Thank you very much for taking the time out of your visit. I know you’ve had a very tight schedule, so I appreciate
your taking a little time to speak with me.

FEUER: It’s always a pleasure to work with you,
and I hope to be invited back.

WOLF: I’m sure you will be. I’ve been speaking with the
Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer, who has been visiting our programs in New York, learning about what we’re
doing here, getting ideas to bring back to California. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communication for at the Center
for Court Innovation. To hear more New Thinking podcasts, please visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org or
you can also listen to us on iTunes, and subscribe, and write a review if you want, actually. Thank you very much
for listening.

Rebuilding Trust in Government in a Country Recovering from Guerrilla Warfare Jun 11, 2014

Miguel Samper Strouss, the vice-minister of criminal policy and restorative justice in the Colombian Ministry
of Justice and Law, discusses the challenge of returning law and order–and trust in justice and government–to the
rural regions of his country that have been devastated by 50 years of guerrilla fighting. (June
2014)

MIGUEL SAMPER STROUSS: The only law enforcement
agency that they know is the FARC, the guerilla groups or the former paramilitary groups, so right now what we have
to do is show them that the government exists, that the government has a human shape, and that the services provided
by the state are trustworthy.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communication
at the Center for Court Innovation with a special guest, Miguel Samper Strouss, the Vice Minister of Criminal Policy
and Restorative Justice at the Ministry of Justice and Law in Columbia, who spent the week in the United States meeting
with justice officials including Attorney General Eric Holder, and talking with experts and visiting programs here
at the Center for Court Innovation’s Midtown Community Court. So I want to welcome you to New Thinking, our
podcast series, where we speak to justice innovators around the U.S. and around the world.

STROUSS:
Well thank you very much for having us here. It has been a very, very interesting and insightful visit.

WOLF: Why don’t I start out by asking you a little bit about some of the challenges that you’re
facing in Columbia regarding the justice system.

STROUSS: Well right now is a very, very curious
moment to ask that because we’re facing the possibility of reaching a peace agreement right now in Columbia,
after 50 years or more of conflict, of armed conflict. We now are facing the greatest opportunity to reach a peace
agreement with the guerilla groups, with the FARC movement. And, well, if we want this peace to be an endurable peace
and a sustainable peace in the future, then we have to build this peace process on three pillars: truth—seeking truth,
finding reparation for victims, and of course the most important one, justice. Justice can ensure that in the future
the conflict will not re-emerge, and the country will see an exit outside of this conflict. So what we now face,
in justice terms, is a big challenge of how to get justice to the regions outside the main cities, the far-reaching
regions of the country, how to get security there through the justice system, and how the state or the government
will regain legitimacy by building trust in the communities through the justice system. It is very important to have
justice present in every single region of the country if you want the state or the government to gain legitimacy
from the citizens. And the armed conflict, what has cost, in many regions in our country, people don’t trust
the government, don’t trust the state. They don’t know the state. The only law enforcement agency that
they know is the FARC, the guerilla groups or the former paramilitary groups, so now what we have to do is show them
that the government exists, that the government has a human shape, and that the services provided by the state are
trustworthy. So we have to get justice to every corner of our country, and to provide good services, reliable services.

WOLF: Well it sounds like a tall order. You’ve got a lot to do, but also an exciting time and a real
opportunity to make long-standing and important changes. Tell me, what have you seen on your visit here that you
think might help you achieve some of the goals you just described?

STROUSS: Well most people know
Columbia, unfortunately, because of the drug production problem. So within having interviews and knowing all the
models, like the drug courts, for example, we visit the drug courts back in Washington, here in New York, the community
court, Columbia is becoming more and more a consumption—a drug consuming country, rather than a drug production country.
So we’re facing there, a huge obstacle for peace if our youth and the new generations are starting to consume
and abuse illegal substances. And we’re trying to evaluate all the models we can find, and the mechanisms, to
treat—not only our peasants because jail is not the answer for them—but also the consumers that are growing in numbers
again, in our country. So right now we are evaluating models in which we, by giving them positive incentives, that
they won’t be in prison, how to handle crimes related to drug abuse. And with that we can improve the security
in the communities, in the cities, but also we can reduce abusing of these illegal substances.

WOLF:
Have you implemented anything like a drug court yet or were you here to see what it’s like when you have a court
that is linking offenders to drug treatment under judicial supervision?

STROUSS: Right. We don’t
have that model in Columbia. We don’t have the mechanisms. I think that our first thoughts when we encounter
this mechanism is that we’re going to need a legal reform because right now those low impact crimes related
to drug abuse, those criminals have to be in prison. So right now we’re running a diagnosis on which model we
should implement in Columbia to tackle the problems I just mentioned.

WOLF: Part of your mission
here is to gather as many options as you can and start thinking through what might work best in your situation.

STROUSS: Exactly.

WOLF: Maybe you could share with me, if there are any innovations or
reforms that you have started to implement, that you think might be of interest to people here in the United States
or in other countries, who might be listening to this podcast.

STROUSS: Yeah, we have a very,
very nice and beautiful program that is called Casas de Justicia, the houses of justice, in which we get the different
alternative justice mechanisms closer to people in the far reaching regions of the country—not in the cities but
in the municipalities that are far away from the cities—so we can get those justice services closer to people, and
also to take the Kafka away, this author that wrote about the judicial system—

WOLF: The surreal
system where you don’t understand what’s going on or how anything works?

STROUSS: Exactly,
and everything is dark, and you don’t understand what’s happening there, and you see the judge—well, you
don’t see the judge. It’s like an anonymous people, person around.

WOLF: Is that a result
of the fears of retribution from drug cartels? That the judges were anonymous?

STROUSS: Well we
implemented that model, but right now I think, even—not only in criminal justice but in civil justice—there’s
a commonly believed idea that justice is very far away from people. So we have to take out the Kafka from our justice.
And this program, Casas de Justicia, is trying to do so by getting alternative mechanisms, not the ordinary judge
sits in Casas de Justicia. What we sit there is referees and mediators and also we have inspectors that try to work
with the community and construct the whole concept of justice and community justice with the community. They work
together to create those bonds that would allow the state to gain legitimacy, and also to provide justice services
in all the regions. We have implemented the program in 82 municipalities right now, and we have provided justice
services for over five million cases in the past 15 or 16 years have been resolved, even better. If you provide justice
services where people haven’t had any contact with the government, then you can ensure that in those regions,
they are not going to make justice by their own hands. They are not going to apply that saying of an eye for an eye
and—

WOLF: —a tooth for a tooth.

STROUSS: Exactly. So what we want is to reduce
and de-escalate the conflict in those regions with this Casas de Justicia.

WOLF: And prior to
the Casas de Justicia, it was kind of a vigilante justice? Or these kinds of crimes or disputes were just resolved
person to person, without any—

STROUSS: Well person to person, but this is the perfect ground
for these guerilla groups or the paramilitary to take place. If you don’t have a government, if you don’t
have a state, if you don’t have institutions or authorities, then any armed group can supply that need. And
that’s what we’re hoping to achieve with this Casas de Justicia, to create safe environments and safe communities
in which the presence of these groups is not going to be needed anymore.

WOLF: I wonder what you
saw at the Midtown Community Court today, because that shares the principle with the Casas de Justicia, of trying
to bring justice into a neighborhood. It’s very different, we’re still in an urban environment, it’s
not the countryside, but I wonder if there was something in what you observed there that you see as similar, or any
ideas that you think might be applicable?

STROUSS: Well, the very interesting part of the community
court is that first it changes the whole way that people interact with justice. because if you think about the ordinary
model in which people interact with justice it’s just through lawyers, in very complex ways, and legal procedures,
legal complications. But this is very close to people. This justice is very close to them, that the justice becomes
not a friend, but a person that is close to the community and one of them, that works with them and not against them,
to try to solve the day by day problems—problems that arise every day. So it’s very interesting to see how it
works and how it handles the drug abuse problems in the community. Because that could trigger a lot of other problems,
persecution, alcohol related crimes. We got a lot of ideas so we can start seeing the way that this will fit according
to Columbian needs.

WOLF: It sounds like you’re taking real advantage of this opportunity
to do a thoughtful job to rebuild the justice system.

STROUSS: Well that’s the idea. That’s
why I’m getting paid. So—

WOLF: Well I want to thank you very much for taking the time to
talk with me. I know you’ve had a busy week.

STROUSS: Well thank you, Rob. It’s been
a very interesting and insightful visit, and of course I enjoyed very much this talk.

WOLF: I’ve
been speaking with Miguel Samper Strouss, the Vice Minister of Criminal Policy and Restorative Justice in Columbia,
who’s been visiting with justice officials and observing programming in the United States. You can listen to
this and other New Thinking podcasts on our website and on iTunes. I’m Rob Wolf, thanks for listening.

How Procedural Justice Strengthens the Public’s Willingness to Obey the Law May 29, 2014

In this New Thinking podcast, Tracey
L. Meares, the Walton Hale Hamilton Professor at Yale Law School, outlines the four components of procedural justice and their power
to enhance perceptions of government legitimacy. She also discusses how procedural justice is incorporated into Chicago
Offender Notification Forums, an anti-violence intervention that she helped design. (June 2014)

TRACEY MEARES: Our forums were organized around legitimacy and the idea is this—is that if legitimacy works,
then you’re going to comply with the law because you believe that government has the right to dictate proper
behavior.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for
Court Innovation and I am in San Francisco at Community Justice 2014 International Summit, meeting and speaking with
a number of leaders in the field of community justice and criminal justice. Right now, I have the pleasure of speaking
with Tracey Meares, who is a professor at Yale Law School. She is a theorist and a social scientist and I want to
thank you for taking the time to speak with me.

MEARES: Thank you.

WOLF: You
will be speaking this afternoon about procedural justice, which is an issue you have been very involved in and done
research on, and written a lot about. So what is procedural justice? I’ve also hear the word legitimacy as well.
Maybe you can help parse those out.

MEARES: So, I think the way to explain how they fit together
is to start with legitimacy first. And the way I like to explain it is to ask people to think about why they, or
other people, obey the law. Do they obey the law because they fear the consequences of failing to do so? Do they
obey the law because they think it’s the right thing to do? Do they obey the law because they think government
has the right to dictate to them proper behavior? The concept of legitimacy encompasses the last idea, that is people
complying voluntarily because they think government has the right to tell them what to do. And it’s a very powerful
when you think about it because unlike the first one—I’m obeying because I fear the consequences of failing to do
so—that’s only gonna work if people perceive there to be someone to carry out a threat. That’s deterrence,
right? That’s often the way criminal justice systems are organized. The second idea, that you’ll obey because
you think it’s the right thing to do, that’s morality. You know, people think about inculcating that idea
through religion and other things, what you teach your children. And that’s a really, really powerful way to
get people—that’s probably the most powerful, that people mostly obey the law because they think it’s the
right thing to do. But every once in awhile there are gonna be laws that you actually don’t think are the right
thing to do. I think historically—registering for the draft, or drug laws, or certain things.
And why is it that people obey those laws? Often it’s because they think that government has the right to dictate
to them proper behavior. And so where does procedural justice fit in? Well, social science research has shown that
procedural justice supports this idea that people will obey because they think government has the right to dictate
to them proper behavior, legitimacy. Procedural justices are the components of government behavior that people tend
to focus on when evaluating legal authorities and finding them fair. There are four factors that people really focus
on. One factor is voice, a second is decision-making neutrality, a third is respectful treatment, and then a fourth
is trust and benevolence. And I’ll explain all four of them in greater detail. So by voice I mean people like
to have an opportunity to tell their side of the story. In a court context, people like to say, well this is what
happened to me. And it’s very important that they have a chance to tell their side of the story, even when it
turns out that it has no impact at all on the outcome. Second, decision-making neutrality. People look for, in interactions
with legal authorities, and they look for indications that the decision that that person is making is neutral and
fair. And one of the best indications is that the person in legal authority gives a reason for what they’re
doing. So the violence reduction strategies that I’ve been involved in, we bring people together who have violent
crimes or gun offenses in their history and, you know, we explain to them the consequences of their behavior, and
we provide them an example of someone who’s changed their life around. And we offer them services. And we say
look, going forward, if you have a gun these are going to be the consequences for you. The reason why that’s
important is so that if that happens, or when that happens, they’ll know exactly why it’s happening and
they’re not singled out because they’re from—well I’m in San Francisco now—they’re
from the tenderloin, or because they’re African-American, or because they’re a young Latino, you know?
They have been given a reason and they know what the reason is. The third factor that’s really, really important
for people is treatment with dignity and respect. And that has often been translated in some other contexts by people
who don’t really understand the theory as just being nice. Like basically you can do whatever you want to people
as long as you’re nice. And I think that it is true that it is possible for police to violate constitutional
dictates and treat people with respect, and have people be relatively satisfied with the encounter after. But you
know, over time obviously that will run into the other factors that I was talking about, clearly. But treatment with
dignity and respect is really key, and research shows that different ethnic groups and racial groups care about these
factors to a greater extent. So Latinos, in particular, really care about this factor.

WOLF: Before
you go on, you mentioned, research has shown. Has it shown for the treating people with dignity and respect produces
a more positive feeling from the litigant or the defender, whoever’s detained, is that true also, has research
of all these aspects of procedural justice voice, decision neutrality—I know you’re going to go on to speak
about trust—have they been all researched in similarly rigorous ways?

MEARES: Yes. Well, because
when you look at the, when you look at the research on procedural justice it’s not as if the research singles
out each individual factor. It’s the bundle of the factors that go together and most of this is done through
survey work, and you can ask people particular questions, and we create scales that capture the different aspects.
And so the last aspect is the one that’s the most amorphous, but basically it’s a more general category
that tries to capture the idea that a person expects to be treated benevolently in the future by the person in legal
authority.

WOLF: Well that’s very interesting. Thank you for the primer on procedural justice
and what it is, and the four components that define it. Let’s talk a little bit about the violence reduction
strategies that you referred to, you were associated with the Chicago forums of the Project Safe Neighborhoods Initiative,
federal initiative, and I know that those are adaptations or related to what are sometimes referred to as call-ins.
There are different names for them that David Kennedy and others developed in Boston, I know in High Point North
Carolina as well. So maybe you could tell me a little bit about the Chicago model, how they work and what is different
about what was developed in Chicago.

MEARES: Well we owe, obviously, a huge debt to the work in
Boston that David and his colleagues have done. That work focused on groups of kids, youth, reciprocating in violence
because of beefs. And so they map that out and they talk to them about the consequences of being involved in violence,
and—

WOLF: And this was really murders and gang violence, right?

MEARES: Yeah. So the first thing we did was structural because mapping that out takes a long time, and we
didn’t have the time or the resources to do it when we started. So we decided to use an individual level intervention,
rather than a group-based intervention. And we selected people based on their criminal history status. So in order
to attend a Chicago forum, you had to have a gun crime in your history or a violent crime. So basically as you got
out of prison, we called people in in groups of 20. And we would have call-ins every three weeks.

WOLF:
Did they follow a similar model where you had people who are giving both a positive message and a message of, if
you—here are resources for you to get your life on track, and here are the consequences
if you don’t, and they could be very serious consequences.

MEARES: So, we were definitely
inspired by that model. Our forums were organized around legitimacy, and the idea was this —is
that if legitimacy works then you’re going to comply with the law because you believe that government has the
right to dictate to you proper behavior. And if it doesn’t then, you know, we have deterrents and we have these
other things, but our overall goal was that. And so the design of the people who were speaking, where we had it,
the structure of the room, everything was all about enhancing legitimacy. So there’s a law enforcement message,
a key part of that law enforcement message is the local police commander saying to the participants, I am your police
chief. It is my job to keep everybody in our community safe. You’re a part of this community and it is my job
to keep you safe. So right there it’s an identification of the participants of members of the community with
value. The ex-offender who tells the story about changing his or her life is really important. I tell that person
to say that this is really hard work. And the service providers are there too, to provide information about an option
because the key to legitimacy is activation of agency, right? It’s internalized. So the constant message is,
this is up to you. No one can make you do it. I’m not gonna make you do it. All I’m gonna do is give you information
about the consequences, but this choice is yours. And then finally architecturally we set up the room in a very particular
way to signal that we’re all in this together. And the tables are in a circle like this, and there’s no
podium.

WOLF: Right, so there’s no podium and not an audience all facing one way. It’s
a circle.

MEARES: It’s a circle and that’s really important. And I also, I never have
the forums in law enforcement location. So we have them in places of what we call civic importance. So in New York
we have it in the Adam Clayton Powell building, and in the Bronx they have it in a beautiful museum, and in Brownsville
they have it in the library. And these are places that citizens go to and, you know, these are folks who should be
welcome there too. And that’s also part of the signal.

WOLF: Well thank you very much. It’s
been very interesting and I really appreciate your taking the time to speak with me. I’ve been talking with
Tracy Meares, who is a law professor at Yale Law School. She’s a social scientist and she is an expert on legitimacy
and procedural justice, so thank you so much.

MEARES: You’re welcome. I had fun.

WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. To listen to more
podcasts and to learn more about procedural justice and community justice you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.
Thank you for listening.

Chief Judge Timothy C. Evans of Cook County, Illinois, participates in a panel on — **Minimizing the Collateral Consequences of a Conviction** May 12, 2014
Timothy C. Evans, chief judge of the Circuit
Court of Cook County in Illinois, explains how courts can help mitigate the collateral consequences of
justice system involvement. Among other things, courts can reach out to those affected to educate them about their
rights and options, Evans says in this New Thinking podcast.

Chief
Judge Timothy C. Evans of Cook County, Illinois, participates in a panel on “Minimizing the Collateral Consequences
of Justice Involvement” at Community Justice 2014.

JUDGE
TIMOTHY C. EVANS: We’ve had instances where people were locked up pending trial, asking—well let me just enter
a plea of guilty so I can get out. They want to get out of jail and don’t realize, hey, that conviction is going
to follow you wherever you’re gonna go.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf,
director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. I’m in San Francisco at Community Justice 2014.
Today I’m speaking with Timothy C. Evans, the Chief Judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County in Chicago, Illinois.
Welcome to our New Thinking podcast series.

JUDGE EVANS: Well thank you, Rob, for inviting me.
It’s a pleasure to be here with you.

WOLF: You participated in a plenary session this morning
that was titled Minimizing the Collateral Consequences of Justice Involvement. So I thought that’s what we would
spend these next few minutes focusing on, and maybe we could start off just by you sharing a little bit or explaining
when we talk about collateral consequences of justice involvement, what exactly does that mean?

JUDGE
EVANS: All right, most people would realize that if, in the criminal justice system, someone is arrested and is charged
with a given offense, let’s say some kind of drug-oriented offense, that if a person is going to enter a plea
of guilty, or goes to trial on an issue like that, probably the direct consequence is going to be some kind of time
in jail, some kind of a conviction that might result in someone losing his or her freedom for a period of time. That’s
a direct consequence. But the collateral consequence would be, using this example but going a step further, that
in addition to the person being convicted and locked up for a time, that person might also find himself deported,
lose his right to stay in the country. So that’s a collateral consequence. An additional one might be that the
person could no longer be in a profession that requires a license. Let’s say barbers, for example, can’t
be convicted of certain offenses, and so that would be a collateral consequence in addition to a plea of guilty for
this particular problem with the drug, they end up losing the right to have that license. Housing is another collateral
consequence. There may be some division where a person is living that says that if you’re convicted of a certain
offense you can’t live there any longer. Scholarships and educational opportunities, if you are convicted of
certain things, you don’t qualify for that. Or you might go into a career like public transportation, driving
a bus—they might say, no, you can’t do that if you’re convicted of this kind of offense. So these are the
kinds of collateral consequences that we’re talking about.

WOLF: So it sounds like someone
could be convicted of one thing and receive a sentence that is proportionate to—hopefully proportionate to the crime,
the offense, but then these collateral consequences could go on for many years to come and affect employment, housing—I
mean it sounds like you could end up homeless if you get kicked out of public housing because of rules against having,
you know, certain kinds of convictions. So it’s very expansive, in a sense. You have a discreet sentence, but
then it affects your life.

JUDGE EVANS: It truly does affect your life in many ways, and the focus
today in the session that we alluded to earlier gave us a chance to concentrate on who has the responsibility of
ameliorating some of these collateral consequences. The Supreme Court case, the Padilla case that was the subject
of that particular discussion, said that at the very least, the lawyer representing the defendant who has been charged
has a responsibility, yes discussing the direct consequences, but also the collateral consequences in a particular
case. A person didn’t have that kind of advice and there was a question whether the sixth amendment applied,
to have effective counsel. But my point of view is that it permeates throughout a system of fairness that should
be committed to justice, that it shouldn’t just be on the shoulder of the defense attorney. But the prosecutorial
segment of our society has to be interested in justice, and certainly the judge hearing that case has a responsibility
too, and I shared that in the state of Illinois, in Cook County, we certainly put that burden on the judge as well.
We want the judge to tell the defendant appearing before the judge—are you aware that if you’re not a citizen,
these are the consequences that may flow from this plea of guilty. So I think it’s a commitment, and we have
to make the fairness, no matter what. And we have to assume that people who are going through that particular phase
of their lives, that they’re not focusing on anything like that. We’ve had instances where people were
locked up pending trial, asking—well let me just enter a plea of guilty so I can get out. They want to get out of
jail and don’t realize, hey, that conviction is going to follow you wherever you’re gonna go. And that
gets back to your question. It absolutely does transcend this time period that they might otherwise be thinking about.

WOLF: You talked about how judges in Cook County will explain the collateral consequence vis-à-vis immigration
status. Are there other ways that the justice system in Cook County is trying to minimize collateral consequences?

JUDGE EVANS: Yes, we have several. One would be a commitment to sealed records so that they couldn’t
be used in an inappropriate way. We have several other kinds of activities I discussed, for example certificates
of relief, certificates of good character, certificates of innocence, that make it possible for the person who has
been rehabilitated to obviate some of the collateral consequences that we talked about. For example, the licensing.
If a person wants to resume being a licensed barber, even though he’d been convicted of something that would
normally take that licensing capability away, under this certificate of relief that we talked about, we could have
that hearing, enter that order, the person receive that certificate, then we would tell the employer you won’t
be charged with any particular problem if you hire this person. They are rehabilitated and they now qualify for the
license that had been taken away from them. So we have all kinds of programs like that and we are pleased to see
them work.

WOLF: And are those programs that are initiated through the judiciary, or are they
legislatively enacted?

JUDGE EVANS: They are carried out by the judiciary, but they are statutorily
in effect. The state legislature has worked closely with the judiciary in trying to make these opportunities available.
But we have to be proactive as members of the judiciary or members of the legal community to make these opportunities
available to people who are not comfortable in our setting. Most people don’t know that they’ve got the
right to petition to expunge a certain record. They don’t know what they have to do to qualify for that, so
they don’t know how to seal a background, they don’t know about these certificates of relief unless we
be proactive in making sure they’re given access to these kinds of activities. I discussed one particular thing
that I thought was particularly helpful in this pending before the legislature right now, and that is the expungement
of juvenile records. Certainly if adults don’t know what it is that I’m talking about, children certainly would
not know and under the legislation that is pending in the legislature in Springfield, Illinois now, that expungement
would be automatic. When a child reaches the age of 18, his or her record would automatically be expunged and they
would then be given a new chance, a second chance to apply for that scholarship to go on to college, or to apply
for the first job they’re gonna get, or to apply for housing for the first time they’ll have access to.

WOLF: And let me just ask you one last question, because you mentioned the fact that although you have these
different ways that people can mitigate the collateral consequences through expungement or these different certificates,
they don’t always take advantage of it. And you alluded to a little of that before as well. What are the strategies?
How do you engage people so that they do come in or they do find out that these things are possible and they do clear
up some of these collateral consequences?

JUDGE EVANS: Well, we try to provide this information
on the circumstances that are beyond the traditional circumstances. For example, if a person had to come to court
to find out about these, chances are they wouldn’t come to court. They think about what is facing them right
then, they’re not looking for other opportunities. So what we do is we provide these opportunities, let’s
say on weekends, Saturdays and Sundays we go to the YMCA, we go to other places where people gather. We go to churches,
we go to civic groupings where we can bring the court, and bring the forms, and bring the lawyers who can help them
fill out those forms at no expense to them. And I think when people see what we have to show them, under those informal
circumstances, then they can ask a question. They’re not embarrassed, they’re not ashamed, they realize
that others have similar problems to the problems they have. So that’s how we try to do it. We ask for free
time on the radio, or on television. We make it kind of a public service, you know, things of that kind.

WOLF: Well thank you very much for explaining, you know, some of these great ideas and the way you’re
carrying it out. Addressing this clearly difficult and important issue. I’ve been speaking with Chief Judge
Timothy C. Evans, he’s the Chief Judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County in Chicago, Illinois, and we’ve
been talking about how to mitigate collateral consequences of justice system involvement. Thank you so much.

JUDGE EVANS: You’re quite welcome, Rob, and I claim you and I have your family back in Chicago. I’m
going to tell them, if I can, what a great job you’re doing in New York and how much you are very effective.
But I’m telling them we need that kind of talent back in Illinois, back in Chicago.

WOLF: Well
thank you very much. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. To learn more
about community justice and the Center for Court Innovation, please visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.
You can also listen to our podcast there, and you can also find us on iTunes. Thanks.

Kathleen West participates in a panel on linking defendants to services at Community Justice 2014. — **Improving Outcomes by Assessing the Impact of Trauma on Offenders** May 07, 2014
Courts need to assess offenders for traumatic exposures so they can match them to effective services and improve
treatment outcomes, says Kathleen West, an expert on trauma-informed care and lecturer at the University of California.
In this New Thinking podcast, West discusses what we know about the impact of trauma on litigants and the justice
system. *(April 2014)*

Kathleen West participates in a panel on linking defendants
to services at Community Justice 2014.

KATHLEEN WEST: Trauma exposure is not equally distributed across our population, so some communities have
a lot, a lot of risk, just certain zip codes have, you know, great risk for being exposed to trauma.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and I am at the Community
Justice 2014 International Summit in sf. I’m speaking with one of the presenters right now, Kathleen West, who
is a researcher. She lectures at UCLA and the University of Southern California, and today she was here speaking
about linking defendants to services, with an emphasis on trauma informed care, and the role trauma has played in
the lives of many people who find themselves in the criminal justice system, and how the justice system can start
considering the effects of trauma when working with these clients and offenders. Thank you very much for taking the
time to speak with me.

WEST: Thanks.

WOLF: So let’s talk a little bit
about trauma-informed care. What is it, exactly?

WEST: Well, basically it means to consider the
traumatic exposures that your clients have had, or your defendants have had, and that you need to be assessing for
trauma exposures, making sure that you are aware of what the background traumatic exposure might be, and that your
system of care is not traumatogenic, that you are not exacerbating the problems, that you’re also not putting
clients in programs where they’re not likely to succeed. You don’t want to set them up to fail if the structure
or ambiance of the program, or the jail or correctional facility is going to induce more trauma, because we know
that folks that are in traumatized states that may have a PTSD diagnosis—

WOLF: Post traumatic—

WEST: Post traumatic stress disorder, or if you really actually have a full blown diagnosis with a disorder
there where you’ve moved into a state of pathology in managing your traumatic stress, then you may not be able
to receive treatment in a way that it’s designed, if you’re not really considering the traumatic effect.
Also we’ve found that a lot of our courts, while not intending to do harm, can do harm both to the practitioners
in the court systems by vicarious trauma, where a lot of our practitioners are clerks or attorneys, are exposed to
a lot of trauma and then we’re traumatogenic in sharing that across our system so that we’re actually—it’s
not just our clients that are suffering, perhaps, but some secondary traumatization can happen as well.

WOLF: So when we speak of the effect on clients, one thing I’m hearing you say is that if you don’t
assess or evaluate the level of trauma they may have experienced in their life, you might not be able to match them
effectively to treatment.

WEST: That’s right, absolutely. So it’s really matching the
treatment issues. So we had a lot of discussions here around risk assessment and that is one element of assessment
that you certainly, obviously, have to do, but traumatic exposure assessment has been rarely done. I think the reason
why this has become a bigger public health awareness issue is really with the average childhood experiences study,
which is a massive longitudinal study, it’s called the ASA study, and it was a very big, ongoing still, longitudinal
study done by the Kaiser Health System. And what they identified was that exposure to what they called adverse childhood
experiences—and that’s an assessment tool that looked at 10 different kinds of exposures that included things
like having a parent in jail, or being abused physically oneself—ended up with a lot of negative health consequences
later on as an adult, including, some of this included traumatic exposures. And now we’re aware that we really
ought to be assessing for those factors as well, that are not criminogenic factors, that we don’t necessarily
think of as risk factors in the same way, but that actually can be a, can make a big difference whether people can
succeed or cannot comply with a program. So, making the distinction between inability to comply and non-compliance
is a really important distinction we’d like to make here, I think. They might look the same, but I think our
ethical obligation to respond to them is different. If somebody is unable to comply because of various exposures
or inability to do things that they have, that’s one thing. But if they are none compliant, that’s something
else. So we need to tease out that difference and try to match our programming appropriately.

WOLF:
And is there the capacity to do that? Do we have the tools to differentiate between those who are unable to comply
and those who are, I guess, who aren’t complying for some sort of willfulness?

WEST: I think
there are the tools available and we’re getting to that place. I’m not gonna be able to name a specific
tool at the moment because I think it really does vary, actually, on the population you’re looking at. But yes,
we are getting to the place where there are those resources available. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration, SAMSA, has an entire website devoted to trauma-informed care, there’s a national clearinghouse,
national center on trauma-informed practices, trauma-informed care. The National Center for Child Traumatic Stress,
NCTSN, has a lot of resources available. Where understanding and evaluating trauma, and then matching what kind of
programs might be available is very important. Also medication management should be influenced by a trauma exposure
assessment as well.

WOLF: And before we started, you referred to the issue of including trauma-informed
care and just the epidemic nature of trauma on certain populations as a public health problem. And I wonder if you
could elaborate on that because I think a lot of people are also interested in the nexus between the justice system
and public health.

WEST: I’m delighted to hear that. I mean I know that that’s really
why I’m here, is the community courts, community justice movement. I do see this as a public health issue. I think
a lot of public health practitioners are increasingly aware that all of our highest risk patients, clients, are also
in the criminal justice system, often times, and when they are not in the criminal justice system, they are recycling
in and out, you know, on the streets, homelessness, domestic violence, problems with the ability to maintain jobs,
employment, certainly health issues, mental health issues, traumatic brain injury, and all sorts of things that are
challenges. So I think many of us certainly look at this as an intergenerational situation as well, that we really
want to get in there and provide early intervention and prevention, and a place where we can deal with this. In some
populations this is endemic. Trauma exposure is not equally distributed across our population, so some communities
have a lot, a lot of risk, just certain zip codes have, you know, great risk for being exposed to trauma, and what
we know for the most part is that the more you’re exposed, it doesn’t mean that you get better at managing
it, actually it’s additive and intensity, duration, and frequency all make a difference in whether or not you’re
able to be resilient. We really want to be looking at resiliency and how our courts can help people do that, so we’re
looking, trying strength-based, how we find pro-social kinds of things, how can we make sure that we’re not
asking people to do things that they can’t comply with and can’t do, just from even a physiological perspective,
and making sure that we give people the time to heal. We want to emphasize that even with a diagnosis of PTSD, this
is not a death now, but a long shot. There is treatment that’s effective and that people can manage and live
with that their whole lives. That’s really important to understand. But if it’s not taken into account
then you can’t treat it, and you may be misdiagnosing or missing something. And that’s just where I think
our courts, especially community courts, are so therapeutic in their approach, that this is just something they ought
not be missing in their assessment.

WOLF: When you talk about a public health approach, or a public
health problem, does it mean not only looking at trauma as a health problem, but applying some of the tools that
come from public health? I mean you refer to prevention and the criminal justice system is increasingly thinking
about prevention and thinking about recidivism. Does that have parallels in the public health system, like preventing
an illness, preventing a return of an illness?

WEST: Absolutely, and it also quite concretely
has a lot to do with good use of scarce resources, right? And the Affordable Care Act is really making people aware
that it makes so much more sense to do really good up front diagnosis, get in that preventative healthcare services,
and you won’t be seeing people in your emergency room, which is not a good place to deliver primary care. I
think there’s a real parallel there, where we ought to be doing better work in our community justice programming,
really identifying clearly at the beginning who we’ve got as high risk populations, screening out our low risk,
make sure we’re maintaining them well and addressing their needs right away, which can be really low cost. Early
intervention, not waiting until you have a frank pathology or a frank perpetrator, you know serious offender on your
hands. We ought to be investing more in our preschool programming, for example, or even in our courts we really need
to be looking at that whole family constellation, which is still our core of our socialization or social norms as
a family. So even when you’ve got a criminal court and we’re working with the defendant as a lone wolf,
they’re not a lone wolf. They’re somewhere embedded in a community with a family and somebody else. And
if we don’t, you know, pay attention to that community and try to support them, they’re gonna be a problem.
And I also think that as we’re looking at our higher risk folks, we need to provide that right dose of care,
identify what the problems are, and really intensively serve them so that we don’t see them, you know, coming
back in and out again of our system. It is an analogy to our healthcare system.

WOLF: Well I know
you have a plane to catch and I really appreciate your taking the time to talk to me.

WEST: Thank
you for your interest. I’m so glad you’re working on this, and I’m so glad to hear that you know, there might
be more opportunities for public health and our court systems to interact, so thank you.

WOLF:
I’ve been speaking Kathleen West, who is a researcher, a lecturer, at University of Southern California and
UCLA, and an expert on trauma-informed care. To find out more about the Center for Court Innovation, about this conference,
Community Justice 2014, or even about the nexus between public health and the justice system, you can visit our website
at www.courtinnovation.org. You can also listen to our New Thinking podcast on iTunes. I’m Rob Wolf, thanks
for listening.

In keynote remarks at Community Justice 2014, Michael Botticelli discusses the importance of public health
strategies in addressing drug addiction. — **Deploying Public Health Strategies to Address Drug Addiction** May 06, 2014
Drug addiction is fundamentally a public health issue, says Michael Botticelli, acting director of National Drug Control Policy, in this New Thinking podcast. Botticelli explains
why law enforcement must work in tandem with public health to address addiction and how his own personal experience
with addiction informs his work.

In keynote remarks at Community Justice 2014, Michael Botticelli discusses the
importance of public health strategies in addressing drug addiction.

*(April 2014)*

MICHAEL BOTTICELLI: You know I say I’m not unique in the sense that I’m one of 23 million Americans who
are in recovery. What makes it unique is I get to sit at the White House and kind of do this work.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi, this is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. I am in San Francisco
at the Community Justice 2014 and I have the pleasure of sitting down right now with Michael Botticelli, who is the
acting director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Thank you so much for taking the time
to speak with me.

BOTTICELLI: It’s great to be here, Rob.

WOLF: I wanted
to ask you a few questions about your role as what is sometimes referred to, and has been over the years, as drug
czar. And I thought a great way to segue into this conversation is really to ask you if that term really captures
your work, and what you think about it. Perhaps there’s been an evolution in thinking about the role of the
office.

BOTTICELLI: I actually really hate the term drug czar, only because I think it, you know,
the term czar actually means something that kind of coordinates things, which is really what we do, but I think it’s
been associated with previous administration’s policy about the war on drugs, which is clearly not what this
administration is all about, so I don’t like the term because I think it raises, for people, this kind of very
law enforcement-centric, arrest people for addiction. So I really, I don’t like the term drug czar. You know,
and the other piece for me is I have a very atypical background in terms of someone who’s leading our agency.
So, I don’t come from a law enforcement background, I come from a public health background, I’m in recovery
myself. Maybe some of it is I don’t associate myself with the drug czar, so that’s probably why I don’t
like the term.

WOLF: You’re talking about your public health background and I wonder if you
think people see illegal drugs as an either/or situation, as either a law enforcement problem or if they’re
coming from your perspective, as a public health problems, and it just depends on the orientation that a police chief
might think of it as a law enforcement problem and a treatment provider thinks of it as public health.

BOTTICELLI: I actually think things are dramatically changing in terms of that kind of focus, and you know,
part of my job I get to talk to a tremendous amount of local law enforcement officers who will say, you can’t
arrest our way out of the problem, and understanding that this is a public health issue. So I just participated in
a conference in Washington with over 200 local law enforcement across the country, and it’s really interesting
for me to hear things like, we can’t arrest our way out of the problem, that we have to partner with public
health in terms of the work that we do. And quite honestly, I think that that’s the function of our office,
in terms of how do we continue to bridge—you know, law enforcement does play a crucial role in terms of the public
safety consequences, and making sure we have safe communities, and trying to minimize the impact that drugs have
on our community. But I think there’s a growing understanding that this is fundamentally a public health related
issue. And so part of our job, at our office, is how do we continue to bridge that gap between public health and
law enforcement, in terms of the strategies. I think a lot of the work that we’ve done on overdose prevention,
I think has moved that conversation dramatically and we’ve seen the dramatic uptake of the use of naloxone,
which was a highly effective, highly safe overdose prevention medication by local law enforcement. And I think that’s
dramatically changed the conversation. So, so I don’t—I think people are understanding that we actually do need
this balanced approach between law enforcement and public safety, and that we can’t just you know, I always
say we can’t incarcerate addiction out of people. And so, you know, I think they understand that we have to
have primarily a public health response, but in partnership with law enforcement.

WOLF: Since
the conference here is a community justice conference, I wonder if you think that problem solving courts like drug
courts or re-entry courts, community courts, can play a role in addressing the problematic use of drugs, and can
they also contribute to reframing the debate about getting law enforcement and public health advocates working more
collaboratively?

BOTTICELLI: So problem-solving courts looking at any opportunity to divert people
away from the criminal justice system has been part of our strategy since the beginning of the administration. And
I would absolutely agree with you that I think these problem-solving courts and drug courts have really shown the
way in terms of well wait a second here, we can have a different kind of approach here, other than just incarcerating
folks. I think we’ve seen the explosion of, particularly, drug courts, not only in the United States but internationally.
And so I think that we have about 2,700 drug courts here in the United States. They are in 22 countries. So I think
there’s a growing understanding that if you partner the criminal justice folks with the public health folks,
that we really can have effective strategies here. I think you know that many, many states across political stripes
have really been engaged in wholesale justice reinvestment. I think they’ve understood that incarceration is
both costly and ineffective in terms of dealing with people with substance use disorders. So, and I think clearly,
you know, you’ve seen the work and the changes that have come out of the attorney general’s office around,
and with, the president, in terms of fairer sentencing laws and really looking at how do we make sure that we’re
not incarcerating folks who really need to be dealt with, in terms of treatment related issues.

WOLF:
And how do you see getting police prosecutors, probation departments, and particularly law enforcement, so police,
to pursue public safety buy also incorporating these lessons of public health, prevention, and treatment, concretely,
rather than just saying—well it’s a public health problem, so let’s bring in some public health advocates—let
them do it. Can law enforcement actively also engage in public health?

BOTTICELLI: I absolutely
think so, and I think that’s a lot of the work that we’ve been doing. And you know, so first and foremost,
we want to make sure that law enforcement, like other people, understand what addiction is, and understand what it
means and how it affects judgment, and how it affects people’s ability to make decisions. And you know, there’s
been models in other areas, particularly in terms of mental health, of how, on the street, can you really not turn
this into an arrest. you know, again, I think I’ve heard from many, many law enforcement folks who’ve seen—and
I think particularly with the prescription drug issue—have seen that they’re arresting the same people over
and over again, and how ineffective that is to be able to do that. And I also, again, think that the overdose situation
has changed dramatically. I think that many of these law enforcement are seeing kids from their own community who
are overdosing, and understanding that we need to have another response to this. So I think it’s been helpful,
and I’m not saying that there are not pockets of resistance or pockets of change, but I do think that there’s
a building momentum around not just a direct kind of local law enforcement response, but a larger criminal justice
response to people with addictive disorders.

WOLF: Let me ask you, and you referred to it yourself
in the beginning of the interview, and your official bio notes that you’re in long term recovery yourself. And
I just wonder how your personal experience informs your work. And do you think recovering addicts can or should play
more active roles in developing drug policies?

BOTTICELLI: So maybe I’ll start with the last first.
You know, obviously being in recovery, I do feel that people who come from affected communities should be part and
parcel of the policy and decision-making. I have a long career in public health and I did a lot of work around HIV
and AIDS, where clearly the consumer voice, you know, needed to be at the table. And there used to be an expression—nothing
about us without us. And I carry that with me in terms of our work that we do on both the national and local levels.
You know, I say I’m not unique in the sense that I’m one of 23 million Americans who are in recovery. What makes
it unique is I get to sit at the White House and kind of do this work. So that’s the really cool piece about
it. But what it says to me is that people who are affected by this disorder really have a unique experience and really
have a unique voice that needs to be heard at every level. And by virtue of the fact that I am in recovery, and am
in this job, I think shows the administration’s commitment to really making sure that folks have a voice at
the table. And it does inform the work that I do in terms of understanding. I think of my own experience and what
were the missed opportunities along the way in terms of identifying this issue with me early on. So it makes us think
about things like screening a brief intervention, of how do we intervene, particularly for folks who we know are
at risk of developing a more significant problem. You know I actually kind of got into treatment because of my own
involvement with the law. I was arrested for drunk driving, I was in a drunk driving car accident, and actually had
the opportunity of being somewhat of a forced opportunity to say, treatment or we can continue down the criminal
justice path. So, you know, part of it for me—and that’s why the significance of being at conferences like this
is to say, you know, 27 years ago I was in handcuffs. And for me, now, to be sitting as the acting Director of the
Office of National Drug Control Policy is, I think, particularly indicative of how we can take those opportunities,
one not let people get involved with the criminal justice system in the first place and second, how do we really
look at those intersections with the criminal justice system? And make sure that people are getting adequate care
and treatment. You know, again, you know we can’t arrest our way out of the problem. You can’t incarcerate
addiction out of people. And we really need to make sure—and I think, again, that’s the exciting part and in
terms of being here at this conference and looking at the agenda, that there is a growing acknowledgment in terms
of that we can have a more effective and, quite honestly, a much more compassionate response in terms of how we deal
with addiction.

WOLF: Well thank you very much for sharing your thoughts with me and good luck
with your mission.

BOTTICELLI: Thanks.

WOLF:
I’ve been speaking with Michael Botticelli, who’s the acting director of the Office of National Drug Control
Policy, and he is about to take the stage shortly at Community Justice 2014 here in sf. I’m Rob Wolf, Director
of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. To listen to more podcasts like this you can visit our website
at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

Edward J. Latessa conducts a session on Evidence-Based Approaches to Alternatives to Incarceration at Community
Justice 2014. — **Thoughtful Implementation is Essential for Evidence-based Practices to Succeed** May 02, 2014
Professor Edward J. Latessa, director of the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati, discusses
the importance of evidence-based practices and the challenges of implementing reform. *(April 2014)*

Edward J. Latessa
conducts a session on Evidence-Based Approaches to Alternatives to Incarceration at Community Justice 2014.

ED LATESSA: I always tell people you know,
you think it’s easy to change behavior, try to change it around, it’s not an easy thing to do. And that’s
certainly true when you’re trying to change a staff or an organization.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi,
I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation and I am here today at the International
Community Justice Summit in San Francisco, and I have the pleasure right now of speaking with Ed Latessa, who is
a professor and director of the School of Criminal Justice, and the University of Cincinnati’s Correction Institute.
Let’s talk about evidence based practice. How has it come about, that we now recognize that evidence based practice
are an important component of any new initiative, and why are they important?

LATESSA: Well, I
think that the evidence based movement had its origins in other fields. For example, medicine is often considered
one of the leaders in moving in this direction. In the case of corrections specifically, I think there were a couple
things that helped the movement. One was through techniques like med analysis. Researchers became better at sifting
through lots and lots of studies, and so we really started to see where there was a cumulative effect of studies
in certain areas. Second, the National Institute of Corrections, 20 some years ago, really began to promote this
work. I remember for many years I did workshops with Don Andrews from Canada, and we spent a lot of time in those
days trying to convince people that we actually knew something about correctional programs. What’s interesting
now is I don’t really have to convince people. It’s really around implementation. The same, if you think
about, you know, basically the use of data to help make better decisions applies in policing, it applies in crime
prevention, and we’ve really seen almost the entire field embrace evidence based practice. I think there’s
a lot of reasons that the message has caught on. As I said, other fields have embraced it. I think more recently
the financial difficulties that states and jurisdictions have faced, some very, very conservative states and legislators
have looked hard and what they’re spending money on, and what they’re getting in return. And that, of course,
has helped fuel the demand for more effective programs and interventions. You know, in Texas they say it’s not
about being tough on crime, it’s about being smart on time. And I think that when you have a state like Texas
that has embraced this kind of work, that sends a powerful message to others.

WOLF: You used the
word implementation as being important, so maybe you could talk a little bit about that. You might have a study that
shows a certain strategy works. Are you saying that may well be true but if you don’t implement in properly,
it won’t work?

LATESSA: Yeah, there’s no question that that’s our biggest challenge.
I always tell people you know, you think it’s easy to change behavior, try to change it around, it’s not
an easy thing to do. And that’s certainly true when you’re trying to change a staff or an organization
that have been doing thing a certain way, they’ve hired people for certain reasons and now, you know, someone
like me comes a long and says what you’re doing isn’t very effective. Once they get past that initial kind
of shock of that, we’re talking about, in many cases, a major paradigm shift, and that requires training, coaching,
quality assurance. That’s a lot of work. That’s not easy. What we have found, in our work, and the research backs
this up, that training alone is not a very good way to change behavior. It’s not very effective. People take
what they like from the training and they ignore the rest. So in some ways, what that’s saying is information
alone isn’t enough. You’ve got to go to that next step, which is coaching staff, just like you would coach
someone who’s trying to learn a new skill, a child trying to learn a sport, an offender trying to learn a new
way to behave. Coaching, giving feedback, collecting data, showing where it works, showing where it doesn’t.
As you put that together, you really become and evidence based organization, and not just someone who uses some evidence
based programs. And I think at the end of the day, that’s where we want to be.

WOLF: So you
can’t have someone drop in and coach you for a week, it sounds like you have to integrate into your functioning
a way to make coaching an ongoing part of the program.

LATESSA: Yeah, with our model, we really
focus on supervisors. We think they’re the key to kind of long term sustainability. You’ve got to have,
obviously, support at the top, but it’s the supervisors where most staff take their cues. And so in some models
we have them training, we not only train everyone, we make the supervisors use the model, they then are trained as
coaches, they then are trained in quality assurance. Because I think for years we spent, you know, millions of dollars
on training staff. You name it, I mean motivational interviewing, cog assessment, and we haven’t necessarily
given the systems the ability to sustain it over time. And I always tell folks I work with, you know, you’re
gonna get trained on something, you need to ask will they train trainers? Will they give us ongoing support? Because
what happens when they leave? Or, of course what happens is most folks, when they roll out some new intervention,
they get everybody trained and all excited and then two years later they’re not gonna spend any more money on
training. And so it becomes quality starts, fidelity starts to slip because they’re basically saying, watch
me and you’ll figure it out. So I’m really convinced that you’ve got to stay with that agency and work
with them, and give them the capacity to stay over time. The other thing it does is as new staff get hired and folks
come on board, they think it’s how you’ve always done it, you know? It all becomes a lot easier to sustain
it, and to do it well.

WOLF: So what are some of the more exciting evidence based practice that
people are beginning to integrate into their work with correction or more broadly in the justice system?

LATESSA: Well, I think there’s some exciting work in a number of areas. I think that we continue to
do work and assessment, and not just looking at assessment tools, but helping folks link those assessments to case
plans and to interventions. A lot of work being done there. We’ve got a new model that we call EPICS, Effective
Practices for Community Supervision, in which we’re training probation, and parole, and case managers, on how
to use core correctional practices, to work differently with their clients. And we’re very excited. We’ve
been doing this work around the country, it’s based on Canadian work that Jim Bonta did, and it really changes
the whole nature of the officer/client relationship. We’ve known for a long time that how many times you see
them doesn’t really matter. Case load sizes don’t matter. It’s what you do when you interact with
an offender. It’s teaching the officer how to develop a relationship, how to use authority appropriately, how
to model, how to teach that offender new skills in a very short structured intervention. We’re very excited
about that work. We’re actually testing something called Family EPICS, with juveniles, where we go out with
the probation and parole officer into the home, and train the parent or parents on how to work differently with their
child. And I’m convinced that if we can change the way we supervise and handle people we can have a profound effect
on reducing recidivism. So that’s exciting work. We’re now starting to look at work with misdemeanants
in pre-trial, some assessment work being done, some work that the center is doing, looking at misdemeanants. This
has often been kind of an overlooked, neglected group because we don’t think they’re serious, but in fact
it includes drunk drivers, and domestic violence offenders, people that can turn very deadly very quickly. And so
that’s exciting work that I think in the next few years we’ll start to see some movement there.

WOLF: Let me ask you about the idea of community justice, which is really the underlying theme of this conference.
Do you see that as something that fits in as an evidence based practice somewhere? Is it something that you can even
really measure when you’re talking about making a community engagement, collaborating with community stakeholders,
a component of what you’re doing? Some of what you described sounded a lot like procedural justice, which has
emerged a lot from community justice programming. So I just wonder how you see community kind of supporting, or not,
the movement to integrate more evidence based practices into justice.

LATESSA: Well, I think at
the end of the day it’s about looking at the data and looking at the studies. And so, you know, the concept
of community justice is a valid one, but I have the same advice I give anyone that works in this field. We have to
follow the data. Are there interventions? Are there groups that are appropriate for that type of model? Yes. Will
it work everywhere? Probably not, and it certainly will not work with every type of offender. But it has a place.
But again, we have to look at the data, we have to determine, you know, how do we get stakeholders engaged in meaningful
ways, and not just superficially, how do we bring victims into this process so that they feel like they have a voice?
And we have to be clear that, you know, there are interventions that are not gonna be effective with high risk offenders
and we are, they are going to have to be in deeper system kind of programs. So I think it’s part of the system,
and we need to, again, collect data and we need folks like, you know, the Center for Court Innovation to kind of
lead the way and help us understand how these processes work.

WOLF: Well, I want to thank you
very much for taking the time to speak with me about your work. I’ve been speaking with Ed Matessa, who is a
professor at the University of Cincinnati. He is the Director of the School of Criminal Justice and also the University
of Cincinnati’s Corrections Institute. I look forward to seeing your work evolve as time goes on.

LATESSA: Thank you, Rob.

WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center
for Court Innovation. To learn more about the Center’s work, you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org,
and you can listen to our podcasts there and on iTunes. Thanks for listening.

After 5 Years, the San Francisco Community Justice Center Continues to Adapt Apr 30, 2014

Judge Braden C. Woods of the San Francisco Community Justice Center discusses the practical implications
of expanding the court’s caseload to include low-level felonies, and he reflects on his first year on the job. (April
2014)

JUDGE BRADEN WOODS: This is a great assignment
because every day I’m enthusiastic about going to work and trying to help somebody get out of the system instead
of just recycling themselves at the hall of justice and at our county jail.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi,
I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and I am in San Francisco today
at Community Justice 2014. I am lucky to be speaking right now with Braden C. Woods, who is the presiding judge of
the San Francisco Community Justice Center.

JUDGE WOODS: Thank you for having me, it’s great
to be here, great to be at the Summit.

WOLF: I thought it would be interesting to talk to you
about both the five year evolution of the San Francisco Community Justice Center and also your more recent experience—you’ve
been the presiding judge for the last year. Let’s talk about how the San Francisco Community Justice Center
has evolved from a court that initially accepted just misdemeanors, to one that now is dealing with low level felonies.
Why the change and what does it mean?

JUDGE WOODS: We’ve learned, stolen from other programs
that are doing a great job, and we felt comfortable enough after doing just misdemeanor cases for approximately two
and a half, almost three years, that we could expand the program when there are so many other people who are catching
felony cases, low level felony cases, that need the same support, services, that we’ve been giving the folks
on misdemeanors. And our program was established with our partners from the Department of Public Health. They gave
us more resources to expand the program, more case management resources, and with that added help, we were able to
start taking on more cases, more serious cases of folks who are now committing felonies.

WOLF:
And what kinds of felonies?

JUDGE WOODS: So we take pretty much all low level felonies here in
California—that would be car break-ins, commercial burglaries, car theft, all drug cases, low level drug cases, mostly
folks who are selling their own legal prescription to get money to buy other drugs, multiple priors can make a theft
case a felony, so we’ll take them into our program.

WOLF: And are you applying the same strategies
and tools, and principles of punishment and help, and having people do community service while also linking them
to services? Or are there additional features or strategies that come with working with low level felony offenders?

JUDGE WOODS: Same strategies on its most basic level. We’re dealing with a harder population. Some
of these folks have mental health issues, even more long-term drug addiction issues, so the program is the same,
but folks are in the program much longer than on some of the misdemeanor cases. We don’t transition them to
our community service portion until we’re really on solid footing in terms of their drug or alcohol addiction,
abuse issues. So the programming in terms of classes and meetings is much longer before we feel confident and comfortable
to then transition them to the prosocial community support, community give back portion of it.

WOLF:
And someone asked a question when you were on a panel this morning about—when you were on the panel that focused
on the next generation of community courts. And someone asked, how did you work with the community to prepare them
for the fact that you’re going from misdemeanors, that maybe people felt less threatened by, or less concerned
about how they were treated, or could be enthusiastic about giving them services, and maybe some people were less
enthusiastic about offering the help to people who had committed more serious crimes.

JUDGE WOODS:
Communication is the key and so we did give the community a heads up that we were going to maybe go down this path,
and we sought their input. Some folks were like no, forget about it, felons have to go to jail. But a lot of folks
were on board, wanted to give it a try because those are the felons, these low level felony folks, who are hurting
themselves and hurting community, and not individuals. And they were open to the idea of getting these people into
services to help break the cycle. So based upon the charges that we were gonna do, and handle, a lot of folks were
enthusiastic about it because those are the people—some of these lower level felony people, who were affecting the
community directly, and who they were seeing on a daily basis, or maybe a weekly basis. They see the police arrest
them, the person would come back a week later and they’d go to their police captain, or go to the district attorney’s
office and go, what happened? The person plead guilty, he accepted responsibility. He’s on probation and he
did his time. And they’re like, well he’s doing the same thing. And so by shifting them to our community
justice center and getting them into treatment and services, we’re trying to break that cycle. And so when community
members see the person and they’re not up to no good, they’re anecdotally like oh, it’s working, as
opposed to just the recycle of jail, out, jail, out.

WOLF: And so let’s talk about your evolution
as a jurist. What was it like for you beginning to reside over this court? What have you learned over this past year?

JUDGE WOODS: It’s been a great year. I’ve actually been a judge just for a year, also. This was
my first assignment as a judge and we sometimes rotate every year to new assignment, and when the presiding judge
asked if I wanted to stay, enthusiastically I was like, very much so. I have unfinished business, as they say. But
I was a local prosecutor here, in San Francisco, I live here in the city. I’ve lived here for 15 years and I
got to see the difference between hard core criminals who are hurting other people, and low level criminals who are
hurting themselves, and see sort of the spectrum. And this is a great assignment because every day I’m enthusiastic
about going to work and trying to help somebody get out of the system instead of just recycling themselves at the
hall of justice and at our county jail. So the evolution, for me, has been a good one to see it from a different
perspective, and I hope to continue to expand our current program, as well as some other programs here in San Francisco.

WOLF: And what do you think are the biggest challenges to evolving the criminal justice system so that it
incorporates evidence-based strategies, procedural justice, these things that we know work, but perhaps the system,
for lack of funds or lack of training, or just habit, is maybe slow to incorporate?

JUDGE WOODS:
The biggest challenge is trying to get everybody to the table. We’re slowly but surely getting there in San
Francisco. We’re sort of there in terms of district attorney, public defender, the police chief, the mayor’s
office, which funds, obviously, a lot of the programs that we use here in San Francisco and the non-profits Trying
to just get everybody in the same boat and rowing in the same direction. So we’re good with that. The biggest
challenge I see with us, I think it’s nationwide, is dual-diagnosis, the mental health issue. We’ve spent
a lot of money and time and best practices trying to figure out drug and alcohol issues in programming and best practices,
and we do a good job of that, but trying to find this other niche, folks with mental health issues, as well as drug
and alcohol, is something that I find to be a challenge, just in terms of finding programs, and enough beds, and
enough people who have training in both. One size does not fit all when it comes to mental health and drug and alcohol
issues. So that’s where the challenge of melding those two and working together.

WOLF: What
do you think is going to happen if and when you move on to a different role as a judge? Are you going to take some
of these strategies or things that you’ve learned with you into new settings? And what if it’s a setting
that isn’t—if it’s not a community justice center that doesn’t immediately have the tools to assess,
or to link to services, or send someone to community service? What would you do?

JUDGE WOODS:
No offense to them, I’d educate some of my other public judges at the hall of justice, in terms of you can get more
bang for your buck with a huge segment of population that does come through the hall of justice into the criminal
system. So just exposing them to what I’ve been doing for the past year, it’ll be at least two years before
I see them again, and some of the other judges who have come before me, have run the community justice center, and
just giving our knowledge to our other brethren who have only been at the hall of justice, or only been at the civic
courthouse, and just let them know that there are alternatives and better ways of doing things. Even though I’m one
of the junior members on the bench, I think I can educate some of my brothers and sisters on the bench.

WOLF: Judge Woods, thank you so much. I really appreciate your sharing your insights and your experience
with me. It’s been very interesting.

JUDGE WOODS: Rob, thank you very much. I really appreciate
it.

WOLF: I’ve been speaking with Braden C. Woods, who is the presiding judge of the San
Francisco Community Justice Center, and we are both here today at Community Justice 2014, it’s being held, actually,
at the office of the California Courts, here in San Francisco. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the
Center for Court Innovation. To find out more about the Center for Court Innovation, visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.
You can also listen to our podcasts there, and you can also find us on iTunes. Thanks for listening.

Denise O’Donnell, director of the Bureau of Justice Assistance, delivers the keynote address at the opening
of Community Justice 2014. — **Evidence-based Practices, Reducing Unnecessary Incarceration are Priorities for Bureau of Justice Assistance** Apr 29, 2014
Denise O’Donnell, director of the Bureau
of Justice Assistance, discusses the Bureau’s strategic mission and holistic approach to justice reform.
She also outlines the Bureau’s new suite of Smart on Crime programs.

Denise
O’Donnell, director of the Bureau of Justice Assistance, delivers the keynote address at the opening of Community
Justice 2014.

(April
2014)

DENISE O’DONNELL: We see reducing recidivism and
reducing unnecessary confinement as going hand in hand with making our communities safer.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi, this is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. I am here today in
San Francisco at Community Justice 2014, and our national summit focusing on community justice, and I am very pleased
to welcome Denise O’Donnell, who is the director of the Bureau of Justice Assistance, part of the Department
of Justice, who gave a keynote address here this morning at the opening of the conference. Welcome to the New Thinking
podcast.

O’DONNELL: Well it’s great to be here, Rob, and it’s great to be at this conference.
The room is electrified. There’s so many innovators in the room, judges who’ve been working and championing
community justice programs and community courts, district attorneys, prosecutors, service providers, and representatives
from 10 countries who are really focusing on community justice, so it’s a great summit.

WOLF: Well, in your opening remarks, you laid out what the Bureau of Justice Assistance has been most recently
interested in, and I heard you describe sort of an evolution in the Bureau’s thinking, and what you’re
focusing on. I thought maybe you could share some of that now with our listeners.

O’DONNELL: Well thank you. you know, BJA adopted a new strategic plan last year that I think does refocus
our mission more holistically on justice systems reform and our mission overall is to reduce crime recidivism and
unnecessary confinement, and support a safe and just criminal justice system. And that’s changed and evolved
over the years, where we see reducing recidivism and reducing unnecessary confinement as going hand in hand with
making our community safer. And so we’ve taken an approach that really looks at the research that we have, amassing
the data that we have available in the criminal justice system, and forging creative and innovative solutions that
make our community safer.

WOLF: You have a whole suite of new initiative, pre-trial is one of
the focuses, and calling the initiatives smart prosecution, smart pre-trial. So maybe you could explain a little
bit about what those are, and a little bit about your interest in tackling pre-trial issues.

O’DONNELL:
Sure. Well, we have created a smart on crime suite of programs, and a few years ago, BGA started an initiative called
the smart policing initiative to really pair police departments with criminal justice researchers to develop new
strategies for fighting crime that are based on research and evaluations, and produce outcomes. And that has been
enormously successful. Police departments focus on a whole gamut of issues, everything from violence reduction to
procedural justice programs, and we are really seeing some of the outcomes, so we feel that it’s growing the
evidence, it’s growing willingness on the part of police departments to innovate. And so given this holistic
approach that BGA has taken, to look at just assistance reform, we decided to expand the smart policing initiative
into a suite of programs. So we now have, for the first time this year, a smart pre-trial program, we have a smart
prosecution program, that was actually supported in the budget this year by Congress, and we have a smart supervision
for probation and parole program. We originally also had a program aimed at indigent defense, called answering Gideon’s
call, and next year we’re going to turn that into a smart defense program. So we’ll have covered the whole
gamut of the criminal justice system, and they have some features in common. First of all, they’re data driven,
so we really look at the data to see what are the drivers in the criminal justice system in all of those areas. Secondly,
they all require a practitioner research partnership, both to help analyze the data but also to evaluate the outcomes
of the program, and third they do require an investment in evidence-based, or at least promising strategies, so that
we can grow the evidence about what works in the system. I think pre-trial is such an important area for everyone
to consider nationwide. 60 percent of the people in our jails, many of which are overcrowded in the country, are
there before trial, and before they’ve been adjudicated guilty. And I think that’s a number that astounds
a lot of stakeholders in the criminal justice system, and certainly the public.

WOLF: We’re
talking about jails as opposed to prisons, so the local facilities.

O’DONNELL: Right, we’re
talking about the local jail. We know that our current system doesn’t work. So high risk, even dangerous offenders,
can get out on bail, and many low level, non-violent offenders stay in jail pre-trial, at great cost and expense,
and certainly not getting any programming or any services that would be of value to them. So this year, through our
smart pre-trial initiative, we’re actually funding pilot programs to take a comprehensive look at their pre-trial
program. Again, using data from looking at researchers who are researching now about what works in the pretrial area.
There are risk assessments, instruments that have been developed and validated in many jurisdictions so that we can
be smarter about the decisions about who should be detained before trial, and certainly some individuals should be,
for community safety, and who should not be. And certainly rectifying any situation where people stay in jail simply
because they can’t afford to post a low level bail for a minor offense.

WOLF: And there are
a lot of negative collateral consequences to being held in jail pre-trial, aren’t there? Especially for people
who are only there because they can’t make bail.

O’DONNELL: It’s true. The Arnold Foundation
has recently published a research study that I think has caught a lot of attention in the criminal justice community,
which indicates that it’s more likely individuals who are detained and will be sentenced to longer periods of
incarceration, even for similarly situated people, depending on their particular individual dangerousness to the
community, and more likely to recidivate, which is also another dimension that we really haven’t looked at before.
And so we can really be making people worse – low risk offenders – by actually keeping them detained on a pre-trial
basis. So there’s a lot of good reasons, I think, for community safety to examine our pre-trial programs nationwide.

WOLF: Let’s talk a little bit about community courts, which is a significant focus of the summit here
in San Francisco. How do you see community courts fitting into the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s goals as you
described them, to reduce recidivism and reduce unnecessary incarceration. Do they fit in here?

O’DONNELL:
I think they are a wonderful innovation and it’s really gratifying to see how the concept has taken off, because
we have a number of mentor community courts represented here, at the summit, and the jurisdictions that they have
worked with, who have started other community courts as a result. It’s also interesting that the first community
courts in Midtown Manhattan, and then in Redhook, that the Center for Court Innovation obviously was instrumental
in starting, are really focused at low level and quality of life offenders, and it’s been fascinating to see
how the concept has grown, and that jurisdictions essentially kind of mold the concept to fit their unique circumstances.
So some of the courts that we’ve heard from, now are focusing on non-violent felony offenses because they think
that there is a lot of opportunities to intervene with low level and non-violent felony offenders, rather than go
through the entire incarceration and adjudication process, and also the fact that it’s so much more productive
in terms of individuals who are addicted, individuals who have other kinds of mental health needs, and so many opportunities
that can be achieved through a community court, that the focus on the community engagement and how the community
is invested in what goes on in their community courts is also so important. And then there’s really exciting
new research and evaluations that show the contribution that community courts make in the whole area of procedural
justice and fairness, and while maybe that wasn’t the original concept behind community courts, it certainly
has been part of the DNA that community judges are very engaged with the community, they interact with the people
before them, many times look at their entire family circumstances, so it’s understandable that the evaluation
is showing that people that go through the community court experience are more likely to succeed, have lower recidivism,
and are more engaged in the outcome of the system.

WOLF: Well, I thank you so much for taking
time to talk with me. I’ve been talking with Denise O’Donnell, who is the director of the Bureau of Justice
Assistance at the Department of Justice, and we are at the Community Justice Summit 2014 in San Francisco. I’m
Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. To learn more about community justice, visit
www.courtinnovation.org, and you can listen to our podcast there and on iTunes. Thanks for listening.

**Teenagers Learn about the Law as They Grapple with Cases of Bias & Bullying** Apr 02, 2014
The Stopping
Hate and Delinquency by Empowering Students (SHADES) program is a teen court focusing on bullying and bias
incidents. The program is run as a partnership of the Los Angeles Superior Court, Department of Probation, and the
Museum of Tolerance. In this episode of New Thinking, David S. Wesley, presiding judge of the Los Angeles Superior
Court, and Camilo Cruz, director of community relations for the Los Angeles Superior Court, discuss the growth of
the city’s teen court program and unique features of the SHADES program.

David
S. WesleyCamilo Cruz

**Teenagers Learn about the Law as They Grapple with Cases of Bias & Bullying** Apr 02, 2014
The Stopping
Hate and Delinquency by Empowering Students (SHADES) program is a teen court focusing on bullying and bias
incidents. The program is run as a partnership of the Los Angeles Superior Court, Department of Probation, and the
Museum of Tolerance. In this episode of New Thinking, David S. Wesley, presiding judge of the Los Angeles Superior
Court, and Camilo Cruz, director of community relations for the Los Angeles Superior Court, discuss the growth of
the city’s teen court program and unique features of the SHADES program.

David
S. WesleyCamilo Cruz

Innovation on the Last Frontier: A Conversation about the Anchorage Mental Health Court Feb 28, 2014

Judge
Stephanie L. Rhoades, who helped found and has presided over the Anchorage Mental Health Court since 1998,
and Kathi
R. Trawver, associate professor of the School of Social Work at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, discuss
the court’s origins, accomplishments and lessons. They co-authored “Homesteading a Pioneering Mental Health Court: A Judicial Perspective from the Last
Frontier” for American Behavioral Scientist.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and welcome
to New Thinking, the podcast where we interview justice reformers and innovators. Today I have on the phone two experts
who are well versed in the intersection of mental health and justice. They are Judge Stephanie L. Rhoades, who has
presided over the Anchorage Mental Health Court since the court was created in 1998, and Kathi R. Trawver, associate
professor of the School of Social Work at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. I know you’re both very busy,
so I really want to thank you for taking the time to talk today.

JUDGE RHOADES: Thank you, Robert.

ROB WOLF: I thought we could focus on the article you both recently co-authored in American Behavioral
Scientist, where you draw some lessons from the experience of the Anchorage Mental Health Court. The article
is Homesteading A Pioneering Mental Health Court: a Judicial Perspective from the Last Frontier.
And I’ll put a link to it on the podcast page, although I think people need to be a journal subscriber to actually
download it. You note in the article that there are about 300 mental health courts in the U.S. today, but back in
1998 there were only a handful and Judge Rhoades actually created the Anchorage court without ever seeing a model
in action. So Judge Rhoades, can you describe some of the motivations—and I know there were some personal ones and
professional ones—that led you and a special commission to explore creating one of the first mental health courts
in the country.

JUDGE RHOADES: I will. Some of the motivation was exactly
what are the motivations for all the courts that are developed, which are the over representation of people with
mental disorders in corrections, basically. And the frustration of judges who would sentence folks on low-level misdemeanor
offenses, and they were committed largely because people are disordered, homeless, they’ve got other challenges,
and the sentences really don’t have an impact because these folks go out the back door of the jail the same
way they come in the front doors. And so nothing’s really changed and there was a kind of a harmonious convergence
of the Department of Corrections in Alaska getting some technical assistance nationally to form a Criminal Justice
Assessment Commission, which was a policy-level group to think about how to reduce the number of people in jail.

So one of the issues that they explored was the over representation of people with mental disorders. Meanwhile,
in my personal life, I have a brother who has both intellectual disability and some mental health issues. And I recognize
that, you know, if anything like this had happened to him and he’d gotten arrested, that he would have certain
needs that nobody in the system was ever going to be able to fulfill. And that is basically what got me thinking
about a mental health court, which is a way to have people be helpful to individuals who were going through the criminal
justice system, to hook them up with treatment and other resources that would, hopefully, address the underlying
issues that brought them before the court, and to prevent them from returning.

WOLF:
The Anchorage Mental Health Court, one of the many things that’s interesting about it is that it was the first
problem-solving court in Alaska. And to my knowledge, most of the time that states have created a mental
health court, they’re usually already familiar with linking defendants to services through their work with drug
courts. I’m wondering how you presented the concept to other court players, and prosecutors, and defenders,
without having, you know, a drug court to point to or some other kind of problem-solving court to point to as an
example.

JUDGE RHOADES: Well, I’ll take that one on, Robert. It’s Judge
Rhoades here. You know, there’s a great saying up here in Alaska: “We don’t do it like they do it outside.”
And we were, in fact, I think the last state to get a drug court, which is sort of funny.

You
know drug courts were top down planned courts. They were federally funded, the start-ups were federally
funded, and the way the mental health court started here, basically, was more of a ground floor response by people
who were experiencing this frustration. I think the deal here is that, generally speaking, our prosecutors have more
understanding that—and more sympathy, perhaps—for people who have mental health disorders, who get caught up in the
system, than they do for people who have addiction disorders.

I think there’s still
quite a bit of thinking about drug and alcohol addictions that basically these are voluntary and that all you have
to do is just say no, but I think the prosecutors definitely got the fact that there are some people who have mental
disorders who just are, you know, really—you can’t punish the disorder out of them.

WOLF:
I imagine that you, with your personal connections with your brother, had a greater credibility to present the need
for this kind of court.

RHOADES: Frankly, Robert, I never divulged to anybody that I
had a brother. It’s a small town here and he lives here, so that really wasn’t something that
anybody knew about me. I think what was really helpful was judicial leadership. You know, when a judge calls somebody
and says ‘let’s have a meeting,’ they show up. That didn’t happen when I was a lawyer. It didn’t happen
when I was, you know, in any other profession and so judges tend to have this really wonderful opportunity to convene
people, to get stakeholders together.

WOLF: Professor Trawver, maybe you can put mental
health courts in context. With the rate of mental illness so high among the justice-involved population, why are
mental health courts significant?

PROFESSOR TRAWVER: Good question. I guess
I can preface my answer by saying that I think, along with other folks, that we don’t really believe, necessarily,
that mental health courts are the only answer or the best answer, but still a really significant contribution to
the continuum of potential diversion opportunities, and I think that they are important in several ways.

First, I think they offer an improved court-based process for individuals. Second, there’s strong evidence
that mental health courts improve access to treatment, even—funny—even when treatment is already available. So they’re
already actually entitled to it, but they seem to still improve access. And I guess the third—another thing that’s
significant about mental health courts is that there’s a strong developing evidence base that mental health
courts result in reduced rates of recidivism. And finally with the development and expansion of mental health courts,
I think they’ve raised awareness about the intersection of mental health and criminal justice involvement. So for
example, in the Anchorage Mental Health Court, all the nursing students who go through UAA are required to come to
watch the mental health court during their psychiatric rotation.

WOLF: One of the key
goals at the outset for the Anchorage Mental Health Court, as you describe in your article, was to try, to some extent,
to decriminalize mental illness and get the mentally ill out of the justice system. Judge Rhoades, why is decriminalization
so hard to achieve, and have you been disappointed or frustrated that you haven’t been able to move further
in that direction?

RHOADES: The premise was that we believed mental illnesses basically
were the direct cause of criminal justice involvement, and really it turns out that it’s very few people for
whom that’s true. It appears now, from more recent research, that mental illness is a reason why people
can’t necessarily change as easily as other people. Really they are just as susceptible, and perhaps more susceptible,
to what we call criminogenic risks and needs. Anti-social behaviors, anti-social personality patterns,
anti-social thinking, anti-social associates, you know, being close associates with people who aren’t law abiding.
Having poor family or marital relationships, not having education or work opportunities, not having pro-social leisure
and recreation, and substance abuse. I think that, unfortunately, people with mental illness tend to experience
these factors perhaps more than other people.

You know, for example, substance abuse
is very highly associated with people who have mental illness. These factors are things that we really did not dig
down into and look at when we first started the court, and now that we are informed by some of this information,
we have begun to actually measure these things on validated instruments to see where people are experiencing high,
medium, or low risks and needs in these areas that predict recidivism. By doing that, we can be more effective in
terms of how and what we are linking people up with, so that they can actually, you know, reduce their recidivism.

WOLF: I think there are probably many unique things about Alaska, and I wonder if, in particular,
relating to the population you’re working with, are there unique challenges regarding the mentally ill?

TRAWVER: There’s a long list. First is just geographic challenges. If
you sort of think about how huge Alaska is, and many people live off the road system in rural areas and in conditions
that I am pretty sure that most New Yorkers would consider Third World conditions. Social problems—Alaska has the
distinction of ranking very high among states in a lot of contributing social problems. For instance, we’re
number one in our rate of adult drug use, number two in alcohol consumption, number two in rates of suicide across
the board, very high rates of trauma and family violence, and that’s disproportionately true among Alaska natives.

Third, I would say access to behavioral health services is a major problem in Alaska. So we do
have some innovations in terms of tele-behavioral health which is interesting and used by a lot of paraprofessionals,
behavioral health aids in remote and rural areas, and housing is just a major barrier in many communities, and there’s
still a great deal of stigma and nimbyism, particularly in some of the larger communities.

RHOADES:
I only want to add one other thing about what makes Alaska’s court different. We take a very broad diagnostic
group, much broader than, I think, most other courts. because we are serving people who have any mental
health disorder, and co-occurring substance abuse disorders, so long as they can be linked and matched with services
in the community, that means for us that we have to become competent at linking and monitoring people in the intellectual
disabilities community as well as the mentally ill community, as well as the substance abuse community. And Alaska
experiences very high rate of traumatic brain injury and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, which are very difficult
disorders to link with treatments.

WOLF: What are the takeaways? What lessons,
Judge Rhoades, do you have for other judges? And Professor Trawver, what do you think, from your perspective,
are the take-aways from the Anchorage Mental Health Court?

TRAWVER: I have some things
I would say about Judge Rhoades. I view her as a true pioneer. Even though she made it sound really simple
when she was talking about how she started the court, I know that she struggled and actually sacrificed a great deal
professionally to create the Anchorage Court.

JUDGE RHOADES: It is true that it was
a long road getting started, but my advice to other courts would be a couple things. One is you really have to get
an education about different diagnoses and what the behaviors are that go along with those, so that you can understand
the perspective of each of the people that come before the court. Judges really need to learn how to talk candidly
to people about mental illness and about other kinds of disabilities because you know it’s really important
to note that they have strengths and challenges, and that they can do really well. And I think the other part of
it is that in terms of the structure of any court, what I would give as advice is that like any project, you’ve
got to have a mission, you’ve got to have policies and procedures that are clearly stated and enforced, and
understood by everybody, most especially the participants, and you really have to go back and every time that there
is a decision to make, because there are many decisions to make that pose ethical dilemmas, every one of those decisions
should really hearken back to whatever your stated mission is.

These courts really have
been put together without much research to guide them. So it’s very easy, under circumstances like that, to
get off the reservation, especially from a very paternalistic point of, you know, let me do good for you, I’ll
put you in jail these five days because you didn’t take your medications. Well, that’s not meeting your
mission if your mission is decriminalization, or reducing the number of days they spend in jail.

WOLF:
Well thank you very much for both of you sharing your experience and knowledge. I’ve been speaking with Judge
Stephanie L. Rhoades, who have presided over the Anchorage Mental Health Court since the court’s very beginning
in 1998, and I’ve also been speaking with Kathi R. Trawver, who’s an associate professor of the School
of Social Work at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. So thank you both very much.

RHOADES:
Thank you, Robert.

TRAWVER: Thank you, Robert.

WOLF: And
for folks who are interested in learning more about the Anchorage Mental Health Court, you can read the article that
they co-authored, that is in the American Behavioral Scientist. It’s called Homesteading
A Pioneering Mental Health Court: A Judicial Perspective from the Last Frontier. And there will
be a link to it on our podcast page at our website, www.courtinnovation.org. I’m Rob Wolf, Director
of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Thanks very much for listening.

(March
2014)

Mental Health and Juvenile Justice: A Discussion about QUEST Futures Feb 04, 2014

QUEST Futures is a juvenile mental health initiative that seeks to establish a comprehensive, coordinated response
to youth with mental illness involved in the juvenile justice system in Queens, New York. Here, researcher Josephine
Hahn discusses the findings of an impact
evaluation of the program. (February 2014)

SARAH SCHWEIG: Hi, I’m
Sarah Schweig, of the Center for Court Innovation, and today I’m talking with Josy Hahn, the author of new research
about a special program that works with kids with mental illness, who are involved in the juvenile justice system.
The publication, Mental Health and Juvenile Justice, records
the findings of the impact evaluation of QUEST Futures. Thanks for speaking with me today and welcome.

JOSY HAHN: Thanks, Sarah.

SARAH SCHWEIG: So, QUEST Futures operates out of a community-based
alternative to detention program. QUEST stands for Queens Engagement Strategies for Teens, so this is in Queens,
New York. And QUEST Futures, specifically, works to engage kids with mental illness and their families in specialized
services. So, now that this program, which was launched in 2008, has been in operation for about five years, maybe
you can start off talking a little bit about the model, what the goal of the program was and the structure, and then
we can get to talking about the evaluation.

JOSY HAHN: Absolutely. So the QUEST Futures program
is so important. We know that youth in the juvenile justice system experience mental health illness at really high
rates, up to 70 percent, and that’s compared to 20 to 25 percent of youth in the general population. There is a huge
need, and yet there are very few resources in the juvenile justice system. So, juvenile detention and jail actually
become the default, which is alarming. Here in New York, QUEST was launched by the Center for Court Innovation—and
it was in collaboration with a number of juvenile justice and mental health agencies—and the overarching goal is
to reduce recidivism among youth in the juvenile justice system by addressing mental health needs. And there are
a couple other key features. One is that they engage with families early on in the case: so pre-adjudication phase.
Another is that really comprehensive individualized treatment plan that provides direct services on-site and also
a vast network of referrals. And then finally, the purpose of QUEST Futures is to increase the capacity of the juvenile
justice system to provide alternatives to detention, which is incredibly important.

SARAH SCHWEIG:
Maybe give us an idea of what QUEST Futures looks like.

JOSY HAHN: So, it’s either through a judicial
mandate, so the judge mandates the program, or a voluntary referral. So in our study, all of the QUEST Futures youth
comes from QUEST ATD referrals. QUEST ATD serves youth with juvenile delinquency cases in the Queens family court,
and they are classified as moderate risk of re-offending, or failure to appear in court. And they are deemed eligible
for community supervision, and that can mean anything from curfew checks and school attendance monitoring, to after
school programming and required services in the community. But in terms of QUEST Futures, every single youth is given
a diagnostic predictive scale, and that’s a mental health instrument that screens for 18 different mental health
disorders—mania, bipolar, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety. If they flag on the DPS and meet
criteria for impairment, they are eligible to go to QUEST Futures. So there’s an intake set up with QUEST Futures
staff and youth and families. There’s a full bio-psycho-social assessment, and this includes a psychiatric evaluation
and supplemental information from home visits, and interviews with the youth support system: so, a parent, caregivers,
other family members, teachers, etc. And then, based on all of that information, program staff are working with youth
and families to build trust and collaborate on what works best to meet the needs of the youth. A feature of QUEST
Futures that’s really impressive is how multi-disciplinary its staff is, from the social workers, case managers,
youth developers, court liaison, a consulting psychiatrist and the senior staff, of course. But then also how often
they’re communicating and working closely with the judge, the prosecuting and defense attorneys, and the community
service providers.

SARAH SCHWEIG: There are many moving parts to that. So, maybe you can talk
a little bit about this evaluation. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the kind of data you collected and the
process for that.

JOSY HAHN: Sure. So, there’s very little research on juvenile diversions in
general, and there’s very little research on juvenile diversions in general, and the results are mixed on recidivism,
you know, whether youth in these programs are doing better or not, and there’s even ones on diversions for specialized
programs like mental health. So in this study we wanted to know how effective QUEST Futures was meeting the needs
of youth with mental health diagnoses in the juvenile justice system and we did this by looking at the impact of
QUEST Futures on a number of outcomes. And I’ll mention that we looked at recidivism—that’s re-arrest—at about one
year after program start, and one year after program end, we looked at final case dispositions—so, whether youth
were released into the community or put in a detention facility and placement, and then also the total detention
days served after program enrollment—if they were, and if so, how long? And we looked at data for background information
and outcomes for QUEST Futures youth and also a comparison sample. It was 392 youth altogether. They were all flagged
for some kind of mental health screen, and they were classified as mostly low to moderate risk, according to a risk
assessment instrument that we use in New York City. So, for the 131 youth in QUEST Futures that were compared to
a similar group of 261 youth in three alternative-to-detention programs that are throughout New York City.

SARAH SCHWEIG: What were some of your findings in looking at the group that did go through QUEST Futures
versus the sample that did not?

JOSY HAHN: So overall, the sample was mostly male and black or
Latino, and the average age for both groups was between 14 or 15. They were eighth grade on average. Both actually
had similar mental health screens, they were mania, post-traumatic stress disorder, and any substance abuse—so that’s
alcohol or any drug. And this related to about a third or more kids in the sample flagging for these issues. We use
propensity score adjustment and that is a great technique to balance any differences between our QUEST Futures and
our comparison group so that they would be similar. We also ran a number of tests to make sure what we were seeing
was the true effect of the QUEST Futures program. What we found was that QUEST Futures youth are significantly less
likely to commit felony offenses. It’s actually about a 12 percent difference compared to their counterparts. And
this is at about one year after program start. And this difference held mostly for one year at program end. The significance
was marginal, but the difference was still 10 percent, and so this was a really promising finding. It means that
the goal of QUEST Futures to reduce recidivism did occur. And then we also found that QUEST Futures youth were actually
less likely to receive a probation disposition when their case had closed, but they were more likely to receive other
kinds of dispositions, where they would still be released into the community. So that’s—it was mostly adjournment
in contemplation of dismissal, or conditional discharge. And then we also found that QUEST Futures youth and their
comparison group were equally likely to be detained after they were in program ATD enrollment but when they were
detained, QUEST Futures youth were actually more likely to spend more days in detention, so about five more days,
and that was a significant difference. So that’s definitely not ideal and something we have to look at in terms of
practicing and policy implications. A couple of the reasons might be that this might indicate a greater awareness
of the judge and other court stakeholders in knowing about the complex mental health needs of youth, and so that
contributes to longer detention stays because they might not have the appropriate care in the community. It might
show a potential supervision effect and this means that closer monitoring by the program and also by the court might
lead to longer detention stays. But in general we actually don’t know why the youth were detained in both groups,
we don’t know the reasons for them—whether they were a program violation like breaking curfew or not going to school,
or if they are new arrests after the program end. We also did an exploratory analysis to see if anything else predicted
outcomes of recidivism and detention days, and we did find some results that weren’t that surprising. Females are
less likely to be rearrested about one year after the program. Youth who flag for any substance abuse are more likely
to be rearrested. That’s not too surprising. But an interesting thing was that youth who flagged for suicide risks,
they were more likely to spend more days in detention, but they were less likely to be rearrested. So that actually
gives some support to the fact that more complex mental health needs, like suicidal ideation might mean that youth
will be in detention for longer. It’s still an issue.

SARAH SCHWEIG: Right, just because there
aren’t resources to deal with that?

JOSY HAHN: Right, not immediately given—even in New York with
such a vast network of quality providers, they might not always have the ability to meet the needs of a youth with
an emergency issue. So I just provided a very brief overview of the complex model that QUEST Futures is, but Kelli
Henry wrote up a process evaluation and some initial results for the outcome evaluation where she describes thoroughly
the planning process for the QUEST Futures model—so how the collaborations occurred, what happened in terms of implementation
and program launch—and she also wrote six very thoughtful case studies around different youth and their paths through
the QUEST Futures program and the juvenile justice system. So, a big plug to Kelli’s process evaluation, Kelli Henry,
on the Center for Court Innovation website as well.

SARAH SCHWEIG: Okay, so maybe just as a last
takeaway, what are some of the lessons that you can see from some of the findings?

JOSY HAHN:
Well the main goal of QUEST Futures to reduce recidivism, especially for more serious offending was met, and so these
are findings that give support to collaborative models for specialized diversions and ways to meet youth with mental
health needs in the justice system, which is fantastic. This does add to a small but growing base of evidence around
specialized youth diversions, and it’s critical because the juvenile justice system is definitely looking at alternatives.

SARAH SCHWEIG: Well it was great speaking with you today. I’m Sarah Schweig and I’ve been speaking with
researcher Josy Hahn about mental illness and the juvenile justice system. To find out more about the Center for
Court Innovation, or to download Josy’s report, visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

Rapid Response is a Priority for Domestic Violence Court in Boise, Idaho Jan 02, 2014

Judges Carolyn Minder and James Cawthon preside over the Ada County Domestic Violence Court in Boise, Idaho.
The court is one of three domestic violence courts in the U.S. selected by the Department of Justice’s Office
on Violence Against Women to serve as a mentor court, helping other courts develop more effective responses to domestic
violence. In this episode of New Thinking, the judges explain how they divide their duties, work closely with the
community, and promote rapid disposition of cases.

[Opening Music]

CAROLYN
MINDER: The judiciary doesn’t drive what we do. The community drives what it expects the judiciary to do,
in order to be responsive.

[Music begins to fade away]

ROBERT V. WOLF:
Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Today I have a chance to talk with
Judge James Cawthon and Judge Carolyn Minder of the Aida County Domestic Violence Court in Boise Idaho. It’s nice
to have you here.

JUDGE MINDER: Thank you.

JUDGE CAWTHON:
Thank you.

WOLF: You are both here at the Center for Court Innovation offices in New
York because your court was one of three domestic violence courts in the U.S. selected by the Department of Justice’s
Office on Violence Against Women as a mentor court. So I thought maybe we could start with the mentor court program.
Judge Cawthon, what’s the idea behind the program?

JUDGE CAWTHON: The main idea here
is we’ve had a lot of experience over the years with domestic violence courts across the nation being successful
at promoting offender accountability, bringing about behavioral change in offenders, strengthening families, strengthening
communities. And as these courts continue to grow, the idea is that the mentor sites can provide training for domestic
violence courts, provide trainings to jurisdictions and communities who are interested in wanting to set up domestic
violence courts.

JUDGE MINDER: And it’s intriguing to me that we were selected because
we started differently than how other courts have begun. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the ’70s and so my background
is from community organization and working things up. And so we started with a prosecuting attorney who was deeply
committed to the notion and myself and one other judge, now that’s moved on, talking about what we need to do differently,
but we needed it to be a community response to a very significant community issue, and having the judiciary be responsive
to what the community was saying—this is what we need. And so the judiciary doesn’t drive what we do. The community
drives what it expects the judiciary to do in order to be responsive. So that’s why our court is different.

WOLF: What role does the community play? How have you gotten the community to play that
role?

JUDGE MINDER: They sit at the table and they are real stakeholders. They are heard,
they bring their ideas to the table, they tell us what doesn’t work, what is working, they identify the gaps for
us, and they are free to tell us what they believe that we need to do in order to be more responsive. And concomitantly
with that, we’ve had leaders who are being pushed from their officers in the field to treat domestic violence differently,
instead of the leadership saying no, we can’t make these kinds of changes, we’re not interested in changing our administrative
practices. They are being compelled to address community needs that are bubbling up from victim advocates, from law
enforcement, from the family justice systems.

WOLF: Why don’t you tell me, then, how
a domestic violence court works?

JUDGE CAWTHON: The model has a number of different
pieces, all engineered to answer certain problems in the way business had been done. One is, it promotes the rapid
disposition of cases. In other words, the goal is that within 45 to 60 days from the date of arrest, that case is
disposed of in some fashion—plead guilty, found guilty, found not guilty at trial. And the notion here: one, it’s
always better to get an offender into treatment, into counseling sooner rather than later. That’s obvious. But the
other thing is that the use of the contact orders and things of that nature, you really put a family in turmoil when
they’re having to be separated for prolonged periods of time—months and month and months. Victims at risk, children
suffer from that. And so that quick disposition of the case addresses those two things.

The second
thing is we have participants from the judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, probation officers, treatment providers,
evaluators who are all specialized in the area of domestic violence. It’s a complex issue that has a number
of different facets – comes in many different forms. And so that specialized knowledge, that specialized dedication
promotes a much better disposition of a case.

And the final thing is the notion of having a court
that is focused on dealing with this family that has found itself into the criminal process, and so our court would
deal not just with the criminal case, but a custody case, a divorce case. In the case of Judge Minder’s expertise,
if there’s a child protection issue, neglect, or abuse case. So one judge, one family, a rapid disposition of the
case to promote the accountability and treatment and change of the offender, and to try to promote the stability
of the family.

JUDGE MINDER: We are really active in terms of judicial monitoring. We
bring these people back and we get these reports to see where people are in the process, and are they engaging or
not.

WOLF: And if they’re not, you’re giving them prompts or sanctions, or feedback
of some kind?

JUDGE MINDER: Correct. It’s the place as well, where the victim is finding
out, how is the defendant doing? Is the defendant holding him or herself accountable? Is the
defendant doing everything that they’re supposed to be doing in order to help our family heal from this?
And so it’s a really nice venue whereby the victim is hearing from all of the people involved, who on some level
are more objective than the information coming from the defendant himself, or herself. We have as many number of
female defendants in our court as we do male offenders. The whole point being that the community is helping the victim
understand what they’re doing on probation, how successful are they being? And then our response to that
is immediate accountability, which would include going into jail because when we sentence we maintain the right to
impose discretionary jail time for non-compliance with probation terms.

WOLF: Probation
for you is reflected in the active partnership between the bench and the probation.

JUDGE MINDER:
Very active partnership. They and the prosecuting attorneys offices are in really good contact with one another but
we don’t anything ex parte. All of our information comes on the record. Probation run accountability groups, they
report immediately when there’s new police reports as to their defendants. And so we will see someone typically within
30 days of sentence. If they’re marginal, we may see them a week later because Judge Cawthon and I share the docket,
and if somebody’s off track, we’ll put them on the calendar for the next week expecting that somebody’s gonna go
to those accountability groups, do what they need to do. So probation is absolutely critical to our ability to assess
accountability and safety of the victim.

WOLF: You both preside over this docket. How
does that work?

JUDGE CAWTHON: When Judge Minder created the court, we didn’t have the
resources to create the court. And so Judge Minder and another judge, our administrative district judge, Judge Hanson,
decided that they could carve one court out of two judge’s dockets. The way it works is this: one week Judge Minder
is doing domestic violence court and I’m doing my regular criminal court docket. The following week, I’ll do domestic
violence court and she’s doing her child protection docket. And certain cases are assigned to me, certain cases are
assigned to Judge Minder. We obviously work together as exigencies present themselves of hearing cases on each other’s
docket to make sure we’re on top of things and that cases are being processed quickly.

WOLF:
I’m curious, are your temperaments such that, from the perspective of a victim or an offender who comes into the
court they’d expect equivalent experience?

JUDGE MINDER: Yes, and I think the reason
for that is not necessarily that we’re exactly alike in terms of our temperament, but we have enough people at our
table and we have enough team meetings, and we are all educated on the same points, that we share a common philosophy
and we share common goals, and we consistently look at what those goals and objectives are, and we can agree with
them. And so we have the ability to treat everyone—not the same, because facts are so unique, but know that no one
would be suffering as a consequence of coming before a female judge more so than coming before Judge Cawthon if you’re
a male defendant.

WOLF: I wonder, do you think you bring to it—because of your genders,
perhaps—different perspectives or enhanced perspectives because you can work together and share your perspectives?

JUDGE CAWTHON: Sure. I think where that manifests itself is when we’re having team meetings. Instead
of it just being my input and my ideas, we’re bouncing things off of each other, working together, talking through
issues and it really helps to come to the right resolution about the way to proceed on things.

JUDGE
MINDER: That, and we do share the probation violation docket. One of us takes the probation violation once
a month and so the month of December, I believe it will be my probation docket that I’ll hear all of the PV’s that
involve the cases that Judge Cawthon has either tried or dispositioned and is currently reviewing. And so we have
a system in place where we take extraordinarily good notes relative to a defendant’s progress. We take notes relative
to the victim’s comments, what their concerns are. So by the time I open a file, I can go through Judge Cawthon’s
notes and he can do the same for mine, and we’re really up to date.

WOLF: Since you,
as a mentor court, are going to be guiding your courts in developing strategies for dealing with domestic violence
cases in a more effective way, I wonder what advice you’d give them.

JUDGE CAWTHON:
I think it just takes real perseverance, and real dedication, and patience in talking to people, and figuring out
“What do I have here in my community, and what are my resources, and what can I change?” Even small changes can make
a huge difference. If a judge just decided “I’m gonna judicially monitor domestic violence cases,” that would make
a significant change if a court or a probation department or prosecutor’s office wanted to get together and decide,
“We want to look at the evaluation tools we’re using. We want to do a better job of diagnosing and case planning
what offenders need.” You would make a significant difference.

JUDGE MINDER: I agree
with you. And I think that it has to be a personal philosophy on the part of a judge in the course of their day-to-day
jobs to say, “What can we do differently without engaging undue resources, without rocking the boat, and without
really asking for the institution to make changes to accommodate me? What can I do within the context of
the caseload that I currently have, to make life better for the individuals that my life is touching?”

WOLF: Thank you, Judge Carolyn Minder and Judge James Cawthon, for taking the time to talk with
me today.

JUDGE CAWTHON: My pleasure.

JUDGE MINDER: You’re
welcome.

WOLF: I’ve been speaking with Judges James Cawthon and Carolyn Minder of the
Aida County Domestic Violence Court in Boise, Idaho. They are one of the three domestic violence courts in the country
that was selected by the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women as mentor courts to help other
courts learn about how to develop and make the best domestic violence court that they can. I’m Rob Wolf, director
for communications at the Center for Court Innovation. To find out more about the Mentor Court program, or to listen
to other New Thinking podcasts, please visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

January 2014

The Harlem Justice Corps Combines Education with Community Service for Justice-Involved Young People Dec 06, 2013

The Harlem
Justice Corps is an intensive career development and service program for justice-involved young men and
women. Project Manager Tai Alex explains how the initiative works, and
participants Elijah Blount and Anthony Brown discuss what they’ve learned so far.

[Opening
music]

ELIJAH BLOUNT: And I learned the seriousness of working because they say it’s
hard to get a job, but now as I’m going through the motions in business, it’s hard to keep a job. That’s one thing
I learned.

[As opening music fades]

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf,
director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Today I’m at the Dempsy Center on 127th Street with
Taí Alex, who is the project manager of the Harlem Justice Corps. Hi, Taí.

TAÍ ALEX:
Hi, how are you?

WOLF: Good, I’m good. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me today.
I’m here to learn about the Harlem Justice Corps, which combines community service with education for young men who
have some criminal justice involvement. Why don’t you explain to what the program is all about?

ALEX:
Sure, I’d love to. So the Harlem Justice Corps is part of a larger city effort initiated by the Center for Economic
Opportunity, and we actually work in close partnership with the Prisoner Reentry Institute as well. The program is
designed for 18- to 24-year-olds who are recently released from jail, on probation, on parole, or otherwise recently
involved in the criminal justice system. We actually serve both men and women, and our particular program focuses
on residents of the East and Central Harlem community.

So basically they’re with us for about
six months intensively, where they work on community benefit service projects, internships, and then we work to get
them full-time employment. If they do not have their GED they’re also in educational classes on a regular basis,
and if they do have their GED or high school diploma, we connect them with the college initiative, and we assist
them to get enrolled in college courses. And while they’re in the program, they work directly with a life coach who
helps to keep them motivated, to help keep them on track, and hold them accountable to the promises that they made
to themselves and to us when they started the program.

WOLF: Tell me a little bit about
what they’re actually doing when they have a work project. Can you give me some examples of the kind of work members
have done?

ALEX: Sure. So basically, in the first two to three weeks they’re in orientation phase,
and in the second week of orientation they start doing what’s called community mapping, where they actually go out
into the community with our site supervisors, and they scope out projects. So the site supervisor may have picked
out about five to 10 suggested projects, and the crew members will actually go and research them, meet the folks
at the site, and decide amongst themselves if they’re going to do the project and before the project even begins,
they actually do a presentation to the community advisory board, which is composed of community members who are invested
in the program.

It’s a PowerPoint presentation and a lot of the groups have never done something
like this before, so that’s an added skill that they get experience with. Some of the past projects include working
at the National Black Theater, at Mt. Zion Church. They also did a project a couple months ago at SCAN-LaGuardia,
which is a community service center in East Harlem, and right now they’re working at a day care at a public housing
building in Harlem.

WOLF: Is it an opportunity for them to learn new skills?

ALEX: Usually what the site will need assistance with is rehab work—renovations, things like that.
So a lot of times they might need several rooms painted. They might need the floors redone, tiling.

Some
may come in with a lot of experience, and they might teach the other corps members, help teach the other corps members,
along with the site supervisor, or they may come in with no experience at all and they end up learning while they’re
there. But I think that in addition to sort of hard skills that they learn, they’re really focusing on soft skills,
like learning to show up every day on time, stay for the whole day, check in with their supervisor when they can’t
be there, working with a team, staying motivated, things like that that they maybe haven’t had the experience with
in the past. So those are the kind of skills that we’re really promoting. And then while they’re at that site, they
might learn about what services that site has, so in the case of National Black Theater they were invited to go to
theater productions for free by the director there. He actually brought one of our members who were interns later
on, and invited us to come back since to do other work there.

WOLF: I’m interested –
you mentioned life coaches before. That sounds like an incredible resource for someone who has made some bad decisions
earlier in life and is now trying to get their life back on track. What does a life coach actually do?

ALEX: So the life coach basically starts working with the corps member even before they enroll
in the program. Before we enroll anybody in the program, we have them fill out an application and they go through
a series of interviews where they get to talk to us about why is it they want to be here. Once they’ve gone through
that process, they’re assigned a life coach and that life coach actually works with them before orientation, to make
sure they’re going to be here, that they’re going to participate. They kind of know everything they need to know
about the program, and they start to develop a very close bond. They’re basically their primary person and the program
really is modeled after that approach, that each member in the program has their primary person, who is their life
coach. So the life coach will, in addition to sitting down with them to kind of think about long-term and short-term
goals, they’ll assist them with anything that comes up. So whether they need assistance getting benefits, whether
they have family issues at home, whether they have child care issues—the life coach will help them with that, to
try to resolve those issues so that they can be at work full time, and be employed and functioning. The life coach
initially was to be a kind of support system and a motivator. They also serve as someone to be helpful and hold accountable.
So you know, it can be a challenge for the corps members to show up every day and to show up on time, so they actually
help to keep them focused, and that is actually something that could include home visits, it could include mediations
with family members and other corps members, whatever it is, and it’s kind of on a case by case basis.

WOLF: Let’s talk for a moment about context. The Harlem Justice Corps really is part of this movement
that’s emerged over the last 10 years to offer more support to people who are returning from prison, or who’ve been
under criminal justice system supervision. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that, about how that kind of support
and structure benefits someone who’s transitioning back to trying to lead a law-abiding life in the community.

ALEX: Definitely. I would agree it definitely is part of a larger initiative, nationally and specifically
here in New York City, because there are other programs. So our program is part of the Young Male Initiative through
the Center for Economic Opportunity. They have other programs that kind of focus on this work. We also partner with
the Re-entry Court, which has been involved in this work for many years. I think that the benefits to having a program
available, particularly for young people coming out of prison is that they are more high risk – they tend to be more
high-risk, just by the very nature of their age, and the other kind of problem that I think everyone is seeing is
that if someone is arrested in your community, they get arrested, they come back to the very same community where
they got into trouble, so to speak. The same friends, the same family members, the same underlying issues that perhaps
led them to make that poor decision. If there are no job opportunities and no educational opportunities, there are
limited options for that person to make any positive changes. So programs like this really are essential to providing
a very basic opportunity – employment, education, economic growth in the community are all very fundamentally important
things to help that individual make a positive change.

WOLF: Can you give me a sense
of the results you’ve seen so far? I know you haven’t done a formal evaluation yet, but can you give me
a picture about what’s emerged from people who have completed the program?

ALEX: Definitely.
We do have, so we’ve completed one full year of programming and most of our corps members who graduated are employed
full time, and if they’re not working full time, they’re working with job developers to obtain employment. We also
have members that are enrolled in college, so they’ve been working towards their degrees. We have a corps member
who just recently graduated and passed the GED, and others that are still working on their GED.

WOLF:
Great. And now we’re going speak with two participants in the Harlem Justice Corps, Elijah Blount, and Anthony Brown.
Thanks guys for taking a minute out of your day to speak with me. So Elijah, how long have you been a participant
in the Harlem Justice Corps?

ELIJAH BLOUNT: I’ve been a participant in the Harlem Justice
Corps for about five weeks, going on six weeks.

WOLF: Tell me a little bit about your
experience. What have you done so far?

BLOUNT: My experience—basically it’s all new
to me, so I’ve learned a lot of things about myself, besides about just maintaining and community service. I’m learning
that you know, I’ve got leadership qualities in me that I didn’t see before. I’m learning how everything rolls downhill,
you know, you’ve got to delegate responsibilities. Being responsible—I learned that. I learned that punctuality is
everything, says everything about you and I learned the seriousness of working, because they say it’s hard to get
a job, but now as I’m going through the motions of business, it’s harder to keep a job. That’s one thing I learned.

And basically I’m giving something back to my community I can really see helping. Like the day care center,
for example, the small kids they are getting accustomed to seeing us, so they always say hey, what’s up?
What are you doing? Ooh cool, what are you doing? Pointing that out. So they just, you know it’s
real nice, it’s real cool.

WOLF: And the day care center, that’s where you’re doing
community service?

BLOUNT: Yes sir.

WOLF: And Anthony Brown,
how long have you been in the Justice Corps?

ANTHONY BROWN: If I’m not mistaken, since
about October 7.

WOLF: What have you been doing? Tell me a little bit about your experience.

BROWN: Most of the things I’ve been doing at the current work site, I’ve already known. However
working around a large group of people, and sometimes by myself, has really given me a chance to polish my skills
because I could say that I knew it, but I wasn’t as good at it as I am now. And just being able to work with different
people that I don’t know—like he said, be around those children, it’s really a big difference. We finished one room
already and, you know, just the look on the children’s faces when they ran into that room and saw the difference,
it just made me kind of happy.

WOLF: Tell me about what this community service consists
of. You’re working at a day care center. What is it you’re doing, exactly?

BROWN: Basically,
we are renovating all of the rooms, like buffing the floors, stripping them. We’re just bringing the room back to
life, basically. You know if they look clean, look new, you’re going to be in a good mood, fresh jumping, you’re
going to be ready to get everything done.

WOLF: Do you guys have long term goals yet?
Do you know where you want to be in a couple of years?

BROWN: Well, right now I think for me it’s
more of a transition stage. I’m in between completing short-term goals that I have in life, and putting my foot through
the door to embark on long-term goals, like receiving my OSHA, going back into college.

WOLF:
Elijah?

BLOUNT: One of my goals is just to work to the end of this year, you know?
Get ready for the holiday season. But some of my long-term goals? I’ve got a goal that I want to see myself work
at the Department of Sanitation. And I know working through Harlem Justice Corps is going to help me get my foot
in the door, so I can see one of my short term goals being completed in the next six months.

WOLF:
Great. Well listen guys, you sound great, and I really appreciate you telling me about your experience, so thanks
very much. And thanks, Taí. I really enjoyed learning about the Harlem Justice Corps.

ALEX:
My pleasure. Thank you for coming.

[Closing music]

WOLF: I’m Rob
Wolf, Director for Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. To learn more about the Harlem Justice Corps
or the Center for Court Innovation, visit our website at www.courtinnovation. org where you can listen, also, to
our podcasts, and you can also listen to us on iTunes. Thanks for listening.

Community Court in Brooklyn Lowers Recidivism, Researchers Find Nov 04, 2013

Cynthia G. Lee and David B. Rottman, researchers from the National Center for State Courts, discuss some of
the key findings in their new report, A Community Court Grows in Brooklyn: A Comprehensive Evaluation of the Red Hook Community
Justice Center. (November 2013)

ROBERT V. WOLF:
[Opening theme music] I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and today’s
New Thinking podcast is about research and the Red Hook Community Justice Center. On the phone with me today are
David B. Rottman and Cynthia G. Lee, both from the National Center for State Courts, and they are two of the seven
researchers who have just completed a comprehensive evaluation of the Red Hook Community Justice Center.
Thanks for taking the time to talk with me today.

DAVID B. ROTTMAN: Well thanks Rob.
We appreciate the opportunity.

WOLF: Well I thought maybe we could start off with a
little overview of what the Red Hook Community Justice Center actually is.

CYNTHIA G. LEE:
The Red Hook Community Justice Center opened in the year 2000 in an underserved neighborhood in a physically and
socially isolated part of Brooklyn, dominated by the Red Hook houses, which are a very large public housing project.
And there was a lot of concern about drug-related crime in the public housing project, and that’s where the impetus
for this project came from. The court is a multi-jurisdictional court that handles misdemeanor and other low-level
criminal cases, summonses that are citations that don’t rise to the level of a criminal case, juvenile delinquency
cases, and also landlord-tenant cases arising in public housing. And it also offers a whole range of community and
youth programs for local residents.

WOLF: So the Justice Center, it’s a big place with
a lot of programs and a lot of clients, which makes me want to ask you how you broke down your research into components
that were manageable and measurable.

ROTTMAN: The Justice Center is, indeed,
a complex operation, but we broke our work down into trying to answer five fundamental questions. The first question
we asked was, “Did the Justice Center get implemented in the way that its planners intended it to?” The
second question is, “Did the Justice Center improve upon the results that we see for defendants that are being processed
in the centralized courthouse in Brooklyn?” We wanted to know in particular, was there lower recidivism
rates at Red Hook than downtown? And also was there a reduction in the levels of crime? The third question
we asked was, “Did the presence of the court have an impact on how the courts, the justice system are received by
defendants, as well as by the local residents?” Our fourth question was an important one these days, “Is the Justice
Center cost efficient in the view of the taxpayer?” And the fifth question, and perhaps the most important
one and the most difficult to answer is, “Why did the Justice Center produce any observed results in terms of improving
upon business as usual in the downtown courts?” So those were our five basic questions.

WOLF:
Where did you collect the data that would allow you to answer those five research questions?

ROTTMAN:
Because it was a community court, we did hire a group of urban ethnographers with a lot of experience working
in low income neighborhoods and justice system issues, to help us interview residents in the area, offenders who
had been to the court, as well as to get offenders who perhaps had not been to the court, but what they thought about
it, what they’d heard, what the word on the street was about the Justice Center. We, ourselves, spent five
weeks in Red Hook interviewing people who work in the court, people in community organizations who have close ties
with the court, to try to understand how the court operates and how it is connected to this neighborhood, and we
also did observations both in the courthouse itself and also in various neighborhoods, and we collected a great deal
of case-level data of court records.

WOLF: Well you mention that one of your research
questions involved impacts on recidivism, so I thought maybe could jump to that.

LEE:
Well to answer this question, we compared defendants whose cases were processed at the Justice Center with similar
defendants who are arrested in the Justice Center’s catchment area, but had their cases processed at Kings County
Criminal Court in downtown Brooklyn. We used a technique that’s called propensity score analysis to make
sure that the people in each sample were as similar as possible in terms of demographics, previous criminal history,
and the current charges.

So when we look at the re-arrest rates for these two groups,
we found that 36 percent of the defendants who’d been through the Justice Center were rearrested within two years,
compared with 40 percent of the downtown defendants. That’s a decrease of four percentage points or 10 percent in
the re-arrest rate, which is statistically significant.

And we also used a technique
that’s called survival analysis, that allowed us to further control for factors such as the characteristics of the
defendants in the case and this analysis confirms that case processing at the Justice Center is associated with a
statistically significant decrease in the risk of recidivism.

WOLF: So 10
percent lower recidivism two years out, after they’ve left the Justice Center, or was it after they were arrested?

LEE: It was within two years after arraignment.

WOLF: Were you able
to come up with a theory as to why the Justice Center was able to achieve lower recidivism among the defendants who
passed through the Justice Center?

CYNTHIA LEE: Well we started out with three hypotheses
about how the Justice Center was intended to reduce recidivism. So the first one of these mechanisms is
deterrence. Here, the Justice Center’s goal is to impose meaningful punishment such as community service
with greater certainty than other misdemeanor courts in New York City. The idea is that if people know
they’re going to get punished, then they’ll be less likely to commit crimes in the future.

The second mechanism is intervention. So here, the Justice Center tries to prevent crime by addressing
its underlying causes, and the Justice Center’s biggest intervention program is treatment for drug addiction that’s
supervised by the judge.

The third mechanism is called legitimacy. So the
idea here is that if people believe that the court has the moral right to enforce the law, they’ll voluntarily obey
the law just because they feel like they should, not because they’re afraid of being punished. One was
that the Justice Center works to establish its legitimacy is by connecting to the neighborhood around issues that
are important to the community, like conditions in public housing and conditions in the local park. But
any court’s most important source of legitimacy is what’s known as procedural justice—in the interaction between
the judge and the people who appear before that judge in the courtroom. Procedural justice means that people feel
they’re being treated with respect, that the judge’s decision is impartial and it’s based on the facts, that they’ve
had an opportunity to express their viewpoint to the judge, and that the judge is trustworthy and sincerely concerned
about all of the people who are involved in the case.

When we tested these hypotheses
in our analysis, we didn’t find any evidence that either deterrence or intervention was at work, at least as
we were able to operationalize these concepts based on the data that were available to us. People who were sentenced
to community service were not any less likely to be rearrested than people who got off with “a walk,” and Red Hook
defendants who went through the drug treatment program didn’t really seem to do any better than similar downtown
defendants who didn’t get drug treatment.

This leaves legitimacy as the most likely
explanation for the decrease that we saw in recidivism. There was a lot of evidence in our interviews and the ethnographic
analysis that people who’d been defendants at the Justice Center, along with people just living in the community
at large, perceived a high degree of procedural justice in the court’s handling of cases, and in its relations with
the community.

WOLF: Well so that would be the biggest factor—their attitude toward
the court and their feeling that the court was treating them fairly and was, in fact, legitimate even if a decision
might have been adverse toward them? Your theory is that they were more likely to respect that decision
and less likely to recidivate as a result?

LEE: Yes, and there’s actually a little bit
of evidence for that in our ethnographic analysis. So there’s a distinction between procedural justice, which is
what we’ve talked about, the perceptions of the processes being fair, versus distributive justice, or the actual
result of the case. And when we first interviewed people who had been defendants, both at Red Hook and at the court
downtown, we found that people who had been defendants at Red Hook were more likely to have a favorable impression
on all of the procedural justice factors, but there was no difference in people’s perceptions of the outcome of the
case, so this really lends credence to the fact that it is procedural justice rather than the sentence or the outcome
of the case that’s having the impact.

WOLF: Very interesting. Let
me ask you about some other results relating to arrests. Now you noted that crime, as reflected in the
number of arrests, went down in the neighborhood served by the Justice Center. I wonder if you could explain how
big the decline was and if you were able to identify what role the Justice Center might have played in that.

LEE: Well we compared the arrest trends in the catchment area of the three police precincts that
feed into the Justice Center with several neighboring precincts in Brooklyn. Before the Justice Center
opened, all of the arrest trends in all of the precincts showed a lot of variation from one month to the next, but
when the Justice Center opened, the number of arrests in each of the three catchment area precincts dropped, and
the trend stabilized, something that didn’t occur outside of the catchment area.

So for example,
between January of 1994 and 1998, and when the Justice Center started taking cases in April of 2000, the monthly
number of misdemeanor arrests in the 76th Precinct ranged anywhere from below 50 to more than 150. After the Justice
Center opened, that line tended to hover right around 50 with a lot less variation. The data don’t tell
us whether the change in the number of arrests results from less crime in the catchment area or a change in police
practices in the catchment area, but the timing and the fact that we didn’t observe similar changes in the neighboring
precincts both point to some type of association with the opening of the Justice Center.

WOLF:
Another interesting finding involves an estimated savings that you found per defendant, and I think people would
be very interested to hear what that savings was and how you figured those numbers out.

LEE:
We’ve identified that our reduced recidivism or reduced victimization from additional crime was the primary benefit
of the Justice Center. So when we looked at the reduction recidivism within a two-year window and averaged it for
all misdemeanor defendants, we found that the processing of each misdemeanor case at Red Hook was associated with
an average decrease of about $1,400 in the victimization cost of property crimes, and a little over $3,000 in victimization
costs for crimes against person, which amounts to a total of $4,756 in victimization cost savings per misdemeanor
defendant. And the victimization cost estimates we used are a standard set of estimates that are used by
many criminal justice researchers.

WOLF: I see. So that savings
is about the savings accrued—if you put a financial value on the victimization costs, it’s not necessarily money
that goes back into the system’s pocket or into the government’s pocket. Is that correct?

LEE:
That’s exactly right.

ROTTMAN: The real meaning is that from the taxpayers’ point
of view in terms of the different ways that taxpayer money could be spent, keeping the Justice Center operational
is beneficial. So the public gains more from the Justice Center than it costs.

WOLF:
We’re not able to touch on all your findings, but I just wondered if there were any other headline findings that
you have.

ROTTMAN: Well, I think the main headline finding is procedural justice.
The ability of a court to generate a belief in a community, among a group of people, that it is showing respect,
that it’s neutral, allows voices to be heard, and above all, that it’s sincerely concerned about people.
And we know that of the lot of research, that is most likely to result in compliance with criminal justice decisions.

I think the other thing that I would point out is the coherence of what goes on in the Justice Center—that
you have people who work for the state court system, from different government agencies, or for community agencies.
You have linkages to dozens of community based institutions that provide treatment services, so it’s quite remarkable
that everything holds together so well, that there aren’t turf wars, there aren’t misunderstandings, but it operates
so smoothly.

ROB WOLF: Well thank you very much for taking the time to explain to me
and basically reducing years of very challenging and fascinating work to a very brief conversation. I have
been speaking with David B. Rottman, and Cynthia G. Lee, both from the National Center for State Courts, about their
evaluation of the Red Hook Community Justice Center that anyone who’s interested in judicial reform should read,
and they can get a copy of the report on our website, www.courtinnovation.org,
and of course also at the National Center for State Courts website, www.ncsc.org.
So once again David and Cynthia, thanks so much for talking with me. I’m Rob Wolf, thanks very much
for listening. [Closing theme music]

Midtown Community Court Celebrates 20 Years of Problem-Solving Justice Oct 25, 2013

The Center for Court Innovation celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Midtown Community Court with speeches by New York State Chief Judge Jonathan
Lippman, Center for Court Innovation Director Greg Berman, and others.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Tonight I’m at
the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Midtown community Court. Over
250 people have turned out—judges, city and state officials, representatives of businesses, not-for-profit organizations,
and the community at large, to honor the nation’s first community court.

Founded in 1993, the
Midtown Community Court has been dedicated to developing innovative and effective responses to low-level crime. A
typical sentence at the Midtown Court seeks to both restore the community and also link an offender to services to
help them rebuild their lives and discourage them from reoffending. Errol Lewis, host of Inside City Hall and tonight’s
emcee, said the court would not be possible without public and private entities working together.

ERROL
LEWIS: We don’t have a theme tonight, but if we did it would be public-private partnerships. Midtown is
the product of many different players from the public and the private sectors coming together to support justice
reform.

WOLF: Tonight’s honorees included New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman,
the Shubert Organization, which as Broadway’s largest theater owner, provided key early funding support to the court,
and Nicole Robinson, a client of the court, who has made huge strides in turning her life around. Greg Berman, director
of the Center for Court Innovation, introduced Judge Lippman.

GREG BERMAN: Now you probably
don’t need me to tell you what kind of public servant Judge Lippman is. All you have to do is pick up the New
York Times to figure that out. But suffice to say over the last couple years since he became the chief
judge, he’s taken on a dizzying array of issues that basically no other public leader had the courage to touch, everything
from civil legal services, to human trafficking, to bail reform.

WOLF: Lippman noted how the Midtown
Court serves not only Times Square and surrounding neighborhoods but the entire justice system by serving as a laboratory
to test new reforms. He explained how his recently announced initiative to start special courts for victims of sex
trafficking was initially tested at the Midtown Court.

JUDGE LIPPMAN: The Midtown Community Court
is serving as a crucial test case. Before launching our statewide initiative to really shut down this evil, this
form of modern day slavery, we chose to pilot a new approach to women arrested for prostitution at the Midtown Court.
We learned an enormous amount about how to identify victims, how to link them to services and help them get off the
streets. We are now adapting these lessons to sites around the state, so the victims of trafficking will not be victimized
again by the justice system or by our society.

WOLF: The final honoree of the evening
gave a human face to the policies being tested at the Midtown Court. The court’s director, Courtney Bryan, introduced
Nicole Robinson. First you’ll hear Bryan, and then Robinson.

COURTNEY BRYAN: She was
victimized and abused as a young child, abandoned by adults who should have cared for her. Nicole’s story is incredible.
Sadly, it is not the exception. There are countless victims of trafficking who are hidden in plain view. In our schools,
in our courts, in our neighborhoods. Thanks to her bravery and her hard work, and with the support of several individuals
and agencies here in this room tonight, Nicole’s future is bright. She has no criminal record and has legal immigration
status and her own apartment. She’s in a leadership program with GEMS, a wonderful organization that works with survivors
of commercial sexual exploitation. She’s studying for the GED and plans to go to college.

NICOLE
ROBINSON: When I came through Midtown three years ago, I finally was treated like a person, a whole person
– not as a number or as a criminal, or looked at as a victim, or as any other label. I really appreciated being treated
with respect and felt like my voice was finally being heard. I finally felt comfortable to trust and let people into
my life. And now three years later, those people are my family. If I could say one thing to you all tonight, it’s
to take time to get to know the person before judging them based on a label.

WOLF: This
was just a sample of the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Midtown Community Court, which took place October
21, 2013 in the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan. To learn more about the court or the Center for Court Innovation,
please visit www.courtinnovation.org. Don’t forget that you can subscribe to our podcasts on iTunes and follow up
on Facebook and Twitter. I’m Rob Wolf of the Center for Court Innovation. Thanks for listening.

October
2013

Information Technology & Social Services: Tracking Clients, Treatment, and Compliance Oct 03, 2013

Andree Mattix, director of social services at Orleans
Parish District Attorney’s Office, discusses how a customized technology application helps her staff
track data and clients in the D.A.’s diversion, victim-witness, and domestic violence programs.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and today’s New
Thinking podcast is focusing on technology, specifically how the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office in New
Orleans uses technology to implement programming and track data. With me on the phone is Andree Mattix, director
of social services at Orleans Parish District Attorney’s office. Thanks for joining me today.

ANDREE
MATTIX: Thank you for having me, Robert.

WOLF: I understand that a few years
ago you found out about the data management systems that our technology team here at the Center for Court Innovation
developed for several of our programs, and you asked our technology experts to help you guys adapt the system for
your own programming. So I thought maybe you could give a little background. What is your programming like and what
kind of technology were you looking for?

MATTIX: I came into the District Attorney’s
Office shortly after this particular district attorney took office, which was at the end of 2008, and when we came
into our offices—this was post-hurricane Katrina—we really didn’t have an office at that time. We were trying to
put our office building back together and trying to figure out what the previous administration had, didn’t have.
And one of the things that I found in my divisions, which are victim witness, diversion, and domestic violence, was
that there was no way of tracking data. There was no database at all. No technology was being used, it was all paper
and pencil files and I had come from a world where that was just not okay. So I had done a lot of reporting to the
federal government with the drug court program I was with and I knew that we were going to be looking at expanding
all of our programming, and that we would need a way to track our data for programming purposes, but also for funder
purposes and for anything that we would need in the future, as well as what we were doing right now. So that’s when
I started researching possible ways that we could do that. We also had no money to do it. I started looking into
Red Hook’s system so I reached out to CCI and I said, you know, is that something we could possibly get in on?
So we figured out a way that we could do it for very little money.

WOLF: So that was
the system that was being used at the Red Hook Community Justice Center in Brooklyn, New York, which our team here
at the Center for Court Innovation helped design. So they adapted that program for you?

MATTIX:
They did. They were able to work with me and my staff. We went back and forth a lot about what parts of that program
would be really good for us, and what parts of the program weren’t really necessary. We were able to take some things
out and they were able to extract New York’s data, an allow for us some new data fields that we would need, and create
a system that I was able to keep separate for each of the three programs, but still was pretty much the same system.
But I had special things that were needed in each one and CCI was really good about coming in and working with me
about the special needs for the different programs while still keeping it similar, and it wasn’t a huge undertaking
to create, you know, three different programs.

WOLF: Maybe you can give me a sense of what the
program does for you that you find most helpful?

MATTIX: Probably the intake component,
especially with my diversion group, is definitely the most utilized for sure, and diversion uses all aspects of the
program. The most, I would say, without question. The other two programs, victim witness and domestic violence use
it for tracking out clients, tracking our client contacts, and for establishing the demographic information and being
able to kind of pull that out when I need to report to different people about what’s going on with the system and,
you know, funders as well as to city council, the mayor, governor’s office, legislature, anybody who needs to know
how many victims are we serving, what’s the domestic violence problem like in New Orleans. But they use it as well
in somewhat the same capacity as diversion does, is that same information is entered so that we have a way to quickly
find an individual, find their addresses, find their phone numbers, the case manager or the counselor having to actually
be here.

WOLF: And were there any challenge to bringing the technology into your work?

MATTIX: Obviously there were some changes, but there were a lot of changes happening at the same
time, so there was kind of a culture of change around here. So because of that it was a little easier. A lot of the
staff coming in were a lot more friendly with technology than some of the longstanding people that had been around
for awhile. So it still was a little bit teaching them, but it’s a fairly user-friendly program.

WOLF:
Did it help you track results, compliance? Can you come up with figures and sort of summarize outcomes
in that way?

MATTIX: I can and it’s particularly useful with diversion because we do
look at the number of people who successfully complete the program, as well as the people who do not complete the
program. And then I have different tracks of that program, so we’re comparing one program to another on the outcomes.
And then we’re able to take the successful completion, the information that we get from there to actually run recidivism
through another, you know obviously it’s through a police computer, but we use the demographic information from JCA
to be able to get the successful completion demographics to run the recidivism. So that’s been really helpful because
we do have fairly low recidivism rates and we’re very excited about that, because we believe that shows that what
we’re doing is working.

WOLF: And just for our listeners, JCA stands for…

MATTIX: Justice Center Application. It’s just you all’s name, not ours, and that’s what we call
it.

WOLF: Are there any challenges around confidentiality? Does it have to
be – are the names blanked out, or is that not necessary?

MATTIX: It’s not necessary
because only the people in my division have access to the database, so the attorneys in the office don’t have access
to my database. Secretaries in the office don’t have access to my database. Only the counselors and social workers
under my three different divisions actually can access it, and they can’t – so for instance, victim witness can’t
access diversion, and domestic violence can’t access victim witness, and that’s done for the sake of confidentiality.

WOLF: Is that all password protected? Is that how it works?

MATTIX:
It is, and it actually prompts us to change our password very frequently. It just gets challenging to keep thinking
of new ones, but I think everyone’s kind of got a system now.

WOLF: The whole world
has to come up with new passwords all the time.

MATTIX: Yeah, but there are so many
everywhere, so we all know to keep track.

WOLF: So just overall, how has technology
improved your work? I mean does it save you time? Does it save money? Has it allowed
you to know certain things, or measure certain things that you couldn’t do very easily before?

MATTIX:
Absolutely. There is no – I can’t even imagine us being able to do the volume of work that we do without this system.
You know, when I first came in, we only had 200 people in diversion and now we have almost 1,000 people in diversion.
So being able to do statistics on 200 people is a lot different than on almost 1,000 people. So being able to get
that data very quickly, at our fingertips, has just been critical to being able to do our quarterly reports, as well
as being able to provide just anyone in the community with information about our program. And the same thing for
victim witness, and domestic violence. Our victim witness program is over 2,000 people at any given time. There’s
just simply no way to do that by hand.

WOLF: And just to give me a sense of what your
diversion program is like, who are the clients that you have? What are they being asked to do and what
are the charges that they had been facing?

MATTIX: We have two tracks of diversion.
Our track one program is designed for property offenders. It is for people who have really never been in trouble
before. They have to pay restitution, their restitution can’t be over 1000 dollars. They are with us, usually, from
nine to 12 months, and they typically cannot have substance abuse or mental health problems to be in track one. They
can still be in diversion, but they have to move to track two, and track two is – and these are all felony offenses,
that’s all we deal with. We don’t deal with misdemeanors in my diversion program. So track two is primarily substance
abuse related offenses, and it is a two year program. They come in, they work with their counselors. I have master’s
level counselors and social workers. We provide individual case management counseling, as well as we do group counseling
four days a week in our office. So some clients come to those groups, some clients go to outside groups, some clients
are in residential treatment. It really just kind of depends on the individual’s needs. But they come in, we do an
assessment, and part of that assessment is built into JCA so we’re able to ask those questions and get that information
up front while we’re doing that intake, so that we can kind of assess where we’re going to need to send this person,
what is this person going to need to be successful in the program. We will help them with employment, with school,
anything that is going to help them stay on the right track. And so JCA is going to be logging their drug tests,
it’s going to be – we have them for drug tests too. It’s going to be logging each of the individual visits, and it’s
also when they come for group counseling, that’ll be logged in there as well.

WOLF:
Wow, so it’s really keeping track of a lot of clients who, it sounds like, are involved in a lot of different possible
treatment options.

MATTIX: Oh yeah. Our program is pretty extensive.

WOLF:
Well thank you very much. I think you’ve given a clear picture of how the Justice Center Application works in your
office, and how you’ve adapted it to your particular needs, there at the Orleans Parrish District Attorney’s office.

MATTIX: Thank you for giving me a chance to speak with you about it.

ROB WOLF:
I’ve been talking with Andree Mattix, director of social services at Orleans Parrish District Attorney’s Office about
their technology application that they use to track their participants in their various social service programs.
I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. To listen to other New Thinking podcasts,
please visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. You can also listen to our podcasts on iTunes. Thanks for listening.

(October 2013)

Addressing Domestic Violence in Guam: a Judge’s Perspective Sep 13, 2013

Judge Michael
Bordallo of the Family Violence Court in Guam discusses his specialized court, including challenges and
opportunities faced by the court and stakeholders. The judge also offers a unique perspective on responding to domestic
violence in an island community. (September 2013)

KATIE CRANK:
Hi, this is Katie Crank, from the Center for Court Innovation’s domestic violence team. Following
is a New Thinking podcast with Judge Michael Bordallo of the Guam Family Violence Court. The conversation
was recorded in September of 2012.

CRANK: Hello, I am here in Guam as part of the national
training and technical assistance that our office provides through the Office on Violence Against Women’s Court
Enhancement and Training Grant funding stream. Today I’m speaking with Judge Michael Bordallo, who
presides over the day to day operations of Guam’s Family Violence Court. Thanks so much for taking
the time to speak with me today.

JUDGE MICHAEL BORDALLO: You’re welcome and welcome
to Guam.

CRANK: Thank you. So Guam is a U.S. territory in the Western Pacific
Ocean with a population of around 160,000 and you have a diverse culture here with a mix of native Chamorro residents,
Filipino, Pacific Islanders, Asian, white, and we’re wondering if there are any specific issues that are really
a challenge to the court in addressing domestic violence with these populations.

BORDALLO:
Well I think the biggest challenge when we have the diverse cultures is language. For the local, for the
Chamorro population it’s not as big an issue because most of us speak English and all the schools, everything
is conducted in English, but the rest of the Asian Pacific Islander population, and to some extent even for the Filipino,
and we have some Koreans and Chinese, a lot of them speak little to no English. So those groups are a little
bit harder. With the Pacific Islanders, we have enough of a defendant population that we can actually bring
in, for instance we conduct groups in Chuukese, which is their native tongue, so we’re fortunate enough to have
counselors who speak the language – and unfortunately there’s enough of them to form a group and so that issue
is addressed there. I think the harder ones would be, for instance, even the Filipino or the Chinese or
the Koreans, where then we need to have translators for each of those defendants. So language is the primary
issue. There are some cultural issues – to what degree is family violence defined? Whether it’s
acceptable or not acceptable, and those form part of the counseling issues that are addressed.

CRANK:
Can you tell me a little bit more about the specialized docket that you have, that’s dedicated to domestic violence
or family violence cases? Your court, as we mentioned, is the recipient of an OVW Courts Enhancement and
Training Grant, and in a lot of domestic violence courts and calendars on the mainland, those courts handle misdemeanor
criminal domestic violence cases, or civil orders of protection, or they’ve created an integrated domestic violence
court. So can you tell us just a little bit more about your family violence court and some of the procedures
that are particular to your work here in Guam?

BORDALLO: I think our work here would
be defined as an integrated domestic violence court. For instance, my docket would include all civil protection
order cases, which we’ve designated as protective order cases, and those used to be defined by cohabitants,
so you had to have lived with the respondent. Now it’s been expanded to include almost any kind of
family relationship, whether they’re living together now or not. I also would handle all of the civil
restraining orders, which is even broader in terms of relationships. It’s integrated so any domestic
case between the same parties, for instance, in a protective order case, whether that domestic case was filed before
or after the civil protection case would also be assigned or reassigned to the court, so it’s one family, one
judge, and then obviously all of the domestic violence misdemeanor as well as felony cases are assigned to this court.
So basically I’m doing almost 100 percent domestic family violence, either in the criminal setting or the civil
setting, just about all my docket time. We’re general jurisdiction judges, so I still have my own
share of regular domestic cases, regular civil cases, but all [of my] criminal cases are family violence cases.

CRANK: Can you tell me a little bit about how you came to preside over this specialized family
violence court?

BORDALLO: Our system here on Guam is that we have seven superior court
judges and we rotate assignments. So prior to coming onto this, I was in charge of the adult drug court.
So we serve, right now we serve three year rotations, so I’m in the first year of a three year rotation on family
violence. And so in the past we’ve just drawn at random which assignment the judges will take with
the understanding that everybody rotates around so that you do all the different assignments. And we have
several treatment courts. We have a mental health court, we have a drug court, we have this, we have the
juvenile drug courts, and we have started a DUI court, but we’re still finalizing some of the aspects of that.

CRANK: Then shifting gears a little bit, can you tell me how the resource coordinator assists
the family violence court?

BORDALLO: She’s been on for two and a half – or two years,
almost, I think, and I’ve only been on for a year so she is in charge of everything with the Family Violence
Court. She’s my liaison to the community. She’s also in charge of reviewing and processing
the program that we provide to the clients, ensuring to the greatest extent possible that we are using the latest
available evidence-based techniques, whether it’s in terms of, for instance, things as little as how the plea
agreements – we’ve just had a recent, I think pretty substantive change in law where we’ve gone from a
diversion to a deferred plea, so she has to coordinate that. She also spends a lot of time reporting to
people on our progress.

CRANK: Can you tell us what’s an example of a lesson learned,
just in your experience in the year that you’ve been on the Family Violence Court, what’s a lesson learned?

BORDALLO: Well I think, you know, number one the biggest benefit that I have received is in terms
of training. And that again goes, that’s part of Siiri’s[kc1]
role as the coordinator here, is to make sure the judges are up to date on the training and, and I think the number
one thing is the approach and understanding, first of all, of your knowledge of what a family violence case involves,
and the dynamics. And I gave an example – there’s a conference going on out here and I gave just a
really simple example of that, just in terms of protective orders. You know, normally in court if somebody
keeps reappearing before you, you tend to say listen, if you appear before me one more time, I’m just not even
going to grant your request. And one of the basic things we learn from our training is to ensure, for example,
victims of domestic violence – I don’t care if you keep dismissing the case. I want you to know that
the court is always open and you are free to come back and ask again for the restraining orders because, for instance,
I think one of the studies pointed out that it normally would take somewhere between five and seven incidences before
a victim would even have courage to seek assistance of the court. So it’s just learning about the
dynamics in a family violence case that has been the biggest benefit. So the training is just, is just
crucial because for the most part – I’ll be honest, it’s not going to be the way you normally think about
cases, or you normally think about incidences. Without that knowledge you never, I think for the most part,
would understand how these cases work.

CRANK: That’s very true. And didn’t
you also attend a National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges training that was specific to running a domestic
violence court docket?

BODALLO: Absolutely, and the trainings – I think I’ve actually
gone to two already in San Francisco and in Chicago, and again – like I said, the best thing was you learned the
realities behind domestic violence. You can read a declaration that just says, oh, he slapped me and then
he pulled my hair, and not really understand the dynamics behind what happened. All that’s gonna show
up on a piece of paper is he pulled my hair, but you have to understand what the dynamics are behind the intimidation
and things of that nature. And I think the training really pointed out, you just don’t think about
how these cases are, and so it’s good to understand that, and then also very important – the treatment aspect
of it, and how you can, you work to make the defendants and the perpetrators change and making sure that you hold
them accountable, but more importantly, you provide them the resources so that they’re not set up to fail.

CRANK: What would you say your biggest challenges are, in terms of offender accountability and
victim safety, and how does the domestic violence court or the family violence court work to address these?

BORDALLO: Well I think in terms of victim safety, our biggest challenge, like everywhere else,
is whether the community as a whole has the ability to provide the resources and supports to the victim so that issues
that affect their behavior are addressed. And for safety it’s things like, okay, can the community
or does the community have the resources to meet their housing needs, their financial needs, their support needs?
because what I’ve learned from training is that all those needs greatly affect whether [00:09:24.21]
or not they’re gonna say, I want to see the defendant or not, whether or not I’m gonna want to see the
person who just beat me up or not. And they affect it so much more than you analyzing it, whatever you
believe. I mean the number one question I think off everybody’s lips, when they hear of this type
of crime is, why didn’t she run? Why didn’t she just leave him? So he supports you,
that’s no reason to stay. I mean those are the – and it’s the natural, in some ways it’s
a natural response, but the reality is you learn that those are very real needs, you know? Children and
taking care of the kids, and providing a house, those are very real needs that people are willing to compromise their
safety for.

CRANK: In closing, if there’s a jurisdiction like yours which is relatively
isolated and perhaps has fewer resources to create a domestic violence docket, or domestic violence court, what would
be one or two words of advice that you might give?

BORDALLO: My first piece of advice
would be that judge has to attend a training session. because if you’re going to start a family violence
court, just as if you’re going to start a drug court, whoever’s in charge has to have that understanding
of those cases before him. I was a judge for 13 years and I was a lawyer for 10 years before that.
I was amazed at how much I learned, just attending one training session. And then the second thing you
need is you need to have the ability to marshal whatever resources you have in that community and it really has to
focus on two areas, and it has to focus on treatment of the defendant, and it has to focus on support of the victim.
And those are kind of the two areas. But you know, we’ve learned that there are a lot of tools that
are inexpensive. For instance, the lethality test and lethality assessments, those are 20 question, 25
question sheets that your victim advocates can use, that go a long way in assisting you in just narrowing the odds,
putting the odds in your favor when you make the decision. Yes you can have contact or no you can’t
have contact. So there are resources out there that are inexpensive and any jurisdiction can access through
organizations such as yours, and STOP grants, and even if you don’t get grants but you can access them for resources
to assist you, so that you make the best decision possible.

CRANK: Great.
Well thanks again, Judge, for talking with us today.

BORDALLO: You’re welcome and
I hope you enjoyed your time on Guam and looking forward to working with you in the future.

CRANK:
Most certainly. Thanks again.

CRANK: We just heard a New Thinking podcast
with Judge Michael Bordallo, recorded in September 2012. To hear more you can follow our podcasts on iTunes
or visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.

Experts at Your Fingertips: The National Drug Court Online Learning System Jul 09, 2013

The National Drug Court Online Learning System at www.drugcourtline.org
offers free training modules on a wide range of topics by national experts. In this podcast, Valerie Raine and Dennis
Reilly, both of the Center for Court Innovation, explain how drug courts can use the system to educate new employees and keep their teams
up to date on developments in the field. (August 2013)

VALERIE RAINE:
Methamphetamine is not an issue for eastern drug courts. It’s a huge issue for Midwest and Midwestern drug courts.
So we have a session on methamphetamine. That won’t be applicable or probably of much interest to the Manhattan
treatment court, but it will be of enormous interest to treatment courts in Arkansas.

ROB WOLF:
I’m Rob Wolf, director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome to another New Thinking
podcast. Today we’re going to talk about a new tool to help drug court practitioners. And for people who, perhaps,
don’t know what drug courts are, they work with drug addicted offenders and link them to treatment using rigorous
evidence-based practices. Specifically today we’re going to talk about the National Drug Court Online Learning
System, which is available at www.drugcourtonline.org. It is a new initiative created by staff here at the Center
for Court Innovation with the support of the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance. I’m speaking
with Valerie Raine, Director of Drug Court Programs at the Center for Court Innovation and Dennis Riley, the Deputy
Director of Drug Court Programs at the Center for Court Innovation. But rather than have me explain it, I thought
maybe you guys could just start off talking about, you know, what is the National Drug Court Online Learning System?

DENNIS RILEY: Thanks, Rob. The National Drug Court Online Learning System has been a long time coming. There’s
been plenty of opportunities for remote learning using webinars and conference calls, but this is really the first
time we’ve taken online learning to a new step with drug courts nationally. And the intent is to present information
on adult drug courts, which is able to be replicated on a frequent basis, used with individuals for individual learning,
and also with teams. The elements of the National Drug Court Online Learning System includes an adult drug court
course which has multiple lessons around the critical elements of drug courts. It also includes virtual site visits
of rural, urban, and suburban drug court locations as well as practitioner perspectives on some of the most important
issues to drug court practitioners.

ROB WOLF: And just so people get a sense of how it works,
they visit the website and then they can click on topic choices and what do they get? Videos? PowerPoints?

DENNIS RILEY: Well, first when you go to drugcourtonline.org, you have to create a free account. This is
a free system supported by the Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Assistance. Once you’ve created an account,
you receive an email confirming that a password has been created, and you can log directly into the Adult Drug Court
course. From there you see a listing of courses and lessons which include video presentations from national experts
on various drug court topics. You can also see the virtual site visits, practitioner perspectives, there’s also
a resource library that includes all the PowerPoint presentations that the experts are providing, as well as written
resources on drug court issues.

ROB WOLF: And just a sense of what those topics that they might
find address.

DENNIS RILEY: The topics range from psychopharmacology to sanctions and incentives,
confidentiality, constitutional issues.

ROB WOLF: So Valerie, let me ask you how did the National
Drug Court Online Learning System come about? What was the reason, the motivation for creating it?

VALERIE
RAINE: Thanks Rob. Originally, and this goes back several years, as drug courts, established drug courts started
experiencing significant turnover in team members—there’s a new judge, there’s a new prosecutor, there’s
a new treatment provider. And even in the sort of more luxury days of funding, you couldn’t hold a four day
training institute every time a team got one new team member. And so the motivation for it originally was to deal
with transitional team members, so that they could come onto a team, take these courses, and at least have some kind
of foundation in drug court practices, drug court operations, and so forth. And that continues to be one of the systems
primary functions. There are, however, other functions, other audiences that are being served as both federal and
state budgets suffer severe setbacks. State drug court administrators can not afford to send new or established drug
court practitioners to live training. It also takes time away from the operation. People have to travel, they’ve
got to close down the court. The federal agencies who have supported drug court training that was live, and was excellent
training, are increasingly concerned about their budgets, and increasingly interested in the potential of remote
learning to, if not replace, at least ameliorate the sort of downturn in live training.

ROB WOLF:
So it sounds like the initial impetus was there are new people coming on – let’s give kind of a primer in how
drug courts work. But you’re saying now the online learning system really has something for everyone—both the
mature practitioner as well as the new arrival to a drug court.

VALERIE RAINE: Exactly. And we
intend to keep this a very dynamic site. As new developments emerge, new evidence-based practices are realized and
implemented, new changes in the law. We, in fact right now, are concluding the development of a module on veteran’s
tracks that specifically targets those drug court practitioners who want to set up a veteran’s court or a veteran’s
drive.

ROB WOLF: I’ll just throw this open to either one of you. Is this the new normal?
Can we expect that trainings going forward for drug court practitioners as well as perhaps in other areas—it’s
gonna be online? Or is this a temporary make-do because budgets are constrained?

VALERIE RAINE:
Well, Rob, I think that online learning is certainly part of the future and I think it’s here to stay regardless
of budgets, because I think it serves a very important need that live training can’t, because it’s not
immediately accessible and accessible 24/7. That said, there is no real replacement for live training. Live training
offers interpersonal contact, opportunities to network, opportunities to talk with one another about what you’re
learning throughout the day, throughout the week. So I certainly hope that live training is very much a part of the
future, along with the opportunities and benefits that online learning offers.

DENNIS RILEY: There
are some certain benefits to having training online. It’s convenient, it’s self-paced. When people don’t
have a lot of time, they can actually consume potions of the content during a lunch break and then restart at any
time that they have some additional time. But we don’t think that this actually replaces live, in-person training.

ROB WOLF: So this is a national system that anyone in the country can access, but presumably every jurisdiction
has unique needs, unique resources, so I wonder how people can take advantage of what the system has to offer, but
also perhaps adapt it to their local circumstance.

VALERIE RAINE: First of all, in the virtual
site visits we did tours of urban courts, rural courts, a suburban court that’s a DWI court, so that when people
tour a court, they’re not saying oh, well that doesn’t apply to us because we’re rural. The other
area where we’ve tried to address different needs is, for instance, in the actual presentations. So methamphetamine
is not an issue for eastern drug courts. It’s a huge issue for Midwest and Midwestern drug courts. So we have
a session on methamphetamine. That won’t be applicable or probably of much interest to the Manhattan treatment
court, but it will be of enormous interest to treatment courts in Arkansas. The third way is that teams may not need
to review the entire curriculum that we have offered on the online learning system. They may do some kind of self-assessment
or just realize themselves that there are shortcomings in various pieces of their program. They might realize, oh
they’re getting a lot of false positives on their drug tests, the protocols don’t seem to be being followed,
you know, we need to sit down as a team and look at the drug testing module and make sure that we’re actually
following the sort of industry standards when it comes to that. So it can be a—and that could be the same for a session
on cultural competency or team members—a whole bunch of new team members come on and they don’t really seem
to get the concept of addiction as a disease. We need to go look at Steve Hanson talk about the psychopharmacology
of addiction, the affect on the brain, and what it actually does to the body.

ROB WOLF: And if
people are doing this and they have questions?

DENNIS RILEY: Not only is there technical support,
but there’s also a content helpline which goes to our desks so we can either identify an answer to a particularly
difficult question, or reach out to that expert who gave the presentation to get the answers for people.

ROB WOLF: How many drug courts are out there now?

DENNIS RILEY: Well, there’s over
2,700 drug courts across the United States, and typically when I go speak at the National Association of Drug Court
Professionals Conference and ask people how long they’ve been sitting in their drug court, half of the attendees
will often raise their hand and say they’re new to the drug court team. This is our response to that issue.

ROB WOLF: I know how hard you guys have worked on this system. It looks great, it’s amazing, it’s
got so much going on so I hope people do take advantage of it, and do visit www.drugcourtonline.org. I’ve been
speaking with Valerie Raine, director of Drug Court Programs at the Center for Court Innovation. Thank you, Valerie.

VALERIE RAINE: Thank you Rob, for this opportunity.

ROB WOLF: And I’ve also been
speaking with Dennis Riley, the deputy director of Drug Court Programs at the Center for Court Innovation.

DENNIS RILEY: Thanks, Rob. We look forward to this new future of training.

ROB WOLF:
I’m Rob Wolf, director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. To listen to other podcasts you
can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org, and you can also listen to our New Thinking podcasts on iTunes.

A View of Domestic Violence from the Judge’s Bench Jul 02, 2013

Chief Magistrate Judge Berryl Anderson of DeKalb County, Georgia discusses the lessons she
has learned over the course of 21 years as an attorney and 13 years as a judge about working with victims of domestic violence and improving
the justice system’s response to intimate partner violence. July 2013

SARAH SCHWEIG: Hi, I’m Sarah Schweig, and today I’m speaking with Chief Magistrate Judge Berryl Anderson,
who has been leading a domestic violence court project in DeKalb County, Georgia. She’s here in New York to participate
in the domestic violence open house here at the Center for Court Innovation, which is the office on Violence Against
Women’s comprehensive technical assistance provider for its courts program. Thanks for speaking with me today.

JUDGE ANDERSON: Well, I am honored and delighted to be here.

SARAH SCHWEIG: First I’m
going to ask you a bit about your background. Your extensive experience in the courts includes representing victims
of domestic violence with the Atlanta Legal Aid Society, and I was curious how did this inform your understanding
of how courts grapple with the complexities of these cases?

JUDGE ANDERSON: Well there are a lot
of complexities, as you know, in cases dealing with domestic violence, and last year I celebrated 21 years as an
attorney, and this year I’m celebrating 13 years on the bench. As a legal aid attorney, working with the Atlanta
Legal Aid Society, I got to work very closely victims of domestic violence and what I suddenly realized is the victims
present with multiple issues. So they’re not just dealing with domestic violence. They have housing issues, consumer
issues, perhaps access to credit issues. And so they present with multiple issues that inform their decisions and
their ability to be autonomous in the decisions that they make. And often times they just want the violence to stop.
They don’t necessarily want a divorce or to split up their family, or to move their children out of their local community
into another community. And the particular office that I worked in, which was the DeKalb County office, we also represented
clients in a neighboring jurisdiction, Wynette County. I got an opportunity to see that there was a little bit of
lack of uniformity from one courtroom and from one jurisdiction to the next. Now all the judges were applying the
law, but it just seemed like the process could be streamlined a little bit better in domestic violence cases, particularly
in those cases where victims were trying to get protective orders.

SARAH SCHWEIG: So as a judge,
how do you kind of come to see that you had a role in responding to domestic violence cases beyond that kind of business
as usual approach?

JUDGE ANDERSON: Well there are a couple of things that really—I think Oprah
calls them “a-ha moments”—so there were a couple of a-ha moments that I had as a judge and one of them was early
on, I took a course with the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court judges called Enhancing Judicial Skills
in domestic violence Cases. It’s a three day workshop where judges get together, and it’s okay to be vulnerable and
talk about what you don’t know. And it’s an opportunity to hear what some of the best practices are around the country,
and it really inspired me to be creative and innovative, and to draw on the strengths in our community, and in our
judicial system, and in our courthouse. And every courthouse has a culture. So I realized that we had a lot of great
systems in place and a lot of great relationships, and it encouraged me and inspired me to build on those relationships
with community partners. And another thing that sort of merged with this is my participating in fatality reviews.
It is something that we usually conduct on an annual basis. It is just a very sad, very sobering reality of how terribly
things can go wrong when victims of domestic violence don’t get what they need on the front end. It’s taking a look
at every level of system contact that that particular victim had and each contact with the system is an opportunity
to better serve that victim. And so we look at it from a lens of how we can better serve victims. And what went wrong?
And not in a finger-pointing way, but where are the gaps in my system? And if you recognize gaps in your system,
and you can’t be thin-skinned about this process but it really is about saving lives.

SARAH SCHWEIG:
You’re a recipient of an Office of Violence Against Women grant to develop your domestic violence court project.
Can you give me a picture of how that project developed and how it operates now?

JUDGE ANDERSON:
you know they say that people practice medicine or they practice law, and I feel like I’m practicing this domestic
violence thing, and you know, you never get to the point where it’s perfect. And so I like to take a critical look
at my court on a regular basis. And this process actually evolved out of taking a look at what we already have in
place. Fortunately, my court is a recipient of a two-year grant to establish a compliance project. DeKalb County
Magistrate court handles temporary protective orders for our cases and there is a portion of Georgia law that says
if you’re a respondent and you have a 12-month family violence order entered against you, then you have to take a
family violence intervention program, a 24-week class. Well judges were issuing orders and the respondents were walking
out of the courtroom, and we had no way of knowing whether or not they were surrendering their weapons, whether or
not they were taking the family violence intervention classes. And so, fortunately, as a recipient of an OVW grant,
we’re allowed to set up that compliance project where I was able to hire two compliance officers. And immediately,
upon a judge issuing a 12-month protective order, the respondent leaves the courtroom and goes into an adjacent room
to meet with a compliance officer who will have the respondent—first of all, talk to them about weapons and we work
with our sheriff’s department to have those weapons seized and have them hold onto those weapons during the time
that the protective order is in place. We’ve also worked collaboratively with our probate court to make sure that
a respondent under a 12-month order doesn’t go to probate court to apply for a weapons permit. So we’ve got the compliance
officer who’s able to monitor this behavior, and the compliance officer makes unannounced visits to make sure that
the respondent’s actually not just showing up for class, but also participating in class. You know, if you’re victim
of domestic violence and you go to the criminal courthouse, and you may have to take a bus and a train to get there,
and then you’ve got this application to fill out, and you’re also upset because when the officer came to the scene,
perhaps he didn’t believe you or for whatever reason he didn’t arrest the batterer, so now you have to try to maneuver
the system on your own. So fortunately in many cases we’ll have an advocate from the Women’s Resource Center there
to assist the victim with the application process and to kind of sit with her when she talks with a judge. Now if
a judge believes that there is probable cause for a warrant to issue, then a warrant can issue at that time. But
if the judge believes there’s not quite probable cause, I need to, you know, I need more evidence, then it will be
set up for a warrant application hearing, which may happen 10 days to two weeks later. We have two courtrooms where
we conduct the warrant application hearings simultaneously, and in each courtroom you may have as many as 60 or 70
people. So it’s a little chaotic and the domestic violence cases are not separated from a neighbor dispute. They’re
not separated out from those other warrant application hearings. And so I realized that that was a service gap that
we have. And it’s great to have an advocate from the Women’s Resource Center there, but that advocate is going back
and forth from one courtroom to the other and trying to identify who’s there for a domestic violence case. So I realized
that there was a system gap and where with this courts training and improvements grant, that we’re able to improve
on the process that we have in place now. And what we will do is have a standalone warrant application hearing process
for victims of domestic violence. We’ll have judges who have the specialized training from the National Council of
Family and Juvenile Court Judges hear these cases. We will have an advocate in the courtroom with them, and the advocate
is no longer running back and forth. We will have sheriff’s department there to monitor courtroom security and will
make sure that the victims are on one side of the courtroom and the perpetrators are on the other side of the courtroom.
And then if a warrant actually issues as a result of that hearing, then the judge has an opportunity to impose special
conditions. And if there are violations then we can deal with that and perhaps revoke the bond and have the defendant
sit in jail until the case goes to trial.

SARAH SCHWEIG: So they know that there’s a real consequence—

JUDGE ANDERSON: There are teeth and there are absolute consequences. And this way we’ll be able to give
a lot of special attention to victims of domestic violence.

SARAH SCHWEIG: So what lessons would
you share with other judges who may be struggling with similar issues, or who might be interested in starting a support
program?

JUDGE ANDERSON: Well if I had to pick one word, it’s about relationships. It’s about
relationships with other judges and other trial levels of court. It is important to develop and nurture relationships
with community stakeholders. Coordinated community response—it’s not just something that sounds good. You need to
actually put it in action, and as judges I think that we are, we have the inherent ability to call a meeting and
people will come. I meet quarterly with the advocates, with the sheriff’s department, with the prosecutors, the public
defenders. You need to do a little bit of research to find out what’s available in your community. And you have to
want to do this work. It is incredibly stressful. The proceedings can be very long. They can be very emotional. There’s
something called vicarious trauma, and judges suffer from it, as well as advocates and other people who deal with
domestic violence cases. You’ve got to learn a little bit about self-care. You’ve got to take care of yourself, whether
it’s walking, or running, or cycling, or swimming. Find something that you love to do that has absolutely nothing
to do with court, and nothing to do with domestic violence, because this work can absolutely consume you.

SARAH SCHWEIG: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for speaking with me today. I’m Sarah Schweig and I’ve
been speaking with Chief Magistrate Judge Berryl Anderson of DeKalb County Georgia, about building relationships
to fight domestic violence in the community. To find out more about the Center for Court Innovation, please visit
www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

Adolescent Diversion Program in NY: Researchers Discuss First-Year Impacts Jun 18, 2013

Co-authors Michael Rempel and Suvi Hynynen Lambson discuss the findings of their study, The Adolescent Diversion Program: A First Year Evaluation of Alternatives to Conventional
Case Processing for Defendants Ages 16 and 17 in New York. The study examines the Adolescent Diversion Program, finding that diverting youth to services does
not increase recidivism rates and, in fact, reduces recidivism for high-risk participants.

[Opening
Music]

MIKE REMPEL: When you give intensive treatments to high-risk individuals, they tend to
be effective. When you give intensive treatments to low-risk individuals, you actually increase the chances that
they will re-offend.

WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center
for Court Innovation, and this is another New Thinking podcast. Today I’m with Mike Rempel, who is the director of
research here at the Center for Court Innovation, and Suvi Hynynen Lambson, who is a senior research associate at
the Center for Court Innovation, and they are both co-authors of a new study that looks at the Adolescent Diversion
Program, which is a response to a unique situation we have here in New York.

New York and, I understand,
North Carolina are the only two states that do what?

REMPEL: They’re the only two states that
treat 16- and 17-year-olds as criminally responsible adults. All other states in the country treat them as juveniles.

WOLF: And so the Adolescent Diversion Program, which was implemented at the behest of the chief
judge of the state of New York, Jonathan Lipmann, in January 2012, is an attempt to bring New York in line with the
other 48 states.

SUVI HYNYNEN LAMBSON: Yeah, it’s a first step in that direction.

WOLF:
So your study looks at the first six months of the implementation of this program. So before we talk about the results,
how does the Adolescent Diversion Program work and how is it implemented?

LAMBSON: The Adolescent
Diversion Program is a pilot program that was implemented in nine different sites throughout the state. There’s a
general program model that each of them applied, such as they have a specialized track or court part. The judges
are trained in adolescent development. The third thing that all of the programs have are expanded sentencing options.
This would include treatment or social services options or community service that’s especially geared for the 16-
and 17-year-olds. The interventions vary in length: two to five days compared to three to six months more common
in Queens, Nassau, Westchester, and up to 12 months, which you sometimes find in Erie [County]. Upon completion of
the program, the case would be dismissed or the charge would be reduced. And participation is, of course, voluntary.

WOLF: What kinds of cases were these nine pilot sites seeing?

LAMBSON:
So most of the pilot sites were seeing exclusively misdemeanor cases. Two of the sites do accept some felonies, but
I don’t believe any of them accept violent felonies, and some of them do include violation cases as well.

ROB WOLF: Meaning lower than misdemeanor?

LAMBSON: Meaning lower than misdemeanor. So
there actually wouldn’t be a criminal conviction attached to that; a violation conviction isn’t reflected on a criminal
record.

WOLF: When you looked at these first six months of the program, what are the
characteristics or the outcomes you were looking at?

LAMBSON: Well that’s a great question,
Rob. We actually have nine different research questions. I won’t go over each of them in detail, but generally speaking
we were looking at how many 16- and 17-year-olds were there in these nine sites? How many of those were
actually eligible for the program? Did they comply with their assigned court mandate? The impact
on criminal convictions, the impact on case outcomes, and, of course, the impact on recidivism.

WOLF:
So let’s try to move through some of these results quickly.

LAMBSON: There
are about almost 14,000 16- and 17-year olds who went through courts in these nine sites. Sixty percent of them were
eligible to participate in the program, but actually only 15 percent of them did end up being in the ADP pilot intervention.
And the volume varied greatly from site to site. The Bronx and Queens had 4 percent and 6 percent, respectively,
of the eligible cases, while Nassau and Erie had 62 percent and 69 percent.

WOLF: Is
there something to be learned from that? Why there was such a broad difference?

LAMBSON:
I think so. I mean at least if we look at the case of Nassau, we know that they really tried to implement this to
the broadest extent possible, probably the way we had envisioned it being implemented throughout the state if possible.
Nearly everyone was eligible except for violent felony offenders, and they had a universal screening assessment that
they used with everyone.

WOLF: And what did you learn about compliance?

LAMBSON:
We were able to look at four sites on their compliance and found out that on average they had an 80 percent compliance
rate, which is really good.

WOLF: So now let’s talk about case outcomes. What did you
find there?

REMPEL: First of all, we were interested in whether the ADP initiative reduced
the collateral consequences of conviction by reducing the percentage of 16- and 17-year-olds that received a criminal
conviction. What we actually found was that because the program was largely focused on a misdemeanor population,
they did not have that affect. That population is not in large numbers in the first place ending up getting a felony
or misdemeanor conviction.

Now a lot of the 16- and 17-year-olds who don’t receive a criminal
conviction, receive something called a youthful offender filing, which is a form of conviction, but it doesn’t create
a criminal record, or they get convicted for a violation offense, which you mentioned earlier—it s a conviction,
but it’s not a “crime” and again the case is sealed so it doesn’t create a criminal record.

If
you take all of these categories together, we found there is not any change in one direction or another, although
we found some interesting variations from site to site. We found that Nassau actually reduced any of these outcomes
that involved some sort of guilty plea by about 30 percentage points—from about 45 percent to about 15 percent. And
then we found in some of the other counties it fluctuated more closely to what it had been. Use in jail is something
that is often discussed. We found that the net across all of the sites we looked at, there was not an effect, but
we found a few places where jail was reduced. Nassau was one of those places, which actually reduced jail to zero
from 4 percent.

WOLF: So if I understand correctly, you’re saying overall, statewide,
although a goal ostensibly of the Adolescent Diversion Program was to reduce some of these punitive outcomes like
a criminal record or jail among the 16- and17-year-olds, overall statewide it didn’t really do that, although it
did in some particular jurisdictions, such as Nassau County.

REMPEL: That’s correct.
And going into this research we had two sets of expectations. Those who planned the ADP pilot desired a reduction
in the collateral consequence of conviction. Those who were leery of the pilot were concerned about the problem of
net-widening, where these new pilots might take 16- and 17-year-olds who, in the old system, would have had their
cases dismissed, and end up leading them to now plead guilty. So we found that none of those expectations or concerns
were ultimately the case. Things stayed about where they were and with that in mind we then go forth and look at
other outcomes.

WOLF: Other outcomes such as, for instance recidivism. What did you see there?

MIKE REMPEL: Okay, so let me say when we look at—our measurement was re-arrest. When we look at
any type of re-arrest, with some differences looking at the sites combined. We also looked at felony-level re-arrest.
When we looked at more serious criminal behavior, we actually did find that overall the sites reduced felony recidivism.
We also found that they significantly reduced violent felony recidivism. We also found some interesting variations
by site. In a nutshell, two of the sites—the Bronx and Queens—tended to reduce re-arrest. And Queens particularly
reduced felony-level re-arrests. I believe it went from 19 percent to three percent. We saw that Erie County increased
re-arrests.

WOLF: So why don’t you tell me why these results varied from site to site.

LAMBSON: Well, I think that the main conclusion that we found was that it’s really related to
risk level, that the people who were at the highest risk of re-offense actually ended up with the best outcomes when
they received these targeted services, and those people who had the lowest risk, if they got services, they actually
performed more poorly.

REMPEL: And Rob, this is actually something that is often surprising
to practitioners, but it reflects a consistent finding across the years of research across multiple kinds of interventions,
that when you give intensive treatments to high-risk individuals, they tend to be effective. When you give intensive
treatments to low-risk individuals who, in the absence of an intervention would likely not have re-offended, you
actually increase the chances that they will re-offend. Why? Because the intervention will probably involve things
like putting them into groups where they are spending a lot of time right next to high-risk peers who can then have
contaminating influences.

So when we go back to those site-specific findings that we mentioned
earlier with respect to Erie seeming to increase re-arrest rates, and the Bronx and Queens seeming to decrease re-arrest
rates, once we adjust for the fact that Erie tends primarily to serve a low-risk population, and the Bronx and Queens
tend primarily to serve a high-risk population, we actually fully explain that finding. It’s not so much that it’s
something about the services in Bronx and Queens that are more effective than the services in Erie, it’s that the
Bronx and Queens are doing a better job serving the kind of target population that research says they should serve:
a high-risk population that will benefit from an intensive intervention.

WOLF: Well
thanks so much. It’s really been great talking to you and learning about the results of your study, which listeners
can download from our website at www.courtinnovation.org. The study is called the Adolescent Diversion
Program: A First Year Evaluation of Alternatives to Conventional Case Processing for defendants ages 16 and 17 in
New York. I’m speaking with two of the report’s four authors, Mike Rempel, who is the director of research,
and Suvi Hynynen Lambson, senior research associate here at the Center for Court Innovation.

BOTH:
Thanks Rob.

[Closing music]

WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications
at the Center for Court Innovation. You can listen to more of our podcasts on our website or on iTunes. Thanks for
listening.

Kristine Lizdas, left, of the Battered Women's Justice Project and Robyn Mazur of the Center for
Court Innovation confer after Lizdas' presentation at the Center's Domestic Violence Court Open
House for Office on Violence Against Women Court Training and Improvements Project grantees. — **Domestic Violence and Child Custody: A 4-Part Model for Helping Judges Make More Informed Decisions** Jun 05, 2013
Family Court judges should consider the impact of violence on families when making decisions about child custody
and visitation, according to Kristine Lizdas, a managing attorney at the Battered Women’s Justice Project. In this podcast, Lizdas discusses the
Justice Project’s four-part model for helping judges make more informed decisions.

Kristine
Lizdas, left, of the Battered Women’s Justice Project and Robyn Mazur of the Center for Court Innovation confer
after Lizdas’ presentation at the Center’s Domestic Violence Court Open House for Office on Violence Against
Women Court Training and Improvements Project grantees.

KRISTINE LIZDAS:
[While introductory theme music plays] This person, the person they’re abusing, could be bringing a great deal,
could be wonderful caretakers for their kids, and could be providing so much for their kids, if it were not for the
battering.

ROBERT V. WOLF: [As introductory theme music ends] Hi, I’m Rob Wolf,
director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome to another New Thinking podcast.
Today I’m speaking with attorney Kristine Lizdas about domestic violence cases and their impact on child custody
and visitation. Christine serves as managing attorney for the Legal Policy Program of the Battered Women’s Justice
Project, which is a national resource center on domestic violence legal policy issues. Welcome to New York and the
Center for Court Innovation.

LIZDAS: Thank you very much.

WOLF:
You’re based in Minnesota, but you’re here today at our open house. The Center for Court Innovation serves
as the Office on Violence Against Women’s comprehensive technical assistance provider for its courts program, and
today and tomorrow, recipients of grants have come here with their multi-disciplinary teams to observe model domestic
violence courts in New York, and hear from experts like you on topics related to planning and implementation of domestic
violence courts. So I know you’re here today speaking to the group this afternoon about custody and visitation,
and I thought a good way to start our conversation was just to ask what makes custody and visitation cases that involve
domestic violence a challenge, or more complicated than the average case?

LIZDAS: We
have, in the battered women’s movement, done a lot of work in terms of reforming the criminal justice system
so it handles the crime of domestic violence better, as a crime, as a wrongdoing of the violation of a right. Talking
about domestic violence in the context of family court is more complicated.

The way family court
is structured and set up is not conducive, does not allow for an assessment of how domestic violence operates—meaning
how is it used in the family, and to what effect? And what impact does it have on the parenting capacities of both
parents? What impact is it having on the kids? Family court is designed to kind of divvy things up.
Family court is not designed to say, “This is our situation. How do we kind of move forward from here, given who’s
involved in this family and what the family’s history is?”

WOLF: Maybe you can
just offer an example of how that can impact a particular family.

LIZDAS: In families where domestic
violence exists, or domestic violence is alleged, there can be violence that has been very isolated, that the children
have been very sheltered from it, but there are going to be other situations in battering violence and coercive and
controlling violence where the kids are brought in more deliberately, either because they’re being exposed to
the continuum of violence going on in that family, or because they are being used to either participate in the abuse
of their spouse, or the same sort of demeaning or controlling, or crazy-making behaviors that a batterer might perpetrate
in a domestic violence situation, is being perpetrated against the family as a whole.

The
kids are going to have a variety of reactions—everything from no reaction at all, to feeling very aggressive toward
the abused parent, feeling very protective of the abused parent. It’s going to manifest in problems,
you know cognitive and behavioral issues that come up for the kids, and until we really have a handle or understanding
on really what’s happening to the kids, we don’t know what kind of separation agreements, what kind of
parenting schedule, what type of supervision, or what types of programming or services are appropriate for that family.

WOLF: How are you recommending that family courts address that issue, because it does sound like
it’s very complicated?

LIZDAS: We engaged in this project several years ago to
develop a framework for family court practitioners so that they can better identify, they can better understand,
and then account for the context and the implications of domestic violence in child custody cases, and in parenting
time and visitation determinations.

At this stage of our project, we are recommending
a four-part analysis, which is very simply that we need to institute tools into various parts of our family court
systems that help us to better identify the existence of domestic violence, whether alleged or not, that we have
implemented protocols within the family court system and help us better understand the nature and the context of
the violence. Who’s using the violence to what end? What impact is it having on the family?

And
then the hardest part, the third step of this four part framework. is then to determine the implications of abuse
and research is emerging on how to recognize that, how to screen for it, how to identify it. If kids are having trouble
with sleeplessness or trouble with school, or are showing strong attachments to either parent, to understand which
of those behaviors, which of those responses are a response of the coercive and controlling violence, what might
be the response of other things going on with that family.

And finally, the fourth step
in our framework is then, indeed, to account for the abuse in our decisions in court and in what we do in the parenting
plans going forward. It would be our proposition that if you have identified actual coercive and controlling
violence or battering violence in a family, it’s very likely that some of that coercive and controlling violence
is going to continue post-separation, that the dissolution and the parenting plan doesn’t put a stop to it.

Some judges, some court practitioners do see that perpetrators will be motivated by their kids, and access
to their kids. So family court judges and family courts have this opportunity, and the proper motivation, to get
perpetrators into services and into programs, to keep an eye on that perpetrator—to be like a mentor, to be a coach,
to be a motivator to keep that perpetrator from using coercive and controlling violence, and they can order graduated
visitation, graduated parenting time.

WOLF: So the judges can use this leverage—access
to the children, basically: “You can get thus and such visitation under these conditions if you receive these services,
if you engage in this particular program?”

LIZDAS: Yes, and it’s not only that it is
an effective motivator for change, but its also completely logically tied to what is best for the children. We do
want children to be able to have healthy relationships with both parents and it’s in the children’s best interest
if we are able to figure out how to work with the perpetrator over time and help them develop their parenting capacity.
I think it’s been the observation of a lot of people who work with parent batterers that they really aren’t aware
of how their battering and coercive and controlling violence affects their kids. And in the current court system,
we provide motivations for parents to attack each other. We put them in this sort of adversarial system that encourages
them to sort of undermine each other’s parenting capacity, and we don’t have enough of a mindset or framework in
family court to say that what we need to be doing, really, is supporting each other’s parenting capacity and if you’re
violent toward your partner, if you’re committing coercive and controlling violence, you know, you’re taking
something away from your kids and we need to be drawing that connection, obviously.

WOLF:
That point you just made, that was a much broader point about any family court case involving custody or visitation.

LIZDAS: It is, that’s true, and it would apply in cases that we technically, or traditionally
call high-conflict cases, which is jargon in the family court system, which is applied very broadly to any parties
that don’t seem to be able to settle on their own, or fail in alternative-dispute resolution. So that is
a message for high-conflict parents that you need to understand better how your conflict is impacting your kids.

In battering situations, or course, or controlling situations, where we really want to focus is on the person
perpetrating the violence—make sure they understand how this person, the person they’re abusing could be bringing
a great deal, could be wonderful caretakers for their kids, could be providing so much for their kids if it were
not for the battering. What’s concerning is the family court system that doesn’t have a sophisticated analysis
is going to look at battering cases and they are going to call it high conflict—and then they’re targeting and directing
their messaging to both parties, and their messaging’s not really the appropriate messaging either. It’s “Get along.”
It’s “Get along or you’re going to hurt your kids.” That’s not the message that’s appropriate if one person is using
coercive and controlling violence against the other.

WOLF: So if people want to find
out more about these issues or some of the skills that you’re developing, what should they do?

LIZDAS: They should contact our office, the Battered Women’s Justice Project. Our website
is www.bwjp.org, and our toll-free telephone number is 1-800-903-0111,
enter prompt 1 to get to our office where the custody project is based.

WOLF: I’ve
been talking with Kristine Lizdas about domestic violence cases and their impact on child custody and visitation.
Kristine is the managing attorney for the Legal Policy Program of the Battered Women’s Justice Project. Good luck
with your presentation this afternoon.

LIZDAS: Thank you very much.

WOLF:
[While theme music plays] I’m Rob Wolf, director for communications at the Center for Court Innovation.
To listen to this podcast or others, you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org
or subscribe to our podcast on iTunes. Thanks for listening.

*June 2013*

After Rockefeller: Research Findings on the Statewide Impact of Judicial Diversion May 22, 2013

Shannon M. Carey
of NPC Research discusses
the impact of the Rockefeller Drug Law Reform, which in 2009 eliminated New York’s mandatory prison sentences
for most felony drug offenders. According to a study she co-authored, court-ordered treatment enrollment after the reform
was implemented in 2009 increased by 77 percent. Also, the study estimated that there would be a potential $2 of
newly available resources after five years for every taxpayer dollar invested.

May 2013

ROB WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation.
Today I’m with Dr. Shannon Kerry, and executive vice president and senior research associate at MPC Research,
which is based in Portland, Oregon. Today we’re talking about a study. The proper name of the study is Testing
the Cost Savings of the Judicial Diversion Program. And if I understand correctly, what this
study is looking at is the impact that that passing of the Rockefeller Drug Law reforms in April 2009 had on judicial
diversion. In other words, drug addicted offenders who were going through court. How many were now being diverted
to alternatives to incarceration. So I thought maybe we could begin with the parts of the study which really looked
at the impact on treatment and on sentencing outcomes.

DR. SHANNON KERRY: Sure. So
the first question that we looked at was, as you said the impact on treatment and what we found was quite a bit of
an impact. There was a 77 percent increase in enrollment into treatment programs, and so people are being diverted
into treatment instead of being incarcerated. The actual numbers went from 1,801 participants in the one year before
to 3,192 people in the one year after October 7th, when it was implemented. So that’s, again, a 77 percent increase
in enrollment in treatment.

ROB WOLF: And that’s statewide in all of New York?

DR. SHANNON KERRY: That’s all the state, right.

ROB WOLF: So 77 percent increase.
So it really, by giving the judge’s discretion, which is essentially what the law did—freed them up from a mandatory
jail sentence, many of them took advantage of that, clearly.

DR. SHANNON KERRY: Right. And it
did vary by geographic location. So some places increased up to 500 percent, and in other places there wasn’t
much difference.

ROB WOLF: The other issue was—

DR. SHANNON KERRY: The second
question was what kind of sentences to people receive for the same charges? So Article 216 is the name of the actual
legislation. And people who are eligible for Article 216, we wanted to see what their sentences were before and after
it was actually implemented. Before the implementation, 100 percent of the people who had an Article 216 eligible
charge were convicted. Afterwards, it was about 81 percent of the people. So 19 or almost 20 percent of the people
after Article 216 had their cases dismissed. So if they successfully completed the program, they never had a conviction.
As far as sentencing outcomes, we found that people spent less time in jail and less time on probation, and about
the same time in prison. And then community supervision was also lower after implementation.

ROB
WOLF: Well let’s move on to the cost benefit part of the study. What costs were you looking at, and what benefits
were you actually measuring?

DR. SHANNON KERRY: The first question we looked at was what was the
cost of a judicial diversion case in itself before the new law was implemented and after. What we found was the cost
of judicial diversion, including the program with treatment, was about $18,500. The cost of the case that was eligible
for judicial diversion, but before judicial diversion, the actual cost of processing that case was about $13,000.
So it was fairly expensive per offender to process them anyway. And the difference in cost was about $5000, a little
bit more than $5,000 per offender. So judicial diversion does cost more, and the majority of that additional cost
is due to treatment.

ROB WOLF: I see. And so the $13,000, before the law was passed involved all
the sort of non-treatment aspects that take place in a case before someone’s going to jail. Before the actual
sentence is implemented?

DR. SHANNON KERRY: Right. So then the next question we asked was about
the sentence for that judicial diversion eligible case, so what we’re calling the instant case. So what kind
of sentence did people get before, and what kind of sentence did they get after? So earlier we talked about the finding
we had about the sentencing practices is that people after judicial diversion spent less time in jail and less time
on probation, and about the same amount of time in prison. So that translates into cost if they spent less time in
jail and less time on probation, then they’re going to cost less. With prison being basically a wash, there
wasn’t a big difference between them, there was a total savings due to judicial diversion of about $5,500 per
offender.

ROB WOLF: So in that case, you’re simply comparing the amount of time spent in
jail, prison, or probation for both these groups?

DR. SHANNON KERRY: Correct.

ROB
WOLF: And so this is where you saw some savings, because there was less time spent in prison and on probation for
those involved in judicial diversion after the implementation of the law?

DR. SHANNON KERRY: Right.
So those people who were spending less time in jail were spending a lot more time in treatment. So that treatment
cost we talked about earlier, $5,000, is kind of made up for by them not spending the time in jail.

ROB
WOLF: So what else did you look at?

DR. SHANNON KERRY: The other thing that we wanted to look
at was the impact of being in judicial diversion on their future criminal behavior. So did they get rearrested less
often because they went through treatment or not? Because Article 216 wasn’t implemented until 2010, October
2010 we didn’t have enough time to look to see if people who were literally sent through the new judicial diversion
had lower recidivism outcomes. When we were doing the study it was 2012. Most of the people were still in the program.
So what we did was we took another study that CCI is just in the midst of completing, and they looked at people who
went through drug court and people who didn’t, and they selected out the people who had Article 216 crimes.
And then they compared the comparison group to people who went through drug court for a three year period, looked
at their recidivism outcomes. And then we put costs to those recidivism outcomes. What we found was over three years,
the cost of someone who went through judicial diversion was just under $20,000, so $19,000. The cost of their time
in jail, prison, their court cases, their new rearrests. Altogether over three years came to just under $20,000,
$19,589 specifically. While the cost in the comparison group, people who were eligible for judicial diversion that
didn’t go was $25,787, so almost $26,000 which results in a savings of just over $6,000 per offender. We then
extrapolated over a five year period. It comes to about $11,000 per participant, a benefit of $11,000 per participant.
And then if you include victimization costs, which anybody who committed a person crime or property crime, there’s
a victim involved. So when we included the victimization costs as well, it comes to just over $18,000 saved, per
offender, for that time period.

ROB WOLF: And what is that associated with? The victimization
cost? That’s actually the value of the stolen goods?

DR. SHANNON KERRY: It’s a whole
combination of when there’s a victim involved there’s often, you know, injuries and the property, and the
damage, fixing the damage. It’s all those things combined.

ROB WOLF: But it doesn’t
include things like pain and suffering? It just includes the tangible injury? Like if someone was injured, it’s
the medical costs. Is it also their lost wages?

DR. SHANNON KERRY: Yes. And we pull those from
a national study of victimization, so those are ones that were calculated specifically for New York.

ROB
WOLF: And when you look at benefits, do you also calculate things like someone is now re-employed, and therefore
contributing taxes to the economy, and that sort of thing?

DR. SHANNON KERRY: We do include that
when we can, but for this study we were looking specifically at taxpayer savings due to criminal justice costs. So
they didn’t include the employment costs.

ROB WOLF: So overall what was your finding? There’s
clearly the money that goes into any case involving judicial diversion, but then there’s also money saved. So
when you compare those two, what’s the overall conclusion?

DR. SHANNON KERRY: Well what we
found is that as far as investment goes, there’s kind of a net investment of just over $5,000 per offender.
And then if you look at the people afterwards, their recidivism, we found that there’s a net savings of about
$10,000, a little over $10,000 per offender. So basically the net benefit is a little over $5,000, which is a cost
benefit of 1:2. So for every dollar you spend investing in the program, you get $2 back.

ROB WOLF:
That sounds like a substantial, or meaningful, at least, return on an investment.

DR. SHANNON
KERRY: It is pretty good.

ROB WOLF: Well I want to thank you very much for taking the time to
explain your work on this study which is an impressive piece of work. People can download it from our website, and
from MPC Research website, which is—Shannon, if you don’t mind telling me?

DR. SHANNON KERRY:
It’s www.mpcresearch.com.

ROB WOLF: Great, well I’ve been speaking with Dr. Shannon
Kerry, and executive vice president and senior research associate at MPC Research based in Portland,
Oregon. We’ve been talking about the recent study that she was involved with along with the team here at the
Center for Court Innovation that looked at the Cost Savings of the Judicial Diversion Program, here in New York,
after the passing of the Rockefeller Drug Law reforms. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center
for Court Innovation. You can download this and other podcasts at our website, www.courtinnovation.org and also on
iTunes. Thanks for listening.

Judge Kelly O'Neill Levy discusses a case with her law clerk and resource coordinator. — **Welcome to Problem Solving: Kelly O’Neill Levy Embraces Her New Assignment as Presiding Judge of the Harlem Community Justice Center** May 13, 2013
Acting Supreme Court Judge Kelly O’Neill Levy discusses her transition from Bronx Family Court to the Harlem
Community Justice Center, where she applies problem-solving strategies to both family and housing cases. May
2013

Judge Kelly O’Neill Levy discusses a case with her law clerk and resource
coordinator.

JUDGE KELLY O’NEILL
LEVY: Always remember that the person who is before you—that the problem they’re coming to court with could
be the most important problem they have in their lives.

ROB WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director
of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome to another New Thinking podcast. Today I’m in
the Harlem community Justice Center with acting Supreme Court Judge Kelly O’Neill Levy, who came to the justice
center in January of 2013, just a few months ago, from the Bronx Family Court, where she was handling child abuse
and neglect cases. I thought we’d sit down and talk a little bit about the transition to her new position and
her vision for the work that she’ll be doing here, and has been doing here the last few months. So welcome to
New Thinking.

JUDGE KELLY O’NEILL LEVY: Thank you, Rob. It’s a pleasure to be able to sit
down and talk with you about the Harlem Community Justice Center.

ROB WOLF: Transitions sometimes
pose challenges as well as opportunities, and I was wondering what you’ve seen so far as far as your challenges
and opportunities as you’ve made the transition from a more conventional New York City family court to a community
court setting, where you’re hearing both family and housing cases, as well as interacting more with the community.

JUDGE KELLY O’NEILL LEVY: There have been challenges as far as getting up to speed. We’ve worked really
hard to get up to speed, but many of the issues that are facing the litigants that we have in Bronx Family Court,
or the issues that are underlying people’s concerns here in housing court are the same. And what is wonderful
about what we are doing here is often you hear when you’re listening to a litigant, other problems—unrelated
necessarily—to non-payment. And the beauty of the Harlem Community Justice Center is we have resources right here.
We have people to assist these litigants in the underlying problems, whether it’s mental health, whether it’s
adult protective services.

ROB WOLF: So it sounds like it’s a more holistic approach.

JUDGE KELLY O’NEILL LEVY: Yes. It’s the holistic approach and we’re thinking of all different
ways that we can be serving this community in our court. One of the things that we are going to be launching in the
next few months—custody and visitation cases that will originate in the Harlem Community Justice Center. Litigants
will have an opportunity to choose whether they want to commence a case for custody and visitation in our case, or
go downtown and commence the case in the downtown family court. I’m also going to be doing Article 78 cases,
which are appeals for an administrative body. So if somebody has an appeal based on a decision that the New York
City Housing Authority has done, they have, in the past, had to go to Supreme Court and do an Article 78 case based
on an administrative decision that has taken place in, for instance, a NYCHA case. Now if I am the judge who’s
handling the landlord-tenant case, I will also be handling the administrative appeal. And that also is a holistic
approach because unfortunately what has happened in the past is sometimes the Supreme Court judge was unaware of
what was going on in the landlord-tenant case, and the person could have possibly gotten a victory in Supreme Court
but by the time that case was heard, they may have already been evicted because that judge was unaware of the status
of exactly where the landlord-tenant case was at that time.

ROB WOLF: So it sounds like there
are a lot of advantages to brining the cases here to the Harlem Community Justice Center. It’s local for the
litigant. They don’t have to travel as far. It’s more comprehensive because you have a fuller understanding
of all the aspects of the case, and there’s also services here like the housing resource center that can support
litigant and landlords as well.

JUDGE KELLY O’NEILL LEVY: We’re very fortunate, because we
have this resource center right in the building. So both tenants and landlords can go to the resource center and
get assistance on how to navigate the process, which can be very intimidating, as we all know.

ROB
WOLF: So let’s talk about community engagement. That’s a guiding principal of a community court like the
Harlem Community Justice Center. Why do you think community engagement is important, and how is the justice center
giving you opportunities to work more closely with the community?

JUDGE KELLY O’NEILL LEVY: It’s
essential that we have community engagement because we are here to serve the community and it’s given us many
opportunities. We have the resource community in the courtroom. She is able to reach out to the service providers
that are in the area that are assisting our litigants to see what they need and how we can assist them better. We
also have a church that’s right across the street that is hosting programs for our reentry program, which assists
people formally incarcerated to get back into society.

ROB WOLF: We’ve talked a lot about
your housing cases, but I know you also handle family court cases. Maybe you could tell me a little bit about what
those case are and how the Harlem Community Justice Center does things maybe a little differently?

JUDGE
KELLY O’NEILL LEVY: We handle juvenile delinquency cases and custody and visitation cases. The things that we do
differently is that the custody and visitation cases, there’s mediation to help parents work out the conflicts
that they’re having. And with regard to the juvenile delinquency cases, we have the services here in order for
these families to be able to work through the juvenile delinquency justice process. Each child, they are living at
home and they meet with the social worker in the court to assist them in making the changes they need to make in
order to ensure that they don’t have any re-arrests in the future. Do they need drug treatment program? Do they
need counseling? And one of the things we just started, somewhat based on the work that I had done in Bronx family
court, is to recognize that the parents play such a critical role in making sure that the child is able to make those
changes. So we’ve started a parent support group. Some of the parents have been able to really turn things around,
assist in transferring their children’s school, helping to enforce curfew, and what we wanted to do was have
those parents be able to assist the other parents who may be having struggles with getting their child to adhere
to a curfew, or navigating the process of transferring them to a different school. The other component to the parenting
group is just an education of what the whole juvenile delinquency justice system is about, and what they can expect.
And we think that this is really a helpful new component that we’ve implemented in the Harlem Community Justice
Center.

ROB WOLF: You’ve had a chance to learn about the community so I wonder what have
you learned and seen so far?

JUDGE KELLY O’NEILL LEVY: Well this has traditionally been an underserved
community and one of the things that is great about this court is that the size is less intimidating for people than
a traditional court. We are on a much smaller scale because there is only one courtroom, there is only one judge,
and that gives us an opportunity to do exciting things which can, we hope, build confidence in the justice system.
One of the things that we are doing is we are translating pre-printed stipulations of settlement and right now many
attorneys come to court with pre-printed stipulations of settlement that they, then, negotiate with tenants and insert
the applicable numbers and time frames that a tenant would have to comply with in order to resolve their case. And
there are many Spanish-speaking litigants who would not have the benefit of leaving the courthouse with a document
that they could truly understand. And so what we have started is a process of getting the pre-printed stipulations
of settlement translated into Spanish. Of course the document that I would review and sign would all be in English,
but the Spanish speaking litigant would have a reference when they left in Spanish. And I think that that alone would
be one step in assisting public confidence in our justice system.

ROB WOLF: That translated stipulation,
other judges could use around the city because it’s a uniform language, I assume?

JUDGE KELLY
O’NEILL LEVY: Yes, certainly. If some of the larger firms who may practice in other boroughs in the city, they certainly
could use that translated stipulated if they find that they’re having that same issue.

ROB
WOLF: So do you have a philosophy of judicial leadership? I know you’ve only been here a few months so far,
but what does it mean to you to be a community court judge?

JUDGE KELLY O’NEILL LEVY: If I had
any philosophy of judicial leadership, it would be to always remember that the person who is before you—that the
problem they’re coming to court with could be the most important problem they have in their lives. And to always
make sure that they feel that they’ve had an opportunity to be heard, and that they’ve had a fair adjudication
of their case. And so one of the things I really enjoy about being a community court judge is that I am able to give
people that opportunity to be heard, and I am able to consider whatever their issues are, and really try to solve
their problems.

ROB WOLF: Well I want to thank you very much for sharing some of your experience
with our listeners. I’ve been speaking with acting Supreme Court Judge Kelly O’Neill Levy, about her experience
here as presiding judge over the family and housing cases at the Harlem Community Justice Center.

JUDGE
KELLY O’NEILL LEVY: Thank you, Robert, it’s been my pleasure.

ROB WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf,
director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. To listen to this podcast and others, visit our website
at www.courtinnovation.org or iTunes. Thanks very much for listening.

Studying Reentry: A Conversation about Research and Reentry Courts Apr 15, 2013

Christine H. Lindquist, a senior research sociologist at RTI
International, talks about reentry
courts, recidivism, and what she’s learned so far from a multi-year study funded by the US Department of Justice. April 2013

CHRISTINE LINDQUIST: Reentry courts really have a talent in terms of delivering all of the needed services
to a diverse population.

ROBERT V. WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the
Center for Court Innovation, and on this New Thinking podcast we’re talking about reentry courts with Christine
Lindquist, a Senior Research Sociologist at RTI International. She just completed the first phase of a multi-year
study of eight reentry courts around the U.S. Welcome to New Thinking, Christine.

LINDQUIST: Thank
you so much for having me.

WOLF: We should be clear about what we mean by the word reentry. So
what is reentry referring to?

LINDQUIST: Reentry refers to the process of a person leaving prison
after incarceration and reintegrating back into their community.

WOLF: You worked on an earlier
evaluation. So I thought maybe we could start off, if you talk a little bit about some of its highlights and how
they may have prepared you for this one.

LINDQUIST: Sure. So the multi-side evaluation of the
Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative, or SVORI, which is a little easier to say, was a large multi-year
evaluation and we looked at recidivism and other outcomes for individuals who received enhanced reentry programming
through SVORI, as well as a comparison group of returning prisoners who received treatment as usual. And basically
in the SVORI evaluation, when we looked at short term effect. And by short term effects we mean recidivism within
two years and then other outcomes such as drug use, employment that we looked at during shorter periods, such as
three months after release, nine months and 15 months. We found some short term effects when looking at some outcomes.
So, for example, for some employment outcomes, people who received enhanced reentry programming did better than those
who received treatment as usual. However, when looking at recidivism, we didn’t really find strong short term
effects. But interestingly, when we looked at longer term recidivism through another grant that we received, we did
find positive effect for recidivism, and by this we mean reductions in arrest, a longer average time to first arrest
following release, and longer time between arrests for the SVORI group compared to those who received treatment as
usual. So I think one thing we learned from the SVORI evaluation is that recidivism effects took longer to observe,
and that suggests the need for longer follow-up in evaluations in order to detect those. And then also we found that
it’s really important not to just assume that all services are helpful. Some services may be more effective
for certain types of prisoners than others. For men, we found that services that promoted individual change – such
as anger management programs, or programs that help with personal relationships, or criminal thinking, were associated
with longer times to first arrest following release. For women, having a case manager and receiving life skills training
were associated with reductions in recidivism. So it just appears that there’s a lot more to be learned about
the effects of different services and that they may be different for men and women.

WOLF: That’s
very interesting. Let’s move on to your current evaluation that you are working on. Now this study focuses on
a particular model called the reentry court. So maybe you could take a moment just to talk about what a reentry court
is?

LINDQUIST: Sure. Reentry court grew out of a larger national movement towards problem solving
courts. And problem solving courts and the drug court model is the most common and well known of these programs,
are courts that combine judicial authority with rehabilitative services. The reentry courts are specialized problem
solving courts specifically focused on recidivism. So they combine judicial oversight, which includes court hearings
in which a returning prisoner would have his or her status reviewed on a regular basis, and if they’re doing
well they would receive praise or other types of rewards, such as advancing through the program. If they’re
not doing well, they would receive graduated sanctions. So it combines this judicial oversight with the provision
of enhanced reentry services.

WOLF: So in the case of a drug court, the ultimate graduated sanction,
if you take it all the way to end would be a jail sentence. In the reentry model, people have already served their
time. So what is, in fact, the leverage that the court has?

LINDQUIST: In almost all of the sites
that are participating in this evaluation, reentry court is established as a condition of supervision. So if someone
isn’t doing well in the reentry court, if they’re not doing what’s expected of them, then the leverage
that the court has is that their supervision would be revoked.

WOLF: And then return to prison,
in other words, because there’s still time on their formal sentence?

LINDQUIST: That’s
right. They could be returned to prison.

WOLF: Well let’s talk about the current study you’re
working on. It’s a collaboration among researchers at your organization, RTI International, which is based in
North Carolina, and NPC Research, which is based in Oregon, and the Center for Court Innovation here in New York.
It’s the first in a series of evaluation that are going to look at what particular aspects of reentry courts?

LINDQUIST: Yeah, it’s actually a single evaluation, but it’s a multi-component evaluation that
includes a process study, an impact study, and a cost effectiveness study. So in the process evaluation, we’re
documenting the start up and ongoing implementation of the eight reentry courts included in the study over several
years in time, looking at what the implementation challenges were, what the context in which the courts are operating
is, what some of the interagency partnerships look like. And then also, as part of our process evaluation, we want
to see what some of the common elements are among the eight programs, to try to see if we can develop a true reentry
court model similar to what we have for drug courts, you know, with the 10 key components. And then for the impact
evaluation, we’re looking at how effective these reentry courts are at reducing recidivism and affecting other
important outcomes. In all eight of the sites, we’re planning on using administrative data to look at rearrests
and reincarceration outcomes, using a masked comparison group design. And then in four of the eight sites, we’re
doing a prospective impact study where we’re interviewing clients who enroll in the reentry court program, and
we’re also interviewing a comparison group of comparable individuals returning from incarceration. And that
allows us to measure employment, family re-integration, community involvement, mental health, substance abuse. And
then we’ll also be able to document personal characteristics that maybe associated with program effects, such
as readiness for change, risk, need for services, and other measures like that. And then finally, we have a cost-effectiveness
analysis where we’re going to be documenting what the costs are of implementing a reentry court, and then also
looking at what the overall cost savings is, if any. So those are the three components of our evaluation, and the
report that we just released is the summary of our first year’s work in the process evaluation.

WOLF:
Given these, that you have eight sites and so many different factors, I mean it seems to me that that’s very
challenging and I wonder if you could talk about some of the challenges of making sense from so much information—eight
different sites, so many different variables.

LINDQUIST: Yeah, the variability is actually not
a problem for the process evaluation. It actually makes it more interesting because we’re really characterizing
how the courts fall on a variety of domains. It’s really interesting to highlight the sources of variability
as opposed to the sources of commonality. What is challenging, though, is for the impact evaluation because when
you have a diverse set of programs, it’s very difficult and often times it’s impossible to pool the data
across the sites. When there’s too much variability, we’re forced to look at site-specific impacts, which
means that effects on recidivism would have to be very large for us to be able to detect those using analytic techniques.

WOLF: What are the most significant findings so far?

LINDQUIST: Well, at this stage I
don’t think we can identify any promising practices or evidence-based practices that seem to be associated with
program effectiveness. What we know so far is that reentry courts are very diverse, unlike drug courts which target
a specific population—people with chemical dependencies. Reentry courts don’t typically target a population
with a specific need, and as a result, reentry courts really have a challenge in terms of delivering all of the needed
services to this diverse population. Another interesting finding, I think, is that you know when reentry courts were
initially conceptualized they were really conceptualized to have a heavy pre-release and post-release component,
such that ideally the person would be identified at the time they were initially sentenced, and that the reentry
court would maintain contact with that person throughout their incarceration. But what’s interesting is that
there really isn’t a major emphasis on pre-release services. A lot of courts don’t have the capacity to
reach in and work with clients while they’re incarcerated. Someone could get sent to prison three hours and
some reentry courts aren’t even sure who is actually going to be coming out on conditional release.

WOLF: You know I’ve really enjoyed hearing about the study and I look forward to seeing it progress.

LINDQUIST: Well thank you. I really enjoyed speaking about our study. We’re excited about our initial
findings and look forward to getting further into this evaluation.

WOLF: Well let me let everyone
know that they can download a copy of the year one study, that’s formal name is the “National Institute
of Justice’s Evaluation of Second Chance Act Adult Reentry Courts – Program Characteristics and Preliminary
Themes from Year One.” And they can download it from our website at www.courtinnovation.org. I’m Rob Wolf,
director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and I’ve been speaking with Christine Lindquist,
a Senior Research Sociologist at RTI International. Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Innovation Down Under: Director of New Centre Explains What Justice Innovation Looks Like In Australia Mar 29, 2013

Tania
Sourdin, a professor of law and dispute resolution at Monash University in Melbourne, explains how the
Australian Centre
for Justice Innovation, which she directs, supports reform through research and experimental projects.

Changes ‘That Don’t Roll Back’: Using Technology to Institutionalize Innovation Jan 16, 2013

Kevin G. Kelly, deputy commissioner of NYC Business Customer Service in the New York City Mayor’s Office,
discusses how the city uses technology to improve efficiency and radically restructure how businesses interact with
government. January 2013

KEVIN
KELLY: Create a new operating normal so that there is no other way to do it. And that’s really the way to use
powerful levers like technology to make changes that don’t roll back.

ROB WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf, director of communication at the Center for Court Innovation. With
me today is Aubrey Fox, the Center for Court Innovation’s director of strategic planning. Today we’re looking
at how technology can be used to improve government and institutionalize innovation. Helping us explore these issues
is Kevin G. Kelly, deputy commissioner of NYC Business Customer Service in the New York City Mayor’s Office. Thanks
for hosting us in your office today.

KEVIN
KELLY: My pleasure.

ROB WOLF:
You’ve been working at the intersection of technology and government for a number of years, particularly helping
change the way businesses interact with city agencies. How important has technology been to that effort and what
have you been able to achieve?

KEVIN
KELLY: Well technology has been a fundamental building blocking driving innovation and radically restructuring how
businesses interact with the city. And if you find a process that’s in a manual state, or that’s paper-based,
or that requires people to go from their place of business to a city location in order to fill out a form and pay
a fee with a money order, bringing technology to bear so that they can enter their information remotely, pay for
things online with a credit card, and manage their transactions with the city using technology has really enabled
us to take what had been a series of fragmented and paper-based processes, and bring them into the 21st century.

AUBREY FOX: Can you give us some concrete examples of
where technology has changed how a customer interacts, or how a citizen interacts with the city?

KEVIN KELLY: So prior to the city building a website
called NYC Business Express, there were no licenses or permits or certifications that businesses required online.
In all cases, those papers needed to either be mailed in or brought into a physical location, so on NYC Business
Express, there’s now 57 licenses, permits, and certifications that a business can go online, create a very simple
account, select the licenses and permits that they need for their business type, pay with a credit card, and send
all of the data to a city agency for processing.

AUBREY FOX: And I can imagine that the opportunities to use technology to improve these processes
are endless. How do you choose what you focus on?

KEVIN KELLY: That’s a great question. So start at one end of the spectrum, which is sort of
Nirvana. If you had $10 billion in 10 years, you could replace every existing legacy system and mainframe, and then
think about practical elements. The amount of money that’s available, how much time the disruption to business
is, etc. The best possible solutions are ones that allow us to leave, to the extent possible, systems that are fundamentally
sound in place so that from a customer perspective, things are radically transformed. They can do things over the
web, they can access the Internet, they can create an account, they can transact with the city. They don’t know
what’s going on behind the curtain. And what’s behind the curtain is sort of an aggregation of technology
solutions leveraging, to the extent possible, the good and the sound and the viable that’s there, with targeted,
specific system switch-outs in cases where it was impossible to mold or extract value out of something that was already
in place.

AUBREY FOX: I think
it’s important to say that you’re using technology to try to meet a policy goal, which is to increase access
to business activity.

KEVIN KELLY:
The other component piece that I would add is that when you make it so difficult to understand what it is that you’re
supposed to do in order to be in compliance. There are businesses that will move forward with their business plan
anyway and they are, you know, just sort of taking a chance that they’re not gonna get caught. So wrapped up
in the economic development objective is also increasing compliance, and increasing the quality of compliance that
business have with oversight agencies like the fire department, and the department of buildings, and the health department.

AUBREY FOX: Does your department have the freedom to
choose where you go? I mean can you survey a city business and say, now I want to look at problem x, now I want to
look at problem y?

KEVIN KELLY:
We have a tremendous amount of latitude inside of some fairly well understood parameters. So for NYC business customer
service, anything that touches on city and, in certain cases, other government oversight requests and demands on
the part of businesses are part of what we’re focusing on and working on. So it could be regulatory analysis,
taking a look at all those laws and requirements associated with licenses and permits and thinking about ways to
simplify the “what” of it. It could be operational transformation, which is the “how” of it.
How you change the way in which things get done. It could be learning and planning, instructional, or producing videos
that are designed to show businesses elements of oversight requirement that potentially would require 15 pages of
text, but if you show someone in a video what you’re talking about, it can be 30 seconds, or two minutes, or
two and a half minutes.

ROB WOLF:
So are there issues around the mayor’s achieved certain fundamental shifts and changes, and you want to embed
those changes in this technology? I mean is that part of it as well?

KEVIN KELLY: It’s not so much embedding the changes in the technology. It’s using the
technology to create a new operating normal so that there is no other way to do it. And that’s really the way
to use powerful levers like technology to make changes that don’t roll back. Because the easy changes are policy
changes. “I hereby declare that…”, you know, or executive orders or, you know, things that happen at
50,000 feet—change with administrations, change with different commissioners, etc. But when you operate at the operational
and technological level, and you change the way things were done and create the way things are done, and you make
it impossible for things to be done in the way that they were, then you’ve effectively guarded against roll
back. And the only thing that you need to concern yourself with when you’re integrating technology into operational
processes is to remember that not everyone can access the Internet. Not everyone is comfortable accessing the Internet.
Some people need support. Some people have language barriers, some people have other types of disabilities. So you
transform your current customer service locations or processing centers that are seeing lots of over the counter
traffic from everyone, because everyone has to do it this way. Those locations should be for the people who need
help.

ROB WOLF: It’s hard
for me to visualize a policy change at the 50,000 feet that you described, that then surfaces in a drop-down menu
on an online questionnaire or something. Can you give an example of how you would take something that—

KEVIN KELLY: Sure, lots of examples. So if an administration
or legislative body decides that people who are looking for certain types of social service should not have to go
through intake 15 times, right? So you can have a policy that says data sharing among social service agencies will
be utilized in order to reduce the number of times someone has to fill out duplicate forms. Then what that can translate
into is a website that has a uniform sort of data capture front end, right? A form that has the three fields that
everyone uses— name, address, phone number, email address, social security number, etc. And then, and on the back
end, that same data packet could be sent to multiple agencies to process someone for specific services, but it doesn’t
mean that that person has to over, and over, and over supply the same information.

AUBREY FOX: Creating a new normal. That seems like the power of technology
at its best. Would you say that’s correct?

KEVIN KELLY: Yes. Technology is without a doubt the single most powerful tool that can be used in
a service delivery realm to create a new operating normal. But in and of itself, it doesn’t necessarily do the
trick. So the business process re-engineering has to happen. You have to analyze what the oversight or policy objectives
are, and I think sometimes where folks get in trouble—not just in government, in private sector it happens all the
time as well—is when they think of technology as an end rather than a means, and they become enamored of a technology
for itself, as if in and of itself it was something that was worthy of admiration, or worthy of consideration.

ROB WOLF: We’ve been talking with Kevin G. Kelly,
who is the deputy commissioner of NYC Business Customer Service in the New York City Mayor’s Office. Thanks so much,
Kevin, for taking the time to talk to us.

KEVIN
KELLY: It was my pleasure. Thanks very much for your interest.

ROB WOLF: If people want to just get a sense of some of the innovations we’re talking about,
is there a web address they can go to to learn more?

KEVIN KELLY: Sure. So one would be www.nyc.gov/businessexpress, and you can look at the one stop
tool that we’ve built for businesses to make it easier to start to operate and expand in the city. Another website
would be www.nyc.gov/nbat, which is the website for the city’s new business acceleration team that works with
food service establishments in a quicker, more efficient manner.

ROB WOLF: That’s great, well thank you very much. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communication
at the Center for Court Innovation, and I’ve been here with—

AUBREY FOX: Aubrey Fox, the director of strategic planning.

ROB WOLF: And to find out more about Center for Court Innovation or to
listen to our podcasts, you can go to our website at www.courtinnovation.org. You can also download our podcasts
on iTunes. Thank you very much for listening.

Testing a Public Health Approach to Gun Violence: A conversation on new research Jan 15, 2013

Authors of new research about gun
violence in Brooklyn, New York, Sarah Picard-Fritsche and Lenore Cerniglia discuss findings on
Save Our Streets (SOS) Crown Heights, an approach to gun violence prevention in the Crown Heights neighborhood. The
new report, “Testing
a Public Health Approach to Gun Violence,” details a comprehensive impact and process evaluation of Save
Our Streets, which is based on the Cure Violence model that treats outbreaks of violence like epidemics of disease.

Additional Resources

To download a Q &
A with the authors, click here.

To read a press release about the findings, click
here.

SARAH SCHWEIG: Hi, I’m Sarah Schweig
of the Center for Court Innovation, and today I’m speaking with Sarah Picard-Fritsche and Lenore Cerniglia,
authors of new research about gun violence in Brooklyn, New York, and an approach to preventing it in the Crown Heights
neighborhood. The new report, Testing a Public Health Approach to Gun Violence, details a comprehensive impact and
process evaluation of Save Our Streets Crown Heights, a program started in 2010. Save Our Streets is based on the
Cure Violence model which treats outbreaks of violence like epidemics of disease, taking a public health approach
similar to campaigns that have addressed risky behaviors such as smoking or not wearing seat belts. Thanks for speaking
with me today and welcome. The Save Our Streets Crown Heights approach to stopping gun violence, known as the Cure
Violence model, uses violence interrupters to prevent shootings before they happen. Can you speak a bit about the
origins of the model and who these violence interrupters are, what their background is, and what violence interruption
actually looks like in practice.

SARAH PICARD-FRITSCHE: The origins of the SOS model, the Save
Our Streets model, it comes from Chicago. The first program of this type began in 1999 and it was designed by a public
health scholar named Dr. Gary Slutkin, and essentially violence interrupters are just a piece of a multi-part model,
but the violence interrupter’s job is to go into a community where they are familiar with those folks who are
at high risk of becoming perpetrators or victims of gun violence and work directly with those folks to try to come
up with—to mediate the conflict and come up with alternatives to gun violence as a solution to the conflict.

SARAH SCHWEIG: Great, and where do they generally come from? How do they have that kind of expertise?

SARAH PICARD-FRITSCHE: Well they’re considered, under the model, credible messengers. Essentially because
they have a background that is either, they were gang involved or possibly perpetrators or victims of some kind of
violence, if not gun violence in the past. Usually they’re from the target community but if they’re not,
they are currently living in or are familiar with the target community. So that means that they, and so they’ve also
sort of turned their lives around so they are able to talk with the folks that are currently involved in the violence
about how to change. So they go out into the community, they find the folk that they knew before they turned their
lives around, start talking to them, find out what the current conflicts are, go find the people that are involved
in the conflicts, and try to work with them directly.

SARAH SCHWEIG: because this approach is
about prevention, I would imagine that evaluation is kind of tricky in that you’re trying to kind of gauge the
amount of violence that was prevented by this approach. So what was your methodology like for this research and how
did you get the numbers that suggest to you that Save Our Streets Crown Heights is really working?

SARAH
PICARD-FRITSCHE: Well it is difficult to evaluate. I’m going to let Lenore speak about the impact evaluation,
which is how we measure the reduction in gun violence in Crown Heights.

LENORE CERNIGLIA: So first
of all, we used quasi-experimental design where we took the shooting numbers from the NYPD for fatal and non-fatal
shootings for the Crown Heights precinct as well as adjacent precincts to Crown Heights that had similar demographics
and crime numbers. And we took those numbers in addition to the shooting numbers from Brooklyn as a whole from a
period of approximately 17 months prior to the start of SOS as well as 21 months following its implementation, to
see if there are any changes as well as the trends that were going on. So our idea was, if we can look at what’s
going on in beforehand, as well as these similarly matched areas in Brooklyn as a whole, then we can see once Crown
Heights has been going on for some times if these changes are also either reflected in these similar areas, or if
crime was displaced from Crown Heights into these adjacent precincts.

SARAH SCHWEIG: Testing a
Public Health Approach to Gun Violence gives the numbers that the average monthly shooting rates in Crown Heights
decreased by 6 percent. In surrounding areas, shooting rates increased by 18-28 percent, and that suggests that gun
violence in Crown Heights is about 20 percent lower than it would have been without Save Our Streets. Did the report
considers whether violence was forced out of Crown Heights into the surrounding areas like you said, the displacement
of violence?

LENORE CERNIGLIA: Yes, and we were able to test that by looking at the shooting numbers
from Brooklyn as a whole, from the whole borough, and we found that the whole borough was going up at the same rates
as these surroundings precincts as well, so Crown Heights was kind of that jewel that was actually decreasing while
surrounding precincts, and the entire borough were increasing at much higher rates.

SARAH SCHWEIG: Right, places far away from Crown Heights.
So the report also shows that over 100 potentially deadly conflicts were mediated by violence interrupters since
2010 and that violence interrupters mediated conflicts involving more than 1,300 people. It also showed that Save
Our Streets increases residents’ confidence in the power of community to prevent gun violence. Why is the confidence
of the residents so important in violence prevention?

SARAH PICARD-FRITSCHE: We have previous
research which essentially shows that community level values and community confidence in the ability of their community
to solve shared social problems has a very real impact on the actual. So, in the case of violence, the lower the
tolerance at the community level for violence, the lower the violence, regardless of whether the average community
member is involved in violence themselves. So it’s basically a concept of collective efficacy. And what the
norms of your community are affect what our individual behavior is gonna be. So in this project we found that there
was a change, a statistically significant and substantial change in the way that a representative sample of residents
in Crown Heights answered a question, the question being—How likely is it that community mobilization campaign to
bring down violence would actually bring down violence? And many more people said that it would after the campaign
than before the campaign.

SARAH SCHWEIG: Maybe one of you can talk just briefly about what a shooting
response really looks like, and why that is so visible to community members.

SARAH PICARD-FRITSCHE:
What they are is a targeted response to an actual shooting even that has happened, and it happens within 72 hours
of the event. And typically they bring out folks who were close to the victim and other community members who are
angry, upset, saddened about the levels of violence in the community. And they make, basically, a show of themselves.
And the message is essentially, we won’t tolerate this anymore. It’s not just to remember the victim, but
to let the folks know out there, that are involved in the violence that the community won’t put up with it anymore.

LENORE CERNIGLIA: And they call it a vigil. A shooting vigil.

SARAH SCHWEIG: You know
many factors, as I’m sure you guys know, affect violence levels in communities. Was it difficult to attribute
decrease of violence in Crown Heights as opposed to other methods like stop and frisk?

LENORE
CERNIGLIA: Well initially when we were first trying to figure out what precincts we were going to compare Crown Heights
to, we made sure that we didn’t pick any precincts that had other specific programs going on. Stop and frisk,
and other NYPD policies are city-wide, so we would expect that they would be going on in Crown Heights as well as
the surrounding precincts such as Bed-Stuy or East Flatbush. So we also made sure that we took time periods that
wouldn’t overlap with other prevention programs going on in that area. We did also look at arrest numbers for
those precincts as well as for Crown Heights in that time period, to make sure that there weren’t large round-ups
of people being arrested, which would then possibly also drive down numbers, and we didn’t find any significant
changes over the time period that we were looking at.

SARAH PICARD-FRITSCHE: Right, so the arrest
numbers were steady over the period. If they had done like some huge sting you would expect like a bunch of arrests
and then a lower violence rate the next month. We didn’t find that.

SARAH SCHWEIG: Why is
it important to evaluate interventions like Save Our Streets and what can Save Our Streets, SOS itself take from
this report moving forward, do you think?

SARAH PICARD-FRITSCHE: Well, as researchers, we think
evaluation is the most important part of any program… Um, you know, I think that in particular
these programs, because they are multi-component and because they are community oriented, it’s not like a laboratory
where you can measure one mechanism that produces one result. There’s a lot going on. And the folks on the ground
in the program don’t always know what’s going on. So as researchers, we try to get a big picture and the
way we build that picture is to do our best to measure every single component. I think the folks in the program can—and
I actually went there last week and talked to them and told them they can be very proud of the work that they’ve
done so far. They’re actually quite data-oriented down there, so they’re already kind of looking at where
they can improve in the future. But I do think there are questions regarding the program, that more specific programs
that would be great if we could answer. We don’t know for sure when someone reports that a conflict is resolved
that it actually is resolved.

LENORE CERNIGLIA: And I would just add, I think for Cure Violence
as a whole, this shows that the model, when adhered to closely, can be replicated in an inner city with a dense population
because it has been tried in Chicago and Baltimore and many other cities. So this just shows that you know, it could
reach a different type of population and kind of area.

SARAH PICARD-FRITSCHE: Right. Every city
is different so the more positive evaluations we get, the more confidence we have in the model as a whole.

SARAH SCHWEIG: Well it’s been great speaking with
you today. I’m Sarah Schweig and I’ve been speaking with researchers Sarah Picard-Fritsche and Lenore Cerniglia
about gun violence prevention and the role communities can play in stopping conflict, as well as the importance of
evaluating innovations like Save Our Streets. To find out more about the Center for Court Innovation, or to download
the new report on Save Our Streets Crown Heights, visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

Kings
County (N.Y.) Justice Joseph Gubbay presides over the Brooklyn pilot of the Adolescent Diversion Program. — **Child or Adult? Adolescent Diversion Program Says ‘Child’ is Right Answer** Nov 23, 2012
Judge Joseph Gubbay, who presides over one of nine pilot sites of the Adolescent Diversion Program, explains how the initiative is expanding the
justice system’s options for dealing with 16- and 17-year-old defendants, who are currently treated under New
York law as adults, even for non-violent offenses.

Kings County (N.Y.) Justice Joseph Gubbay presides over the Brooklyn pilot of
the Adolescent Diversion Program.

ROB WOLF: Welcome to New Thinking. I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communication at the Center for Court
Innovation. Today’s podcasts focuses on a special pilot program called the Adolescent Diversion Program. I’m
in the chambers of Supreme Court Justice Joseph Gubbay, who presides over one of nine sites across New York State
where the adolescent diversion program is being carried out. Glad you could join me on New Thinking today.

JOSEPH GUBBAY: Thank you very much. It’s wonderful
to be here.

ROB WOLF: I think
it would be helpful to start with an overview of what the adolescent diversion program is. So what is it and how
did it come about?

JOSEPH GUBBAY:
Let me give you a little background. New York State and North Carolina are the only two states which prosecute 16-
and 17-year-olds as adults. So Jonathan Lippman, the Chief Judge of the New York court of appeals identified this
inequity and recognized that in order to change it, there would have to be legislative change, which is slow going.
So to address the problem on a more immediate basis, he created these nine pilot programs. What are we trying to
accomplish? Three things. Number one, identify services which, if completed by the individual, will stop the behavior
that brought the individual to court in the first place.

ROB WOLF: And just to be clear, what kinds of charges are you handling in this court?

JOSEPH GUBBAY: We’re seeing actually a whole range
of charges. Certainly we’re seeing theft of services cases, which may involve jumping a turnstile, going into
the subway system without paying the lawful fare. We may see trespass, being in a location without permission or
authority, whether that’s a part after hours, whether that’s a housing development on somebody’s roof
or something like that. But we’re also trying to address the more complex cases, so this may involve assaultive
behavior within a family, assaultive behavior at a school. Goal number two, this is about growth and this is about
maturity, and this is about accountability. For this very, very young population, these are qualities that come with
experience, and these are qualities that come frankly with age. And what we’re trying to do is give this young
population, give these young people the tools to make better decisions, to become more responsible, and three, if
the services are performed as set forth by the court, they will end up without a criminal conviction. These three
goals are shared by myself, the chief judge, and this is the underlying policy of the court. Now none of this could
happen unless you have a progressive prosecutor. And we are very fortunate to have Charles Hynes as the district
attorney of Kings County, who recognizes that this young population really needs to be treated a little differently.
And the services and change and growth are ultimately going to be safer for our community, and a better alternative
than jail. And I think it’s critical to recognize the incredible support that we’re getting from the defense
bar as well. Brooklyn Defender Services, the Legal Aid Society, and the private bar have devoted extraordinary resources
to ensure the success of this program.

ROB
WOLF: In the past, those crimes, those offenses that you’ve described, those all would have been handled in
a more conventional criminal court fashion, as a criminal offense?

JOSEPH GUBBAY: Absolutely. In a typical court, the case may be disposed of with a day or two of
community service cleaning up a park, but we’re trying to something much more than that. We’re trying to
provide a more nuanced approach so a lot of effort goes on in terms of an assessment to identify those specific and
particular needs of the individual that appears before us. That just cannot take place in a large all purpose traditional
court, where the volume of cases is crushing.

ROB WOLF: And I know you work closely with the Redhook Community Justice Center, which has an onsite
clinic and had extensive knowledge of community providers, social service providers, and relationships with them.
How, in fact, have they supported the work of the adolescent diversion program?

JOSEPH GUBBAY: It’s actually a two part model. My job is to identify
services and craft an offer and negotiate between the parties, between the prosecutor and the defense to make a deal
that’s going to work. Compliance is monitored by my colleague, Alex Calabrese.

ROB WOLF: So in essence, the young person comes here, appears before you,
their attorney, the prosecutor, yourself work out the plea, and then they’ll go a couple miles away to the Redhook
Community Justice Center where they might actually have onsite services, they appear before Judge Calabrese, who
monitors compliance, offers his words of encouragement, and they don’t come back here until the case is closed?
Or they never come back unless there’s a problem and they need a little shot in the arm to encourage them?

JOSEPH GUBBAY: Exactly, it’s the latter. Hopefully
then never come back to see me again. If they’re coming back to see me again, it’s because there’s
a problem.

ROB WOLF: I had a
wonderful chance to observe you in the court and I found you were very clear, you didn’t use jargon or lingo,
you seemed to really almost want it to be participatory. You asked people to raise their hand, was this their first
time here, were their family members here? Please raise your hand. You spoke directly to the defendants; you spoke
with their family members when they appeared before you did things like encourage the young person to thank their
guardian, who presumably took time off of work, made an effort to be with them. So there was a certain accessibility
there, and I also thought an attempt to really make sure that the young person understood and wasn’t just a
cog. And I wonder, is this how you always are, or is this a reflection of the fact that a young person, as you’ve
said, that they are in fact different than adults.

JOSEPH GUBBAY: I come to the adolescent diversion part having served in a felony drug treatment
court for many, many years. So I have experience in the area of recovery, in the area of providing services, and
in the area of—I want to call it—engagement. Because there are two models at work here. There’s the coercive
element. If you don’t do it, there’s gonna be a punishment. You have to do it, okay. That doesn’t
always work. There has to be engagement. There has to be internal motivation. So what I’m trying to do is, I’m
trying to communicate and get across that this is going to be something that is going to be good for you and your
family, and those you care about the most. I think it is very, very important, whether in adolescent diversion part,
or whether you’re in a conventional, traditional part, that the process is transparent. And in order for it
to be transparent, then it needs to be intelligible, it needs to be understandable, and it needs to be in a language
that’s gonna be accessible.

ROB
WOLF: So what is it like working with young people, versus your experience working, even with adults in drug court?
And what’s your feeling as the pilot moves forward? You know, has it been successful and what have you learned?

JOSEPH GUBBAY: you know, I’m very, very encouraged.
Our rough sense is that we have a very high compliance rate, somewhere around 80, 85 percent which is extraordinary.
And there needs to be some flexibility, there needs to be second chances, there may even need to be third chances.

ROB WOLF: There are nine pilots that are being carried out in different counties, including here in Kings
County, which is otherwise known as Brooklyn, with the ultimate goal, perhaps, of legislative change so that it’ll
become system wide. And I wonder how you feel about the advantages about testing it in these pilot sites before it
goes system-wide.

JOSEPH GUBBAY: The creation of a pilot program before this goes live if you
will, very sound, very prudent. And it’s exciting to be in the middle of it.

ROB WOLF: Well
it’s been exciting talking to you today. I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communication at the Center for Court
Innovation and I’ve been speaking with Kings County Supreme Court Justice, Joseph Gubbay, who presides over
the Adolescent Diversion Program here in Brooklyn.

JOSEPH GUBBAY: Rob, thanks for having me.

ROB WOLF: To find out more about the adolescent diversion program or hear more of our podcasts, you can
visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org, or you can listen to us through iTunes. Thanks very much for listening.

Judge Joseph Gubbay welcomes observers, including Chief Executive Heather Munro of the London Probation
Trust, into his courtroom in Brooklyn Criminal Court. — **Lessons from London: Improving Probation on Both Sides of the Atlantic** Nov 17, 2012
While on a visit to observe practices in New York City, Heather Munro, the chief executive of the London Probation
Trust, takes a break to discuss the challenges facing probation in both the U.S. and the United Kingdom and new initiatives,
including experiments in England and Wales with high-intensity community sentence projects (which is also the subject
of a monograph by Centre for Justice Innovation’s director Phil Bowen). November
2012

Judge Joseph Gubbay welcomes observers, including Chief
Executive Heather Munro of the London Probation Trust, into his courtroom in Brooklyn Criminal Court.

ROB WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation and today
we’re focusing on probation. I’m with Heather Munro, who’d visiting New York City this week from London.
She was appointed Chief Executive of London Probation Trust in 2010, which means she’s in charge of probation
for the whole city—about 70,000 offenders a year. She’s in New York City this week, learning how probation and
justice in general is carried out in the U.S., observing several of the Center for Court Innovation’s demonstration
projects. Thanks for joining today.

HEATHER MUNRO: Thank you, it’s a pleasure.

ROB WOLF: So probation at its heart is about keeping offenders accountable without sending them to jail
and if things work out well, probation is also about making sure the offender doesn’t return to offending. But
I know in the U.S. that the probation department sometimes has a hard time because of budget cuts, high case loads,
reduced resources. They have a hard time meeting those goals. I understand that in London, you’re going through
an era of change. You’re probably facing quite a few challenges of your own, and I thought maybe we could start
out by you explaining a little bit about what some of those challenges are and how you’ve been addressing them.

HEATHER MUNRO: Okay, yes. Probation in England is slightly different than in New York because we also deal
with offenders who you would normally call on parole. So we’re dealing with both community orders and parole
orders. We call them licensees.

ROB WOLF: So people who have served time in jail or prison and
are returning to the community.

HEATHER MUNRO: Yes. So we have much more of a sort of holistic—we’re
dealing with some very serious offenders, dangerous offenders who are coming out of custody, as well as the lower
level cases. And having observed New York, I think there are lots of similarities about the challenges we’re
facing. You’re right about the economic pressures, having to do more for less is a—we’ve been going through
cuts over the years but there’s also lots of differences. I think we do probably manage to have more contact
with the majority of offenders, although we are about to trial kiosks, which I know is something that’s been
part of the way they’ve managed the large numbers of cases.

ROB WOLF: Here in New York. In
other words, the offender goes to a kiosk and checks in without actually speaking to a human probation officer.

HEATHER MUNRO: Yes, yes. So we’re looking to trial that approach in a different way, I think maybe
as an incentive towards the end of an order or at a different point. So yes, some challenges around how me manage
the cases. What I’ve noticed is that, so the differences are we have probably more use of an assessment tool,
and our staff probably have more intensive training—probably because of the management of these higher risk offenders.
So it takes about 18 months to qualify. So I think it’s slightly different here.

ROB WOLF:
They go through an 18 month training process after they’ve been hired or prior to being hired?

HEATHER
MUNRO: Yeah, well they are hired on the job, so they start off as a probation service officer and then they can be
trained to become a probation officer, and that takes about 18 months on the job and academic, university work as
well. So there’s quite a lot of investment in those people, I think probably because they are managing some
very dangerous and difficult offenders in the community. But otherwise, I think there’s lots of similarities
with New York probation where I think they’re looking at working much more in the community. We are similarly
looking at how can we get our staff much more out of their offices based in the community. So it’s been fascinating
seeing the work that the Center for Court Innovation—all of those, the problem-solving, and how all of that works,
and the real work around community engagement that’s being done. So certainly one of the things we’ll be
taking back is looking at how we can get more buy-in from the community. But also do people really know what we do?
Similar things, I’m sure here, does anybody understand what it is that probation services do? They’ve heard
of us but do they know what we really do?

ROB WOLF: You had actually written an essay where you
said that there isn’t a lot of public understanding, and because of that lack of understanding, there isn’t
a lot of support for community sentences.

HEATHER MUNRO: Yes. Certainly a big thing in the U.K.
around the credibility. And the debate around punishment, and the care aspect, rehabilitation, and there’s been,
over the years, much more of a focus on the punitive elements of order. In fact, only this week there’s been
an announcement from our Ministry of Justice that every community order, probation-type order, will have an element—they
propose to have an element of punishment in there. So we use electronic monitoring, or it could be fines, or it could
be community service, or community payback. So there is a feeling that the public don’t feel that there’s
enough punishment in orders. Now those of us that work in the system probably think that’s not as accurate because
actually doing a community order can, for many offenders, be much more punishing or challenging than going to prison.
They’ve been in and out of prison, it’s very easy, things are on tap, on hand for them. It’s much
more challenging to actually have to change your behavior. So for those of us who’ve tried to lose weight or
stop smoking or whatever, you know, it’s a really difficult process and that’s what we’re often doing
with people is trying to do some difficult work with them about how to change their behavior.

ROB
WOLF: Such as what? Stopping abusing drugs or—

HEATHER MUNRO: Absolutely. Abusing drugs, thinking
differently, domestic violence.

ROB WOLF: And you do have the resources then, because that does
sound—I mean it is called intensive probation. Do you have the resources to be so intensively supervisory?

HEATHER MUNRO: Yes, we do do a lot of the intervention, so there’s a lot of work going into it. So
we run a lot of programs—cognitive behavioral programs, but what we do very much is we base our resources on risk
and need principles. So the higher the risk, and the higher the need, the more resources would go into that, so the
more intensive the work we’re doing. So we also do have people that we’re seeing less often, doing less
intensive work.

ROB WOLF: And then that ties back into your saying that you do an assessment initially,
and that’s how you determine the level of risk and the level of need?

HEATHER MUNRO: Yes.
The assessment is usually done pre-court and it is the basis of all of our work. We call it OASIS and it’s an
assessment system.

ROB WOLF: I noticed you were honorary visiting professor at the University
of Lestor, where you wrote about your interest in research and basing practice on real evidence. And I wondered if
you have been able to incorporate research into the way London Probation conducts business. It sounds like this assessment
tool is an evidence-based practice.

HEATHER MUNRO: Yes it is. I think we’ve found that at
a local level, particularly, it’s been hard to have the resources to do the research that’s needed around
the ways we work. So the one thing we’re doing is trying to build up a greater research capacity within the
trust, but also it’s looking to the evidence that’s done by academic institutions and trying to make sure
our practice is aligned with that. So we’ve done a lot of work around cognitive behavioral groups. We’re
delivering those, but the latest research around assistance theory talks about the importance of the one to one relationships
of offenders being able to see themselves as non-offenders. And so therefore what we’ve done is try to bring
in more peer mentors, more work with people who are ex-offenders so they can see role models there, and try to do
work with our staff around the importance of that one to one relationship.

ROB WOLF: One thing
that I’ve heard about from a colleague of mine, was you were looking at an intensive community order for young gang-involved
individuals. And I know that it builds on the intensive alternative to custody pilots, which our own Phil Bowen,
who directs our London office wrote about—and I’ll link to the paper that he wrote with this podcast, but I
wonder if you can tell me a little bit about why the focus on gang-involved individuals and how that works, how that’s
customized to them.

HEATHER MUNRO: Yes. I mean I think we, first of all, being entrusted in doing
something which is more responsive and different for the younger age group. We deal with people over 18, but the
18-24 year olds, having something that looks different, not that one size fits all approach. When you’re 18
you become an adult and you get the typical adult sentence. And in London the whole problem of gangs is an issue.
It’s a priority for our mayor and the police and for us. So we wanted to help with that, so that’s what
we’re hoping to do, and we’ll start talking to sentences shortly.

ROB WOLF: You started
off a little bit referring to some of the lessons you think you’ll be taking back from New York with you, about
community engagement, for example. Are there any other lessons that come to mind?

HEATHER MUNRO:
Yes. We feel that there’s a lot here around, that’s being done around immediacy, doing things much quicker,
and so we want to look at how we can try and speed up some of the ways in which we are picking people up at court,
working with some very impressive things—like in Brownsville—and others where we’ve seen, where people are seen
quickly and dealt with. So that’s one aspect. I think a more flexible approach, so that it was interesting how
certainly the judge at Red Hook was able to give very flexible sentences.

ROB WOLF: At the Red
Hook Community Justice Center? Judge Calebrese?

HEATHER MUNRO: Yes. And that was great. I really
enjoyed that visit. Also, I think this accountability bit. I think what we’ve seen here is the focus on holding
offenders or clients to account for what they’ve done, and coming back regularly, the reviews, it doesn’t
happen so much. We have some work around that with our drugs courts, but it’s not a routine as I think we could
make it, particularly with the intensive alternative to custody. That’s an option we’ve now thought about
looking at how can we hold people to account at regular intervals.

ROB WOLF: Well great. It sounds
like you’ve had a productive week.

HEATHER MUNRO: We’ve had a great time.

ROB WOLF: I’ve been speaking with Heather Munro, who is visiting New York from London. She is the Chief
Executive of London Probation Trust. I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation.
Download our podcasts from our website at www.courtinnovation.org and from iTunes. Ms. Munro, thank you so much for
taking the time.

HEATHER MUNRO: Thank you.

Payback with a Purpose Nov 09, 2012

Phil Bowen, co-author of Payback
with a Purpose and director of the Centre for Justice Innovation in the U.K.,
discusses what good “community payback” (“community service” in the U.S.) should look like, comparing
the experience in the U.K. with New York City. The debate about what community payback ought
to be comes at a crucial time for probation services in England and Wales, where the Government is committed
to encouraging non-state organizations to provide community payback.

SARAH
SCHWEIG: Hi, I’m Sarah Schweig of the Center for Court Innovation and today I’m talking with Phil Bowen. Phil Bowen
is the director of the Centre for Justice Innovation in London, and international project of the Center for Court
Innovation that works to promote thoughtful criminal justice reform in the United Kingdom. Phil has just written
a new paper called Payback with a Purpose, about community service, or as it’s called in the U.K., community payback.
And so today he’s here in our New York office and will be discussing some new thinking about giving back to the community
and what it can mean for offenders and communities here in New York and overseas. Thanks for speaking with me today.

PHIL BOWEN: It’s my pleasure.

SARAH SCHWEIG: So just to start off, I think many people
would consider community service or community payback a good thing for the community, but can community payback benefit
both the neighborhood as well as the offenders, and how can it do that?

PHIL BOWEN: Sure. I mean,
I think community payback, when it’s done well, focuses on local issues of concern to a neighborhood, local problems,
whether that be gang graffiti tagging or streets that sort of feel unsafe at night. So payback should be a place
where local law enforcement agencies and local neighborhoods come together to figure out how they can use unpaid
labor to solve problems in their communities. For offenders, it’s about getting them to reflect on what it feels
like to do a good day’s work in that community and put something back on the table for the crime and the harm they’ve
caused. So I think good payback should work at both those levels, looking at how to solve problems for neighborhoods
but helping offenders to move away from a life of crime.

SARAH SCHWEIG: In this paper, Payback
with a Purpose, you mention that the community payback system is sort of at a crossroads in the U.K. Can you speak
a bit about this and maybe what led up to that, and sort of where it is now?

PHIL BOWEN: Sure,
there’s been a government policy since the election of the coalition government 2010 to look at how they can open
up statewide services to other providers, and how that’s kind of played out in the criminal justice field has been
looking at community payback in particular and thinking about, well how can we get other people to provide the service,
rather than it just being provided by the Public Health and Probation Trust. So in July the first big contract was
awarded, it was awarded to a private firm called Circo, who have partnered up with London Probation to deliver community
payback. So it is at a sort of crossroads. You’ve got opportunity where new providers can come in and maybe deliver
it a bit differently, and I guess the theory of change is, can they reduce the costs, reduce recidivism, and provide
something that’s maybe more meaningful to communities.

SARAH SCHWEIG: And I would imagine like
organization of these projects can be very complex logistically and in terms of, you know, the kind of bureaucracies
that are in charge. How do you think, considering that, considering how kind of the delivery on that level can be
kind of complicated and politicized, how do you think community payback practices can ensure that projects remain
or maybe even become more meaningful to the community? Help them be more meaningful based on the sentences that are
being fulfilled?

PHIL BOWEN: Well I guess part of the purpose of writing the paper was to reflect
on, like what’s the really important thing here? The important thing is having payback that works for communities,
that’s engaged with neighborhood associations and civic groups, and that is really driven by local needs. Part of
the point of the paper was to remind people of that because a lot of the discussion in the U.K. has been about contracts
and how the money flows, and who’s getting commissioned. So we have a concern that in that discussion about how payback
will be commissioned, people might lose the picture on what actually really matters to the victims and communities.

SARAH SCHWEIG: So you’ve been listening to some lessons learned from community service practices in New
York City. Can you speak a little about maybe some things that stood out for you, and also how they’ve helped potentially
inform the new thinking about community payback in England?

PHIL BOWEN: I mean in many ways what
the paper’s done is it documents about eight or nine key principles that should be in any good community payback
program. Some of those, in fact most of those won’t be used to practice in England, Wales. I think in many really
good projects that’s what’s happening in England and Wales. What we wanted to do is remind people of those principles
and to make sure that however the new contracts and the new providers come aboard, that has to be the core of what
they do. There’s a great opportunity for building on those principles. They can deliver something that’s even better.
I think one of the things that is striking about the New York practice, which is maybe a bit different than what
we have in England and Wales, is a lot of the Center for Court Innovation projects are based around courthouses.
So there’s a real priority on getting people right after they’ve been sentenced, putting them into an intake office
and set them up for a mandate, and that mandate is worked as quickly as possible. So the sort of idea of swift and
sure justice is one that is actually delivered here. It’s one that I think in England and Wales people embrace and
they get, but whether they’re actually able to deliver it at the moment, I think that’s in question.

SARAH
SCHWEIG: Right, right. There were some—

PHIL BOWEN: Yeah, there’s a sort of classic anecdote that
people would do one day of community services every week and it would stretch on for months and months, and then
it would take two weeks to get them started. No, I think that’s a bit of a myth these days, but I think like all
myths, there’s some truth in it.

SARAH SCHWEIG: The paper does a great job highlighting lessons
from New York and specific cases, and sort of talking about the larger picture too. So, you know, New York and London
are obviously both large urban areas. But I assume that while similar in that way, they also share many differences.
What do you think, in general, are some of the things to keep in mind about applying lessons learned from, you know,
one city to another, or one location to another?

PHIL BOWEN: I think this is a really good question
and something that we’ve struggled with on a daily basis of, you know, looking at particular projects in New York
that are in our field, how do we deliver those in London, or in the U.K. more generally? And I think, you know, one
of the key things to do is to sort of move up a level of instruction and think okay, what are the key ingredients
of making, say, the Redhook Community Justice Center work so well? It’s not necessarily about exactly following a
detailed play book. It’s thinking about, well these guys are really engaging very well with their communities, so
that’s what the core of the values should be, but part of the particularity of communities is understanding that
they’re all different and that you need to respond to those differences. So when we’re advising practitioners about
how to come up with new ideas, we always try to make sure that we’re clear about grounding, the circumstances, the
assets of your community. I mean one key difference, for example, between London and New York is we’ve got a much
bigger state sector. You’ve got National Health Service provides centralized medicine, you know? Those kinds of things,
and they are big things. So you have to always ground whatever you’re trying to do in the circumstances that face
you, rather than try to think that there’s a sort of blueprint that originated in New York and all we have to do
is follow it exactly.

SARAH SCHWEIG: Right. And so just as sort of a take away, since your paper
really addresses this sort of crossroads that’s taking place in the U.K. about public and private services being
utilized, what do you see as some of the potential advantages coming about in the future, from that partnership?

PHIL BOWEN: Well I think one of the takeaways from the New York experience is to, you know, tell a practitioner
in the U.K. that this doesn’t necessarily have to be a scary thing, that it can lead to great renovation, it can
lead to sort of dynamic partnerships with community groups and volunteer sector organizations that maybe you haven’t
worked with before. So it can actually really add value. But it’s about being really clear about what the values
and vision should be, and having that collective vision. And that’s certainly my take away from the New York experience—has
been over 15 years, has been this commitment to a particular vision of payback that’s allowed New York to go from
a position where, frankly, community payback was a bit of a neglected service to something that’s really vibrant
and dynamic. So I guess our message is embrace the change, but embrace the right circumstances.

SARAH
SCHWEIG: That’s great. Thank you so much for speaking with me today. I’m Sarah Schweig and I’ve been speaking with
Phil Bowen at the Center for Justice Innovation in London, about community payback. To find out more about the Center
for Court Innovation or the Centre for Justice Innovation, visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for
listening.

Taking Responsibility: A Conversation on Restorative Justice and Youth Oct 23, 2012

Dr. Mara Schiff, an associate professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida Atlantic
University, focuses her work on restorative justice, community justice, and juvenile justice. Here, she gives on
overview of restorative practices and discusses why a restorative approach can be particularly valuable for youth. October
2012

SARAH SCHWEIG: I’m Sarah Schweig of
the Center for Court Innovation and today on New Thinking I’m speaking with Dr. Mara Schiff. Dr. Schiff is an
associate professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida Atlantic University. Her work specializes
in restorative justice with focuses on community justice and juvenile justice. Dr. Schiff is in New York because
she has just participated in a research roundtable on youth courts hosted by the Center for Court Innovation. Thanks
for speaking with me today. Welcome. Restorative justice basically is about healing the harm done to victims and
communities while holding offenders accountable for their actions. So to start, can you give us a brief description
of what some restorative processes look like in practice, and how are these practices different from the sort of
business as usual approach in the criminal justice system?

DR. SCHIFF: There are many different
types of restorative practices. The most important thing about restorative practices is not the model it uses, although
I’ll talk about those, but the values and principles on which the intervention is based, specifically, as you
mentioned, the idea of repairing harm. The idea of including stakeholders, so the victim, the offender, and communities
in the response to crime. That it be an inclusive process, that it be flexible to the needs of the participants,
or those that have been affected by the particular event. And a series of values, respect, how we interact with each
other. It’s not so much just about the model, although there are models that demonstrate, if done well, that
demonstrate these values. So, for example there’s victim/offender mediation, which is a dyadic model with a
victim, an offender, and a facilitator. That can then expand outward to something called a conference or a family
group conference, which might include a victim, an offender, a facilitator, and members of their respective families,
and possibly other supporters. That can expand further outward to something called circles. And in circles there
may be—the facilitator in circles is called a keeper, who may do a lot of work prior to bringing—in any of these
interventions a lot of work is done prior to bringing the priors together. You’d never do that without making
sure it’s appropriate to have these people in a room together. But in circles you may include the victim, the
offender, their families, and anybody who feels that they have a stake in the outcome of this event, that they were
affected by it and want to participate in how it’s going to be discussed and resolved.

SARAH
SCHWEIG: You’re here in New York for a round table in youth courts. The youth courts train teenagers to serve as
jurors, judges, and attorneys handling real life cases involving their peers. How do you see the goals of restorative
justice related to what you’ve observed during your visit, and do you think youth courts can be restorative?

DR. SCHIFF: So I’ve learned a lot about youth courts in my visit. And there are, as with any process,
even including traditional court-based processes, there’s advantages and disadvantages, things that work and
things that don’t work. What works about youth courts—again, and in any of this the caveat has to be—when they’re
done well. What works is that it gives youth an opportunity to engage with their peers about the impact of their
actions and what needs to be done to resolve it. So that it’s not simply about adults telling kids what to do
or punishing kids for what they do. It’s kids working with kids and understanding the actions and behaviors
of their peers, not of people who they can’t really relate to. Youth courts also have a lot of different models.
Some of them are restorative, some of them are not, and it’s not better or worse because it’s restorative,
it’s just the model through which it’s been implemented. Personally, I like things that are more restorative,
obviously, so I believe more in models that are restorative. And by that I mean they are dialogue based, they are
not deliberatively punitive, that are inclusive and flexible to the needs of the participant, not adversarial. It’s
not about us versus them. It’s how do we collectively understand and respond to what’s happened? In an
adversarial model, we are generally trained not to take responsibility rather than to take responsibility. And restorative
process is grounded in taking responsibility and being honored for that. Being respected for the guts and the maturity
it takes to be responsible rather than to deny responsibility in hopes of getting lesser punishment. Youth courts,
when implemented restoratively, where they are about repairing harm, and they are about understanding the impact
of your actions, and they are about giving youth an opportunity to make amends and earn their own redemption back
into their communities and be honored and respected for doing that, to become known as the kid who does good, rather
than the kid who’s always messing up.

SARAH SCHWEIG: As you know, evidence based practices
are very much based on being able to prove outcomes in certain ways, and proving impact, and quantifying what a program
is achieving. And I saw you wrote that impact of restorative justice interventions on communities is especially problematic
because definitions and boundaries of community are amorphous and hard to pin down. So I was wondering if maybe you
could talk about some of the challenges of evaluating the impact of restorative justice programs, especially those
perhaps designed for youth and do traditional measures effectiveness, like delinquent behavior or recidivism adequately
measure effective programs?

DR. SCHIFF: Over the last 10 years probably, we’ve gotten far
more sophisticated at measuring the impacts of restorative processes. Yes, we should measure recidivism. Yes we should
look at—do restorative interventions reduce subsequent harm in offending as much as, or more than traditional court
interventions. Of course we should look at that. But we shouldn’t use that as the exclusive gauge of whether
or not a program is working. I’ve been working for the last four years on restorative practices in schools because
I’ve come to believe that by the time a kid gets into the juvenile justice system we’ve missed so many
opportunities to learn that something’s going on with this kid, and we’ve missed so many opportunities
to intervene in a way to direct him out of the system. There’s an opportunity in schools where you have an active
audience. Kids have to be there. And given that, we have an opportunity to teach them ways of behavior, and ways
of interacting with each other, ways of accountability, ways of being engaged in community. So for example, if you’re
looking at a restorative practice in a school, yeah we want to look at—did we keep the kid out of the system? Of
course it’s hard to measure what we didn’t do, and that’s one of the hardest things about this is
it’s hard to measure what we’ve prevented. But for example, is the kid doing better in school? Does he
have more friends? Is he showing up? Does he feel engaged in his school community? Is he talking more in class? Now
those aren’t necessarily things that you can say, a justice-based intervention is responsible for doing, but
there are ways of looking at the benefits of a practice that are not just about, did the kid commit another offense?
And particularly in restorative justice processes, we want to be attentive to that. For most of the kids who wind
up in the justice system, there are so many problems. There are so many issues that these kids confront that it’s
really unfair to say that because A or B intervention did not produce the result of keeping him out of the system,
that we’ve done a bad job, when there are many other issues and problems and concerns that may face this kid,
that are just so much more complex than did he not re-offend again because he participated in a circle. Youth courts
can occur either in a justice setting or a school setting, but the language of those settings differs. The outcomes
we want to look at from those settings differs and the way that the restorative practice integrates with other things
that are going on in the justice process or in a school-based process are very different. And we have to be cognizant
of the environment in and outside of the school, and what a kid may need to do simply to survive. So we teach a kid
how to talk about what happened, but then he goes to his home or his community and is given a completely different
set of cues, is ridiculed, maybe, for talking about it or wanting to be “sensitive” to someone else, or
to somebody that he harmed. When if we’re not including communities in the type of work we’re doing in
a justice system and in a school system, we may be beating our head against a wall because we can’t, through
one intervention that doesn’t permeate all of the different communities and environments a child may have to
encounter. We tend, when there’s something like restorative justice or some other intervention, to hold it to
very high standards, like it’s got to do everything that the court system doesn’t do to consider it effective.
Well no, it doesn’t have to be the be all and end all that solves all problems for all kids.

SARAH
SCHWEIG: Right. How does restorative justice itself change when applied to young people, do you think? Or how should
it change?

DR. SCHIFF: Kids are kids. Kids do dumb things because they’re kids, not because
they’re evil. But if you look back 20 years ago or 30 years ago, things happened in schools or on streets that
were not criminal offenses, they were just what happened. And kids grow out of them. Now we criminalize a lot of
small, minor stuff that kids will grow out of. And it’s tragic. And we’re putting kids into a system for
stupidity, really, or for immaturity, not for criminal behavior. So we have to be aware that kids are kids and their
mental, and moral, and social, psychological, emotional development is not that of an adult and we can’t interact
with them like they should know that. We have to teach them.

SARAH SCHWEIG: I’m Sarah Schweig
of the Center for Court Innovation and I have been speaking with about restorative justice and juvenile justice.
To learn more about the Center for Court Innovation, please visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks
for listening.

Beyond Fighting Crime, Police in a Minnesota Town Seek to Foster a Sense of Community Oct 01, 2012

Under Chief Michael A. Davis, the police officers of Brooklyn Park, a suburb of Minneapolis-St. Paul, pursue
community building.

ROB WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, Director
of Communication at the Center for Court Innovation. This New Thinking podcast is focused on policing and the ideas
of community building and police legitimacy. On the phone with me today is Michael Davis, the chief of police of
Brooklyn Park, which, with about 80,000 people is the second largest suburb of Minneapolis – Saint Paul. Chief Davis
was recognized earlier this year by the Police Executive Research Forum as an up and coming innovator. Thanks for
taking the time to talk with me, Chief Davis.

CHIEF MICHAEL DAVIS: Thank you.

ROB
WOLF: Let’s start with community building. You’ve said, at a National Institute of Justice conference in
2011, community building is the next generation of community policing. And I think many listeners might be somewhat
familiar with the idea of community policing, but what is community building?

CHIEF MICHAEL DAVIS:
Well in the context that I speak of it, community building is more reliant on the assets of the community more so
than trying to fix the problems. Now for those who know community policing, they know that at the core of it is this
problem-oriented policing model by which if your rectify low-level problems, in theory, that you prevent other levels
of crime and disorder. Well the problem with that is that there’s limitations to problem-fixing. There really
is no limitations to building upon assets. And so if you want to change this place, want to make this place better
than what it is currently, it really is about leveraging all the assets that exist within a community, not simply
fixing the problems. And so this gets away from the transactional model, and more towards a model that is built on
the understanding of three things. One is, is that we’re a community that has abundant assets. The second thing
is that we know to make those—activate those assets, we must have strong relational ties. And thirdly, these relational
ties aren’t serendipitous. We have to go out and intentionally connect with one another, which is why, I think,
it’s a shift in focus. Not necessarily a new iteration of community policing, but more a new way of looking
at our role in community.

ROB WOLF: So you’re saying that instead, perhaps, of saying, Oh,
there’s a problem in this neighborhood around drug sales—are you saying think larger than that? Let’s look
at the whole community and how can we strengthen connections within the community so that anything, any challenges
that may arise, it would be in a better position to deal with?

CHIEF MICHAEL DAVIS: Absolutely.
You look at what a community is meant to accomplish. A competent community is one that supports the family in accomplishing
its mission. So the larger structure supports the smaller structure, the family, in accomplishing its mission. When
that breaks down and we rely exclusively on services, like the police, to do what the community is supposed to do,
then the impact of what the police can do alone is obviously severely limited. And so we have to re-engage the community
and get them to see what their role actually is, which is to take ownership, to be accountable to one another. In
that process we are creating a competent community. I mean it’s not an abdication of our role to pluck out the
deviants of our society, but this is thinking bigger than that.

ROB WOLF: The philosophy of community
policing—hasn’t it in some ways tried to promote that?

CHIEF MICHAEL DAVIS: Yeah, well I
mean obviously community policing purists will say that, you know, this is what the essence of community policing
is. I disagree, and I disagree because it’s not what’s happening. This is not what’s happening in
our communities. You’re talking about communities that have been trying different iterations of community policing
for 30 years, yet the conditions of their communities remain unchanged. People point to this dip in crime, so to
speak, that we’ve been experiencing throughout the country. In some cities it’s reversing itself and no
one can explain it. And so my focus really is on really understanding what makes a community really successful. And
it’s not the most robust police department. What we do know is that the conditions in the most challenged neighborhoods
that need to be reversed. There’s a condition of isolation, there’s a condition of fear, there’s a
condition of dependency. We know that when we study any successful community. People reminisce all the time about
the small town. Well in small town America, typically there’s a dearth of what we call municipal services that
can do things the community can’t, and so they’re forced to rely on one another. Probably the most common
occurrence where this transaction takes place between one another, where interdependency is developed, is in the
local cafe. Every morning folks get together, and it’s not about bacon and eggs, they have those things at home.
It’s about being able to talk about what’s going on amongst this social group. What problems they have
and how they’re gonna work together to solve those things.

ROB WOLF: It sounds like almost
the work of either a café owner, who can bring people together around breakfast, or a social worker who understands
how to bridge cultural or societal or class differences. How do the police help bridge that divide and build that
social capital?

CHIEF MICHAEL DAVIS: Well first of all, we inculcate it to every aspect of our
service model. We become conveners, we become facilitators. If a community meeting looks like you walk into a classroom
where everybody’s staring at the back of one another’s heads, looking to the front of the classroom waiting
for someone to rain down wisdom, that’s not gonna build community. But if you put people in small groups, bring
people together, you have them talk about assets. You set the ground rules and you have them communicate. And then
you carry out that methodology through every type of community contact, you begin to build fabric.

ROB
WOLF: And have you been able to bring people together in this way, around Brooklyn Park?

CHIEF
MICHAEL DAVIS: Absolutely. I mean we started off in earnest really three years ago with our community café, which
is a methodology of bringing people together in small groups to talk about what they want the impending future of
the community to be. And from that, we develop a model, a structure by which people can become engaged. And from
that we have begun to infuse this methodology into every aspect of how we interact with community. So police officers
are not only rated on how well they go out there and perform the perfunctory task of policing, but they’re also
rated on how well they go out and engage the community—not just the police with the community but also the community
with one another.

ROB WOLF: And how do you measure if your officers have been successful?

CHIEF MICHAEL DAVIS: Well, there’s a couple different methodologies. Obviously there are proven methodologies
by which you go out and you ask folks about the level of connectivity, level of commitment. Obviously, there’s
the anecdotal success.

ROB WOLF: And you hold these community cafés? Your officers arrange them
on a regular basis?

CHIEF MICHAEL DAVIS: Not only officers, but other city staff. It has now become
a framework by which we vet through a whole host of issues, from how to deal with the relational conditions, to whether
we want to organize garbage haul.

ROB WOLF: And you bring food? Or the citizens, people, community
members bring food?

CHIEF MICHAEL DAVIS: Yeah. Food is key, right? Especially in a diverse community
like ours. We are a 25 percent foreign born here, right? And one of the things we know, one of the universal languages
of hospitality is food.

ROB WOLF: Let’s talk about police legitimacy, and clearly there seems
to be a connection. How does it tie into the idea of community building, tie into police legitimacy and how are you
trying to advance police credibility in the city of Brooklyn Park?

CHIEF MICHAEL DAVIS: Well in
terms of our ability to influence people, we’re leading. This is a leadership role that we’re taking on
as a police department. Us being viewed as a legitimate government entity is absolutely critical, and what we know
through research is that it’s not the outcomes we’re talking about. It’s not whether or not someone
gets a ticket or someone gets arrested. There’s the process of administering law enforcement services besides
whether or not people feel it’s legitimate or not.

ROB WOLF: That’s like the concept
of procedural fairness or procedural justice.

CHIEF MICHAEL DAVIS: Absolutely. Absolutely. The
two are inextricably linked. Legitimacy is the outcome. Procedural justice is the process, is the methodology. What
we know is that effective policing doesn’t have to be brash or harsh. You can do it with a sense of empathy
and understanding. You give a voice to the people you come in contact with. And you do that by making sure that you’re
creating a culture within an organization that reflects the service that you intend for people to deliver outside
the organization. You create a microcosm of what you want to be expressed in the community. So if you want those
officers to be community builders, you make sure that you have that type of framework within the organization. We
say that we encourage collaboration, and this place, this organization is yours, not mine. Just because I’m
Chief doesn’t mean I own it.

ROB WOLF: I’ve been talking with Michael Davis, the Chief
of Police of Brooklyn Park, which is a suburb of Minneapolis, St. Paul. Thanks so much, Chief Davis, for taking the
time to talk about police legitimacy and community building.

CHIEF MICHAEL DAVIS: Well thank you.
It’s my pleasure.

ROB WOLF: And I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communication at the Center
for Court Innovation. This has been one of our New Thinking podcasts. To listen to other podcasts you can visit our
website at www.courtinnovation.org, and you can also listen to us on iTunes.

Officials Announce Funding for the Brownsville Anti-Violence Project Aug 28, 2012

A multi-faceted partnership to lower violence in one of Brooklyn’s most beleaguered neighborhoods gets a major
boost with the announcement of $599,000 in funding from the U.S. Department of Justice. Among those speaking at a
press conference to announce the grant are Denise E. O’Donnell, director of the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance,
New York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Loretta E.
Lynch, and Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes. September 2012

ROB
WOLF: While crime is down across New York City, residents of some neighborhoods still fear gunfire and gangs. One
of those neighborhoods is Brownsville, Brooklyn, site of several new programs launched by the Center for Court Innovation
to address violence and strengthen community responses. I’m Rob Wolf, director of Communications at the Center
for Court Innovation and in this New Thinking podcast, the focus is on the Brownsville Anti-Violence Project, which
was the subject of a press conference September 26, 2012, in which the director of the Bureau of Justice Assistance
of the U.S. Department of Justice, announced that the project would receive nearly $600,000 in funding out of $11
million in grants distributed to 15 neighborhoods across the U.S. With a siren in the background reminding the audience
what was at stake, the Bureau of Justice Assistance Director, Denise O’Donnell, said that the grant was not
about the federal government dictating priorities but about empowering communities.

DENISE O’DONNELL:
This program is not about the federal government changing neighborhoods. It’s about community members and stakeholders
working together to identify priorities and solutions to persistent crime problems.

ROB WOLF:
O’Donnell was joined at the podium in the Heritage Room of the Stone Avenue Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library
by a number of officials, including New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who said his department was always
willing to test new ideas.

RAY KELLY: You know, when it comes to driving crime down or saving
lives, I can assure you that the New York City Police Department is open to new ideas. Anything that has the potential
to save lives and make this community safer, we’re for it, and we see in the Brownsville Anti-Violence Program
some very strong potential.

ROB WOLF: District Attorney Charles J. Hynes described call-ins, a
key feature of the Brownsville Anti-Violence Program, in which recent parolees are offered services and encouragement
while, at the same time, being reminded of the serious consequences they face if they get into trouble again.

CHARLES HYNES: The past two months we have partnered with the Center for Court Innovation, United States
Attorney Lynch, Commissioner Kelly, and the NYPD in implementing an evidence-based gun violence reduction strategy
with Project Safe Neighborhoods call-in forums. These call-in forums send a clear message to those with violent pasts
who are reentering the Brownsville community after incarceration, to desist from picking up guns, that gang life
is a dead end, and that we stand ready to help anyone who wants to be on the productive trail.

ROB
WOLF: The real life importance of the grant was underscored by Mark Tannis, a community leader.

MARK
TANNIS: With this grant, in conjunction with VJA, we can have a coordinated effort to get guns off the street. Stop
the gun violence. By far, the large majority of our community want safe streets and a sense of peace, where they
all call home. Unfortunately, too many times that tranquility is shattered by senseless gun violence.

ROB
WOLF: The Brownsville Anti-Violence Program works closely with the community, according to James Brodick, director
of the Brownsville Community Justice Center.

JAMES BRODICK: We started to do a community wide
survey and focus groups. And time after time after time we hear common themes. Theme number one is a lack of opportunities
for young people. And we understand that it’s very clear that we need to get our young people better education, job
readiness, and actual jobs. But what we also hear is that there are real issues with gangs and guns, and unfortunately
as much as people say one of the ways of solving this problem is opening up more after school centers, or opening
up you know, opening up a community center, if young people don’t feel comfortable to cross Van Dyke to the
Brownsville Houses, we can’t get past that. And again, you know, one of the things that the Center for Court
Innovation is here to do today, is what we bring to the table is an expertise in research and expertise in trying
to convene people to solve problems, but we’re not the ones who are going to solve the problem by ourselves.
It’s gonna be the systems, the partners, and most importantly the community.

ROB WOLF: U.S.
Attorney Loretta Lynch, whose office is a partner in the Anti-Violence Initiative, said the Department of Justice’s
anti-violence strategy has three legs.

LORETTA LYNCH: Our anti-violence strategy consists of what
has been described, really as the three-legged stool. Each piece equally important. Prevention—you’ve heard
about the youth programs. Let’s prevent this crime from occurring. Let’s keep people safe. Targeted prosecution—and
yes, we’re here to do that. And re-entry assistance—because we all know that to send people home, back into
the same environment and issues and conflicts that led them into violence in the first place, is just creating a
vicious cycle.

ROB WOLF: For more on the Brownsville Anti-Violence Program or the Brownsville
Community Justice Center, or other podcasts in our series, you can visit our website www.courtinnovation.org. You
can also subscribe to our podcasts on iTunes. And feel free to like the Center for Court Innovation on our Facebook
page. I’m Rob Wolf, director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Thanks for listening.

Improving Youth Programming: The Role of Research Aug 16, 2012

Angela Irvine, director of research in the Criminal Justice Division of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency,
sat down for this podcast interview after participating in a research roundtable on youth courts that was sponsored
by the Center for Court Innovation and the Lowenstein Family Foundation on July 18, 2012. Irvine also discusses
research into lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender justice-involved youth.

ROBERT V.
WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. In this New Thinking
podcast, I’m with Angela Irvine, director of research of the criminal justice division of the National Council
of Crime and Delinquency. And I have the good fortune to have a few minutes with her just as she’s finished
participating in a research roundtable on youth courts that the Center for Court Innovation hosted here today in
Manhattan, at the law firm of Skadden Arps. So thanks, Angela, for taking the time to talk with me.

ANGELA
IRVINE: Thank you for having me.

WOLF: Are there particular challenges that researchers
face when looking at a justice program geared for youth?

IRVINE: I’m not sure if
there are different challenges. I think that people, in a lot of ways, have given up on adult criminals. In a lot
of ways I find research on adults challenging because it’s hard to engage a public, or to find a source of sympathy
for adult criminals. I think that what’s actually exciting about doing research in the juvenile justice arena
is that we have the possibility of engaging sympathy for different populations of youth who are engaged in the system.
I think if you look at girls in the juvenile justice system, researchers have done a really good job of sort of highlighting
the links between past traumatic experiences and how that drives young people into the juvenile justice system, and
how therefore we, as a society, need to take responsibility for creating firewalls so that girls who have experienced
trauma don’t end up in the juvenile justice system. And what I’m really interested in, moving forward, is thinking
about ways to engage the public in becoming more sympathetic to boys of color who are in the juvenile justice system
who’ve also experienced trauma.

WOLF: One thing I hear you saying is that there’s
a greater, perhaps, societal interest in research of justice programs that focus on youth, and that is because it’s
easier to have empathy for youth?

IRVINE: I think so, yes, compared to adults.

WOLF: And is it also because there’s this general sense that there’s a greater possibility
of rehabilitation?

IRVINE: I think that there is so much fear of boys of color, in particular—in
public schools, in public spaces, and so I’m not sure how much the general public thinks about wanting to rehabilitate
that population. In theory I think that the juvenile court system was developed to rehabilitate young people in a
different way than the adult criminal justice system has been, but I think that we’re caught in a little bit of a
quagmire right now. If you look from the ’80s on, I think that that’s when super-predators in urban Chicago,
urban New York, started to take over media. You know –

WOLF: Like “wilding,” that kind
of thing?

IRVINE: Yeah, exactly. And I think that it’s really important for us
to sort of stop the fear of those young people, and to try to move back in time, to a time when we really do think
of the juvenile justice system as different than the adult criminal justice system, and a system that does seriously
invest in the rehabilitation of those young people, because they’re all our kids.

WOLF:
And do you think researchers have a role to play in helping to change that orientation?

IRVINE:
Researcher always have a role in identifying which program should be invested in. So if researchers identify programs
that effectively reduce recidivism or improve graduation rates, I think that the government, the federal government,
state governments always justify their investment in programs based on research. I think that it’s really important
to think about who the researchers should be doing this work. I think it’s really important that we try to recruit
researchers of color who come from the neighborhoods where we are arresting most of the people, so that we can have
a richer discussion about what the findings are, but also have a richer discussion about what the possible solutions
are because in my experience, researchers who are more familiar with low-income communities of color come up with
more realistic solutions in terms of effectively changing behavior, essentially.

WOLF:
You’ve done a lot of research with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth, and they face a number of
problems that make them more likely to offend or get involved in the system. I wonder if you can maybe explain some
of your findings.

IRVINE: The most important finding is that LGBT youth are over represented
in the system. We surveyed young people at the point of arrest and we found that at that point, 15 percent of young
people disclosed being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, which we believe is a higher percentage than the general
population, though we don’t have an accurate measure of the general population. And if you just aggregate by
what we consider, you know, traditionally consider gender, that’s about 11 percent of boys but 27 percent of girls.
I also think it’s important to remember that we have the same disclosure rates for African-American, Latino,
and white youth. Now, in terms of why LGBT youth are there, our surveys show that LGBT youth were twice as likely
to be removed from their home as children because of conflict with their parents, were twice as likely to be homeless
at some point in time, and then twice as likely to be held in detention for status offenses like running away, or
prostitution.

WOLF: Your employer, the National Council of Crime and Delinquency, started
a project called Improving Permanency for LGBT Youth, which is trying to build an infrastructure of permanent, competent
housing for LGBT youth.

IRVINE: So I think that what’s really exciting for me about
this program is that youth who are placed outside of their home are at risk for negative outcomes, no matter who
you are. I think that the data shows that if you are a youth of color, or that if you’re LGBT, you’re less likely
to be placed in a home that can meet your needs because it’s very difficult to identify foster parents of color,
or group homes that can adequately serve the needs of African-American and Latino youth, and LGBT youth. And so what
you see is then youth running away from placement, and then because they’re running away from placement, then they
get elevated to higher levels of placement, and they essentially get anchored into the system.

So
in each of three counties, Alameda, Orange, and Fresno county, we’re going to be working with task forces and the
goal of all three task forces would be immediately to try to pass anti-discrimination policies because that—the moment
of crisis is when LGBT youth are in juvenile detention centers, and we need to make sure that youth are not discriminated
against, that we deconstruct homophobic sort of systems, what people say, but also how particular gender non-conforming
youth are placed in housing units. But then the next step is to try to dig into these communities and see, what is
the infrastructure? How many, you know, do we have homes that have been identified as LGBT culturally competent?
Are there solutions that can be put into place to reunify kids with their families, or with some sort of kin care,
sooner than later?

WOLF: And will research be playing a role in the development of this
program? How will researchers be helping inform this process?

IRVINE: That’s
a really good question. So the project is being managed by Bernadette Brown, who’s a really accomplished attorney
and LGBT advocate. And so she’ll be running the task forces in each of the counties. And then I’ll sit on, as
a researcher, each of the task forces and make sure that we are setting data-collection protocols into place, so
that we can measure outcomes for youth in each of those system.

WOLF: So let me ask
you about what brought you here, to New York today, from Oakland, California, your home. So you spent the day here
in Manhattan, here at the law firm of Scadden Arps, where we are now in the middle of an incredible thunderstorm.
So the theme of the roundtable discussion was on the topic of youth courts and research. The roundtable itself was
sponsored by the Center for Court Innovation. And I’m wondering now, after the five-hour conversation, you know,
what did you learn from it, and what did you think about youth courts before you arrived and have your attitudes
changed or is it too early to really make any particular declaration?

IRVINE: I think
that my initial concerns about youth courts is that they were a program that could accidentally pull low-risk youth
into either the juvenile justice system or school disciplinary procedures.

WOLF: Maybe
I’ll just clarify that youth courts, as we’re talking about them here, are program that train teenagers
to play court-like roles to evaluate cases of their peers, and usually just come up with a disposition—they usually
don’t determine guilt. And some are in schools and some are outside of schools. So I just wanted to say that.
I didn’t want to interrupt you.

IRVINE: So I think that what—I’m really impressed
by the group of people that were here and I think that what I saw is a real commitment to creating a model that works.
I think that there are really two populations that potentially benefit from youth courts. I think that there are
what are called the respondents, so young people who have gotten in trouble, who are essentially the defendants in
a youth court, and then there are the young people who serve as jurists and judges and bailiffs. And the engagement
of those young people who are involved in the program, and staffing the program, is much longer and the benefits
to those young people are very, very clear. I think that in general these young people develop positive relationships
with the adults who are facilitating the program. I think that you see really high rates of graduation and college
attendance. And I think that what everybody coalesced around was the idea that Jeffrey Butts proposed, which is that
we don’t want to do any harm to the respondents or the defendants in this system. And understanding that is a complicated
process, but I’m really excited to have been a part of a group that really sort of rolled up our sleeves and
thought about, how is it that we can document, or how is it that we can ensure that the respondents or the defendants
have positive outcomes instead of negative outcomes.

WOLF: These are important questions
because youth courts are sort of gaining popularity, and yet there hasn’t been a whole lot of research about
their efficacy.

IRVINE: Exactly. I think it’s really, really important that we
be able to posit an effective model. I think that the idea of youth courts is easy to replicate, right, just based
on common sense. And I think that it’s really, really important that we identify elements, potentially effective
elements like peer-to-peer-led courtrooms. That was a variable that came up today that we try to reduce the punitive
nature of those courts, perhaps not even calling them courts anymore, that we think about healing and stopping the
cycle of trauma, so that we create—intentionally create what I want to call systems, or structures of those youth
courts that make young people feel comfortable and forgiven by their peers.

WOLF: Well
listen, thank you so much Angela.

IRVINE: Thank you.

ROB:
I really appreciate the time you’ve taken to talk with me. I’ve been speaking with Angela Irvine, who’s
the director of research of the criminal justice division of the National Council of Crime and Delinquency. And her
office is based in Oakland, although the National Council has offices in several locations. If you want to learn
more about some of her work, you can go to the National Council on Crime and Delinquency’s website which is
www.nccdglobal.org. And to find out more about youth courts or about the Center for Court Innovation, please go to
www.courtinnovation.org. You can also listen to this podcast on iTunes. You can follow us on Facebook as well, and
on Twitter. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Thank you for listening.

July 2012

Parent Support Program Helps Repair Parent-Child Relationships Aug 10, 2012

The graduation of seven fathers serves as a jumping off point for Liberty Aldrich, director of the Center for
Court Innovation’s family
and domestic
violence programming, to discuss the Kings County Parent Support Program, which links non-custodial parents with needed services
to increase child support payments and maintain healthy parent-child relationships.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation.
And today I’m talking with Liberty Aldrich, who is our director of domestic violence and family court Programs.
Hi Liberty.

LIBERTY ALDRICH: Hi.

WOLF: We’re talking
today about the King’s County Parent Support Program, which the Center for Court Innovation operates in collaboration
with New York City Family Court and the city’s Human Resources Administration. The Parent Support
Program works closely with non-custodial parents who owe child support. Over the course of the program’s first
17 months there have been about $140,000 in child support collected. Liberty and I recently had a chance
to see a graduation of participants, so today I thought we would listen to some excerpts from that. To
start off, Liberty, I thought maybe you could give an overview of what the King’s County Parent Support Program is.

LIBERTY: Sure, thanks. The Parent Support Program takes a problem-solving approach to
address a problem that has bedeviled courts and parents and families for a long time, which is how can we address
the persistent problem of non-payment of child support in a way that is both fair to the non-custodial parents, but
also provides support to children. The Parent Support Program is open to any non-custodial parent in Brooklyn
who is in arrears on their child support. Support magistrates, attorneys, or other folks can refer potential participants
to the Parent Support Program and that program has a resource coordinator. The resource coordinator meets with the
non-custodial dad, sees whether he’s eligible for the program, sees what kind of services he needs in order
to become better employed, better able to support his children, and if it’s appropriate, she makes that recommendation
to the support magistrate that that non-custodial dad be ordered to participate in those programs in lieu of more
traditional sanctions. The court continues to monitor his compliance with the programs on a regular basis, bringing
him back to court and checking in to see if, in fact, he’s taking advantage of the services offered.

WOLF: I’m gathering that the program really is to support, as its name suggests. I thought
maybe we could listen to some of the things we heard from the graduation. Here, in her welcoming remarks,
Theodora Andreopoulos, the deputy borough chief of child support for the Brooklyn Family Court Division, pointed
out that the Parent Support Program goes beyond focusing just on the parent’s failures to actually trying to
offer some concrete help.

THEODORA ANDREOPOULOS: Enforcement petitions are often viewed
as proceedings which focus on a parent’s failure to pay child support. However the Parent Support Program and
the success of the graduates today has shown that enforcement petitions can be more than that. They can be an opportunity
for a second chance to be given to a parent who wished to comply with the child support order but had not had the
ability to do so in the past, because of his or her own personal circumstances.

WOLF:
So maybe you can tell me what kind of personal circumstances might prevent a parent from being able to make child
support payments.

ALDRICH: In a lot of the cases that we’ve had so far, and so
far we’ve worked with over 120 non-custodial parents, the major issues are a history of incarceration, which
makes it very difficult to find adequate employment, and under-employment. So folks who’ve lost their jobs,
folks who were previously making a regular salary who are no longer able to sustain that level of income, and so
they may be making ends meet for their personal needs by doing odd jobs, but they are unable to find adequate employment.

WOLF: Let’s listen to what Devin Banton said about why he wasn’t able to make his payments.

WOLF: What brought you to the program? What was the situation that got you here?

DEVIN BANTON: The situation was that you know, the economy got bad and I had my own vehicle, and
I had an accident, twice. Not my fault, but because of the accident I had suffered the loss of T&LC
license and then wasn’t working, payment got backed up on me. So the child’s mother decided to take me
here.

WOLF: When I spoke to Support Magistrate Nicholas Palos he said the problems for
some non-custodial parent often start with the child support order. Here’s part of what he said.

NICHOLAS PALOS: A needs-based order for most of the people that we see in Brooklyn, and the way
we calculate them, they’re way beyond the means of the non-custodial parent.

WOLF:
So what is a needs-based order?

PALOS: A needs-based order is if you don’t have good information
regarding the income of a parent, we have to then enter an order based upon the needs of a child. When
you have nothing countering it—it’s a default order for example, that’s what we enter and these guys get
these huge bills. And a lot of times they’re never going to get out from underneath them unless we take some
more proactive steps, and that’s what we’re looking to do.

WOLF: So Liberty,
let me ask you if someone is facing high arrears because of an order that goes well beyond their ability to pay,
how does the Parent Support Program help the parent turn the situation around?

ALDRICH:
In two ways. The first is that we do an individualized assessment with each participant in the program and see what
kind of services that we know are out there, would actually improve his chances of finding a good job that will allow
him to support his children. The second point is that many of these folks are overwhelmed by the court process itself,
so while they knew they weren’t really able to make this payment, they felt so overwhelmed that they never came
into court to ask for it to be reduced to reflect what their actual income was. So they let the payments continue
to accumulate and they got further and further behind. So the second thing that we really do is work with them on
understanding the legal process and understanding what they can do to make their payments more manageable in the
future.

WOLF: Magistrate Palos also explained that the Parent Support Program doesn’t
just offer the parent services like job training, but also intensive supervision.

PALOS:
It’s intensive in court that they may be on the calendar for a while every week, but it’s also a matter
of carrots and sticks as well. I mean it’s a matter of—if they’re doing well, I pat them on the back and
we move them along and we expand their court appearances out. If things aren’t going, well we’ve used things
such as contracting the amount of when you come to court, a couple of times sit in the back of the court room and
just watch for a day, sort of the equivalent when I was a kid of standing in the corner. I’ve had
them write essays, and about three guys we’ve actually referred for community service. The ultimate leverage,
of course, is proceeding to the hearing on a willful violation and the potential for possibly recommending jail.

WOLF: So how important is this kind of supervision that the Parent Support Program offers?

ALDRICH: It is absolutely essential. That’s really the key factor that distinguishes the
Parent Support Program from any other program. We are combining the provision of services, making sure people know
where they can get help – with the accountability to make sure they are taking advantage of those services. It’s
not okay for folks not to support their children. That can’t be the outcome here. The outcome here has to be
that it’s a win for the non-custodial dad, but it’s also a win for the kids. And the way that we ensure
that is through the compliance reviews. By making sure that the non-custodial parents are actually applying for jobs,
that they’re actually participating in the programs, and that they’re taking proactive steps to address
their legal situation.

WOLF: How widespread is this model? Is this happening
in other places, and what are the plans for carrying it forward?

ALDRICH: There are
several jurisdictions around the country that are trying similar kinds of approaches in child support cases, and
we think that it’s very promising. We think that it’s, as I said before, really can be a win for everybody,
for the custodial parent who needs and has a right to get support, for the non-custodial parent, who can reestablish
a relationship with their child, because often when they’re not paying child support that causes difficulty
in their relationship with their children, and for the child, obviously, who is able to have the support that they
need. We’re certainly hoping to replicate it in other jurisdictions in New York City, as well as work with other
jurisdiction around the country who are interested in replicating this approach.

WOLF:
I have to say my overall impression, just having been there for the graduation, was of this incredibly positive energy
from the fathers speaking very positively about the program, and I thought maybe we could conclude just by hearing
from the father we heard earlier, Devin Banton.

BANTON: Uou know, I really feel great
about the program because at first I thought it would kill me.

WOLF: How so?

BANTON: Because you know, listening to people’s experience that a, it’s the ladies always
win, and the judge gives you the burden, some amount to pay, but it was reasonable to me and the program was created
in a way that it gives me a chance again, to see myself as a father because I was feeling less of myself, especially
when I’m – you’re a deadbeat dad. So I was encouraged that this program here give me a certificate and
it really makes me feel as if I have achieved something great, so I’m just looking forward to just making my
payments on time, and double up to catch up with some of the arrears that I owe.

WOLF:
I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation and I’ve been speaking with
Liberty Aldrich, who is the director for the Center for Court Innovation’s family and domestic violence programming,
which includes the Parent Support Program, which is run in close collaboration with Brooklyn Family Court and the
New York City Human Resources Administration. To find out more about the Parent Support Program or anything else
we do at the Center for Court Innovation, you can visit our website www.courtinnovation.org, and you can listen to
more New Thinking podcasts on our website or on iTunes. Thanks for listening.

(August 2012)

Lacking U.S. Citizenship, Some Survivors of Domestic Violence Face Extra Challenges Jul 23, 2012

Gail Pendleton, co-director of ASISTA, which advises and trains advocates and attorneys who work with immigrant
survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, discusses some of the complex issues non-citizen survivors face. July
2012

SARAH SCHWEIG: Hi, I’m Sarah Schweig at the Center for Court Innovation
and today I’m speaking with Gail Pendleton about how issues around domestic violence become far more complicated
when they involve victims with pending immigration status. Gail Pendleton is co-director of ASISTA, a national immigration
law technical assistance project supported by the Federal Office on Violence Against Women. Thank you for speaking
with me today and welcome.

GAIL PENDLETON: Thank you.

SARAH SCHWEIG: Women
who are victims of domestic violence already face a number of hurdles, and women who aren’t citizens often face
a much more complex situation. Can you give a sense of these challenges and, you know, for instance, how does immigration
status factor into the sort of abuse patterns that they’re experiencing?

GAIL PENDLETON:
Well the first thing to think about is how is this similar to what you might see with citizen survivors? So for instance,
language might be an issue for deaf women, for instance, right? Language access and understanding what they’re
saying, and who’s information are you taking as true, if you’re not getting it directly from their mouth.
Culture also could be an issue. Is the pastor or the religious leader telling people they should stay married?
That could be true for immigrants, it could be true for citizens. Economics, also an issue for citizens, but when
you’re talking about someone who may not be able to work legally, or is working illegally, that adds an extra
tool of power and control in the hands of—particularly a documented spouse or intimate partner. And in our immigration
family system, prior to the Violence Against Women act, the U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident spouse controls
the immigration process. And so that’s why, in the Violence Against Women Act, Congress created a special route
to status for victims of domestic violence by citizens and lawful permanent residents. So that control of the immigration
status is the one weapon that, you know, wouldn’t happen to a U.S. citizen. And the other thing that I think
is probably true for a lot of citizen survivors, but especially true for a lot of non-citizens is who is their source
of information? Because the isolation may be even more intense for non-citizen survivors than it is for citizens,
their source of information is going to be their perpetrator and what are they telling them? They’re telling
them, you—our court system won’t help you because you’re undocumented, or semi-documented. I’ll get
custody of the kids, you’ll get deported, you’ll get turned over to ICE if you call the police. All of
those are very effective tools for abusers to keep their spouses and their kids in violent homes.

SARAH
SCHWEIG: Right. And ICE, just for our listeners—

GAIL PENDLETON: Oh right. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement.

SARAH SCHWEIG: Okay. A victim of domestic violence, a domestic violence offender,
and any children involved may have all varying immigration status. Is that right? How does that further complicate
the situation, and how do you sort of deal with those differences in the court system?

GAIL PENDLETON:
Well, the crucial role that we have tried to work on is ensuring that there are routes to status that allow victims
of domestic violence to pursue immigration status without the control of their abusers. And so most of the system,
unless you’re the—what we call the principal beneficiary of an immigration benefit, which is usually going to
be the abuser, frankly, like say engineers who come over on high-tech visas or whatever. Their family members are
here legally, but if they leave them then they get deported. So you can’t—and in the family-based system, as
I mentioned, the abuser controls—for the most part—controls the process. So that was the initial attempt was—it doesn’t
matter so much whether, what status they have. It matters who c controls getting a permanent status. And the safest
permanent status, short of citizenship, is a green card, what people call lawful permanent residents. And that actually
takes a long time, even if you do self-petitioning. Or the U-Visa, which is the other thing I wanted to mention because
self-petitioning just parallels regular family-based process, but those of you who work in court systems will know
that often times the abuser also lacks a secure immigration status, or doesn’t fit our normal family base, like
same-sex marriages, for instance. Immigration law does not recognize same sex marriages, because DOMA trumps, like
Massachusetts state law, where I’m from. So—Oren Hatch, as I mentioned in the training just now suggested the
U-Visa as a tool to get people who are too afraid, victims who are too afraid to call law enforcement, give a tool
for law enforcement to reach out to those folks and a form of humanitarian relief for them. They do have to be helpful
to law enforcement and they have to have certification for law enforcement. So the hurdles are higher in terms of
proof, for getting that status, but it helps a lot of people who really wouldn’t be able to be helped in our
regular system.

SARAH SCHWEIG: Yeah. You mentioned that you’ve done a lot of reform work
with immigration issues and policy change, and I know policies are often shifting and making headway on this issue.
Can you describe some of the recent legislation Congress has passed, and what hurdles have been cleared and what
else needs to be accomplished?

GAIL PENDLETON: Well, one of the things I tell the impatient lawyers
and advocates is that getting the law passed is, in some ways, the easy part and then you spend a decade getting
it implemented the right way. And we’ve been fortunate in the Violence Against Women area to have basically
a series of incremental improvements in access to status for immigrant survivors of domestic violence and sexual
assault, and human trafficking. So you have the ’94 Violence Against Women Act, then 2000, the Victims of Trafficking
Act, 2005 again, but we’re still working—I also serve as a liaison at immigration services on how to implement
these laws since 1997, and so it takes a long time, you know? It’s the government, right? It’s the federal
government and there are a lot of stakeholder besides us who are involved. So we’re still working on getting
some parts of, for instance, the U-Visa implemented, even though it was passed in 2000. So a lot of what I do is
work with the advocates and lawyers, and with CIS trying to create that fruitful communication as opposed to adversarial
relationship. And like I just said, we also recently in the past year have developed the same kind of relationship
with ICE headquarters, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Department of Homeland Security, Civil Rights
and Civil Liberties. So we’re trying to find common ground and, you know, share agendas. We obviously don’t
all share all agendas, but we do share some.

SARAH SCHWEIG: And at least share the information
to help an act.

GAIL PENDLETON: Right, and I help inform them about what we’re seeing in
the field. So, for instance, in the past year—I can’t take credit for this—but ICE did implement some prosecutorial
discretion memos and one is designed specifically for victims of crimes. And the idea is they have priority, you
know, people with criminal convictions, terrorists, you know, there are other priorities they have for removal, so
if someone is the victim of a crime and is being helpful to law enforcement, it’s not a high priority for them
to remove them, and tehy should allow them to stay here and pursue status. So that just happened, so again, my message
to the field is—this is gonna take another decade to actually make it work, but we’re here to—we, at the national
level are here to help you try to work that out in as non-adversarial way as possible.

SARAH SCHWEIG:
As with any issue with sort of ever-changing policies, keeping court advocates up to date seems incredibly crucial.
How do you ensure that jurisdictions are kept informed, and all those stakeholders are, you know, trained? How does
that work?

GAIL PENDLETON: Well there are two ways that we try to do it. One is that we work with
organizations such as the Center for Court Innovation and the National Judicial Institute, that are sponsored by
the Office on Violence Against Women, who have special training for court systems, and that’s kind of the trickle
down, and then because we’ve been doing this since 1993, we have a large field of thousands of people who are
out there, actually out there doing this, right? And so the idea is give them the ability to go out and do this locally,
because there’s only so much you can do. You have to have a bottom, pushing from the bottom, us pushing from
the top. So, and it’s never gonna be perfect, but hopefully it will make our systems better. I would say a thing
to do in the next few years is pick a few models that seem to be working, you know? There’s no one model that
works everywhere, so like what works in Suffolk County, New York, is not gonna work in northwest Arkansas, right?
You know, you’ve got to take the principles, it seems, the most important principles and figure out how people
can apply them to the resources that they have locally.

SARAH SCHWEIG: And so for those jurisdictions
that maybe haven’t gotten, you know, the training, what can a court do to help advocates and attorneys work
with immigrant survivors of domestic violence and you know, what are the key things that you think they need to be
aware of?

GAIL PENDLETON: Well I’d say the message for judges is judicial leadership. That’s
the key thing is that they need to go back to their systems because there’s only so much a judge can do by the
time it gets to them, right? It’s got to be the advocates in the system, it’s got to be the police and
the DAs, and the domestic violence people out there who are really the first point of entry for these folks so that
they even get to the judge, right? So often what the judges will say, the main thing they realize is they’ve
got to take this back and encourage bar association trainings, and at the stakeholder meetings raising these issues,
that kind of thing. And then the other piece is to get all those other players in the system trained up. There are
trainings out there, we do trainings at the National District Attorneys Association. The FJC conference is the Sexual
Assault and domestic violence Conferences for advocates, and there’s lots of materials out there. That’s
the other message is, you don’t need to start from scratch. Lots of people have been doing this around the country
in lots of different context so we don’t—because we have this huge network, we can also find people who can
talk to you. I’m a big fan of peer training. So if the message is better coming from and advocate for advocates,
or a police chief for other police chiefs, we can work on that.

SARAH SCHWEIG: That’s great.
Thank you so much for talking to me today. I’m Sarah Schweig and I’ve been speaking with Gail Pendleton,
co-director of ASISTA, about domestic violence and its bearing on immigration policy. To learn more about the Center
for Court Innovation please visit www.courtinnovation.org. Thank you for listening.

Can Batterers be Rehabilitated? Jul 09, 2012

David Adams, co-founder and co-director of Emerge,
the first counseling program in the nation for men who abuse women, discusses the inner workings, challenges,
and potential benefits of group counseling for men who batter. (July 2012)

SARAH SCHWEIG: Hi, I’m Sarah Schweig, of the Center for Court Innovation, and today I’m speaking
with Dr. David Adams. Dr. Adams is co-founder and co-director of Emerge, the first counseling program in the nation
for men who abuse women. He is one of the nation’s leading experts on men who batter and has conducted trainings
for social service and criminal justice professionals in 46 states and 18 nations. Dr. Adams has also conducted outreach
to victims of abuse for 35 years. Thanks for speaking with me today.

DR. DAVID ADAMS: Thank you.

SARAH SCHWEIG: Can you give us a little background about the kind of counseling you do? What kinds of issues
does counseling in this case seek to address? And is there a kind of model you use or promising practice?

DR. DAVID ADAMS: Well, I mean first of all, it’s small groups, and secondly the model that we use is
male/female co-facilitated. And the reason we do that is that we really want to provide a role modeling opportunity
for the abusive men to see women and men working together operatively and sharing leadership. Our program is divided
into two phases. There’s an educational phase, which is the first eight weeks where they’re exposed to
just really basic information about what is abusive behavior, broadening their understanding that it’s not just
the illegal behavior. How does it affect their partner, how does it affect their children, other alternatives and
so forth. But then the more interesting phase, you know, the second phase which is the remaining 32 weeks is more
of an interactive group. And that’s where we’re a little different as a model from other kinds of programs.
because we’re a psycho-educational model, not just an educational model, which really means that we’re
able to give individualized feedback to the men in the program, and to really kind of like focus more in depth about
each person’s history of abusive behavior. We actually do a very interesting exercise, which I call a relationship
history, where we ask each person 14 questions about every intimate relationship he’s had. And it’s done
right in the group. The other men ask the questions. And we do another interesting exercise where we really develop
very individualized goals for each man in the group, and the other men, again, are very involved in that process,
making suggestions about what goals make sense for that person. And so really the whole purpose of the goal of our
program is to really learn two things. One is respect, and how is respect communicated in relationships—not just
with your partner or with your children, but also empathy too. Because most abusers are very—kind of have a narcissistic
orientation and so the beginning stages, it’s really clear that it’s hard for them to see their own behavior
from their partner’s perspective. And so over time, we’re really trying to do that. We’re trying to build
that into the program so that even when men are giving each other feedback in a group, we’re asking men to try
to see things from the partner’s perspective. So when a man’s reporting an interaction with his partner,
for instance, we’re asking all the other men to say, okay, what do you think his partner’s perspective
was in that interaction? And in the process, they are learning empathy too. Because it’s easier, I think sometimes
to recognize another person’s abusive behavior than one’s own, you know? So we kind of take advantage of
that natural ability that abusers have. They’re very good at actually spotting other people’s abusive behavior,
not so much their own. And so we really kind of teach the men how to give each other constructive feedback, and how
to kind of hold each other to a higher standard. That’s really kind of the premise of our program.

SARAH SCHWEIG: So, as you know treating domestic violence offenders can be controversial. Some people say
that abusers can’t be reformed or treated. Can you talk a little bit about how this affects your work, and what
you have seen in your perspective?

DR. DAVID ADAMS: Yeah. Well, I think there’s been a lot
of misinformation about the outcome studies that have been done, first of all, and I also think it kind of reflects
that the outcome that has been done has a very kind of narrow definition of what outcome is, you know, too, because
I always say I’d like to get the same deal the substance abuse programs get. Because nobody ever questions the
value of substance abuse programs, and yet their outcomes aren’t any better than ours. And yet, somehow for
us to have the same outcomes, you know, there’s questioning about—are we worth it? And I think that what all
of the outcome studies have found is that program completers do a lot better than non-completers because of recidivism.
So that’s very reassuring to us, because just like a substance abuser program, it sort of is a given that the
more treatment they get, the better they do over time. I think that, however, when you have the expectation, this
all or nothing expectation that—do we cure? because some of the outcome studies have sort of compared program participants
with non-participants, but even program complicits who only get one session, you know who drop out and reoffend,
that counts as a program failure. And that makes no sense because he’s only had one session. But the other thing
is that we feel that we provide a valuable service regardless of the outcome, because we provide really useful information
to the courts about his participation, about noncompliance, for instance. And noncompliance is really a big deal
because that’s a predictor of his reoffending. We provide really useful information to the partners, to the
victims of abuse, and that’s a big deal because victims are really trying to make decisions, you know? Quite
often when he’s in the batterers program, you know, do I want to say in this relationship? Do I want to maybe
curtail his access to the children? And so, you know, they’re hearing back from us, and if they’re hearing
back from us, well you know, he’s still minimizing his abusive behavior. Or he’s still really blaming you.
That’s really useful for victims, because we want to make sure that she doesn’t just automatically conclude
that because he’s in our program, you know that naturally things are going to get better, you know too.

SARAH SCHWEIG: Those are some excellent points about the information sharing, and I wanted to ask about,
you know, in the court how your program sort of comes into play, and as you know domestic violence court emphasizes
holding offenders accountable for their abusive behavior. Do you see a tension between accountability and treatment
within the court, and how do those concepts fit together?

DR. DAVID ADAMS: Well, yeah, I think
that sometimes accountability is taken to mean punishment. Most of the men who participate in Emerge, they definitely,
when they start our program, think of our program as a part of their punishment. And yet, our understanding of accountability
is really much broader than that. It’s about recognizing the impact of your behavior on other people, being
able to really identify and talk about your abusive behavior, and to make changes. That’s all a part of accountability.
And so that’s very different from punishment. You know? Some abusers, they’d love to just be punished,
you know, because then they’re sort of off the hook. They don’t really have to change. So that really,
accountability, we try to sort of build that into our program so that just the process of having them describe their
abusive behavior, which they would never do on their own, right? I mean and also to put it on record too, you know,
so it really goes back to the court and so now he is on record as admitting, you know, in some detail, what his abusive
behavior, is—and has been. Another part of the accountability is being able to really be open to feedback too, in
the program. So really it’s kind of an aging process, accountability. It’s more than just punishment.

SARAH SCHWEIG: How do you think a justice system can be flexible enough to sort of fit the response to the
needs of the offender, in terms of sort of redefining accountability in that way?

DR. DAVID ADAMS:
Right. I mean first of all we love it when judges do more than just sentence abusers to programs, but also kind of
reinforce the goals of the program, to really kind of say to the defendant, you know, I’m gonna sentence you
to this program, but I want you to be an active participant in the program. In fact, I’m going to review your
progress in the program. And that’s one of the great advantages of domestic violence courts, is there’s
that built into it, so that a person knows that they’re going to have to be accountable in that way, they have
to go back before the judge, the court, and kind of review the process. And they take it more seriously themselves
too. And I think it’s just human nature, that people will do that.

SARAH SCHWEIG: So since
you established Emerge in 1977, how has working with domestic violence offenders changed, and do any new achievements
come to mind or any new complications or challenges that you might want to mention?

DR. DAVID
ADAMS: Well, I think it’s been a lot of trial and error over the years and we’ve learned a lot about how
to engage men. And certainly programs have become more culturally relevant too, over time, as well as programs specifically
geared towards abusers in same sex relationships, too. But I think that in the beginning, I think there was kind
of a consciousness raising, more of a sort of emphasis really only one set of issues, which was really sort of gender,
equality, and more of a kind of confrontative approach, sort of confronting them about sexist attitudes and so forth.
And I think what we’ve learned over time is that that can be really quite alienating, that people—and really,
I think we’ve kind of replaced that with more of an emphasis on respect, because respect is more of a universal
value, and respect definitely plays into gender equality in terms of relationships. And so we sort of try to keep
it focused on how much do you respect your individual partner? More than, you know, what’s your attitude toward
women in general.

SARAH SCHWEIG: And that also goes back to teaching, you know, teaching empathy,
which is a much more intimate experience. So you’re also the author of the book, “Why Do They Kill? Men
Who Murder Their Intimate Partners.” Maybe talk a little bit about how you sought to answer that question and
what were some of your findings in cases of homicide?

DR. DAVID ADAMS: Well, I mean when I started
working on that project, there had been a real spike of intimate partner homicides in Massachusetts, so much so that
our governor had declared a state of Emergency for women. And so it really kind of made me curious about what distinguishes
batterers who kill from those who don’t kill. What do we need to know that can really help us to identify these
cases in the earlier stages, though I did interviews with prisoners that all had killed their intimate partners in
Massachusetts, and I also did interviews with victims of attempted homicide. And it really identified that there
were, essentially, five different types of killers in terms of their motivations to kill, and so I think we need
to make it better in the system, in identifying those men earlier on, flagging those cases, you know, looking at
the mental health issue on top of the domestic violence issue. I mean I think the first really, duty in combating
terrorism, you know, is to gather intelligence. These are domestic terrorists, so you know, we really need to gather
better intelligence about the people that are gonna be causing the problem, you know, which is the abusers.

SARAH SCHWEIG: Well that’s fascinating and it’s been wonderful talking to you. I’m Sarah
Schweig and I’ve been speaking with Dr. David Adams, co-founder and co-director of Emerge. To learn more about
the Center for Court Innovation, please visit www.courtinnovation.org. Thank you for listening.

‘Each One’s a Success When They Walk Through That Door’: Creating and Sustaining a Tribal Peacemaking Program Jul 06, 2012

Peacemaker Administrator Anna Francis-Jack discusses tribal history and how The Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in Washington State have
launched and grown their peacemaking program. May 2012

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. During
a visit to the Colville tribes in Washington State, I had a chance to interview a number of different people about
peacemaking, which is a traditional Native American approach to justice. In earlier podcasts, I spoke with two elders
and a client about their experiences with peacemaking, and in this podcast I talk with Anna Francis-Jack, who coordinates
the program. One of the first things we talked about was the building we were sitting in, which allowed Anna to talk
a bit about her tribe’s history.

Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.

ANNA
FRANCIS-JACK: Yes, of course.

WOLF: Why don’t you say where we are actually.

FRANCIS-JACK:
We are at the Nesperse Long (sp?) house, which is one of the very last living legend of the Nesperse that went to
war, and we were exiled here as—my forefathers were exiled here as prisoners of war.

WOLF: And
approximately when was that?

FRANCIS-JACK: Late 1800’s.

WOLF: Okay.

FRANCIS-JACK: So some of the tribes refused to talk to us because—well refused to talk to my forefathers
because they had blood on their hands, because some of the tribes here on the Colville reservation never went to
war. That’s one of the intergenerational family traumas that still goes on today.

WOLF: And
this was a war against the whites, against the government?

FRANCIS-JACK: Yes, yes. but because
of who the chief Joseph Nesperse were, when they came here they weren’t quite welcome, so at one point I called
myself an Indian without a country because you know, we are still here despite all the odds. This is the only Long
House on the Colville reservation that practices tradition. We chose our religion, we chose our language—well not
me personally but my family, my forefathers, ancestors, and the ones that came before me. It’s what I was born
into.

WOLF: Why don’t you tell me how did your program get off the ground? You found some
peacemakers and you trained them? You trained each other?

FRANCIS-JACK: They gave me a resolution
that authorized the creation of the peacemaking circle program, and a list of elders.

WOLF: And
this was from the tribal council?

FRANCIS-JACK: Yes. So I began from there and I did a mail-out,
of course. I managed to get like 15 people to inquire. We started having meetings. I went off to Green Bay to the
traditional peacemaking, and I went to one of Fillmore Blue House’s presentations there and then I came back,
and then I started putting together information and sharing it with the elders, and then they would come and they
would give me things. And so everyone was doing research on peacemaking.

WOLF: And trying to look
at traditions.

FRANCIS-JACK: Yes.

WOLF: A traditional way of resolving conflict
and dealing with criminal behavior or misbehavior.

FRANCIS-JACK: Yes, but first we had to figure
out exactly what peacemaking was, and then they could relate it back to their different tribes within this specific
Colville reservation, since we’re a confederation—we have 12 tribes. And as I explained earlier, it’s the
prayer, it’s the smudging, it’s the talking, healing circle, and it’s the elders coming together,
you know, with the best needs of the client in mind at all times, trying to make him feel welcome, trying to make
him feel equal, trying to make him feel at ease, trying to make him trust. They have to search within themselves
to find that place that they can say, okay, I did this. I can be responsible. I can stand up and I can tell the elders
yes, I did this, yes, I was wrong. And maybe initially they just may mouth it but somewhere later on down the line,
they actually start conveying it. It’s not just words anymore.

WOLF: So just to be clear,
what you said before and what you just reiterated was that it starts, there’s a prayer involved, and then there’s
the ceremony, the smudge ceremony if someone wants to do that, and there’s a talking piece which can be handed
around and whoever holds the talking piece then speaks?

FRANCIS-JACK: Yes.

WOLF:
So what are some, what are the typical issues or offenses that are brought to a peacemaking circle?

FRANCIS-JACK:
Peacemaking was originally formed to handle juvenile cases but we don’t have an active juvenile code. But the
peacemaker was still created so don’t ask me why.

WOLF: But you do work with juveniles, so
where do they come from? Or do you not work with juveniles?

FRANCIS-JACK: No, we work with young
adults. Our very first case was a juvenile just turning 18, so you could call it a cusp. When he committed the offense
he was a juvenile, but when he finally made it to court he was 18 years old. He had four offenses against him that
involved a person that found themselves with three other people, where they entered a house and eventually shot off
a gun, which has three or four adults and also some minors in the home.

WOLF: I know you’ve
also spoken about dealing with serious assaults.

FRANCIS-JACK: Yes. Majority of our cases now
are domestic violence and the last two that we had, they referred both the man and the woman because it takes two
to heal over this very serious offense. It goes against how we want to look at a person holistically, we want to
heal them inside out, but it needs to be both the man and the woman, because the offense was against one another.

WOLF: Is there a protocol for how long a session lasts or how many sessions you have, or is that something
fluid that is decided upon case by case?

FRANCIS-JACK: It takes its own life. It depends on where
the person is at in their personal life. Some of them are really into alcohol and you know, the dysfunction in the
home. Others have already been working on themselves and have only seen us four times and they’re on with their
life. Others have—I know one client who has been with us going on 10 months now. His attorney wrote me a letter saying
that he had known this boy, turned into a man, for over two decades, representing him in a court. He said I’d
like to really thank you for what it is that you and the elders do because I haven’t seen or heard from him
since he joined peacemaking.

WOLF: So he’s been staying out of trouble, in other words.

FRANCIS-JACK: He’s been staying out of trouble.

WOLF: So, it’s a very intimate
process, isn’t it? People—I mean what I’ve learned today is, you know, among the things that peacemakers
do, they’ll relate their own stories about their own, perhaps, troubled past or conflicts in the past, to offer
instruction or to offer some kind of model to the client, or example.

FRANCIS-JACK: I guess to
mirror. We mirror back what we’ve gone through, and a lot of them realize that they’re not in this on their
own. There’s somebody that cares for you. There’s somebody that prays for you. There’s somebody that’s
there for you. There’s somebody there that can listen. There’s somebody there that will pick you up once
you fall. If you fall down, and if you do your drugs or do your alcohol, pick yourself back up because we’ve
all been there. We’ve all—well a majority of us, some of us have never—I’m, you know, but it’s each
and every elder that has, like Matthew was saying, it’s each and every elder that offers their little piece
of information that makes it so much more full, that you know, that little pieces altogether make a much more impact
on the client. And we’re not there to preach, we’re not there to condemn, we’re not there to judge—which
is their biggest fear. I consider each one of them a success when they walk through that door, because they’ve
overcome all their fears and all their self-judgment, all their put-downs in their head, and all their old tapes.
And they say, I’m gonna try it anyway.

(SINGING)

WOLF: That’s the
voice of Ray Diel who is a peacemaker with the Navajo nation, who was with us on the Colville reservation. Towards
the end of our conversation, I asked Anna about the first peacemaking case, the one she’d mentioned earlier
about the 18-year-old charged for being with a group that had discharged a gun in a home. She said he dropped out
of peacemaking, but then returned awhile later, ready to serve both the jail sentence imposed by the court, and participate
again with this group of elders in peacemaking.

FRANCIS-JACK: And he tells me, I want to go back
to your peacemaking. I told him, well, you can’t ask me. He said why not? I said because it’s the elders
you have to ask forgiveness from. I said because they were there for you then. But I didn’t tell him I had already
asked them, and that’s what they told me to ask him. (Laughs)

WOLF: That’s good, right.
And so is he in now? Is he back?

FRANCIS-JACK: Yes, he’s in now and he’s about ready
to graduate. He’s taking care of everything now and he’s getting married. His significant other is coming
to his sessions and she was even sitting in my office Tuesday. It seems like she said he was in jail doing his time.

WOLF: Doing time that he owed previously?

FRANCIS-JACK: Yeah. So he’s taking care
of his business and clearing his path, which is what we asked him to do. You need to clear your path. If you’re
going to be starting on a road with this significant other and getting married, it needs to be clear. And he’s
also the one that asked one of the elders to sweat with him, because he wanted to have that as part of his healing.

WOLF: And to sweat is another, is a religious—

FRANCIS-JACK: To go into the sweat house
and pray, and ceremony, and ritual and do all the things that are significant. And they did, they did it. And I think
his, he’s gonna be a future peacemaker because Matthew’s always telling everybody, you know when you come
into peacemaking, after you graduate here you’re a peacemaker.

WOLF: So you don’t have
to be an elder, per se, you have to be an older longstanding member?

FRANCIS-JACK: No.

WOLF: You can be a young person, that makes you an elder as well?

FRANCIS-JACK: Yes,
it does.

WOLF: Or that makes you a peacemaker, I mean. I think I would have to conclude with that
happy note, that I’ve been speaking with Anna Francis-Jack, who is the coordinator of the peacemaking program
at the Confederate Tribes of Colville. So I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation.
To find out more about peacemaking and the Center for Court Innovation please visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org,
and you can also subscribe to this podcast on iTunes. So thanks very much, and thanks for listening.

Peacemaking: How Native American Elders Use Tradition to Support Offender Reintegration Jun 21, 2012

During a visit by the Tribal Justice Exchange to the Confederated
Tribes of the Colville Reservation in Washington State, Robert V. Wolf talks with two elders–Matthew Dick
Jr. and Darlene Wilder–and a client about peacemaking, a traditional Native American approach to resolving both
criminal and civil issues. May 2012

ROB WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. In this
New Thinking podcast, the focus is on peacemaking, the traditional Native American approach to resolving both criminal
and civil issues. Peacemaking focuses on repairing harm. In a peacemaking session, an offender might meet with a
group of elders who will talk about how the offender can make restitution and get his or her life back on track.
The Center for Court Innovation’s tribal justice exchange is in the process of exploring the creation of a pilot
peacemaking project in state court. I was lucky enough to join two of my colleagues on a visit to the Confederated
Tribes of the Colville Reservation in Washington State, where we had a chance to see a peacemaking session firsthand.
After that session, I recorded the following interview with two elders and a client about their personal take on
the peacemaking process.

ROB WOLF: With me are Matthew Dick, Jr., and elder and peacemaker, and
Darlene Wilder, also an elder and a peacemaker, and then Brad, who is a 29-year-old client who has participated in
peacemaking. So I’ll direct this to the elders here. If someone says to you, gosh what is peacemaking? How do
you explain it to someone? Matthew?

MATTHEW DICK, JR: From my perspective, peacemaking has been
in our culture forever. It’s just that we haven’t practiced it for a long time and peacemaking is the ability
to live together with a lot of people, like our tribes did a long time ago in harmony.

ROB WOLF:
Darlene? Take it from there.

DARLENE WILDER: I never really thought about it so much of what it
is, but how it’s done. And I think aboriginally or traditionally we did it in our family units, and predominantly
with what was called a talking circle, where you gather like we did earlier today and you just went around and spoke
about whatever it is that you needed to discuss or resolve, or question that had more than one point of view that
needed to be heard. And I was just recollecting, we kind of celebrated a birthday, but I went around and each one
of them, I had all of those around that circle talk about something in their lifetime, an experience that they had,
that they would like somebody else to have because they learned something from it, or an experience that they would
caution no one to have because they learned something from it. So that way even the smallest child who could speak
is able to relate to that. Some of it might just be a scary dream, they’d wake up and think there’s something
under the bed or whatever, and they’d go look under the bed and there really isn’t anything there. So that’s
how I think a long time ago our family probably did this peacemaking. We would talk about what our experience was
and how we could benefit others by that experience. To me, that’s what peacemaking is, where we can share whatever
it is we’ve had in our life, with someone who is seeking more information that they don’t have or never
had the opportunity for that.

ROB WOLF: And so in the context of peacemaking here in Colville
now, you’re using those same principles you’ve just described in situations involving offending, and I
wonder how that goes. I’ll ask Brad in a minute about his experience, but I don’t know if Matthew wanted
to say anything about taking what Darlene described and putting it into this setting where you’re working with
someone who maybe has committed a serious crime, or some sort of crime.

MATTHEW DICK, JR: And
what the traditions that Darlene was talking about is some of the rights of passage of our people a long time ago,
their transition from being a child to a teenager and to an adult, and that’s one of the things, some of the
things that at least the peacemaker circle that I’ve been involved in, is that we try to bring those kinds of
traditions back up and talk about them, and explain why they were so important. And it’s so amazing the reception
that we get from the people that have been involved with us, because when I was 29 years old, I would have never
thought to sit down with my elders and try to learn something. I was one of those kids that knew it all and I was
bullet proof. Once you begin to learn about those traditions that have made the Native Americans such a strong people,
that have lasted through all these traumatic events that I was talking about in there, how they stood us in good
stead to bring us through all that. We’re trying to revive those traditions, those teachings, the
way of life, the culture back up to so at least our young people are going to be recipients of what we remember.

ROB WOLF: Brad, I wonder if you could explain how you came into contact with peacemaking circle, and why
you decided to participate?

BRAD: The first time I heard about peacemaker circle I was actually
in corrections, didn’t know nothing about it and this was just last November. They asked me if I wanted to do
it and I said, yeah. And then so they released me from custody and told me I had to be at the center and I was gonna
meet with these elders. I didn’t know anything about it or anything, but those first couple sessions they really
touched me, and my whole outlook on peacemaker circle, you know it changed and just having them elders and stuff
tell you.

ROB WOLF: What do you remember? Like, what touched you?

BRAD: Mostly
it was their stories relating to my problems, but normally that, the problems I did say I had, they was guiding me
through it and helping me out, and trying to figure out how to fix it and stuff, and it’s just that guidance.
That’s what being an elder is, is you’re in that position to pass on the wisdom and the teachings, and
what you learned, and pass that on to the little ones, so they have it so they can pass it on. That’s what I’ve
been taught.

ROB WOLF: Are they giving you things that you hadn’t found previously in your
life, and teaching you things you hadn’t known much about?

BRAD: Yes. Most of the old people
where I’m from, I don’t see. I know they’re old, but I don’t see them as elders. A lot of them
are still drinking and not passing on what they’ve been taught. So it kind of sounds mean, but my understanding
is that it’s just an old person. I mean there’s that respect there, still, but you know, they’re not
deemed my elder. I mean do you guys feel that way?

DARLENE WILDER: When I was finishing high school
and going on to after high school, and after about four years my dad figured out that I was getting an education
to be a teacher, and I don’t think he really wanted me to be a teacher. I don’t know what he wanted me
to do. I think he wanted me to be a secretary in the legal system because I had a good memory. And at that point,
you know he probably gave me his best words of wisdom, personally, and he goes you can’t teach what you don’t
got. And I thought, wow, isn’t that the truth. I mean, I’m gonna be a teacher? What do I have that I can teach?
And then it really, you know, put the weight there and made me think, when I do I really have got to know what it
is I’m going to be doing. So he said the right things for me, as far as putting me in my spot, my place. But
he was good about that, I mean he – and I guess I would have considered him an elder because I still think back on
a lot of things he shared with me.

ROB WOLF: So it sounds like the same applies to an elder—that
you can’t pass on what you don’t have, snd so that an elder is someone who has some life experience to
pass on. I mean, does that sound accurate?

DARLENE WILDER: And willing to do it. Not just, like
you said, they may have that knowledge, but maybe they don’t have the setting or the circumstances to do that,
and the peacemaking is allowing that to happen here.

MATTHEW DICK, JR: And it’s changed so
much since our parents were young ones growing up, because the people back then didn’t consider themselves elders,
but they would sit around and talk and they would do things, and you were expected to sit there and listen to them
talk, and observe what they were doing. That’s how you learned back then. And they never did consider themselves
teachers back then either, but they conveyed a lot of wisdom to the people as they were growing up. And I know my
mother tried to do that with me, but like I said I knew everything so I didn’t listen too much. The people nowadays,
even though they’re older, they—most of them don’t think they really have anything to offer, and if they
sat down with the elders here—and we need elders, we need them to start participating—if they sat down and just start
talking about those things that they remembered, that’s the teaching on its own. That’s the kind of teaching
that our people used to do a long time ago. And we are really in desperate need of male elders because we have 100
ladies that come to these things, and we’ve got four or five men that come to them.

ROB WOLF:
So maybe, tell me a little bit about how Brad—what you’ve seen in him, the progress he’s made because you
know, I’d heard you talking about it before. I wonder if you want to share some of that.

DARLENE
WILDER: When he came to the peacemaking circle, it wasn’t like I’ll fill in my application, turn it in,
and I’ll be in the peacemaking circle. He had to come to one of our monthly meetings when there was, what, 30,
40 of us elders there, and then they had to present. He wasn’t the only one there. There were others that came,
that had to present why they were seeking peacemaking circle. And at that point I saw Brad scared and nervous, and
when he was a little kid he might have been scared and nervous, but he never acted it the way I saw him acting at
that point, because it was more defensive and defiant, and there was no defensiveness and no defiance, and it was
just, I am a pitiful person and I need help. And that’s a lot of how we begin our prayers, is to the creator
that I’m just a pitiful person and I need your help. And that’s what I saw in Brad at that first peacemaking
circle. And since then he’s finally wearing that he has to pity himself because if you don’t pity yourself
you’re not gonna admit your faults and weaknesses. And we all have faults and weaknesses and we’ve got
to go fess up to them, and accept them, and go on. If we can’t accept them then it’s hard to go on.

ROB WOLF: I want to thank you all for sharing with me and people who are listening, your experience as peacemakers
and your experience in the peacemaking circle. I’ve been speaking with Brad, who’s been a participant in
a peacemaking circle, a client, and Darlene Wilder, and Matthew Dick, Jr., both of whom are peacemakers and elders
on the Colville Reservation. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. For
more information about the Center you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

Associate Professor Mark Halsey, left, answers a question as part of a panel on community court research
at Community Justice 2012. — **Lessons from Australia: What Researchers Have Learned about the Melbourne Neighbourhood Justice Centre** Mar 28, 2012
Mark Halsey of Flinders University Law School discusses key findings of an evaluation of Australia’s first community court.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation and
I’m in Washington D.C. at Community Justice 2012. I’m speaking with Mark Halsey. He’s
a professor of criminal justice at the Flinders Law School in Adelaide, Australia, and he was also one of the joint
leaders of the team that evaluated the Melbourne Neighbourhood Justice Centre. Mark, first off let me just
thank you for taking the time to speak with me

MARK HALSEY: Pleasure. Thanks
for it.

WOLF: What I wanted to do is ask you a little bit about the evaluation. So I
thought maybe you could just start off by describing what the three most important findings were, and maybe you want
to give just a little background about the evaluation, when it was conducted, and how it was conducted.

HALSEY: Okay, so the evaluation virtually started when the center first opened, and it first took
clients in around February 2007. And the evaluation – we collected data for just over two-and-a-half years,
and handed out the final report at the end of 2009, and the court was set up to serve a population of around 80,000
people in a locality called the city of Yara. Quite a mix of people who come under the banner of the lowest
socioeconomic index, indeed in the country, one report found, with some very wealthy pockets in the population as
well, of the catchment area.

In terms of your question around what were the three most
significant findings, the first one is that, I mean in terms of just out and out kind of findings, [we asked] “Was
this thing a success? One of the things that we were charged with measuring was the degree of community
participation. There has to be a big focus on the Community Justice Center, the neighborhood justice center, and
we found kind of high levels of community participation and satisfaction, and it was evidenced by people reporting
that not only had the NJC given them the opportunity to be heard about justice and local community issues in their
area, but they also saw—around 50 percent of everybody surveyed reported that their decisions have been reflected
in things the Community Justice Center or neighborhood justice center had done.

Another
big finding is that over time, everybody asks the recidivism question. Now the court didn’t just handle
criminal matters. It sat as a children’s court, it sat as a VCAT, or Victorian Civil Administrative Tribunal,
you know, like residential tenancy matters and so forth. It heard a wide range of matters. The majority of the matters
were criminal matters, however. We looked at a sample of NJC clients and they were following up for about, I think
it was about 16 to 18 months, against the control group from other courts with similar backgrounds, kind of offense
histories, times in and out of court and so forth. And what it shows is the survival times of NJC clients
was slightly better than the control group. It may have came down to something like 7 to 10 percent lower recidivism
rate. I think one of the other clear results was the compliance rate on community-based orders and doing community
service that proved to be a better compliance rate than the state average.

WOLF: Let
me ask you about something you brought up in your presentation that I thought we could discuss briefly and that was
what happens in the court room, in terms of who speaks. And you made a point that you found that beyond
the attorneys, the prosecutor and defense, other people including the defendant were much more likely to have an
opportunity to speak and be heard in the courtroom than in a conventional setting. And I wonder if you
could just say a little more about that.

HALSEY: Sure. We did look at, we
ran a series of court observations at the neighborhood justice center court and two comparative sites as well, two
kind of regular, traditional magistrate courts, and we were very interested in, to what extent do people in the court,
engaged in the process of the matter or the case, speak. What was interesting was that defendants themselves
were not only far more likely to be called on to speak, to be asked to speak by the magistrate, but they themselves
would ask to speak, in a non-prompted way to the magistrate far more often than in other courts, which to us I guess
indicated a degree of trust or, you know, a sense that what they wanted to say would be taken seriously, and they
felt they could actually put their own views on the agenda, if you like.

One of the
other important things about the NJC court, as opposed to other courts, is the presence of other support people there.
So if you’re dealing with a clinician or a counselor or whatever, for mental health, alcohol and drugs, financial
counselor, if they needed to be in court to either support or clarify things immediately for the magistrate, they
were far more likely to be there and understand something about that person’s situation – their history, where
they need to go, and where they’re at in their kind of recovery process – if I can put it like that – and to
inform the magistrate of that. Which made for a much more holistic hearing, if you like.

WOLF:
There was one other thing you mentioned, that it was absolutely fundamental—I think those are the words you used—to
think about the way the magistrate is chosen, or in our case usually the judge in the United States. I thought maybe
you could just explain a little bit more about that, but it also raises for me the question, does it become personality-driven,
and if the personality of the judge is so crucial, does that make it harder to, say, replicate in different settings?

HALSEY: Look, it does make it slightly more challenging because people are unique, but I think,
you know, they did exceptionally well in appointing the magistrate that they did, and I think one of the best things
that they can do is to try to really try to map – what are the great strengths of that particular magistrate?
Why does he work in that scenario and so when they go to fill that position again, that at least some of those features
can be present. And I think, you know, it’s been said here at the conference as well that, you know, you need
someone that is willing to move away, if you like, from kind of the moral condemnation script that kind of inhabits
a lot of court kind of operations, and that is willing to canvas some other kind of way of operating, like the therapeutic
justice, like procedural justice, to actually kind of, in a sense, be willing to work with individuals and work to
understand the things that underpin their offending, if indeed they’re before you as a criminal defendant. No
one’s irreplaceable. It’s just a matter of going about the business of selecting someone very carefully
and not thinking you can just slot someone in and they’ll be overwhelmed by the climate and they’ll just
automatically changed. There has to be some kind of integration process.

WOLF:
So let me ask you one more question, Mark. What would you say are the three most critical factors to a community
court’s success?

HALSEY: Okay, so the things that we know, I think ultimately in
the final report, were a single magistrate. So the magistrate gets to know, basically, everybody that comes before
them and they can set up some kind of tangible relationship with them, and the monthly—or however often the court
reviews for specific people—is really important. The second things is that it is really important to have
a neighborhood justice officer, or a person that can act as the go between or liase between the magistrate and the
people who are trying to help clients in a more direct sense, you know, the clinical team and the other members of
the larger support team, like financial counseling, homelessness, whatever. There needs to be that person
so that you can maintain the independence of the magistrate in court, and that they’re not seen to be interfering
in those other clinician’s roles

WOLF: Would that parallel the role of the resource
coordinator that we have in community courts?

HALSEY: I don’t know the answer.
It may well, but if it is someone that basically is in court the majority of time, and knows what the magistrate
is doing, and knows what other aspects of the center are doing for particular clients who are in the court, then
that would be right.

WOLF: Yeah, that sounds pretty parallel.

HALSEY:
So that’s the second thing. The other thing is that it has to be, or from our point of view, there is huge weight
to be attached to the on-site nature of services so that clients don’t get shunted or lost between and order
from a court and trying to either find a service some distance away, or hope that they turn up to that, or hope that
they go to their community corrections office somewhere else.

WOLF: Well great, thanks
so much, Mark,

HALSEY: It’s a pleasure, Rob. I’m really happy to
be here.

WOLF: I’ve been speaking with Mark Halsey, who is a professor of Criminal
Justice at the Flinders Law School in Adelaide, Australia. We’ve been talking about what he learned
as one of the joint leaders of the team who evaluated the Melbourne Justice Center.

HALSEY:
Thanks Rob. Can I just also acknowledge the other members of the team and that’s Professor
David Bamford from Flinders University, Dr. Stuart Ross from University of Melbourne, and we also had assistance
from PriceWaterhouseCoopers, who did a cost-benefit analysis for us. And the Social Research Center of North Melbourne,
and the Brotherhood of St. Lawrence based in Collinwood in Melbourne.

ROB WOLF: I am
Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. If you want to hear more of our
podcasts you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.

*(March 2012)*

Associate Professor
Mark Halsey, left, answers a question as part of a panel on community
court research at Community Justice
2012.

Jim Burack, third from right, says the new combined courthouse/police station fosters inter-agencycollaboration.
With Burack are, from left, Benito Garcia, Commander, Police Dept., Bruce Fickel, Community Prosecutor, Jessica Jones,
Community Court Case & Resource Manager, Maria Zuniga,Community Services Assistant, Police Dept., John
Easley, Community Court Judge, Beatriz Rangel,Community Court Clerk, and Mick Peters, School Resource Officer. — **The Architecture of Collaboration: A New Courthouse in Colorado has Cooperation in Mind** Mar 21, 2012
A new building in Milliken, Colorado, houses a community court, police station and social services in an effort
to foster collaboration among agencies and be more user-friendly for both the public and staff. Jim Burack, town
administrator and chief of police, discusses the logic behind the building’s design.

The
following is a transcript of the conversation.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and
I’m at Community Justice 2012 in Washington, D.C., and I’m speaking to various people who are in attendance
and presenting.

And right now I’m going to take a little time to talk to Jim Burack, who
is the town administrator and also the chief of police in Milliken, Colorado. And I was going to talk to him about
the development of a community court in Milliken, but I thought, Jim, I would start first with a little bit about
your personal journey, because I know that you used to be the counsel and director of operations at the Police Executive
Research Forum, which is kind of a think tank that explores issues around police, police policy, and I wonder how
you went from that role here in Washington, with a national perspective, to this more local perspective in Colorado.

**JIM BURACK**: You know, I spent, as you said, I spent six years at
PERF here in Washington, D.C., and I had the opportunity to meet and to hear and spend time with a lot of the leading
police researchers, leading police practitioners. So it was really an incomparable opportunity, and I was really
fortunate to have that chance to see up close, to be able to visit some of these communities that have done great
anti-crime initiatives and to be part of them as either a member of a consulting team, or a member of the research
team.

But there gets to be a point where you’re still an outsider that you want to actually be
engaged with making something happen in the field. And so after a number of years at PERF it was clear to me that
I wanted to get back into the field. I had been a police officer when I first got out of college. I was a patrol
officer on the street outside of Denver and that’s where I wanted to be. And that’s actually been the plan
since college—to be a police chief.

**WOLF**: Well tell me, then, how
you began to think about creating a community court in Milliken and what led you to that idea and what the process
has been like to actually bring it to fruition.

**BURACK**: I think
I have to go back years. I mean probably PERF was the formative, the formative period, but I spent a lot of time
working on problem-oriented policing, and I had a chance to spend time with Herman Goldstein and Ron Clarke and practitioners,
Chuck Wexler, who was my boss, and a number of folks who, if you’re in the world of policing, mean a great deal.
So I worked a lot on problem-oriented policing, community policing. One of your colleagues from CCI, Julius Lang,
came in and spoke at a problem-oriented policing conference. So it was clear to me at that point, listening to Julius,
that community courts was the twin of problem-oriented policing, and that there were these synergies that can happen
between policing and courts.

After a couple of years I had an opportunity to build a new police
station. We’re a very fast growing community in northern Colorado, and my county was one of the fastest growing
counties in the country in the early 2000s. We went to the voters for a bond. The voters approved it, and I think
early on I recognized I wanted to build a building which tried to incorporate all of these strands of police innovation:
community policing, problem-oriented policing, CPTED or crime prevention through environmental design. And my impulse
was “We need to build a courthouse into it.” We talked through it. We were going to build a courthouse into it and
figure out how we can make, at the municipal level, the very lowest levels of the criminal justice system, how we
can get the police and courts to cooperate better. And that was the genesis of it.

**WOLF**:
So it sounds like you’re making a connection between the architecture of the space and the actual practical
relationship the court system and the police have, or you hope that they will have.

**BURACK**:
I think that’s exactly correct. You put it better than I. I think that design has an impact. It sends a message
both to the defendants and folks who are participating in the in the justice system at the local level, and it sends
a clear message, I think, to the officers and participants that we believe in problem-solving and prevention.

The
beauty of it is that you can design this, what’s effectively a neighborhood-based police and court, for this
clearly defined geographic area and deliver service on a personal retail basis, where there’s a high level of
accountability, a high level of knowledge by officers about the community and about the customers and the families
and the businesses we serve.

So the question that I think our Milliken model leads to is whether
or not there’s some basis of suggesting that you could design or replicate neighborhood-based, decentralized
community police stations twinned with a community court along, probably, with some sort of human service resource
center, which is what we’ve added in our lobby of our police station. I think it’s a theory worth trying.

**WOLF**: Well tell me a little bit about the architecture, then. Paint
a picture then. What’s it like?

**BURACK**: Well, I think if you’re
a visitor, the first thing that strikes you when you walk into our building, first of all, it’s right downtown.
The building overlooks our future town square. But when you walk in, you walk into a lobby with a children’s
library, with children’s toys, with a fireplace, with rocking chairs.

You even walk in and
next to the service counter for the police department, there are two chairs at the counter. And what it does, I think
it changes the dynamic of that interaction between the visitor to the police station and our personnel behind the
counter. Because it instantly suggests to a visitor, “Please sit down. Let’s actually talk.” I mean, you’re
not there to get a burger. You’re there to sit down and talk out a problem. And I think it ties to this procedure
of justice. It’s not only how you’re treated, it’s those silent signals that the customer of justice
services receives, that “I’m gonna be treated with dignity and respect, and be listened to, because my environment
tells me that that’s what’s going to happen in this place.”

We put a lot of glass on
the outside of the courthouse. You want the court participants, you want the judge, you want the victim’s family
and the defendant’s family to understand that there’s a community beyond that glass, outside, that’s
being affected by that behavior that we’re talking about in court. And we wanted to reflect a sense that we
might to restorative justice in the courtroom, so we have a circular design in the center of the room so that if
we do conferencing or, you know, healing circles, that there’s some way that we reflect that tradition that
we hope, at some point, to start.

**WOLF**: So tell me about introducing
this idea of a community court and even some of the community policing ideas that you’ve brought to Milliken.
Have you found any kind of culture clash or any challenges or obstacles?

**BURACK**:
I’ll make one observation, which may be counterintuitive, but it reinforces itself from time to time. And that
is when you explain these concepts to the layperson, they intuitively understand it. They intuitively say it’s
a good idea, and it makes sense to them. Curiously, when you explain concepts like this to folks who are the experts,
the professionals, the folks who spent a lifetime in a silo, have a more difficult time—some of them—sort of bridging
the silos because they’re invested in a certain way of doing business. And community courts are a great example
of trying to pull people out of those silos and out of those sorts of cultural norms of the profession we’ve
grown up with.

**WOLF**: Great, well it’s been a pleasure talking
with you Jim. I’ve been speaking with Jim Burack who’s the town administrator and also the chief of police
of Milliken, Colorado. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. To listen
to more podcasts, visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

Jim Burack, third from right, says the new combined courthouse/police station
fosters inter-agency
collaboration. With Burack are, from left, Benito Garcia, Commander, Police Dept.,
Bruce Fickel,
Community Prosecutor, Jessica Jones, Community Court Case & Resource Manager, Maria
Zuniga,
Community Services Assistant, Police Dept., John Easley, Community Court Judge, Beatriz Rangel,
Community
Court Clerk, and Mick Peters, School Resource Officer.

Sustaining Community Courts: What Makes a Program Attractive to Potential Funders? Mar 14, 2012

Burke Fitzpatrick administers the Office
of Justice Programs in South Carolina’s Department of Public Safety, which distributes federal justice
dollars to programs in the state. In this interview, he explains why he thinks problem-solving courts have been a
good investment and what he looks for in a funding application.

The
following is a transcript of the interview.

ROBERT V.
WOLF: For anyone trying to start a new program, funding is crucial. The big question is, how do you
attract dollars to your initiative? I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation,
and I turned to Burke Fitzpatrick for an answer to that question.

Mr. Fitzpatrick is the Administrator
for the Office of Justice Programs in the South Carolina Department of Public Safety, and his team oversees the distribution
of federal justice dollars in his state. Mr. Fitzpatrick participated in a panel on funding at Community Justice
2012: the International Conference of Community Courts. I caught up with him afterward to talk about why he thinks
South Carolina’s problem-solving courts have been a good investment and to get a sense of what he looks for
in a funding application.

Thank you very much, Burke, for taking the time to talk to me.

BURKE FITZPATRICK: Pleasure to be here.

WOLF:
Why are you interested in community courts, given your capacity as overseer of federal justice dollars distributed
in South Carolina?

FITZPATRICK: Let me first give you a little
context. My office does distribute and manage much of the federal law enforcement funds that come from the Department
of Justice, as well as victim of crimes money and juvenile justice grant funds, and we’ve been doing that for
a very long time.

And in South Carolina we don’t have a very distinguished record as far
as our rankings in violent crime and property crime in general. In the last decade, we’ve been ranked number
one per capita in violent crime in the country. And we’re not in that ranking right now, we’ve slipped
to number two, thankfully, and maybe we’re down to five; we’re heading in the right direction. But for all those
years and before, my office put a lot of money into law enforcement to fight violent crime, with a number of initiatives,
multijurisdictional narcotics task forces, all kinds of things. But what we didn’t address—and I think this
was an oversight, which we are now trying to correct—what we didn’t address is the piece on the courts. Because
you can arrest a lot of people, either for minor crimes or major crimes—and major crimes are probably going to do
prison time, but the minor crimes, which affect the quality of life and lead, I think, to violent crime numbers in
the state—actually if you ignore those folks then you’re not solving the problem.

So we
now think that putting some resources into the specialized court, such as community courts, such as domestic violence
courts, such as mental health courts and other types of specialized courts is a wise investment because we’re
going to break that revolving door that—we’re going to break that chain where the offenders who start out as
low-level offenders—although it’s very, very serious, the people they impact—these low-level offenders, we can reintegrate
them into the community, get them sober, and stable, and employed, and have sufficient supervision, perhaps, for
a period of time where they’re a contributing member of the community and not, maybe, someone who’s going
to graduate to a more and more serious crime.

So in a nutshell, we’ve been putting a lot
of money into the law enforcement side and neglecting, to a great extent, the community corrections or community
court side. And now I think it’s time to balance that out. And interestingly, it comes at a time when federal
grant funds are diminishing, so it’s going to be even more difficult to do that. I think law enforcement in
our state and many states have sort of been used to taking advantage, rightfully so, of the justice system’s grants
and the Byrne Funds, and other funds. What they need to see—and I think many, many of our law enforcement officers
do—but they don’t want to be locking up the same people again and again either. And they don’t want their
communities to suffer the same problems over and over again that these courts might be able to solve. So we’ve
got good track records with some of our domestic violence courts. We’ve got a good track record for our mental
health courts— don’t have enough of them, they don’t impact enough people, and they’re not a perfect solution,
but they’re headed in the right direction.

WOLF: So you have
had experience with these kinds of problem-solving courts, and you’re saying that your experience has been positive?

FITZPATRICK: They have been positive. We have funded, out of my
office, domestic violence courts and mental health courts. They’ve all been successful, they’ve got very,
very talented people, judiciary and staff support, and all kinds of community resources behind them, but I question
whether we’re going to ever get to a point where we can have enough of them to make sort of a tidal change in
the kind of the crime rates we’re talking about. But certainly it’s the right thing to do for the judiciary
and it’s the right thing to do for the criminal justice system.

WOLF:
What factors are you weighing? What are you looking for in an applicant who is coming to you and saying, “You know,
we have a great idea. We want to start this kind of court or this kind of program”?

FITZPATRICK:
It’s an interesting question because for a grant administrator, it’s always a question as to where you
put your resources, and in my office we’ve taken the philosophy that we will reach out to everybody, make them
aware of these possibilities, and make them aware of the grant solicitation resources out there. But we’re not
wise enough to get on the community level and decide if that’s a good place or the next county’s a good
place, or the next city’s a good place. So we let them come to us. We let those proposals come to our office
because they’ve already shown the initiative and the interest, and they’ve talked amongst themselves and
got buy-in, probably, from law enforcement and courts and probation, parole and pardon services, and the alcohol
and drug abuse folks on the local level before they send us the grant application. Then we’ll look at it and
maybe give it some guidance on budget and structure and evaluation, and make sure they have measurable objectives
and good performance indicators. And then it’s our job to take that application and put it against all the others,
because we get millions of more dollars worth of requests than we can fulfill, and say that’s the project we
need to fund at the expense of others that aren’t gonna get funded.

We’ve been successful
in that because I think the council and board that we report to see the big picture the same way we do, in that if
we just concentrate on that one part of the criminal justice system, we’re just not going to be successful.

WOLF: And have you found that there is some resistance in some
parts within, perhaps, law enforcement or the judiciary to some of these alternative approaches, or are people welcoming
these ideas with open arms at this point?

FITZPATRICK: Let me speak
candidly here. When drug courts first were initiated around the country and I think also in South Carolina, the title
“drug court,” to the general public, meant that you had a special court set up to crack down on drug offenders. And
that was okay because that’s really not what the court was supposed to be about; it was supposed to break that
link of continued criminality and continued recidivism. So we didn’t get too much criticism from the public
because they thought this was a tougher, tougher measure, and I think that as people began to understand what the
drug court was about and saw its successes, they said “hey, this isn’t a bad idea. This is a good idea.”

Mental health courts, I think the community adopted that idea right away. I think the private sector, the communities,
the retailers, they knew that these panhandlers and folks were making, you know, are minor thieves, and people who
were scrawling graffiti or peeing and urinating all over the front of their businesses, they know they’re crazy.
I mean, that’s not a politically correct word, but yeah, they are, and they need special help. And they immediately
endorsed mental health courts, I think.

Domestic violence courts, that’s a very specialized
crime, and we need to work with those offenders so it doesn’t escalate, and people seemed to adopt that pretty
well, as well.

WOLF: And so given, as you referred to, the reduction
in federal dollars, where does that leave states and communities in terms of strategies or the options open to them?

FITZPATRICK: Well there’s ways to initiate community courts
with very little initial funding input. Traditionally it’s been done through grants because most communities
and municipalities just don’t have unprogrammed dollars just sitting around on the shelf saying, “Gosh, what
a great idea. Let’s start a court.”

So they come to maybe a state administrative agency
like mine and say, “I’d like a grant if you have grant money, but after two or three years, or four years, we’ll
stand on our own two feet.” And that’s the model we use in South Carolina.

The first year
is getting it all together and getting organized and getting that client/defendant population in place. The second
year is really hitting your stride and working out all the kinks and getting some good data. And the third year,
the third year is critical because you’re going back to your county council, back to your city council, or whomever
you can find, and saying, “Listen, these grant funds are going to be withdrawn. We have demonstrated success. Here
are our numbers.” And if that community really understands what that community court is about, if they’ve been
in the court and actually seen it and realize “Okay, there’s real people here acting compassionately and fairly,
but firmly,” that community’s going to say, “We understand that the community is safer, saving valuable tax
dollars, we’ve got to continue it.”

WOLF: Great, well, you
know, I really appreciate your taking the time to talk to me.

FITZPATRICK:
Well thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be invited to the conference. Great job.

WOLF: Thank you. I’ve been speaking with Burke Fitzpatrick, who’s the administrator of the
Office of Justice Programs of the South Carolina Department of Public Safety. I am Rob Wolf, Director of Communications
at the Center for Court Innovation. To hear more podcasts, you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.

In Vancouver, Offenders Find Community Service is a Two-Way Street Mar 07, 2012

Crown Counsel Adam Dalrymple explains how the Downtown Vancouver Community Court uses community service assignments to match
offenders with organizations that address their social service needs.

The
following is a transcript of the interview.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Is it possible to punish an offender and help them at the same time? The Downtown Vancouver
Community Court assigns offenders to restitution projects and the very social services that can help them.

I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. And in the following
interview, I talk to Crown Prosecutor Adam Dalrymple about the Downtown Vancouver Community Court’s approach
to combining community service and social services.

WOLF: Hi Adam.

ADAM DALRYMPLE: Hello.

WOLF:
I wanted to ask you about a presentation you participated in today at Community Justice 2012, which really focused
on community service. I think Vancouver’s Downtown Community Court has been able to achieve something that a
lot of community courts strive to achieve, which is a kind of community service that not only seeks to improve the
community but does something for the defendant as well. And I wonder if you could sort of explain to me how your
community service works and how you meet the needs, both of the defendant and the community through your community
service assignments.

DALRYMPLE: Well the first step was identifying
the needs in the community. The Downtown East Side of Vancouver is an area marred by drug addiction, mental health
issues, homelessness, and poverty. We also knew that were there a number of social services in the community, and
the key was trying to connect or link the offenders to those social services.

What we did was,
throughout our community service program at community court, we attempted to organize these programs and have our
offenders go to these programs based on their social needs. And how we went about doing that was through a motivational
interview with a probation officer. So once an accused or an offender was deemed suitable for community work service,
they would go upstairs and have a meeting with a probation officer. The probation officer would employ the motivational
interview, which is designed to elicit information; it’s reflective listening and engagement from the offender–asking
the offender, you know, “What do you think the problem is?” or “Do you have housing? Do you have employment?” Those
sorts of things.

And then based on the answer, that probation officer would match that need
with a placement in the community at one of the various outreach organizations. For example, with women who may have
come in committing a theft under $5,000 or a shoplifting, they may have been victims of domestic violence in their
past. So the idea was, why don’t we place them with the women’s shelter in the Downtown East Side? It’s
a safe environment for them to go to, to give back to their community, learn about the various resources at the shelter,
such as obviously shelter, housing, food; they have outreach workers there.

WOLF:
So they’re actually doing work for the shelter as they learn about what the shelter provides?

DALRYMPLE: So they are, they are sorting clothing, they’re doing administrative
tasks, they’re cleaning, they’re serving food. So they’re working at the shelter, and at the same
time, they’re learning about the services that may assist them in the future. And so in a way we are sort of
killing two birds with one stone. And at the same time, we’re connecting the social services to the court and
the offenders of the court to the social services. We’re really rebuilding a community that was fractured.

WOLF: And are there other examples? So a defendant who has a history of domestic
violence, that sounds like a natural fit. Have her work in a shelter.

ADAM DALRYMPLE:
Well for example, we have individuals who don’t have stable housing who are new to Vancouver. There’s a
large population in Vancouver that are from other provinces and other countries that are on the Downtown East Side
using drugs, things of that nature. They don’t have stable housing. So we would refer them to a shelter where
they’ll complete their community work service. They may serve food there, they may engage in janitorial duties,
administrative tasks. The idea is to open their minds to all of the resources that are really at their fingertips
that they may not have been aware of before.

We had one really good example of an individual
from Edmonton, Alberta, who recently moved to Vancouver—didn’t have a lot of connections, didn’t have a
home, did his community work service for a minor offense at a shelter and now he’s thriving. He feels like he’s
part of the community. He actually returns to that shelter and plays ping pong and chess, and things of that nature.
And now he feels like he’s a part of that community. And we haven’t seen any recidivism with respect to
him.

WOLF: Was it a hard sell to the community at large? I’m
just speculating that in some instances, someone may feel that it’s too good for the defendants, it’s not
hard enough. I just wonder if there’s any push back.

DALRYMPLE:
We haven’t experienced any push back. In fact, most of community is quite practical about community work service
and educating them as well with respect to the principles of restorative justice. The idea that if you can restore
the offender as part of the community, that can pay itself forward many times over. This is someone who, if they
are linked up to shelters, to housing, to food, they may not need to steal from the local market. They may not engage
in criminal activity. So this has benefits for everyone. We’ve only received quite positive feedback.

WOLF: And was it difficult to find partners willing to take on defendants?
I mean presumably they’re working with similar populations, but were there new issues of supervision, or compliance
monitoring that needed to be put in place for the program to work.

DALRYMPLE:
I wasn’t responsible for setting up the program, but what I can tell you is that certain placements have restrictions.
For example, they may not want a sex offender working in their facility, or at a women’s shelter they won’t
have men. We respect those rules.

We have open dialogue with these organizations in terms of
compliance. The organization or the placement tells us if they’ve provided compliance. And I mentioned, we have
worksheets that are completed by the organization and when they’re submitted with respect to compliance, we’ll
actually go pick them up so that we have direct communication and dialogue with the organization. That keeps, sort
of, our thumb on the pulse of the organization, and it allows us to continue building those relationships.

WOLF: Are there plans going forward to expand or other thoughts about community
service that you perhaps are picking up here at the conference or you guys are already working on?

DALRYMPLE: Well an idea that we’re sort of thinking of is community work service
as a means to really engage the community and strengthen the ties of the court in the community. And that’s
one thing that I’ve discovered in preparing for this presentation, is that a lot of the organizations aren’t
quite familiar with community court. They care about community court and if we perhaps, we reached out to an even
broader group of groups and organizations, it may increase the profile of the court in the community. And that’s
always a good thing.

WOLF: Have you noticed from your contact
with American prosecutors, a difference in their approach or attitudes toward community court or specific strategies
or obstacles they encounter that perhaps you don’t encounter in Canada?

DALRYMPLE:
I’ve learned a lot about the difference between the Canadian and the American community court models. One important
difference is their profile within the community. The American courts are more active with private sector funding,
marketing, reaching out, whereas in Canada we are, have been relatively reluctant to do that. That’s the one
major difference.

As well, I’ve also learned from speaking to my American colleagues that
their courts deal with a lot of quality-of-life type crimes. In Vancouver, we deal with quite a number of serious
offenses in our community court. We deal with domestic assaults, we deal with fraud, we deal with weapons offenses,
we deal with break-and-enters of commercial premises, assault causing bodily harm type offenses. So it represents
an opportunity in Vancouver because we deal with such a variety of different offenses.

WOLF:
Adam, thank you very much. I’ve been talking to Adam Dalrymple, who is a crown prosecutor with the Downtown
Community Court in Vancouver, Canada. We’ve been talking about their approach to community service among other
things. Adam, thank you very much.

DALRYMPLE: Thank you.

WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court
Innovation. To hear more podcasts, you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

March 2012

Breaking the Cycle: A Canadian Province Explores an Integrated Approach to Addressing Offenders’ Underlying Problems Feb 29, 2012

Kurt Sandstrom, assistant deputy minister of Alberta Justice in Alberta, Canada discusses his province’s efforts to
break cycles of offending with integrated, evidence-based services.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation and I am
at Community Justice 2012 at the end of January in Washington, D.C. And I am speaking with Kurt Sandstrom who is
Deputy –

KURT SANDSTROM: Assistant Deputy Minister –

WOLF:
Thank you Kurt – for Alberta Justice in the province of Alberta in Canada. And I understand that you in Alberta are
exploring the possibility of creating a community court. So maybe you could tell me a little bit about where you
are in the process and what made you interested in the first place.

SANDSTROM:
It’s a long story, so I could go back in time to 2009 when we started looking at this issue. And we have a stakeholder
vehicle called the Justice Policy Advisory Committee that is co-hosted by the Minister of Justice and the Solicitor
General. And we had presentations at that meeting, outlining some of the innovative work that was going on in the
United States – notably the Redhook Community [Justice Center], and also looking at a lot of things that were going
on in Canada, the Victoria Integrated Court and the Vancouver Community Court, and the drug courts.

And
we were looking at a number of silos that were popping up, depending on the needs or circumstances of the offender.
So, for example, if you were addicted you could get into the drug court program. If you had mental health issues
you would qualify for mental health diversion. If you went down the road and were homeless, then you could get into
the Pathways to Housing program that would look at your justice needs.

And so the Justice Minister,
who is now our Premier, at that point in time, along with the Solicitor General, said we need to look at how we break
down these silos and look at it in a more holistic manner. So the Integrated Justice Services Project was born and
we engaged some consultants who looked at all the models across North America and came up with the Cadillac model,
which we’d like to implement, but we’re not able to make as much headway on the Cadillac model at the moment. We
are taking small steps and right at the moment we’re launching a pilot in Calgary, Alberta, that will be entitled
A Safe Community’s Resource Center. And it will be focusing on the population that is post-conviction that will be
serving their sentence in the community. And the idea would be to refer them to a program that has a joint assessment
team of probation and health services members who also have all the supports of housing, mental health, alcohol addictions
counseling.

We’ll be working in partnership with community organizations to essentially create
a center with wraparound, holistic, integrated services down the road. And so you’ll know that the court is not involved
in that project at the moment because we’re trying to focus on the government services and the other support services
in that offending population that is post-sentence but serving in the community. We then hope to evaluate and proceed
to other phases of the project that will look at pre-conviction. We’ll also look at pre-charge because the police
population is saying—or the police officers are saying—we need some sort of solution to deal with diversion without
charge. And so all of this will be considered and evaluated in the fullness of time.

WOLF:
And when you say the court’s not involved, you mean because it’s post-conviction?

SANDSTROM:
Correct. Because it’s post-conviction and these offenders are put on probation, at the moment the judiciary will
not have really much to say to nor will defense or Crown. It will be a determination based on the probation officer’s
assessment of whether the offender would qualify for the safe community’s resource center. And if they do so qualify,
then one comprehensive treatment plan will be set up for them. The judiciary are involved in our two drug courts
in the province already in the pre-trial, or pre-conviction population. So right at the moment we’re working with
them to ensure that they’ve got everything they need to come at it holistically, and we’re hoping to build on some
of their experiences when we go forward with the project further.

WOLF:
So your vision – correct me if I’m wrong – is that this resource center that you’re pulling together using community-based
organizations and not-for-profits and such, and government agencies, presumably, could serve as a resource for these
other components, when and if you create them – the pre-trial one that you referred to. It would be sort of an all-in-one
place that, as it expands, you perhaps could draw upon and refer defendants to?

SANDSTROM:
Yes and no. We want to make sure that the phases are separate from coming up with one cookie-cutter approach. So
we may be looking at the resource center doing some of this, but we may also be looking at other solutions. For example,
right at the moment we’ve got two communities in Alberta—Edmonton and Calgary—organizing at the community level with
respect to the community-based organizations, because they’re reaching out to clients in distress. And they’re, at
the moment, saying we need to do business differently. We need to provide one place for a person who’s not even charged
with an offense to have, you know, their distress remediated in some fashion or another. So the community right at
the moment is driving some of the solution making.

We’re gonna be participating as a government
with those community organizations. What they set up could be the response to the other phases of a project. And
the key is that we’re going to continue to integrate as we move forward. We have a number of, as I said, earlier
silos that we’ll need to kind of put together. And we’re creating one position within our Safe Communities provincial
government that we call the Director of Integrated Justice Services. And this person’s position will be to further
integrate, to further design programming that will get at the offender’s criminogenic needs and really try to move
that marker in terms of an integrated provincial system.

WOLF: And
how much of an emphasis are you placing on evidence-based practices, using strategies that evidence has shown apparently
works?

SANDSTROM: That’s the cornerstone to the model. We’re looking
at only working with programs that have been evaluated and have been shown to be successful. And that’s difficult
within Alberta to ensure that we have the knowledge base that we need to draw from that. There’s quite a bit of work
going on across North America and worldwide, I think, in this area. We really want to set ourselves up as experts
in that fidelity in the science, and build from that, and also contribute to it. So, for example, our Safe Communities
initiative has funded 88 crime-prevention pilots, pilot projects across Alberta, all of which have to be evaluated
from a social return on investment, as to what will work in preventing crime? Even getting further upstream, what
are we doing to prevent crime? And all of that evaluation and research will help infuse our approach provincially,
and will also hopefully contribute to the literature across North America on what works.

WOLF:
So I understand you visited the Red Hook Community Justice Center. Have you seen other community courts and, if so,
are there things in particular that you want to try to replicate, and are there things you think will not work in
Alberta?

SANDSTROM: I haven’t personally visited any of the community
courts other than the Victoria Integrated Court. But the team has and our consultants have gone out to Dallas. They’ve
seen Red Hook, they’ve seen Vancouver. Really we’re not sure exactly how we’re going to replicate this. It’s a, it’s
certainly not a cookie-cutter approach. We’re going to be seeing what works and what doesn’t. So right at the moment,
we’re just struggling to get the government services together, working differently, and at that point we’re going
to build community in so we’ll be looking at these other models to see what their successes are, drawing from them,
and hopefully, you know, replicating something that’s going to get at that criminogenic aspect.

WOLF:
And one last question. I know you’re kind of early in the process. It sounds like you’ve done an incredible amount
of research and now you’re putting in, you know, you’re taking steps to move forward with the plan. Are there any
lessons that you’ve learned so far, that you might share, that might help someone else who’s exploring the possibility
of creating this integrated approach, or something like a community court?

SANDSTROM:
Yeah, I guess the first learning I would have is it’s not often that state or provincial or federal governments will
attempt to do this from the top down. We’ve attempted to do it from the top down, drawing from the experience of
more community-driven success stories. It’s difficult driving it from the top down. What I’ve encountered is that
often times change is slow to come to systems, especially government systems. In the future I might look at another
approach as a provincial government going into this, whereby we actually empower work that’s going on in communities
and are there to enable and facilitate the work that would be happening there, and let the models come up. In a perfect
world, I guess you have to be top down and bottom up. And so don’t forget the bottom, the community. The community
is critical in the solution. Every community is different. Every organization or community has different organizations
and they all have to be engaged and it is difficult for government to know what is going on in that area. And so
we need to find a way to make sure the bottom is coming up to the top and the top is coming down to the bottom.

WOLF:
Very interesting. Well thank you very much, Kurt Sandstrom. I appreciate your taking the time to talk to me. I’ve
been speaking with Kurt Sandstrom who is Assistant Deputy Minister in Alberta Justice. And you guys are working on
exploring the possibility of creating something like a community court or an integrated approach, offering alternatives
to incarceration, enhancing probation.

SANDSTROM: Exactly, Integrated
Justice Services is what we’re calling it, as opposed to being a court at the moment.

WOLF:
So thanks very much for taking the time to talk to me.

SANDSTROM:
Thanks very much.

WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications
at the Center for Court Innovation at Community Justice 2012. To hear more of our podcasts, visit www.courtinnovation.org.
Thanks for listening.

February 2012

Connections Among People: Tracking and Preventing Violence through Social Network Analysis Feb 17, 2012

Sociologist Andrew Papachristos focuses his studies on urban neighborhoods, social networks, street gangs, violent
crime, and gun violence. A Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at Harvard University, Papachristos discusses
how social network analysis can aid crime prevention.

SARAH SCHWEIG:
Hi, I’m Sarah Schweig at the Center for Court Innovation, and today I’m speaking with Andrew Papachristos. We
are currently in an executive session in Washington, D.C. sponsored by the California Endowment, Community Oriented
Policing Services, and the Center for Court Innovation that brought together public health experts and law enforcement
representatives for a conversation about public health approaches to public safety. Andrew Papachristos is a sociologist
who focuses his studies on urban neighborhoods, social networks, street gangs, violent crime, and gun violence. As
a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar, Andrew will expand his use of network analysis to the study of
crime epidemics in U.S. cities, paying particular attention to the way violence diffuses among populations of youth.
Thank you for speaking with me today.

ANDREW PAPACHRISTOS:
It’s my pleasure.

SCHWEIG: So let’s start out by talking
about crime epidemics. How does treating violence like a contagious disease affect approaches to crime in law enforcement,
and how does it help us understand, in general, how crime occurs?

PAPACHRISTOS:
So I think when the phrase ‘crime epidemics’ is typically brought up, it’s brought up as sort of like a moral panic
to sort of motivate people into action, and usually the action is political or law enforcement. I think we mentioned
in our talk today one of the actions when you have a crime epidemic is to call out the National Guard, quite literally.
I think what both I’m trying to do, as well as people in this room are trying to do, is understand what the idea
of an epidemic means in public health—so we don’t mobilize the National Guard when we have an outbreak of influenza
or an STD—and in fact, taking some of the science that’s used in contagious disease studies and apply them to violence,
as in who is most susceptible to getting shot. And to use more precise models, especially around social networks
to really understand if crime is a disease, then how does it spread? What is its form? What is the way that it is
transmitted? So to actually take this sort of analogy, which is often political, and actually take it at its sort
of real value, and understand what these mechanisms of contagion might be.

SCHWEIG:
The public probably thinks of social networks as Facebook and stuff like that. Can you talk a bit about
what you mean when you say, ‘using social network analysis,’ and also the kinds of relationships are you looking
at—and why are you looking at those relationships?

PAPACHRISTOS:
So social network analysis is a science that’s been around for 60+ years. It really started in anthropology and sociology
where people were interested to understand the connections among groups and individuals, and how that affects action,
political action, social action, health and behaviors, and the difference between that and sort of regular science
is—rather than just understand individuals in isolation—network analysis really tries to understand how the connections
among people affect their behavior. So how your friend’s choice of political candidates affects your choice, or whether
it’s eating habits or social influence, or how you get a job. And so the idea of understanding connections
and how that affects your behavior. When you talk about the connections that you have, like Facebook, who
are your friends, it is actually—the science behind it is much like social network analysis, especially the mathematics.
What you are interested in, who are your friends, who are your family, who did you go to school with, who were you
in clubs with? As well as sort of—did you buy the same book as other people? So Amazon uses that type of analysis
to understand people who bought this, they also like this, based on what other people like you have done.

In the case of today’s discussion about crime, we’re trying to understand how certain types of risky relationships—so
sort of offending relationships or gang relationships affect some of these outcomes like mortality: who gets shot
and killed. And like other types of behavior like intravenous drug use or sex behavior, you want to understand the
relationships that matter. So who you share needles with, who you’re sleeping with, in much the same way we’re trying
to understand who you hang out with and how that affects all these sorts of bad outcomes.

SCHWEIG:
Right. And you mentioned an offending population and during the talk today you talked about co-offending populations—how
does mass incarceration, that our country is dealing with right now, tend to affect the offending networks?

PAPACHRISTOS: So it’s a great question. I haven’t looked at it sort
of in this analysis yet. But what it does do, we know—from the evidence as well as what I would hypothesize—is it
disrupts these positive networks—family, school, romantic relationships, jobs—and then essentially filters you into
a different set of networks when you come out. So the capacity to get a job being an incarcerated felon, the capacity
to maintain relationships with your children, and that then getting passed down to them, intergenerational transition
of things like poverty, really incarceration is having a long effect on these networks both now and in the future.
And hopefully it’s something we can get at empirically.

SCHWEIG:
That’s really interesting. And sort of in the vein of where you want this to go in the future, where do you see this
research moving and how might it affect law enforcement approaches on the ground? And also maybe talk a little bit
about what jurisdictions would need to best implement these ideas in the most useful ways.

PAPACHRISTOS:
Yeah, I mean my guess is that in 5 to 10 years—probably 10—sort of network mapping for police will be where sort
of hotspot mapping is now. I think that intuitively people understand more now—because of things like Facebook and
Amazon and the Internet—how connections matter. I think we’ve always known, you know, it’s not what you know but
who you know, the good old boys club, like all of those sort of images and sort of analogies now have a basis in
scientific analysis. So I think that it’s only gonna go up. I think there’s a critical mass of people beginning to
sort of galvanize around it. I think the difference is it’s not quite as intuitively simple as geographic map.
So you have to actually get people past a certain learning curve. I think that there are all kinds of tools for both
enforcement that can be developed technology-wise, as well as for other public health and violence prevention initiatives.
Again, so this has been done on smaller scales with HIV and needle-exchange programs, sex work, and hopefully the
same models can be applied, but it can’t be cut and paste. It has to be specific to the epidemic you’re examining,
right? So crime is like, but not the same as, a needle exchange, right? So understanding the context is
essential. And that’s sort of the caution to moving forward.

SCHWEIG:
And you mentioned also moving some of these initiatives during your talk toward Milwaukee and San Francisco, some
of that analysis. Do you want to talk a little bit about that, just sort of as a last point?

PAPACHRISTOS:
Yeah, so I think that what I’m seeing these last couple years is more and more jurisdictions that are eager to try
something that’s much more directed, especially given the limited resources. But not just directed, but is directed
and can have a huge sort of effect for a small sort of intervention. I just received the NSF award to expand the
work in Chicago and Boston, to Cincinnati and potentially San Francisco, but even already cities like Atlanta, Milwaukee,
Minneapolis, Brooklyn Park, there are a bunch of cities that are already eager to do it and the capacity is just
not there. The big barrier is that it’s not a point and click approach just yet, right? So with crime mapping, you
put in a bunch of addresses you get your picture. There’s a—there’s quite a bit more backend to this type of technology
and we’re not at that stage yet, where people with basic computer skills can do it. So it requires an analyst. And
so as we train more analysts, it will become more pervasive, I think.

SCHWEIG:
Great. Thank you so much for speaking with me today.

PAPACHRISTOS:
My pleasure.

SCHWEIG: I’m Sarah Schweig and I’ve been speaking
with Andrew Papachristos. To learn more about the Center for Court Innovation, please visit www.courtinnovation.org.
Thank you for listening.

January 2012

A Community Court Takes Washington D.C.: Expanding the Model in the Nation’s Capital Feb 17, 2012

Dan Cipullo, director of the Criminal Division of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, discusses
why and how the court expanded its community court approach from one neighborhood to cover the entire city.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation and I am
in Washington, D.C., at Community Justice 2012, which is the International Conference of Community Courts. And I’m
speaking with Dan Cipullo, who is the director of the Criminal Division of the Superior Court in Washington, D.C.
And I wanted to talk to you, Dan, a little bit about the East of the River Community Court and plans for expanding
it.

DAN CIPULLO: Sure

WOLF:
Maybe you can start by describing the East of the River Community Court, when it started and just a little bit about
it.

CIPULLO: East of the River Community Court started in the early
2000s. We were actually experiencing problems in D.C. We had a zero tolerance in D.C. so we were inundated with a
large number of misdemeanor arrests. We went up about 30 percent in misdemeanor arrests, which led to a lot of delays
in processing cases and a lot of police overtime. So police overtime was the initial impetus of looking at community
courts.

We worked with the Justice Management Institute, with Dick Hoffman there and Barry Mahoney.
And Barry had heard about the community court concept from New York and we got a group together. We went out to see
Midtown [Community Court], we went up to see the community court in Minneapolis and in Portland. And we brought those
ideas back to our city. We said, ‘How do we implement it here?’

The first community court concept
was more of city-wide on the really low-level quality-of-life crimes. Judge [Richard H.] Ringell in our D.C. misdemeanor
court. And then we went and looked at the East of the River community, which is a primarily underserved area, with
high poverty rates, high crime rates, and just generally underserved in social services. And we decided to make that
our project, to start out there. And Judge Noël Kramer, a wonderful, wonderful judge, and I went out there, and we
started it first in the sixth police district, which comprised the northern half of the Anacostia neighborhood, and
the seventh police district was the second side of Anacostia.

And we expanded. We really started
with no services, with no real idea other than to go out there and make it better. And we did a good job. We did
really link with our city agencies, the pre-trial services agency, some city agencies to bring some social services.
And Judge Kramer was just an unending champion of the community court movement out there.

So
we had that running since 2003. In 2010 we actually were able to find some money and do our first evaluation of the
program, and we looked to see whether it was reducing recidivism in the community.

WOLF:
So what did you find?

CIPULLO: Well we worked with the group, Weststat,
they came in and did an independent survey for us, and they found a statistically significant reduction in recidivism
in people who went through the East of the River Community Court as opposed to people who had gone through the traditional
system.

WOLF: I understand right now there are plans for expanding
it or you’re in the process of expanding it.

CIPULLO: We all knew
there was a little bit of unfairness in the city because the only people who really got the diversion opportunities
were people coming out of the East of the River Community Court. The prosecutor was not offering the same treatment
and diversion opportunities to everybody else across the court. And Judge Russell Canan and Judge Robert Morin, our
presiding and deputy presiding judges, had been very, very concerned about that and really wanted to expand that
and make it more fair to every defendant coming into the court. And we decided that at the beginning of 2012 we were
going to expand it citywide.

WOLF: So what would that model actually
look like?

CIPULLO: Well, we created six misdemeanor courts where
the judges will be taking the cases for their own individual police district. So we start in the summer with community
engagement, trying to get the judges out into the community to work with those civic associations, with those neighborhood
commissioners and start talking about the program. We work with the prosecutors and defense attorneys to kind of
align it.

We’ve taken – the court took over, actually, the community service program, too, which
was a big change for us because prior to that, part of it had been run by the pre-trial service agency for the East
of the River people, and then a small amount done by the US Attorney’s Office directly, and now the court’s taking
that over. So it’s been a big change for us in how we handle that community service.

But right
now we’re in the process of trying to line up some of the social services we need, but we do run a really good drug
court, we do run a really good mental health court, so anybody coming into the community courts who need those services
will be referred to those courts. So we’ll be looking at the lower level of drug users and hopefully lower-level
mental health people. So really try to find services that fit them and their needs.

WOLF:
Was it a tough sell, this decision to take the community court that had previously just been focused in the Anacostia
neighborhood to the entire city?

CIPULLO: Our chief judge was so
supportive, Chief Judge [Lee F.] Satterfield has been very, very, very supportive of the idea and the problem-solving
courts.

It’s been a little challenge with our judges because in the past our community court
judge did not do any trials. It was really just a problem-solving court, and that’s our model for our drug court
and our mental health court. So the judges have been very concerned about, ‘How can I be a problem-solver and still
do trials?’ So that’s been one of our biggest sells and we’re really working with our judges on that.

We’re
all really looking, the community’s been very receptive, we’ve been out to all the community meetings. We’ve had
judges out for a couple months now getting to most of the community meetings we can find. And the community is really,
really embracing it. The prosecutors are great partners in that, the pre-trial agency—[all] have been great partners.
So the whole criminal justice system is really embracing it. We’re actually cooperating with the city, and they’re
going to give us, hopefully, personnel to help us in our community service program too. So it’s been a great cooperative
effort so far.

WOLF: And I suppose it’s correct to say that the
experience you had at the East of the River Community Court acclimated all of these agencies, the U.S. Attorney’s
Office who serves as the prosecutor in D.C., the defense bar, even the court system itself to some extent had exposure
with it, so you could point to that positive example when you’re expanding it.

CIPULLO:
Yeah, it’s just been really great, the whole thing. When we first started community court the public defender service
was not a big fan of the community court. They really believed in, you know, the adversarial process and it took
a long time to convince some of them that actually we can do really good justice and not lose the adversarial process.

One of the great things about our court is too, that we have been doing most of our community
court diversions pretrial, so that if you fail in it, you still have the right to trial, which is something that
our public defender has appreciated, our CJA bar has really appreciated too. So some of the challenges we’ve had,
but overall it’s been a great partnership with all the agencies.

WOLF:
Give me a sense of what the expansion means in terms of how many places does the East of the River Community Court
handle annually and going forward –

CIPULLO: Yeah, the East of the
River Community Court was handling two police districts, so around 3,000 cases a year, give or take. Some people
opted out of that community court. They wanted to go to trial instead and that’s still always the option. But as
we expand it citywide, we’ll be affecting over 13,000 cases. The prosecutors estimated that about 70 percent of the
defendants coming in will be eligible for some kind of diversion – either mental health or drug court or community
court.

WOLF: Tell me are there any extra costs or are you hoping
to save money through the change?

CIPULLO: I don’t think we’ll save
any money, but right now we’re not creating any additional costs because there’s just the money there. The big challenge
is, how do we line up, how do we do the assessment for people with social service needs, how do we provide those
social service needs? So that’s one of the big areas we’re really looking at.

We’re going to
send our serious drug abusers to our drug court, people with serious mental illness to our mental health court, but
of course you have other offenders whose problems aren’t quite so severe who still need that treatment, who still
need that help. And we’re really looking at that right now, how do we deal with that? Unemployment’s a big issue
in D.C. too, so we’re really working with our department of employment services to bring employment services into
the courthouse.

We’re really blessed, we actually have a mental health clinic in our courthouse
so anybody who’s showing signs of mental illness, we can send right down. We have a doctor there who can start medication,
can start treatment immediately. So we’re really blessed in some regards, but we really need to expand our resources
to be able to meet the needs of the population we’re serving.

WOLF:
And one final question. Did your experience planning the East of the River Community Court originally in any way
inform or help you as you’re doing the expansion? The lessons you’ve learned, has it made it easier?

CIPULLO:
Yes, so much easier because when we really started East of the River we started with no resources, no real plan,
but we had seen the other programs we thought it was great, and the time was right, we had a very supportive chief
judge, and we had an opportunity to move forward. We just did, kind of built it by the seats of our pants.

So
actually seeing what we did over the years, having worked with our partners over the years, how we saw the rate of
recidivism changing, we thought it was a great opportunity to move forward and that experience has really helped
guide us in trying to expand citywide.

WOLF: Great, well listen,
I really appreciate you taking the time, Dan.

CIPULLO: Sure.

WOLF:
I’ve been talking to Dan Cipullo, who is the director of the Criminal Division of the Superior Court in Washington,
D.C., and we’ve been talking about the community courts here in Washington, D.C., starting with the East of the River
Community Court, and the plans going forward now to expand the model to the entire city. So, good luck to you and
thank you.

CIPULLO: Thank you.

WOLF:
I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Thanks for listening.

February
2012

‘Victims, Not Perpetrators’: Ohio’s Changing Actions To Change Habits Court Feb 05, 2012

Judge Paul M. Herbert of the Changing Actions To Change Habits Court in Ohio’s Franklin
County Municipal Court explains how a problem-solving approach to prostitution treats offenders as victims, giving
them the support and links to social services they need to escape a cycle of exploitation and abuse.

Changing Perceptions: A Conversation on Prostitution Diversion with Judge Fernando Camacho Dec 21, 2011

Queens County (NY) Judge Fernando Camacho discusses why he created a prostitution diversion
court that helps victims leave a life of prostitution by linking them to counseling and social
services instead of sentencing them to jail time.

SARAH SCHWEIG:
Hi, I’m Sarah Schweig of the Center for Court Innovation, and today I’m speaking with Judge Fernando Camacho. Judge
Camacho is currently a Queens County Administrative Judge for Criminal Matters. He has served as Deputy Supervising
Judge at the Queens County Criminal Court, where he presided over the Domestic Violence Court, and began a specialized
court dealing with teenagers charged with prostitution-related offenses. Today he discusses the beginnings of this
program and the roles courts can take for defendants with histories of trauma. So I wanted to talk a little bit about
what initially gave rise to the prostitution diversion program in the Queen’s County Supreme Court.

JUDGE
CAMACHO: Well, I was sitting in arraignment back in 2002, 2003, and a young woman named Siobhan who
was a runaway from Suffolk County, was in the well about 11:00 at night, and she had been arrested, and she was—I
think she was 16, and she had been arrested three or four times for prostitution. And, and I looked at her and the
offer, I think was plea the charge and 15 days, and I said I don’t want to do this. There’s got to be an explanation
as to why she’s out in the street at the age of 16.

I was working in arraignments just for that
week and I adjourned her case to my regular part for the following week, just to get to the bottom of it. And the
next time the case was on I started asking the attorneys questions, and there were answers that I wasn’t happy with,
specifically that I just didn’t think that she was out there of her own free will and she was making a knowing and
voluntary decision that we should be prosecuting her as an adult for. So from that point on, rather than giving her
a jail sentence I started looking for services for her.

After a couple years, believe it or not,
she kept coming back, she ultimately succeeded. When she came back and actually got into college, she came back and
told me. When she came back to get her driver’s license she came back and told me. And ultimately she turned out
to be a tremendous success story.

But in the meantime, every time I would come across a young
person charged with prostitution, I would ask the same types of questions and I was getting the same answers. ‘How’d
you get into the life?’ ‘Well, I got into the life because I was a runaway or I was a throwaway or I ran away from
home because I was getting physically or sexually abused at home and I ran away, and I was recruited by a pimp.’
And I got the same stories over and over and over again to the point that it became clear, even to me, that it wasn’t
a coincidence: There was something going on out there in our own backyard where young kids who were runaways and
throwaways were winding up in vulnerable situations where they were being preyed upon and recruited by very bad people.
It also became clear to me that once they were in the street that it was not so easy if not downright impossible
for them to leave, and that the way we were dealing with – had been dealing with them traditionally in the criminal
justice system just wasn’t the right way. It wasn’t. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t just, and that’s how it started.

SCHWEIG: You previously worked as a prosecutor. How did your experiences there
help inform this initiative?

CAMACHO: I saw how we dealt with young
people charged with prostitution and back then it didn’t make any sense to me. Jail is not the right place for these
young people. A young person is presumed to be not competent to consent under certain statutory sex offenses, yet
the same young person who is not even capable of consenting is now going to be prosecuted as an adult for engaging
in prostitution and prostitution-related offenses. And that never made any sense. That’s just silly. All of us who
were sitting in that area way back in 1986 understood that these young kids who were being charged with prostitution
were going to jail for 15, 20, 25 days, we were just not doing it the right way. We were just not doing the right
thing for these kids. And then once I got in a position where I had some discretion and I could do it differently,
I ultimately got enough resolve together to say, ‘Look, this is wrong. Let’s do it the right way.’

SCHWEIG:
What do you think are some of the issues surrounding prostitution that the courts and especially judges need to be
aware of as they deal with these cases?

CAMACHO: You know, I’m gonna
give everybody the benefit of the doubt, including myself way back when. I just don’t think any of us realized the
amount of pressure, coercion that was going on: the threats, the violence. I don’t think any of us realized that
if they didn’t go out there and come back with a certain amount of money, they were gonna be beaten. And none of
us, I think, realized that. And I think it’s just such a distasteful thing for all of us to just look at these kids,
these children standing there in these ridiculous looking outfits—and we just didn’t want to face the truth. And
I, I also think in terms of the elected officials who count on the votes of these communities, the community is very
outspoken when they find, you know, used condoms on their street, when they have their kids and understandably so:
They don’t want their neighborhood to be the track. You know, nobody could argue with that. But they put a lot of
pressure to bear upon the politicians. But what I don’t think the response of the people in public service wasn’t
the correct response. The response should have been, ‘I agree with you. The neighborhood should not be where this
stuff is happening, but the way we’ve been dealing with this problem traditionally is just not accomplishing anything
because they’re still there. We can round them all up and put them on a bus and bring them to central booking and
they’ll be out tomorrow and they’ll be back on your street the day after.’ So this is not the right way. The right
way is to, through education, to actually reach out to these kids and to show them that there is a way out of the
life and if this is not what they want to be doing, we will give them the resources, we will give them the ability
to leave the life and to do something different like Siobhan did.

SCHWEIG:
What were some of the challenges you encountered developing this model?

CAMACHO:
What I had to initially deal with was changing that perception. And I’m talking about changing the perception, first
of all with myself, and secondly with the people I work with: my colleagues, with the D.A.’s office, with even the
defense bar, with the police department. I mean everybody had to change the way they looked at these kids. And these
aren’t bad girls who like to do this. Many of them are poor, unfortunate, lost souls who have no choice but to do
this. And then after that, you know, operationally the obstacles were just—I can’t even name them. I mean just in
terms of getting all these kids going to the same part, the pimps hanging around the corner waiting for the cases
to be called, using my quorum as a place to recruit, getting these kids—the security issues—getting these kids out
safely without the, without you know, the pimp waiting outside to throw them in a car and take them back to the track.

There’s an inherent conflict, there always has been between the advocates and the social workers, the people
who advocate for these kids, and law enforcement, and the police department, and the D.A.’s office because the advocates
want the kids to be safe, they want them to get out of the life, but they don’t want them to cooperate with law enforcement
against the pimps because they fear for the kids’ safety and rightly so. On the law enforcement side, on the D.A.
side, on the police side, they want these kids to cooperate and be witnesses. They may not be as concerned about
their safety as the advocates are. So there’s always been that inherent conflict—bridging those differences and those
conflicts was a difficult thing to do because if we didn’t get them all at the same table talking about solutions
to these problems, it wasn’t gonna work.

Once that happened—and I think it has happened to a great
degree—you’re getting these advocates agreeing to have these victims cooperate with the DA’s office in prosecution
against very, very bad traffickers. At the same time, you have these prosecutors who are willing to take a young
kid and put them up on the witness stand and asking the jury to believe them. Traditionally they were reluctant to
put these kids on the stand. Their attitude was, ‘who’s gonna believe this prostitute?’ And, and, and now they’re
understanding that they have to go beyond that and say to the jury, ‘Look, this is not a – this is a kid who had
no choice but to get into this and they had no way out.’ So I think that the prosecutors are now understanding that
they can, in fact, persuade a jury that these kids are credible. Um, in terms of resources initially there were very,
very few resources available. I mean now, thankfully we have many, many organizations who are now working with this
population.

SCHWEIG: So maybe you could talk a little bit about what
some of the lessons learned from the implementation of this program are and what advice you would give other jurisdictions
interested in creating a prostitution diversion program in their courts.

CAMACHO:
I think in terms of just bringing everybody together, getting law enforcement to appreciate that these are—many of
them are—just poor lost kids, they’re not the criminals. And having them have to face these kids and talk to them
and get the story themselves. Because anybody who sits down with these kids and hears their story and hears the same
story over and over again, unless they’re—unless they’re not human, they can’t help but be moved and they can’t help
but to understand that we need to do something about this. Getting the advocates to understand that maybe you can
trust the police. Maybe you can trust law enforcement. Maybe you can, maybe you can counsel your client, the victim,
to really cooperate with the police because maybe that’s the only way that they’re gonna be able to rid themselves
of this person who is just, you know, this shadow that just hangs over them that’s never gonna let them go. So just,
I think just educating everybody, making everybody understand that the goal really is the same, and the goal is to,
is to prosecute the traffickers. The goal is to give these young kids an opportunity to get out of the life.

SCHWEIG: Right. And that in turn would affect the general public safety of
communities, I would imagine.

CAMACHO: Absolutely because we are
having, we have more prosecutions now of traffickers than we’ve ever had ever before, and that’s because of the change
in legislation and that’s because of the change in perception. Also among law enforcement that they’re now more willing
to investigate and prosecute traffickers. And among the victims, who are now more willing to cooperate and testify
because there’s less mistrust. So it’s all a process and the more success stories that you have, the more kids who
are getting out of the life, who are going to college, who are getting their own apartments, who are getting their
job, who are having, you know, having a family, who are now coming back and mentoring these other kids and saying,
‘Look at me. I made it. Look at me now.’

So there is—in this particular area, it is so complicated.
Anybody who tells me on the first effort you’re gonna get these kids to leave the life, they—maybe one out of 1,000
will do that. It’s gonna—they’re gonna fail. They’re gonna fail once, they’re gonna fail twice, they’re gonna fail
three times, and they’re gonna go back. And unless the judge is educated enough to understand that there was a re-arrest
for prostitution: ‘well yeah, I expected that.’ And they’re gonna yell—I’ve been called every name in the book by
some of these kids. You have to say ‘Okay, relax, take it easy.’ And if you’re lucky, the 10^th
time they’ll get it. They have lived 10 lifetimes in their 16 or 17 years of life. And these are kids that you need
patience with, you need understanding, you need experience, you need special resources, you need special people,
you need to train people to appreciate their issues and their problems. Otherwise you’re not gonna reach them.

SCHWEIG: I’m Sarah Schweig of the Center for Court Innovation and I’ve been
speaking with Judge Fernando Camacho about the challenges the issue of prostitution presents to individuals and communities,
and a new approach courts can take with defendants who have histories of trauma. To find out more about the Center
for Court Innovation, visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thank you for listening.

January
2012

Celebrating 15 Years of Reform: NYC Mayor Bloomberg and Others Reflect on the Center’s Achievements Oct 05, 2011

The Center for Court Innovation celebrated its 15th anniversary on Oct. 4, 2011 at the Chelsea Art Museum with
the help of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, Center Director Greg Berman, and
Mayoral Advisor John Feinblatt, who was the evening’s honoree.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communication at the Center for Court Innovation and tonight
we’re celebrating our 15th anniversary. What follows are some excerpts from tonight’s speakers, starting with
New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, followed by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, then our director,
Greg Berman, and finally our evening’s honoree, John Feinblatt, who is our founding director and now serves
as Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s senior advisor.

(APPLAUSE)

JUDGE
JONATHAN LIPPMAN: It seems like only a short time ago that I met with John Feinblatt to discuss what
at the time was an out-of-the-box idea: that the New York State Court System should make a deep investment in research
and development and should do that by creating a new entity devoted exclusively to justice reform.

Fifteen
years later it is fair to say that this investment has paid off, and how. Nearly two dozen demonstration projects
in all five boroughs. Groundbreaking research into the effectiveness of alternatives to incarceration, the value
of procedural of justice, and the importance of trial and error in criminal justice reform.

Since
the Center started, it has employed hundreds of New Yorkers, many of whom are here tonight. These include social
workers who helped troubled young people and struggling adults get back on track; advocates who work behind the scenes
to make sure that victims get the support they need to feel safe; researchers who are responsible for helping set
new benchmarks for the justice system, and so many more.

Over the past generation, we have shown
that contrary to conventional wisdom, it is possible to reduce both crime and incarceration. There are many reasons
why New York has been able to achieve these remarkable results. Certainly, the Center for Court Innovation, with
its support for thoughtful innovation and well-crafted and well-evaluated alternatives to incarceration has been
part of this story.

(APPLAUSE)

MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG:
You know, by giving the judges more options, more carrots, and more sticks, the Center gives defendants a better
chance of turning their lives around and staying out of trouble. We all know about the turnstile justice that we
have; reducing recidivism is one of the toughest things to do in criminal justice, but it is probably one of the
most important and has the greatest impact on crime rate. Everybody wins when it happens. Our streets are safer,
taxpayers spend less money on jail, and people put their talents to more productive uses.

And
I think it’s fair to say that no one has been as effective and finding new ways to reduce recidivism than the
Center for Court Innovation and no person has been more effective in finding innovative criminal justice strategies,
both inside and outside of government, than John Feinblatt.

As many of you in this room know,
John was the founding director of the Center for Court Innovation, and throughout his career, John has been a force
for challenging conventional wisdom and disrupting the status quo. That is the defining spirit of the Center for
Court Innovation.

The Center has been our partner, seriously, on a number of reform initiatives
from improving the return of parolees to Harlem, to reducing juvenile detention in Staten Island and in Queens, to
promoting alternative incarceration in the Bronx. Taken together, these programs really have touched the lives of
hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers and helped us drive crime down to record lows.

(APPLAUSE)

GREG BERMAN: It is my duty and my pleasure to introduce tonight’s
honoree, the great John Feinblatt. I have to say the number one lesson I ever learned from John is that rhetoric
is ultimately meaningless, and that at the end of the day, action trumps talk every day of the week. And we’re
here today to celebrate John’s commitment to really getting things done on the ground. And it’s his commitment
to making things happen in the real world that has given us the Midtown Community Court, that has given us the Center
for Court Innovation, that has given us a reformed juvenile justice system in New York City, that has given us success
in the national fight against illegal guns.

(APPLAUSE)

JOHN
FEINBLATT: You know Mike Bloomberg is an extraordinary person to work for. He asks hard questions,
and he expects answers. But it’s not just the hard questions; it’s that he often asks different kinds of
questions. He doesn’t just ask “How we can do it better?” but asks “Why do we do it this way in the first place?”
I think that’s the same spirit that has animated the Center for Court Innovation. It’s its willingness
to challenge orthodoxy.

I have been lucky to count others as my friends and my mentors, and two
of them are the two remarkable chief judges who are here tonight. From the beginning, both of them embraced me and
were willing to answer questions that I think very few chief judges were willing to ask, like “What is the role of
a judge in a front line state court that’s dealing with people who are addicted and people who are poor and
people who are mentally ill?” They were willing to ask questions like, “How do we actually measure success in cases
that might not be so complicated, legally, but were certainly complicated socially?”

WOLF:
You’ve just heard some remarks from John Feinblatt, our founding director, who was honored tonight at the Center
for Court Innovation’s 15th anniversary fundraiser. He was preceded by our director, Greg Burman. Before that
you heard New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the first remarks you heard were from New York State Chief Judge
Jonathan Lippman.

I’m Rob Wolf, director of communication at the Center for Court Innovation.
To learn more about the Center, visit us at www.courtinovation.org. Thanks for listening.

Involved Communities Support Vermont’s Restorative Justice Panels Sep 29, 2011

Yvonne Byrd, director of the Montpelier Community Justice Center, Karen Vastine, the community justice
coordinator in Burlington,
and Marc Wennberg, director of the St. Alban’s Community Justice Center, explain how volunteers help craft restorative
responses to crime and conflict in Vermont.

ROBERT V. WOLF:
Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and today I’m lucky to have
three guests from Vermont, all of whom are involved with community driven justice centers.

With
me is Yvonne Byrd, director of the Montpelier Community Justice Center, and Karen Vastine, who is the community justice
coordinator in Burlington, and Mark Wennberg, who is the director of the St. Albans Community Justice Center.

Nice
to have you all here.

ALL: Thank you, nice to be here.

WOLF:
So your work in creating and running some of Vermont’s 15 community justice centers has made you guys experts
in involving the community in the delivery of justice. What is a community justice center. Yvonne, I thought you
might want to answer that.

YVONNE BYRD: The community justice center
is charged with delivering restorative responses to conflict and crime, and a restorative response would be basically
having the people involved, with the support of community, come up with the best, the most positive resolution to
a negative situation.

WOLF: Why involve the community in the first
place, Karen?

KAREN VASTINE: Well, I wonder too if it’s just
important to add that victims are a very important component of our community and that they are also involved in
restorative justice. As a matter of fact, it’s an opportunity for the offender to make direct amends to the
victim, if the victim so chooses to be engaged in that way.

And I believe that, in terms of involving
community members in restorative justice and helping to hold low level offenders accountable, or any kind of offenders
accountable, that what it’s about is empowering your community. And I think that it brings the community also
closer to the offender.

So one thing that we know is that if somebody is in isolation, that if
they don’t feel connected to their community, that they are less likely to change their behavior. So having
the community members involved actually shows the participant or the offender that there’s a reason for caring
and wanting to change their behavior. And I think, also, that it helps to link them in a more positive, more meaningful
way to their community if they don’t already have that linkage.

WOLF:
Also, maybe we can be a little more specific about how the community is, in fact, involved in the reparative justice
panels. So maybe Mark can just give a brief description of how, how they work and explain how the community is involved?

MARC WENNBERG: So restorative justice panels or restorative boards
receive referrals from multiple sources. It could be their pre-charge from the police or the state’s attorney,
or post-adjudication directly from the judge or the probation or parole department.

The reparative
panel/ restorative justice board is volunteer-driven, volunteer-led, although there are staff present at the meetings,
in most cases, where, working with the offender and if the victim wants to participate, the victim as well, we identify
what happened, who was affected by what happened, how were they affected, what do they need for the harm to be repaired,
and who’s responsibility is it to repair this harm, as well as what is this person going to do so that something
like this doesn’t happen again? So how are they taking concrete changes in their own life?

They
collectively, and in a consensus fashion, develop a reparative contract, which is a set up specific activities that
the offender is going to go through, is going to complete, in order to fulfill their contract agreement.

And
they typically, typically have about 90 days to complete that, at which time they come back, they meet again with
the group, and talk about what they’ve learned from the process, demonstrate the specific achievables that they
were asked to do, and then they’re at least finished with our aspect of the restorative process.

WOLF:
And what’s a typical sentence? I suppose it depends on the offense.

WENNBERG:
It’s not so much a sentence as an agreement. Often it involves, perhaps, a letter of apology, perhaps a project
that helps them to get a better understanding of how they affected either the victim or the community.

Sometimes
the victim will specifically ask for something that they need from the process. Sometimes it’s community service.
It could be a creative project as well that taps into the offender’s creative abilities.

WOLF:
And are these all low-level offenses or do they cover the gamut?

BYRD:
I guess it depends on how you define the offense. Post-adjudicated, we have people with DUI 2, sometimes DUI 3, which
I think is a pretty serious offense.

WOLF: So when you say post-adjudicated,
they’ve already been found guilty in court and then as part of their …

BYRD:
… sentence from the judge, the judge orders that they participate in the reparative process.

And
in my mind there’s a big difference between a sentence which is punitive and going back to your community and
talking with, sometimes the victim, other affected parties from your community, about what you did.

When
you go through the court process, immediately you become the defendant and that’s what you vigorously do, is
defend yourself.

Either I didn’t do it unless you can prove it, and if you can prove that
I did it, well it’s because of, you know, this, that, or the other, you know? I was drunk or, you know, I needed
it, or – so the actual effect of what you did and what was wrong with it, and the people that you hurt never even
comes into the conversation.

So if you end there, with that sentence, the person has stayed disconnected
from what was wrong with what they did and often come out of the criminal justice system considering themselves a
victim of that system and mostly concerned by how they’ve been impacted by the punishment, by the court process,
whatever. So it’s a very different look at the offense when they come to the reparative board.

WOLF:
What is the commitment you’re asking from the community members who participate in this? How often do they show
up for a panel? How much time does it take? And how long do they usually stick around in terms of their longevity
and participation on a panel?

VASTINE: So this is Karen. We actually
are the busiest justice center and because of our caseload, we typically have six to eight panels of three to five
community members meeting every week. And generally, at a minimum, that’s a 2 1/2 hour commitment every week.

WOLF: Wow, so that’s in Burlington, which is the largest city
in Vermont.

VASTINE: Right, that’s in Burlington and I think
Mark and Yvonne have a much different expectation of your volunteers.

BYRD:
Our volunteers for repair board are asked to come to a two hour meeting twice a month. We schedule new cases for
an hour and review cases for half an hour. So we could have two new cases or a new case and two reviews.

And
sometimes if we’re backlogged we’ll ask people to do a little more in a meeting, but that’s what’s
typical. And in terms of longevity, we have one person who’s been a volunteer on a reparative board since 1997,
’98, and most people stay a long time.

WOLF: I’m speaking
with Yvonne Byrd, and Karen Vastine, and Mark Wennberg, who are all involved in community justice initiatives in
Vermont.

Let me ask you. It sounds like a big commitment and I wonder, where does the enthusiasm
and the interest come from, that people are willing to make this commitment to what sounds like a potentially difficult
and challenging—and in the case of the Burlington boards, somewhat time-consuming—commitment? Does anyone want to
take on that question?

VASTINE: I’d be happy to.

WOLF:
Karen.

VASTINE: Since we also ask more of our volunteers.

So
I think that what’s interesting about Vermont—I don’t think it’s just unique to Vermont—but because
of the scale of Vermont, you know, there’s about 625,000 people in our state, and so the scale of Vermont really
lends itself nicely to participatory democracy, and I believe that that is very alive and well in Vermont.

We
still have town meeting day, which is where a lot of decisions are made in local municipalities, and in Burlington,
for instance, was have something called neighborhood planning assemblies, and those are specific groups that inform
our city government, since we’re a little bit too big to have town meeting day.

And so I
think because in part of this history steeped in citizen engagement, that we see a lot of interest in this opportunity
to have a direct impact on the criminal justice system and then also what’s happening within city government.

And then on top of that, many years ago we had a commissioner of corrections, John Gorczyk, who
we really credit with bringing restorative justice practices to Vermont. He really saw this as a way to keep offenders
in the community and also to keep the community safe, and as a way of really empowering our community.

WOLF:
And so is Vermont just this ideal of community involvement everywhere you go?

WENNBERG:
The birth of the justice centers might have been the brainchild of a few key figures, but it’s become much larger
than that. I think that that had helped to institutionalize what we do.

VASTINE:
And in terms of are we all singing kumbayah and holding hands in Vermont? The answer is no.

I
mean in Burlington, and I know in many other communities, we are challenged to figure out how to diversify our participation
in government. I know that in Burlington, we have spent a lot of time focusing on how to engage non-white, non-educated
individuals, you know, in government. And that’s also true for our justice centers, is that we would also like
to continue to diversify our applicant pool.

BYRD: John Gorczyk,
who Karen referred to, he was one of the longer-reigning commissioners of corrections, and he used his authority
to start reparative boards, and it was based on his belief that he has that government’s role is to provide
assistance, resources, technical assistance and such to communities, and that community’s role is to support
families, and that the family’s role is to support individuals and nurture and grow individuals.

And
that what we have had as a system is one in which government bypasses community and families and is doing the social
service, human resources is like government taking care of individuals.

WOLF:
That’s fascinating. It really speaks to the power of an individual with a vision finding the right fertile ground
to implement his vision.

I thought I would just ask you one more question. If any of you guys
have any tips for people who want to explore some of the models outside of Vermont, what advice might you give someone
who doesn’t necessarily have a visionary leader or a culture maybe of specific community involvement?

VASTINE:
This is Karen. I think that one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned from this is really asking your community
what it wants. And so whether that’s taking advantage of existing infrastructures through community groups and
churches and that sort of thing, or going out there and seeing what are your community members most concerned about?

WOLF: Does anyone have anything to add to that?

BYRD:
Not a lot of people know what the term restorative justice means. There’s a great book that Howard Zehr wrote,
“The New Book of Restorative Justice,” which we pass out to all of our volunteers and potential volunteers. And I
think when you read that you come away with the sense that “Wow, this just makes sense. This is what we ought to
do,” and it’s kind of inspiring.

So maybe disseminating that information in the community
is a helpful prelude to the conversation, and I do think having a champion at a high level is really important.

WOLF:
That’s Howard Zehr. How do you spell his name?

BYRD: Z-E-H-R.

WOLF: Great. Anyone want to add anything more?

WENNBERG:
Only that I think even in communities where there are community justice options, there are a lot of organizations
that are doing work that there is potential alignment to. And so it wouldn’t be so far afield for them to adopt
some of these practices with some institutional support, to begin doing this kind of work.

WOLF:
I thank all three of you for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.

I’ve
been speaking with Yvonne Byrd, director of the Montpelier Community Justice Center, Karen Vastine, the community
justice coordinator in Burlington, and Mark Wennberg, director of the St. Albans Community Justice Center.

I’m
Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. For more information about the Center for
Court Innovation you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thank you for listening.

September
2011

The Evolution of a Prosecutor: Early Intervention Improves Safety and Saves Money Sep 02, 2011

T.J. Donovan, the state’s attorney for Chittenden County, explains a new initiative in Burlington, Vermont,
that mandates community restitution and participation in social services as alternatives to court or incarceration.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf, director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation and I’m
here with T.J. Donovan, the state’s attorney of Chittenden County, Vermont, which includes Burlington. That’s
the state’s largest city, is that right?

T.J. DONOVAN: That’s
correct.

WOLF: Well, thanks for talking to me.

DONOVAN:
Happy to be here.

WOLF: You’re here at the Center for Court
Innovation today with about 20 people who are participating in a roundtable to share ideas about community engagement.
You guys have spent the morning talking about the different the programs you’ve started or are involved in that
actively involve community members. I thought we’d start out by talking to you about the experiences that have
helped shape your outlook as a prosecutor.

DONOVAN: Sure. You know,
I grew up in Burlington, Vermont, certainly made a number of bad judgments and mistakes as a young person. I was
given the opportunity for second chances numerous times—not that I was a child of privilege, but rather I came from
a two-parent home with some resources, with a family that had been embedded in the community. And I think that reflecting
back on that, I was probably the beneficiary of many second chances for some of my youthful exuberance. And when
I became a prosecutor first in Philadelphia, and then in Burlington, Vermont, it was not lost on me that we were
prosecuting people, both African-Americans and white people, who came from poverty, who came from places with a lack
of resources. They came from marginalized places in the world and I began to realize that we were continuing to marginalize
them through the criminal justice system, whether it be for drug prosecution or mental health illnesses that caused
criminal behavior, often times those individuals who don’t come from a family of resources, the first time they
get that intervention or assistance is through the criminal justice system as opposed to somebody who does come from
a family of resources—that intervention is often happening much earlier in time and they are being kept out of the
criminal justice system.

So, as we continued to work in the court system, some things weren’t
changing. The recidivism rate was extremely high, about 50 to 60 percent in Vermont. The budget for the Department
of Corrections kept increasing and we weren’t getting good results. And we kept seeing the same people, and
the demographic I saw were mostly poor people, people who had lack of education, lack of job skills or job training,
substance abuse issues—both alcohol and drugs—and mental health issues. And where we thought we could engage and
make a difference was by intervening earlier in the process to keep these individuals out of the criminal justice
system. They were committing crimes that—not that we’re condoning any criminal activity—but they were committing
crimes that were low-level misdemeanors. And so the question was, what are we gonna do that’s gonna keep the
community safe and enhance public safety? And we started to say we need to address the root cause of their criminal
behavior. So we were able to obtain funding for a community coordinator whose job was to bring those community groups
into the court system, because in the past what we’ve done is we’ve put people on probation, we load them
up with conditions of probation, and then we push them back out into the community and say you’re on your own.
Often times they come back on a violation of probation and we lock them up. So the community coordinator was to screen
cases as they came in, conduct somewhat informal risk assessments on these individuals, and then link these people
with the appropriate social service agency to address the root cause of their behavior in lieu of prosecution. So
far the results are good. It’s very early in the process but I think we’re seeing that when given an opportunity,
many time this is the first time these people have been given an opportunity. People try to make the most of it.

WOLF: When did you start this project?

DONOVAN:
We started it last September.

WOLF: Who is eligible, generally speaking?
I mean, you described sort of a broad profile.

DONOVAN: Yeah, let
me say who’s not eligible. Obviously we’re not gonna divert any cases that are sex crimes, any cases that
are domestic violence, any cases that are serious felonies, any cases where there are weapons involved, drug dealing
or drug selling. And really any cases—as I like to say the standard is—does it pass the “straight-face test”
for the guy in the street. Because I think the public has to believe in what we’re doing in order to keep the
justice system credible. So generally they are low-level misdemeanors. We have diverted some felonies, and it’s
really on a case-by-case analysis.

WOLF: And these are pre-charge,
right? Is that the idea?

DONOVAN: Yep.

WOLF:
So what is the leverage that you have?

DONOVAN: Well, the incentive
for the individual is to, number one, get some help and not to be prosecuted. The leverage is: if you don’t
do what we ask, you’ll come back for prosecution. You’ll go back on the traditional track.

WOLF:
So then there is follow-up?

DONOVAN: Yes, and that’s, that’s,
frankly, has been a challenge for us, you know? We’ve started on this really limited budget, we got some funding,
but the critical piece here is the infrastructure, the capacity to do that, because I think the most important thing
is ensuring compliance and then tracking outcomes. And so that’s the part we’re working on right now. We
have a couple of interns working on that. It’s tough work, we need more funding, frankly, to build the infrastructure
to make this program truly successful.

WOLF: One resource you have
in Burlington is the Community Justice Center. And the Justice Center is doing all of these interesting things like
restorative justice panels, which involve citizens, and working really hands-on directly with offenders. I wonder
if you can explain to me how you take advantage of what the community justice center has to offer.

DONOVAN:
Well, we view the Community Justice Center as a partner. So often some of the cases we refer from this program will
go to the Community Justice Center. We think that’s the appropriate place in lieu of prosecution. They can go
to the CJC and engage in a reparative board, restorative justice type process. So really what we’re looking
for on the front end is a menu of options because it does a couple of things. I think we’re gonna get better
outcomes that way. We’re going to enhance public safety, and then it’s gonna free up those very scarce
resources we, in the prosecutor’s office, to focus truly on the crimes that affect public safety—homicides,
sexual assaults, drug-dealing.

WOLF: During the morning session,
you used the term “cost drivers,” and I wonder if you could explain what that word means.

DONOVAN:
It’s about identifying the population where we think we can make the most impact, and kind of bend the curve
in criminal justice system that’s gonna enhance public safety, and frankly save the state money—save the taxpayers’
money. Because with a recidivism rate of 60 percent, and in Vermont a corrections budget that’s second fastest
budget item that’s growing, behind healthcare, we can do better. We need to do better because we’re spending
a lot of money. And it’s the same people going in and out. And really the demographic, I think, is the cost
drivers to all of our systems—you know, the cost drivers in the criminal justice system, the cost drivers in the
healthcare industry system because these are the people that go to the ER for their primary care physician, and it’s
the cost drivers in the job training field, because these are the people who we want to be trained and these are
the services we provide. And so it’s the same population across systems. They’re in the court system. The
trick is to identify them. The trick is to conduct an assessment to really understand, what is the root cause of
the issue here, and try to address it.

WOLF: Just to remind people
that I’m speaking to T.J. Donovan, the state’s attorney in Chittenden County, Vermont. I thought I would
just ask you about a question that a defense attorney raised at the morning session, which was really that concern
that some of these initiatives are, perhaps, imposing greater penalties on people if they choose to participate in
this alternative than they would if they just went through the normal process where they, in fact, might just get
time served and they’ll be out in 10 minutes. And the restorative justice process, the alternative might impose
what might be viewed as something more arduous. You may get community service, you may have to get a GED—

DONOVAN: Well yeah, you can go through the court system, you can plead guilty,
you’ll probably get a fine and be out the door in 10 minutes. But you’re not realizing that criminal conviction’s
gonna stay with you the rest of your life and there’s a lot of collateral consequences that go with it. Loss
of eligibility for federal student loans and other collateral consequences. So, I think doing a little bit more work
up front and thinking long term—again, it’s about enhancing public safety, creating a vibrant community for
everybody, giving everybody an opportunity to be successful. I mean I think part of the reason for recidivism is
you take away an opportunity from somebody. Well, you know, somebody who is 19 years old and had a bag of marijuana
on him and he plead guilty and got a $200 fine, how did that enhance public safety when now he’s 29 or 39 and
he’s still answering for that conviction at 19? And that conviction is still preventing him from having gone
to school, getting a job. And so the issues of collateral consequences where you can get out of that courtroom really
quick, but there’s gonna be long-lasting effects because of that criminal conviction. It may be more arduous
up front to do more community service, but we think it’s about accountability, we think it’s about restoring
the harm done to the community, but also giving the offender the opportunity to go on to be a productive, law-abiding
citizen.

WOLF: We’ve run out of time. Thank you so much for
taking the time. I’ve been talking with T.J. Donovan, the state’s attorney in Chittenden County, Vermont,
who’s here today participating in a roundtable at the Center for Court Innovation about community engagement
strategies for the criminal justice system. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court
Innovation. Visit us at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

August 2011

Military Families: How Courts and Communities Can Offer Support Sep 01, 2011

Barbara Thompson, director of the Department of Defense’s Office of Family Policy/Children
and Youth, discusses the impacts that prolonged deployment of a parent or sibling can have on children.
This is one of three podcasts produced in collaboration with the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

SARAH
SCHWEIG: Hi, I’m Sarah Schweig of the Center for Court Innovation and this is one in a series
of special podcasts the Center is doing with the support and assistance of the National Council of Juvenile and Family
Court Judges, which is hosting its 74th conference in New York in July 2011. I’m speaking with Barbara Thompson,
director of the Department of Defense’s Office of Family Policy, Children, and Youth, which gives her responsibility
over the Department of Defense Child Development and Youth Programs, serving 700,000 children at over 300 locations
worldwide. It’s interesting that we have someone from the Department of Defense at this judges conference. What
brings you to the conference today?

BARBARA THOMPSON: Well I was
invited by one of our legal aides, Colonel Sean Shumake, who felt it was really important for family judges to know
some of the issues that are facing military families and to help them be aware of the support systems that are available.
Less than one percent of our population serves in uniform and so it behooves the 99 percent of us who benefit from
their sacrifice, that we are contributing to their well being, and that takes a community to do that.

SCHWEIG:
And so what types of challenges are service members and their families facing today?

THOMPSON:
These are unprecedented times for the military. We have been in combat for almost 10 years, and the strain and the
stress on the service members and their families is really very high. Many of our service members have faced multiple
deployments for long periods of time, which makes it hard for the stay-at-home parent to deal with all of the issues
as a single parent versus the couple that they were. And children are particularly vulnerable because of their developmental
stages, being separated from an important adult in their life for such long periods of time.

SCHWEIG:
What is the impact on youth and children in these families of military service members?

THOMPSON:
I would like to say first, I feel and I think very strongly that our military families are very resilient, and they
are very proud and very rarely ask for help. And our children, in particular, are sacrificing long periods of time
with one of their parents, which is—or a big brother, even, a sibling, you know? These are important adults in their
lives and to—even though we have Skype and we have computer connectivity, it’s not the same as missing your
high school graduation, missing your birthday, missing the holidays, missing big events in your life that that special
parent is not there with you. And so we are concerned that children are having some challenging behaviors and we
worry about our teens in particular, who are at a point in their lives that they can make risky decisions and engage
in risky behaviors. And again, I would behoove the judicial system, when they have a young person in their court,
to ask if somebody in their family is serving or has been deployed. I think that, again, that’s one of those
indicators that maybe this child just needs some extra help to get through.

SCHWEIG:
So what kinds of supports are available for service members and their families to address these unique needs?

THOMPSON: Well there’s a very robust family support system, especially
for our active duty force. We have a systemic approach and an infrastructure on the installations. What became a
challenge for those of us who serve military families is how do we reach our guard and reservists, who have stepped
up to the plate to be brothers in arms, sisters in arms with the active duty force for Operation Enduring Freedom
and for Operation Iraqi Freedom. So they’re dispersed throughout the entire country and even the four territories,
and we don’t have that brick and mortar infrastructure for them. So we’ve done some pretty innovative programs—one
of them is called Military OneSource, which is a 1-800, 24/7, 365 day-a-year information and assistance call and
website where families and service members, regardless of their activation status, can call and receive support.
A master’s level counselor answers the phone. You never get a recording, and they have varied services, such
as face-to-face telephonic and web-based non-medical counseling. So if you need to talk to somebody about a challenging
issue in your life such as communicating with your teen, or anger management, or stress management, there are licensed
clinicians available to support you. They also offer financial counseling. They offer healthy coaching, and there’s
a wide variety of educational materials on the website that can support military families.

Two
of the programs particularly geared for the guard and reserve: one is the joint family support assistance program.
We were mandated by law in 2007 to set up a program to support the geographically dispersed. We’ve partnered
with the National Guard Bureau to actually set up teams of licensed clinicians, financial counselors, and a Military
OneSource consultant at each state headquarters to support the state family program director. And that way we can
reach out to those families who are located in the states.

We have another program called the
military family life counselor program—again, non-medical counselors. It’s family support, it’s prevention.
We are gonna make sure we have very qualified people to be able to read the red flags. So if it is going to escalate
to something more serious than just life coaching, that they know those red flags and can then refer them to a more
of an intervention with medical professionals. And we augment the yellow ribbon events, which are events that are,
again, mandated by congress to support returning guard and reservists at the 30/60/90 day mark to make sure, hands-on,
eyes-on that they are doing okay, they are readjusting back into society.

SCHWEIG:
Do you want to say something about how these programs maybe team up with those courts? That might be an interesting
sort of innovative collaboration.

THOMPSON: Yeah, I think it’s
really exciting. A new field for me, in particular, is interested in military families and is interested in our young
veterans who are very young, coming back from combat and reintegrating into the civilian society. And they’re
coming back with some issues. And I think the more the court system understands those issues, it can be a support
to find and connect them with the right resources to help them as they strive to reach a level of normalcy that takes
time.

SCHWEIG: We mentioned family court but how do your programs
and initiatives relate to veteran-specific courts?

THOMPSON: You
know, we work very closely with the VA and we know that they have a remarkable and wonderful infrastructure of vet
centers across the country. I think there are over 250. They are staffed with veterans, they’re staffed with
licensed clinicians, and they offer free counseling, not only to the service member, but also to their family. And
again, if the court system knows about these vet centers and knows about the vet courts, they, again, can be able
to communicate the issues that they’re facing, be more aware of some of those challenges, and then find the
right resources. I think it would be very sad that we don’t ask somebody who is in jail, “Have you served? Did
you just get back from deployment?”

SCHWEIG: If there’s one
thing you want professionals and the general public to remember about the time we’re in and military families,
what kind of role the community might need to have?

THOMPSON: We
are just unbelievably astounded by the level of support we’re receiving from the White House, from the congress
on taking care of military member and their families, and Mrs. Obama and Dr. Biden have both made it a part of their
administration that we need to build awareness of the issues facing military families. And two thirds of our active
duty live off of the installation. So they are in our communities. All of our guard and reservists live in our communities.
We need to be asking, “Do you serve? Are you a member of the military?” And know if your neighbor has a deployed
spouse, that you can be there to do some of the little things to take off some of that sacrifice and that burden.
And I think judges are particularly in a position of making the entire community, whether it’s the faith-based
community, whether it’s law enforcement, whether it’s systems in place to be able to say, we need to reach
out to the members in our community who have sacrificed so much for our freedom and our well-being, and we need to
give back to those families.

SCHWEIG: Excellent. If you want to learn
more about some of these initiatives, where do you suggest that the public or court professionals look?

THOMPSON: Well, there are two avenues to find that out. One is just Google
“military homefront,” and that’s our official quality of life portal, which lists all of our programs,
lists all of the regulations and information about military families. And for those interested parties who want to
share resources with military families, I would suggest that they learn about Military OneSource, which is militaryonesource.com.
It’s all one word. And then the 1-800 number is 1-800-342-9647.

SCHWEIG:
Excellent. Well thanks so much for speaking with me today. I’m Sarah Schweig, and I’ve been speaking with
Barbara Thompson, director of the Office of Family Policy, Children, and Youth, about the Department of Defense’s
programs for military families. This podcast was jointly sponsored by the National Council of Juvenile and Family
Court Judges and the Center for Court Innovation. To find more about the National Council, you can visit their website
at www.ncjfcj.org. The Center for Court Innovation’s website is at www.courtinnovation.org. Thank you for listening.

July 2011

Elder Abuse: Looking for Effective Responses Aug 18, 2011

Judge
John Leventhal of the New York Appellate Division and attorney Jennifer White of Futures without Violence describe the misconceptions people have about the
elderly as both victims and perpetrators of crime. This is one of three podcasts produced in collaboration with the
National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation and
this is one of several special podcasts that the Center is doing with the support and assistance of the National
Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, which is hosting its 74th conference this month in New York City, July
2011.

I’m speaking with Judge John Leventhal, who is currently an associate justice of the
New York State Appellate Division and who, before he was appointed to the Appellate Division by the governor, founded
and served for many years as the presiding judge of the Brooklyn Domestic Violence Court which was, in fact, the
first felony domestic violence court in the country.

And I’m also with Jennifer White, who’s
an attorney with Futures Without Violence, which has recently changed its name from the Family Violence Prevention
Fund. And that organization is based in San Francisco and it’s dedicated to preventing domestic, dating, and sexual
violence.

Thank you both for being with me today.

JUDGE LEVENTHAL:
Thank you for having us.

JENNIFER WHITE: Thank you.

WOLF:
And today we’re gonna focus on elder abuse so I thought—and you’re both presenting on that topic here at
the conference. Elder abuse, I’ve heard a lot about recently. It seems to be in the news more and it’s certainly
a lot more in conversations among judicial practitioners and law enforcement, but I think a lot of people may not
fully understand what the term means and so Ms. White, I thought maybe we could start out by you just defining elder
abuse. What does the term refer to, exactly?

WHITE: Sure. A lot
of times when you hear elder abuse, particularly in the media they’re referring strictly to financial exploitation.
But what we know is that more common is abuse that’s perpetrated usually by somebody with whom the elder has
some expectation of trust, so usually a family member or caregiver. It includes any of several forms of maltreatment,
including physical and sexual violence, emotional and psychological abuse, including also financial exploitation.

WOLF: And do we have a sense of how widespread this is? I mean just
because people are talking about it more, you hear about it more, is that because there’s a greater incidence
of it or a greater awareness of it?

WHITE: Well, for one thing,
because the baby boomer population in 2006 hit 75 million over 60 years old. So I think that there has been a lot
of renewed focused on elder abuse because of that population coming into their senior years. The reality is that
there’s not a lot of really strong, good prevalence data. What we do know, according to the national elder abuse
incident survey is that elder abuse is actually about 85 percent of cases go unreported. We are seeing rising numbers
of cases being reported, but we still have this huge gap of victims who are not reporting.

WOLF:
Judge Leventhal, when a case or an issue involving elder abuse does make it into the court system, does it pose unique
challenges?

LEVENTHAL: Well sure, we have a lot of stereotypes in
society regarding ageism and the elderly, that they’re imagining things, that they don’t know what they’re
talking about. People sometimes confuse lack of good hearing with lack of credibility, and ability to think and be
aware of what’s going on around them. So that’s a challenge not only to the courts, but to prosecutors,
to lawyers who represent them.

It is about power and control. People don’t want to live
alone. People don’t want to be alone. They want to be cared for by family members. So that’s one of the
reasons why it’s less reported. It’s a similar dynamic to domestic violence because there’s another
layer on top of it—people with the fear of living alone or being alone. They want someone to care for them. And the
psychological and emotional trauma of turning in a child who’s taking care of them because it’s their child
and they love them, or grandchild. It’s another dynamic on the overlay of domestic violence.

WOLF:
It sounds like these are complicated cases that sometimes touch on civil, sometimes touch on criminal issues. So
where are you most frequently seeing these types of cases? Which types of judges and in which courts are you seeing
these cases?

LEVENTHAL: There are two components. There’s the
criminal component, there’s the civil component. And the civil component usually would be financial exploitation
or someone needs a guardian to help with their property or their person, to make medical and personal decisions for
them. Then you also have the criminal component where someone is physically or sexually abused.

I
think the new standard could be, if we could combine one judge who was schooled in both of those because just coincidentally,
I did guardianships at the same time as I did domestic violence and I thought that was a great fit. And I think that
really is the future in this, in handling elder abuse.

WHITE: It’s
a really good point because I think that in addition to that, one of the things that we talk about is that these
cases, because they’re not being identified very well yet, they really show up everywhere. So someplace where
they’re showing up a lot is in juvenile delinquency because kids who are living with their grandparent would
be, let’s say in juvenile delinquency court because of various things, but you’ll see that the grandparent
is being abused.

I mean it’s really important, I think, for judges that are presenting with
all different types of cases to learn how to identify elder abuse before them because what we hope really – I mean
and I say hope, but – is that victims are gonna come to a domestic violence type-court like to get an order of protection
or something like that but that’s not really where they’re gonna be popping up. I mean they could pop up
in probate court, you know, as I said juvenile court, criminal court, family court, I mean really anywhere, even
civil or small claims court.

LEVENTHAL: Guardianship.

WHITE:
Guardianship. So it’s really anywhere so it’s important for judges to be able to identify the signs.

LEVENTHAL:
And there’s also another stereotype that we have omitted and inadvertently. People think that the elderly can’t
be sexually abused, besides physically abused, sexually abused, and it happens. I have cases where children have
sexually abused their parents. We have a scenario in our presentation today where a grandson raped his 98 year old
grandmother. And on the other hand, there are cases where an elder can be an abuser or sexual abuser.

WHITE:
It’s definitely sort of a misconception. Some of the things that we deal with at the National Judicial Institute
when we give trainings on elder abuse, which Judge Leventhal has taught at the training, is to really help courts
see that some of these assumptions that you make about elders, you know, one being that because you’re of a
certain age you lack capacity to make decisions. It’s a huge misconception, and the other huge misconception
that’s so common is the idea that because you’re of a certain age that you suddenly lose the ability to
cause harm.

So you have a lot of elder perpetrators that are in the court that maybe just start
abusing a spouse, for instance, or have been abusing a spouse for 50, 60 years and the courts won’t, potentially,
hold that person accountable in the same way they would if the person was 35 years old because they’re 65 years
old and they think, ‘oh, this person can’t do harm.’

The reality is how much strength or
ability does it take to, for instance, pick up a gun and shoot somebody? Not very much. So it is something that we
sort of work to educate the judiciary about.

WOLF: So, you’ve
presented a lot of different, described kind of the challenges, I thought, very, very well and painted a picture.
Have courts been responding effectively? Have they been picking up speed as there has been more awareness and more
of these cases coming to the courts? Have you been pleased with what you’re seeing?

WHITE:
I think that in terms of elder abuse, the entire system is really behind. Most people that practice in this field
will tell you we’re probably 20 years behind the domestic violence fields, child abuse fields.

But
yes, I think there has been more focus on it. There’s been some judicial trainings, law enforcement trainings,
and prosecutor trainings nationally, which have been sponsored by the Office on Violence Against Women to get more
of this on the radar.

There are a couple of courts in the country that have elder abuse dockets.
So I know in California, for example, there is a judge that started an elder abuse docket there. In Georgia there
is a compliance review docket for elder abuse cases. So there are a couple but in terms of it being really common
or sort of on the radar the way that domestic violence is now, definitely not.

There still needs
a lot more focus, a lot more awareness, and I think the best way to start that process is, particularly for judges
to exercise leadership in their court systems to really get these coordinated community response teams started the
way that we have for domestic violence, because that seems to be the most effective way to enhance services and to
get justice for elders.

WOLF: So let me ask you about that in a
second, but let me just remind everyone that I’m Rob Wolf at the Center for Court Innovation and I’m at the
annual conference of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, speaking with Judge John Leventhal
of New York, and attorney Jennifer White of San Francisco about elder abuse.

Ms. White, you mentioned
a coordinated community response, which is a term, I think, familiar in the domestic violence world. What is it and
how would that apply as a response to elder abuse?

WHITE: Sure.
Coordinated Community Response—they can be many, many different—there are many, many different kinds. There’s
some that specialize in, for instance, if you have teams that will meet to deal with particular cases, and then some
coordinated response teams are more system-wide.

So it’s really meant to get professionals
from the various systems that impact the case. So let’s say the prosecutor’s office, law enforcement, sometimes
judges will be involved, advocates. For elder abuse cases we hope to see aging services involved, adult protective
services, hopefully geriatric psychologists, psychiatrists are involved so that they can get together and look at
the system and see how they can coordinate, communicate better, to make service delivery smoother and more effective.

LEVENTHAL: And I think, our motto in New York, you can call it a
partnership, you can call it Coordinated Community Response. We have the usual suspects, the D.A.’s office,
parole, probation. We have elder abuse organizations, we have aging –

WHITE:
Services.

LEVENTHAL: …services—adult protective services. We also
have a defense bar and the reason why that’s important is because if the judge is going to be involved, you
have to involve the defense.

And it’s very important when the judges take a leadership role,
these kinds of things happen – parole and probation will be more involved—you’ll get more support than if you
just do it on your own.

So I thought that was very important and I’m really gratified now
that there’s being more attention being paid – not only because I have a 97-year-old mother, but because when
I started doing this thing, you would take elder abuse cases, as you know the domestic violence issues were raised
by the women’s movement and the focus really then was on intimate partner abuse. And elder abuse is kind of
secondarily or an afterthought.

Now you know, everyone has a parent, everyone’s going to
get old, and it’s important. And I always thought that it was important, I always thought there should be more
emphasis on it. And I was not only gratified that we are doing this, I’m gratified that I have an opportunity
to take part in this.

WOLF: Great, well I want to thank you both
for taking the time to talk with me today.

I’ve been talking about the challenges of dealing
with elder abuse in the courts with Judge John Leventhal and attorney Jennifer White. This podcast was jointly sponsored
by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and the Center for Court Innovation.

To
find out more about the National Council you can visit their website at www.ncjfcj.org, and to find out more about the Center for Court Innovation,
you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center
for Court Innovation. Thanks for listening.

July 2011

Tribal Courts and Families: Native American Sovereignty and the Indian Child Welfare Act Aug 17, 2011

Theresa Pouley of the Tulalip Tribal Court, Michael Petoskey of the Pokagan Band of Potawatomi Indians, and
William A. Thorne Jr., a Pomo/Coast Miwok Indian appointed to the Utah Court of Appeals, discuss the advantages
of transferring child welfare cases from state to tribal jurisdiction. This is one of three podcasts produced in
collaboration with the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and
this is one of several special podcasts the Center’s doing with the support and assistance of the National Council
of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, which is hosting its 74th conference in New York City this month, July 2011.

Today I’m speaking with Judge William A. Thorne Jr., Judge Theresa Pouley, and Judge Michael
Petoskey, all of whom are judges in tribal courts, and they’re all involved with a lot of important issues like
improving and strengthening tribal judicial systems, and the welfare of Indian children.

So you
all have long biographies so I just thought I’d give a very brief introduction for all of you. Judge Thorne
is a Pomo/Coast Miwok Indian from Northern California, and he has served in the past as a tribal judge for numerous
tribes. He’s also served 14 years as a state trial judge in Utah and in 2000 was appointed a judge on the Utah
Court of Appeals.

Judge Pouley was appointed this year by President Obama to the Indian Law and
Order Commission, and she’s currently the chief judge of the Tulalip Tribal Court in Washington, and an associate
justice of the Colville Tribal Court of appeals and a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes in Northeast Washington.

And Judge Petoskey Is the Chief Judge of the Pokagan Band of Potawatomi Indians in Michigan.

So I just want to welcome you all and thanks for taking the time out of the conference to chat
with me.

I thought we’d focus today on children and families and I thought we’d start
off with the Indian Child Welfare Act, which is a pivotal piece of federal legislation. What are the problems that
it’s intended to address?

JUDGE THORNE: It’s a piece of federal
legislation that was intended to remedy the problem of Indian children being taken out of their homes way too often
and unnecessarily. And it takes a couple different tacks to try and solve the problem of removing kids too often.

It raises the standard of proof that’s necessary. It gives an opportunity for extended family
to become the first option for surrogate care, and you remember this was back in the ’70s when most states didn’t
do that. And it provided a mechanism to transfer the decision point to tribal judges, who were more likely to understand
the families in context, and therefore more likely to help them heal and be able to take care of their children.

WOLF: Okay, so that was Judge Thorne. Thank you very much for that
explanation. So it was enacted in ’78 and its 2011 now, and I wonder If Judge Pouley or Judge Petoskey wants
to talk about, a little bit about, if they feel state and tribal systems have a grasp of what the Indian Child Welfare
Act Is and how to apply it.

JUDGE POULEY: Well the Indian Child
Welfare Act really is about making state courts engage in some particularly culturally relevant behavior when dealing
with Indian children. It isn’t a restriction or a requirement on tribal court judges.

Interestingly
enough, most of the recent studies that have been done—and this is true in Washington State—indicate that the Indian
Child Welfare Act, whose goal is to place Indian children in Indian families, to decrease the number of times and
the length of time they’re in foster care, to increase relative placements, that those policy goals are being
profoundly met in state court systems.

So that Indian children actually, in Washington State,
for example, end up in foster care four times more often and four times longer than non-Indian children. That Indian
children in Washington State, for example, are more likely to end up in detention more than children from any other
race, even though their primary issue, of course, is being abused and neglected.

So it’s actually
a little alarming that given the length of time that the Indian Child Welfare Act has been in place, that we still
have so many Indian children who are not placed within their families and within their communities.

With
that said, I think Washington State does a pretty good job of trying to transfer those cases to a local tribal court.
Tribal courts always have a preference for placement of kids in relative families. So, for example, we have probably
150 dependency cases active in our tribal court and of those, about 80 percent of those kids are living either in
their own homes or with relatives in their community.

So that sort of consistency and ability
to place kids with their family really strengthen when you get them back to their community. So I think as more judges,
state court judges become educated about how tribal court judges can help facilitate placement of kids in the home,
I think they’ll see those statistics numbers change.

WOLF:
And Judge Petoskey, are you seeing something similar in Michigan as well, in terms of the number of Indian children
who aren’t in placement, and some of these challenges of educating state judges about the Indian Child Welfare
Act?

JUDGE PETOSKEY: Well I think the nature of the beast is that
education is ongoing. It’s not a one-time kind of thing.

We, as Indian people, carry the
burden of making sure that others understand who we are, so that we can alleviate any fears, any misconceptions they
might have about what a cooperative kind of relationship looks like.

I would agree with Judge
Pouley. We have many advantages in tribal courts and as people become more aware of us being the village. You know,
you hear, ‘It takes a village’; well we are the village.

You know, we’re members
of the community, we’re members of those families, and so the stake that we have as tribal officials working
in those tribal communities is as much like a family.

WOLF: This
Is Rob Wolf. I’m talking with Judge William A. Thorne Jr., Judge Theresa Pouley, and Judge Michael Petoskey
here at the Annual Conference of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

We’re
were talking about tribal courts, and we’re talking about child welfare in particular, and maybe I thought we
could take a step back. Judge Thorne, if you could explain, where does the legal authority come from for tribal court?

JUDGE THORNE: Most kids are taught in school about the two different
governments that impact their lives: the federal government and the state government. But what the instruction often
leaves out is that there is a third leg of the stool in that family of governments, and that’s the tribal governments.

And the authority for the tribal government, the sovereignty, actually predates the U.S. Constitution.
And while the Supreme Court has said that Congress has plenary authority, Congress has the ultimate say on whether
tribal governmental existence continues or not, the policy of the Congress, the policy of the Supreme Court has been
that tribes have a legitimate government, and particularly have an important tool, an important voice in taking care
of their children.

And that’s what founded, or was the underlying cause of the Indian Child
Welfare Act. It was a recognition by Congress that tribes had a vested interest in the outcome of their children’s
cases.

And so now the federal law recognizes that parents have a role and have rights in any
state court proceeding involving tribal children, and tribes do as well. They have a separate voice that’s recognized
as being valuable and legitimate about the health and welfare of their children.

WOLF:
Give me a sense of how many tribes, in fact, have their own court systems.

JUDGE
THORNE: There are roughly 565 Indian tribes in the country. There are a little over 300 tribal courts.

WOLF: Tell me, with the existence of these 300 or so tribal courts,
what can be done to improve the understanding between these various legs of the stool, as you’ve described?

JUDGE POULEY: Education, education, education.

It
doesn’t make any difference if you do it with a grade school child, a child in kindergarten, a high school student,
or a judge who’s been sitting on the bench for 20 years. They have to understand that tribal courts have been
in existence. They are absolutely competent to adjudicate the matters in front of them. They just need to be considered
as sort of the equal of state and federal court systems, which they absolutely, positively are.

In
terms of providing long-term solutions for persons in their community, they really are the experts. So just an ongoing
recognition that they are a co-equal branch of the government, that they are someone who should be respected and
maybe more important than that, solicited for input.

Because the statistics for tribal court
and the outcomes in tribal court are the exact same outcomes that federal and state court judges aspire to. We want
healthy children. We want to reunify kids with their families. We want to stop substance abuse in families, and we
have the tools and the resources in our communities, which can help not only our clients, our clients of the tribal
court system, but clients of the state court system as well.

So equality and communication is
sort of the key.

WOLF: Thank you, Judge Pouley.

Judge
Petoskey, there’s been money from the federal government over the years at various times. Is it going to the
right places in terms of helping the courts strengthen their capacity to handle child and family cases?

JUDGE
PETOSKEY: It seems to me that, you know, under the trust responsibility, tribes have always, sadly,
just received a pittance of what they need to function and operate.

Being a tribal member and
having been a chief judge of my own tribal community for 16 years, I realized that I wasn’t going to allow money
to be a barrier, that we would put our heads together and collaborate and come around the table and do what we can
for our own children, because if we didn’t, nobody else was.

I would like to go back to
something Judge Pouley mentioned and it is in Michigan when the former chief justice and current Justice Michael
Kavanaugh first brought tribal court and state court judges together over 20 years ago, so that they could first
meet each other and develop strategies for avoiding jurisdictional conflict and strategies also for cooperation,
one of the very first things he said to us, to us tribal judges was, “We will learn more from you, probably, than
you will learn from us.”

JUDGE THORNE: Historically, tribal welfare
systems have not had access to the federal support systems available to the states. The biggest has been 4-E which
is a $5 billion pot of money. Congress just recently authorized tribes to have access to that. There is also a separate
fund that the federal government makes available to every state to improve their juvenile court systems. They’re
called Court Improvement Funds and tribes don’t have access to those.

And so tribal courts
have historically been underfunded. In the last 20 years the training money for tribal courts has basically dried
up. As Judge Petoskey said, they’re doing a good job of doing a lot with very little. But just a little bit
more resources would help them start innovative practices, find new approaches, find new ways of helping, because
they’re already masters of stretching the dollar.

WOLF: I hope
people who see this podcast can exert some Influence and help expand the resources for the incredible work that you
guys are doing.

Thanks so much for talking with me today. I’ve been talking about tribal
justice and the Indian Child Welfare Act with Judges William A. Thorne Jr., Theresa Pouley, and Michael Petoskey.

This podcast was jointly sponsored by the National Council of Juvenile Family Court Judges and
the Center for Court Innovation. To find out more about the National Council, you can visit their website at www.ncjfcj.org
or you can learn about the Center for Court Innovation at the Center’s website at www.courtinnovation.org.

I’m
Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Thank you for listening.

July
2011

A Community Process: Strategies to Improve the Response to Domestic Violence Aug 12, 2011

Jim Henderson, a trainer and lecturer on domestic violence, discusses probation group conferencing, motivational
interview techniques, and the importance of community collaboration.

SARAH
SCHWEIG: Hi. I’m Sarah Schweig at the Center for Court Innovation and today I’m speaking with Jim
Henderson. Jim provides technical assistance as a trainer and lecturer to courts, probation offices, and other criminal
justice agencies to help them improve their responses to domestic violence as part of the Federal Office on Violence
Against Women Battered Women’s Justice Project. Jim also acts as a consultancy team member for the Family Justice
Center Alliance, the Battered Women’s Justice Program, and the Center for Court Innovation. Thanks for speaking with
me today and welcome.

JIM HENDERSON: Thank you.

SCHWEIG:
So what are the biggest challenges probation offices face when working with domestic violence offenders and how does
the court monitor compliance?

HENDERSON: I think probably the biggest
challenge is figuring out how to do an adequate assessment: you know—are we getting police reports that are well-written
and well thought-out? Did the detectives do an appropriate investigation and questioning? Do we have access to 911
tapes? Do we have access to prior personal protection orders, prior police reports, calls to the home? So are we
really looking at domestic violence in the whole context of what’s really going on. Then if we’re doing that, are
we then able to collect that information in a way, disseminate it to the judge where it makes a meaningful impact
for sentencing. Hopefully, if everything goes well, we’re able to assess who truly is the batterer, who is the true
victim in context, look at what type of intervention we feel will be most helpful as far as enhancing victim safety
and holding the offender accountable.

From there, it’s trying to make sure that the judge is adequately
informed about what are we doing? How’s the program operating? Do probation officers have the training they need
to be able to talk to those who are victimized by the violence? That’s another challenge because we’re trained so
much to really investigate a case and kind of be a little hard-nosed at times. And when we talk to a victim, if we
investigate it appropriately and she’s 100 percent honest, sometimes that can result in collateral consequences to
her or retaliation that we get frustrated with when we are trying to talk to her and we feel she’s not being forthcoming.
And trying to get probation officers to understand that it might not be in her best interest to be forthcoming and
why she may recant or change her story, or why she might take him back. In looking at that entirety and helping probation
officers really kind of come to that realization has been difficult.

SCHWEIG:
You’ve utilized probation group reporting to gain better compliance. Can you talk a bit about what it is exactly
and how that works?

HENDERSON: What happens, when we came into the
domestic violence field it actually fit very well with my training as a social worker in the sense that we really
look at systems. So saying okay, if we’re really going to address domestic violence it has to be a community process.
So, you know, are police on board? Are the prosecutors on board? What are the messages they’re sending to those victimized,
to the community, and to the assailants? You know, how—what’s the judge doing? What are the victims’ services that
are in place? What are children’s services that are in place? So as a probation agent, I was trying to figure out
how do I better collaborate and learn from my partners? What training can I get from the shelter? How can I incorporate
their voices or their experiences into our policy so that we’re not creating policy or engaging in practices that
actually hurt or hinder the people we say we’re there to protect, right? And that takes a lot of time, going to the
CCR meetings, watching the batterers in a bunch of programs to make sure they’re actually doing what they say they
do, doing home visits, contacting victims.

When I’ve seen defendants in a traditional manner,
in individual sessions, it seems like every single client had the exact same road blocks to success. They do the
same kind of threats or you know, accountability plans, they did the same pep talks, and it was a waste of time.
There was one day I had seen every client back to back to back. I had like 14 clients. At the end of the day, at
5:00, I finally get to listen to my messages. Three victims called, the judge called twice, and I wasn’t able to
get a hold of any of those people because it was after 5:00. And so I’m like, this isn’t working because every defendant—I
could have put them all in one room, played a tape, and said listen to the first guy I talked to, and it would have
got accomplished the same thing. And so I said well then why don’t I do that?

We created a probation
group reporting really as a time-saving mechanism so I would have more time to reach out to victims and work with
community partners. What happened was, almost overnight, our compliance rate rose through the ceiling because we
started being able to break down barriers to successful completion of probation by using other offenders experience
who had successfully achieved that. So an example would be if you’re not able to make it to AA so that’s your excuse
because you don’t have a driver’s license. So then we talk in the group, well how are other people getting to AA?
And people are brainstorming all these different options. People are telling the guy about meetings he might not
have known about; people are offering to pick him up; people are talking about their sponsor who lives two houses
down from the offender and are willing to give him his number. So all of a sudden he had all these new resources
opened up to him that I couldn’t do individually. And he’s also seen that some of his excuses were lame. That other
people had accomplished, with larger road blocks, were being compliant.

And so it just ended up
not being just a time-saving mechanism. It ended up being our batterers intervention compliance went right through
the ceiling. People who were violating probation dramatically decreased because now—let’s say you’re skipping meetings:
we’re going to violate you and take you back to court and a judge is gonna give you one day of jail for every day
you missed of the batterers intervention program. Well now instead of me even doing that, I can go around the room
and say, ‘Okay, George, I understand you haven’t gone for the program, you don’t have time. Has anybody else not
gone to the program?’ Five guys raise up their hand. We say, ‘Okay, so Tom, what happened to you?’ ‘The judge gave
me one day jail for every day I missed.’ ‘Michael, what did the judge do to you?’ ‘She gave me one day jail for every
day I missed.’ ‘Thomas, what did the judge do to you?’ he gave me one day jail for every day I missed.’ Now I can
go back to defendant A and say, ‘Okay, when I violate you, what do you think the judge is gonna do?’ He already knows.
‘Well, it sounds like she’s gonna give me one day of jail for every day I missed.’ ‘Is that what you want?’ ‘No,
that’s not going to be helpful to me.’ So I say, ‘Okay group, what do you think we can do to help Thomas so he doesn’t
go to jail?’ And they will tell him a variety of ways that he can get compliant before we go back to court. So then
the other guy who’s sitting in a room who hasn’t screwed up yet is thinking about it, already has been taught ‘Oh,
this is what’s gonna happen.’ So really, all of a sudden, less people were skipping, more people were going, more
people were dealing with their resistance, and it ended up being a helpful tool.

SCHWEIG:
It sort of offers all different kinds of perspectives in that system. That’s really interesting. Um, so you’ve also
worked with changing the dynamics of you know, interviewing the domestic violence offenders as well as victims. Can
you talk a bit about the motivational techniques used with domestic violence offenders? It sounds like you sort of
addressed that a little.

HENDERSON: In motivational interviewing,
the whole thing is rowing with the resistance. We’re helping a client identify what their needs are and pointing
out discrepancies. So let’s say Client A who hasn’t gone to the batterer’s intervention program who says that he
doesn’t have time. He has a wife and three kids to take care of. So then we’ll talk, you know, how many people have
a wife and multiple kids. ‘How are you guys able to juggle that?’ So we have some clients who have five kids, some
who have six, some whose wife just had twins. So they can talk about how they’re juggling that. We can also talk
about pointing out the discrepancy: ‘Okay, you heard from all these guys that it sounds like the judge is gonna give
you one day jail for every day you missed. Is that gonna be consistent with your desire to spend more time with your
family? Do you think your wife and kids are gonna go to jail with you for those eight days that you’re gonna be in
there, or do you think those are gonna be eight days you’re not gonna have any access to them and not be earning
any income to help support your family that you say you care so much about.’ ‘So maybe I understand you don’t want
to give up that two hours a week to go to class, but you tell me which is going to be more advantageous to your goal?’
He gets to—I don’t tell him—what to do. I don’t tell him what to think. I help him assess where he’s at in his life
space, and what’s going to be the best role for him. And we don’t really argue with him. We just kind of point out
what’s gonna happen.

And you can also tap into the strengths of the other clients who have done
well. Clients who you never thought would make it and never graduated high school, now all of a sudden they’ve got
their GED, they’re finishing this program, and you can compliment them and their successes. We’re not gonna compliment
them and say they’re not a batterer, because I don’t know. But I do know he made it through his batterers intervention
program, he got his GED, he completed his drug testing class—he hasn’t ever tested positive in two years, you know?
There’s a lot to be proud of and just identifying that and letting him be able to brag and tell other clients how
they can, too, be successful.

SCHWEIG: So you’ve also worked on changing
the focus of the victim interview as well. Can you talk about the importance of playing the role of an information
provider to the victim rather than an information gatherer, and why the shift is so significant?

HENDERSON:
Probation officers are trained really well on how to gather information, right? And so we set somebody down and we
almost interrogate them, right? We ask them all these questions about very intimate, personal, shameful experiences
that they’ve had. And then sometimes we get frustrated when people aren’t forthcoming with that information. We talked
a little bit about sometimes if people are forthcoming with it—so let’s say I make you feel very comfortable and
very safe; you give out more information than you really would have been in your best interest.

And
now as agent of the court, I have to provide it to the court, the assailant gets to read it and hear what you told
me, and now there’s retaliation against you. I’ve accomplished nothing. So really, what I want to do in my interviews
is ask you questions in a way that even if you aren’t honest, even if you can’t be honest, when you leave my room,
if you’re a victim of domestic violence you understand what that means. If you’re a higher risk than the general
population, you understand what risk factors are. That you understand what community resources are in place that
would be more advantageous to you than the court. So maybe I’m not the best person to tell, but maybe knowing that
Theresa Johnson at the shelter specializes in sexual abuse and trauma, then you can go talk to her 100 percent confidential,
would be life-changing for you. That’s what we mean.

So it’s really a way for probation officers
to ask questions. If a victim feels empowered enough or safe enough to disclose, she can, but if she doesn’t it doesn’t
mean I’m not successful. I think sometimes probation officers felt like they were non-successful: ‘I just spent a
half hour or an hour with this person and I got no goods.’ Well you know what, if you got no goods and her life is
safer, she knows what resources are available, she knows what the system can and can’t do for her, you were 100 percent
successful and you should be extremely proud of the time you spent.

And so that’s kind of what
we mean by it’s less about gathering and more about providing. I even start out the interviews now—I tell, when I
meet with an individual who’s been victimized, I say, ‘You know, I’m gonna ask you very personal questions that are
probably none of my business, other than the fact that I want to make a recommendation to the court that’s gonna
make your life safer, um, and better help the offender change his behavior. However, if you think answering any questions
are gonna endanger you, you are not on probation, you are not required to answer anything. What you can do is just
say, ‘Jim, I prefer not to answer that question and I will never document that.’

So I’m trying
to work to bridge that gap, instead of giving that victim our card and saying, I think you should call this person—which
she won’t because it’s too shameful, it’s too difficult—I’m gonna say, ‘We care enough about you to reach out to
you at a time that’s convenient and safe for you.’ And I have a good enough relationship with my partners that I
believe they’ll do that. They’ll never come back and tell me they did because they have confidentiality, but I trust
them as individuals that if I say, ‘Theresa will you please call Mrs. Johnson? Here’s what I’m concerned about; here’s
what happened in our meeting today,’ I have faith that somebody will call her that could assist her.

SCHWEIG:
Excellent. Well thank you for letting me ask you the questions today. I’m Sarah Schweig and I’ve been talking to
Jim Henderson about probation group conferencing, motivational interviewing techniques with domestic violence offenders,
and the importance of collaboration within the community to address domestic violence. To find out more about the
Center for Court Innovation, you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thank you for listening.

July 2011

Privileged Work: A Conversation about Victim Advocacy Jun 01, 2011

Robyn Wiktorski-Reynolds, the advocate program coordinator for Crisis Services in Buffalo,
New York, has worked in the field of domestic violence and sexual assault for 12 years. Here she discusses
the collaborative nature of victim advocacy work.

SARAH
SCHWEIG: Hi. I’m Sarah Schweig of the Center for Court Innovation, and today I’m speaking with Robyn
Wiktorski-Reynolds. Robyn is the advocate program coordinator for Crisis Services in Buffalo, New York, and she has
worked in the field of domestic violence and sexual assault for 12 years. Welcome.

ROBYN
WIKTORSKI-REYNOLDS: Thank you. Great to be here.

SCHWEIG:
Thanks for speaking with me today. I wanted to know what does it mean to work in victim advocacy, and what kinds
of services and initiatives do you work on?

WIKTORSKI-REYNOLDS: Sure.
It’s a great question. Victim advocacy work is really very privileged work. Everyone that is able to connect
with survivors of these crimes feels really honored to be able to be in that position. And what’s really unique about
victim advocacy is that individuals have to be sort of jack-of-all-trades. When you’re advocating for clients, it
may be in a medical setting or it may be in a criminal justice setting, law enforcement, or you know, you name it.
So when folks get involved in this, they become quickly involved with many systems that victims of these crimes have
to interface with. So you need someone who’s incredibly flexible and can learn a lot of things and be able to collaborate
professionally with all these different disciplines.

SCHWEIG: So
Erie County, where Buffalo is located, has three different types of specialized courts that relate to domestic violence:
domestic violence courts, integrated domestic violence courts, and sex offense courts. Can you explain just a little
bit about how these courts differ from each other?

WIKTORSKI-REYNOLDS:
Sure. Sure. The domestic violence court that we have in Erie County is located in the City of Buffalo’s court, domestic
violence part. So those cases that are being handled are strictly from the City of Buffalo. The integrated domestic
violence court is for the entire county, and it’s when an individual’s case is in two of the three different courts,
so whether that’s criminal court, family court matter, or Supreme Court matter. As long as they have two of those
three options, then those will get funneled into the integrated domestic violence court. And then the sex offense
court is really more felony-level, sex offense cases, that’s only about, I want to say, three years old now, and
it’s been developing over time. The victim advocacy component is now more of an as-needed basis.

SCHWEIG:
How does victim advocacy vary between the context of all three of those different kinds of courts?

WIKTORSKI-REYNOLDS:
Sure. Let me back up a little bit and talk about the different services that the program has. The advocate program
is part of a larger crisis center in Buffalo in Erie County. And we are the rape crisis center for Erie County and
that’s a New York State Department of Health designation. And we’re also a New York State approved non-residential
domestic violence service provider. So in that sense, what that means is that we’re approved by the state to do domestic
violence services but we just don’t have a shelter. And my staff is comprised of case managers, victim advocates,
therapists, I have a trainer/volunteer coordinator, and also a sexual assault nurse examiner/coordinator. The majority
of my staff are what we call out-stationed. They’re based in collaborative projects. For example, the Buffalo police
department sex offense section—we’ve been there for about 15 or 16 years—so we’re literally sharing an office with
the detectives. The Town of Tonawanda Police Department—it’s a smaller suburban police department—we’re in their
family offense unit. And we’re also in one of the Erie County sheriff’s office hubs. Then we have staff that are
located at our family justice center in Erie County, and we also have staff that are literally in the domestic violence
court in Buffalo. So what this means is that person—we’ve been there for probably, I’m going to say, 13 years now—she’s
literally in a suite with the judge and the judge’s team, and she will stand in the courtroom and meet with victims
there, do on-site assistance with orders of protection, sometimes the modifications, sometimes it’s crisis intervention
depending on what’s going on, a lot of safety planning, and then determining what that victim needs beyond the courtroom
experience. So generally, there’s way more levels of need as I’m sure you’re familiar with, so we will either connect
him or her with internal resources, with crisis services that we have or refer to other services in the community.
We work very closely with the DA’s office and their advocates, understanding the roles that we have that are similar
but then different. We really have an on-site presence.

The way that we handle integrated domestic
violence court is there is one of our partners, the local shelter, Haven House—they have an advocate station there.
So if we’re working with a client, depending on what her level of need is, we will either encourage her to work with
the on-site advocate there for the court proceedings, or if there’s a level of rapport or she really just wants her
crisis services advocate, we will go to IDV court with her. And then sex offense court, like I said, now we just
go there on an as-needed basis with the clients.

Now when we look at the rural parts of the county
because there are swabs of rural areas, the town courts, we have a staff person, the one that is stationed at the
Erie County sheriff’s department. She has dedicated time at three of the hotbed areas of domestic violence court,
and so, she’ll go there—those are evening hours—so she’ll go and provide on-site crisis intervention court advocacy
to the victims that are there. There’s also a DA’s victim advocate that she sort of— they tag team, you know, maybe
that DA’s advocate needs to go to a different court, so my advocate is going to go and try to help her out somewhere
else—there’s a really good communication around making sure the victims’ needs get met. So even though those town
courts don’t have designated courts for DV, we can certainly send advocates to victims there to address those needs.

SCHWEIG: Excellent. And it’s wonderful that you can offer that sort of on a
case-by-case basis.

WIKTORSKI-REYNOLDS: It’s wonderful, it’s wonderful.
And the other component that’s really unique is the Native American territories that we have, and nations that we
have. And again, the sheriff’s department staff person—and really any of my staff can do this, but really it’s about
location and timing—will assist with any of the potentially tribal court matters that might come up or any advocacy
needs are needed on the nation. There is a very strong liaison in collaboration with the sheriff’s department and
the reservation. So because we’re connected with them, there has been a developing and developed trust with our advocates,
so as needed, we’ll get pulled into those cases as well.

SCHWEIG:
Wow. I’m sure you’re pretty busy. And in addition to all the things you just described, you also currently chair
the Crisis Services Rape Crisis Advisory Committee?

WIKTORSKI-REYNOLDS:
Yes.

SCHWEIG: Is that right? Who is involved in this committee and
what kinds of initiatives is the committee currently working on?

WIKTORSKI-REYNOLDS:
Sure. This is sort of the rape crisis hat of my program. We’re a dual program, so both sexual assault and domestic
violence, and there’s a lot of overlap. But the focus of this committee is really to develop and continue to work
on a coordinated community response to sexual assaults in Erie County. So the major stakeholders at the table include
the district attorney’s office, the local law enforcement, local universities—we have about four universities that
sit on this panel—a variety of human service agencies that deal with anything from women’s reproductive health to
developmental disabilities, you name it. We also have our sexual assault nurse examiner coordinator and the various
SANE (Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner) representatives from the variety of like 11 hospitals in Erie County. So we
have a variety of people that sit on that. We meet on a bi-monthly basis. The forensics for Erie County sit on that
as well as the medical examiner’s office because they have their hands obviously in the forensic evidence kits or
rape kits, as well as the drug facilitator sexual assault kits. So we get everybody together. We review current issues
or trends on the table and try to address them. Really the SANE (Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner) coordinator was born
of this committee. You know, we applied for a grant through DCJS. I was able to fund a position and it’s just sort
of morphed—same with the drug facilitator sexual assault kit testing, and that was developed through there.

And through this committee, we’ve had about four conferences since 2002 really dealing with what’s going
on. You know, the most recent one was sex abuse by school personnel because there was a lot going on in our community
around that. And the way that different school systems were handling it, it was really disturbing, and we weren’t
quite sure what to do, so we were like, let’s have a conference. So we brought in school administrators from all
over to talk about the liabilities, offender ideology, we actually had a local offender who was arrested for having
sex with one of his students—we had him on video. So it was really great. We try to be creative in our approach,
but then also handling the day-to-day. And at the very end of the day, just getting all those people in the same
room on a bi-monthly basis just increases communication across the board. I also have a victim advocate sit at the
table. So there’s just a professional collegiality. It just helps things move smoother on a day-to-day basis.

SCHWEIG: Excellent. And I think I just have one more question for you about
yet another project you work on, which is overseeing the operation of the New York State domestic and sexual violence
hotline. What are the goals of this hotline and what kinds of services does it provide?

WIKTORSKI-REYNOLDS:
The state hotline, we were awarded this contract in September of 2010. So we have been in existence for many, many
years. And the goal of this state hotline was to give folks around the state a centralized place they could call—there’s
an English line and a Spanish line, but obviously people are calling with all different languages—to essentially
determine safety, get them linked to their local domestic violence or sexual assault service provider. The sexual
assault component of the hotline was only added in, I want to say in 2006—I could be off by a year or two. And so,
that was great that they really combined these issues and brought them together. And currently, the way that we operate
is under the same theory that we want to give people a general place that they can call, safety plan, you know, discuss
what their current issues are and point them to their local providers who have local expertise and the services that
are there because what we know and understand is that even though there are regulating offices, Office of Child and
Family Services, Department of Health for rape crisis or domestic violence, there are a lot of organizations that
serve the domestic violence and sexual assault victims within communities that aren’t necessarily recognized by those
entities. And we are not necessarily going to know that, so we want to link people back. There is no service other
than that. It really is that immediate phone work. We don’t pass them on to a case manager as if they were calling
our other hotline for our local piece. So really it really is a service to the entire state that we’re really trying
to enhance, and we just continue to provide quality service for.

SCHWEIG:
Excellent. Thank you so much for speaking with me.

WIKTORSKI-REYNOLDS:
You’re welcome. Thank you. This is great.

SCHWEIG: Wonderful. I’m
Sarah Schweig and I’ve been speaking with Robyn Wiktorski-Reynolds, advocate program coordinator for Crisis Services
in Buffalo. To find out more about the Center for Court Innovation, you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.
Thank you for listening.

June 2011

With 11 Questions, Officers Assess Homicide Risk May 18, 2011

David M. Sargent of the Maryland
Network Against Domestic Violence has taught thousands of law enforcement officers how to implement the Lethality
Assessment Program, which uses a short survey to assess victims’ risk of being killed and a simple protocol
to encourage them to get help.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi, I’m
Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. This is New Thinking, our podcast series
where we interview justice professionals who are addressing some of the most challenging problems society confronts.

Today I’m talking with David Sargent about domestic violence. David served 21 years with
the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., and he now works with the Maryland Network Against Domestic
Violence.

Thanks for taking a few minutes to chat.

DAVID SARGENT:
You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here.

WOLF: David’s
in our office today helping train a group of visitors that we’re hosting from Minnesota. The focus of your training
is on the process of the lethality assessment program, which is a screening tool that police use to identify high-risk
domestic violence victims. And then there’s a process around what you do with that information. So that’s
what I wanted to ask you about.

Who is a high-risk domestic violence victim, and how does the
lethality assessment program fit in?

SARGENT: Well when we say high-risk,
what we’re saying is that this victim is at the greatest risk of being killed.

The screening
process that we use is evidence-based, mostly on the work of Dr. Jacqueline Campbell from Johns Hopkins University,
who has done danger and lethality assessment work over the past more than 25 years. And we have used that information
with Dr. Campbell’s assistance to be able to take information that has been available on a clinician’s
level, since before 1981, to be able to take that information and to bring it to the level of the field practitioner
so that the field practitioner can make the same research-based assessment identification of victims who are at the
greatest risk of being killed.

With that information, what we do is we try to get victims into
domestic violence services. We use a very proactive approach to be able to accomplish that. For example, with police
officers, the officer uses the screen on the scene of a domestic violence call.

WOLF:
Before you go on, the police officer is called to a scene, and there has been an allegation of domestic violence,
and then the screen is a series of questions?

SARGENT: Essentially
after the investigation is completed, the officer goes through a process where he tells the victim that he would
like to ask her some questions to get a better idea of her situation.

He proceeds to ask the
11 questions that are a part of the field screening process. If a victim has answered yes to enough of these questions,
which an officer immediately is able to determine, the officer tells the victim that she’s in danger, that in
situations like this people have been killed.

And what he or she—the officer—would like to do
is to contact the domestic violence hotline to be able to get some information to pass onto her, but also for her
to think about getting on the phone with the hotline worker.

It’s always the victim’s
decision. If the victim answers ‘No, I don’t want to get on the phone,’ then we respect that, but we encourage
her again. And we say, ‘Well, that’s fine, you don’t have to, but I’m gonna call the domestic violence
hotline to get some information to pass onto you and while I’m on the phone, I’d just like you to think about
speaking with them.’

We’ve essentially hit the victim cold with this kind of information,
or this overture that we’ve made to her. So we’d like her to have an opportunity to be able to process
it and proactively have the hotline worker right there, prepared to speak with her. WOLF: Let me ask you, just to
give a sense, what kinds of questions are you actually asking that help you make this determination?

SARGENT:
The questions are, again, those that are most predictive of homicide, such as ‘Has he ever threatened you with a
weapon? Does he have access to firearms? Has he ever tried to—as we say in the screen—choke you?’ We know the word
is strangled, but choke is the word that the public commonly understands.

We ask questions like
that, that as we’ve determined from the research are most predictive of homicide. And not of re-abuse. That’s
a different level. Again, we’re trying to identify that portion of those victims who are being abused, who are
at the greatest risk of being killed.

WOLF: And just to understand
how this differentiates from common practice because I’m sure that police officers in many jurisdictions give
a referral of some kind when they leave. This sounds much more proactive, where the officer is actually making the
phone call in front of the victim. Is that sort of what distinguishes it from other methods?

SARGENT:
It is absolutely. You’re right. The normal approach is for simple referral. We decided early on during the development
of this screen that it was not sufficient to have just an instrument that identified victims who were at a risk of
being killed, but to have something proactively to be able to move that victim along to be able to take action.

What
we found with our victims that we work with, who call for service, is that that is generally a different kind of
victim than the victim who picks up the telephone in the middle of the night to call the domestic violence hotline
because she is ready to get help. The victims that we see are not in the same—at the same stage.

There’s
a process called the stages of change that victims go through. And generally the victims that we’re seeing on
the road are those victims who are in the early stages of change. They don’t recognize the situation they’re
in, and they are less apt to move forward. And so the process, the lethality process, by asking the questions—and
hard questions to answer to—and telling the victim that in situations like this people have been killed, which is
true and we know that from the research, to try to open her eyes and try to get her to take action.

Getting
the hotline worker is another part of that. And part of the job of the hotline worker when she has the opportunity
to speak with the victim is that the hotline worker will encourage the victim to come in for services, even to the
point of scheduling an appointment and telling the victim that ‘You know, when tomorrow comes and you’re thinking
about this appointment, you’re not gonna want to come in. Resist that and come anyway.’

We’ve
been successful in getting victims into services. The national percentages of victims who have been killed in domestic
violence situations—only four percent of them have ever availed themselves of the services of a domestic violence
program, because they didn’t know about it, because they weren’t ready to take action or they were afraid
to take action.

Well, now victims become aware of our services. And 38 percent of victims who
went in for services in 2010 in the state of Maryland, 38 percent of victims who spoke on the phone, excuse me, went
in for services. These are high-risk victims that we know of, none of that 38 percent which last year was nearly
1,200 victims, none of those victims was killed in a domestic situation.

WOLF:
So each one of those situations is challenging, really, to measure the impact on homicide, presumably, but you’re
looking for other indications like these are people who probably would not have gone for services if the officer
hadn’t been so proactive and the hotline operator also hadn’t been proactive.

SARGENT:
In the last three years, our intimate partner homicide rate has been reduced by 41 percent. We can’t attribute
that to the lethality assessment program, but when we are getting the percentages and numbers of high-danger victims
into services that we are, none of those has been killed. And I think we can say with some hope that the reduction
is due, in large measure, to the work in the lethality assessment program.

WOLF:
So I’m speaking with Dave Sargent, who served 21 years with the metropolitan Police Department in Washington, and
is now helping train people in Maryland and around the country in the lethality assessment program.

And
I wanted to ask you how it started in Maryland, when did it actually start, and now how widely is the process used?

SARGENT: We went through a development process with a large committee,
multi-disciplinary committee between 2003 and 2005. We implemented it in the state of Maryland in October of 2005
and 92 percent of our law enforcement agencies that respond to calls for service participate in the lethality assessment
program, including our state police. All of our domestic violence programs in all of our counties are participants
as well.

Yes, we have extended beyond Maryland. The lethality assessment program is now being
implemented by more than 140 law enforcement agencies in 13 states with their partner programs. And we’re preparing
to train even more jurisdictions in other states as we speak.

So this has had a broader impact
than we imagined when we first began. I think it just speaks to the simplicity of use, but also to the paradigm shift
that has occurred in how victims are worked with, both by law enforcement and by the domestic violence program. The
communication level between the two, between domestic violence services and between law enforcement, has been a big
byproduct of the lethality assessment program.

It’s improved and it will improve if the
agency and the program are working together to make sure that there are successful aspects of this, that they try
to get a victim on the telephone, the officers do. That the hotline tries to get the victim into services, and encourages
them to take that step. And it happens.

And our, in small sample surveys that we’ve done
with victims, they have told us that they have gone in for services in one respect based on the partnership that
they felt between the law enforcement officer and the hotline worker during that time of that call for service. They
sensed a certain working together that was occurring, and they felt support from both that officer and that hotline
worker. And that was the encouragement that propelled them to move forward, to seek out the services.

WOLF:
So obviously you recommend that groundwork be laid between the police agency and the hotline to coordinate this,
obviously, because it just doesn’t happen naturally, it sounds like.

SARGENT:
It has to happen. Both law enforcement agencies and the domestic violence program have to be willing to work together
to see this through.

WOLF: And the 11 questions, are they very user
friendly for a police officer? Can anyone do this or is it best if an officer is a special kind of officer trained
not only in this questionnaire but in the domestic violence issues?

SARGENT:
We do go through considerable training because we want to be able to convey the process that we believe is at stake
here, and we want the officers and domestic violence advocates to fully understand the process. But the actual practice
of it is very, very simple.

Yes, any police officer can ask the questions. Any person who’s
working in an agency, a receptionist who’s working for an agency that may see a domestic violence victim come
in during the course of its normal work would be in a position to ask these, and they’re not conveying any kind
of professional or expert information in doing this. So essentially they’re serving as a conduit to that domestic
violence program where the expert information can be relayed.

So yes, anybody can do it, and
part of the process is to train other community partners to be able to use the lethality assessment program, such
as hospitals, departments of health, departments of social services, even the faith community because we find that
victims go to their faith leaders and disclose domestic violence and to seek guidance in large numbers. And if they’re
going to this source for help, then we need to work with that, with those faith leaders to be able to allow them
to be able to serve as an appropriate conduit to the professional help that is available through the domestic violence
program.

WOLF: And if someone wanted to find out more about the
lethality assessment program, where can they get that information?

SARGENT:
Well it’s on the Maryland Network against Domestic Violence’s website, which is www.mnadv.org. All our
information is there, including our email information, which is info@mnadv.org.

WOLF:
Great, well I thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.

SARGENT:
Thank you so much, I appreciate the time.

WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf,
director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. I’ve been talking with David Sargent of the Maryland
Network Against Domestic Violence about the lethality assessment program. To find out more information about the
Center for Court Innovation you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

May 2011

An Outsider’s Perspective on an Inside Job May 09, 2011

New York City Commissioner of Probation Vincent N. Schiraldi, who previously
ran the juvenile justice system in Washington D.C., describes his journey from gadfly to government insider and the
reforms he’s been implementing along the way.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: This is Rob Wolf, director of communications for the Center for Court Innovation, and today
I’m with Vinnie Schiraldi, who is the commissioner of the Department of Probation in New York City.

VINNIE
SCHIRALDI: Good morning Rob. Thanks a lot for having me.

WOLF:
So you’ve been on the job for 13 months or so and you’re route to this job is kind of an interesting one,
and I thought maybe you could talk a little bit about how you began after college working with justice-involved youth
and traveled this route from advocate to working in the government.

SCHIRALDI:
So I was a house parent in a seven-bed home for juvenile delinquent boys run by the State Division for Youth. That’s
what the Office for Children and Family Services was called. The best job I ever had, I loved working with young
people.

And then, you know, I just heard a speech by a really charismatic non-profit leader named
Jerome Miller who had deinstitutionalized the whole juvenile justice system for the state of Massachusetts and was
running a non-profit that did alternatives to incarceration. And I was hooked as soon as I heard this guy speak because
I really, really, really felt that incarceration was doing damage to these kids.

And so I chased
him out of the classroom when I was getting my master’s at Syracuse University. He hired me on the spot. I went to
work with a woman named Marsha Weissman, who lots of folks may know because she was at the Center for Community Alternatives
in New York. There I embarked upon a 25 year career in the non-profit world.

WOLF:
How did you end up running the juvenile justice system in Washington, DC?

SCHIRALDI:
Well, it was 2004 and I had been running the Justice Policy Institute, which is a major, major critic of over incarceration
in general, and specifically of the juvenile justice system in D.C.

I was writing op-eds and
screaming and yelling about how I wouldn’t kennel my dog in the D.C. juvenile justice system, and miraculously,
under enormous amounts of pressure, the mayor of D.C. hired me. Not pressure to hire me, pressure to do something
to fix this pathological system.

And he really broke the mold and everybody he had hired, or
everybody everybody hired before that had decades of experience running youth correctional facilities. And unfortunately,
this is a system where decades of experience can often be a minus in my opinion. Because so much of what goes on
in these systems is so bad. It’s just systemically bad. It’s not even just chronically bad.

And
so, to his credit, the mayor said you know what? I’m gonna try a different mold. I’m gonna bring a guy
in that really is outside the box. And that was Mayor Williams and then thankfully when Mayor Fenty got elected,
he kept me on.

WOLF: And so I understand you were the 20th director
in 19 years.

SCHIRALDI: That’s right.

WOLF:
But you stayed for five years. How did you manage to stay so much longer than anyone had and how did you—what kinds
of changes did you bring about? And how did you do it?

SCHIRALDI:
I did a couple things. One is that we really did articulate a vision that was very different than what was going
on.

We said, too many of these kids are locked up. Many of them should be in community service,
community programs. We designed a really good set of community programs and then we tackled awful, awful institutional
conditions.

We told every political leader that as we do this, there is gonna be enormous push-back.
The status quo will fight us back. Get ready because if you want to fix this you gotta know, the rubbers gonna hit
the road and you’re gonna have to take my back. If you’re not willing to do that, don’t bother hiring
me. So I told them coming in, don’t think this is gonna be an easy ride. This system is not gonna be shaken
up without fighting back.

And I had two votes of no-confidence from my unions within three months.
So they – I was right. And then people started leaking stuff to the press and, you know, to their credit, both mayors
and the city council, they took my back. They said we believe where this guy is going.

I’d
invite them up to activities we had there. We started a theatrical group. The kids were doing artwork. The kids were
taking guns that the police gave us, that had been disassembled, turning them into artwork, drawing together with
victims so that they could learn about, you know, victims of violence.

We were doing an enormous
amount of creative activity and every time I did it, I made sure the mayor, I made sure city council, I made sure
the judges, I made sure the media knew about it. Because I knew I was gonna take my hits so I needed to build up
a well of support.

WOLF: So what was the biggest lesson you’ve
learned from making the transition from advocacy to government?

SCHIRALDI:
I think the biggest thing I didn’t know is how much implementation and infrastructure matter, right? You can
sit back and think of all of the wonderful ideas in the world, but the trick with government isn’t just to come
up with good ideas. It’s to have those ideas implemented with some level of fidelity to what they were originally
about. And that’s, that’s really tricky.

I mean a lot of people don’t realize
that if I, today, decide I’m running a new program, it’s going to take a year before I can start that program.
I’ve got to write a scope of service. I’ve got to get it approved. A bunch of lawyers got to look at it. I’ve
got to get the money, you know? All of this stuff’s got to get together.

No actually, even
when I have the money, it’s going to take a year. So that’s something I really just, I didn’t know
anything about. I didn’t know anything about how difficult it was going to be to fix the boilers or procure
underwear for the kids in my facility.

These things were extraordinarily difficult in the government
context. And I, as an advocate, I had sort of always assumed that the bureaucrats that weren’t getting that
stuff done were dragging their feet, right? Because it just seems ridiculous that it’s gonna take six months
to procure new underwear for the kids so that they don’t have to wear recycled underwear when they come to the
facility. That’s a huge indignity and anyone who can’t fix that right away must be a bad person. So here
I am, and I’m a good person and I care about this, and I’m trying, and it’s taken me six months. So that was
a bit of a humbling lesson.

But on the other side, I do think that you don’t want to over
learn that lesson. What you don’t want to do is give up. You don’t want to start every reform with deflated
expectations. You got to have some rage in you and some fight in you, to believe that the unbelievable is true. So
even though it’s going to take you six months, you got to believe you can do it in two months. And you got to
fight like hell because if you do, you might get it done in six months, and then you might actually get it done,
which nobody did before, right?

The kids were always wearing recycled underwear. It took three
times as long as it should have, but they got underwear. So that was good. And that’s just one stupid little
example, but, although meaningful for kids, but we closed this facility that had been open since the ’60s.

You
don’t know how many of my staff people came up to me and said, “I never thought we were going to do this.” But
three and a half years in, I closed the old – Oak Hill it was called – it was the old facility, which was an awful,
awful place, and opened up a really beautiful, well-designed, new facility. That was, I got – I think that’s
the proudest moment in my entire career today. We padlocked Oak Hill and moved all those kids to that new place.
If you have a nice building and you want a good program, the synergy between the two really matters.

WOLF:
So let me ask you how you came to New York. What was the situation you were confronting?

SCHIRALDI:
The things I was confronted with here are very, very different than it was in D.C. because I think Marty did a good
job. Marty Horne, who was my predecessor, and Pat Brennan, I think, did a good job. I think, you know, New York’s
had some pretty, really terrific probation commissioners: Mike Jacobson, Catherine Abate, you know, a bunch of folks,
just tops in the field. So this wasn’t coming into a crippled, bitter place like I did in D.C., which is terrific
cause I can build.

Now’s the fun part, right? Now you can really sort of take the high level
and dream of making it higher, as opposed to having to slog through things like broilers and underwear, right?

I
think that by and large, people see us as a place that has a lot of decent people in it. So it’s not like they
don’t like my staff or don’t like the administration. But I feel like people view our services as generally
mediocre. And so in that respect, I do think that we could do some improving, particularly on the very essence of
the interaction between our staff and the people on probation. I think we can actually produce a better product.

But I can only do that cause Marty helped do all the stuff he did before. And the stuff he did
on juvenile justice, where he declared Project Zero, and he called the state centralized bureaucracy as a place where
nobody from New York City should go. He did that in 2004, and now Mayor Bloomberg came out and said, “We want to
take every single one of our kids out of that system in 2010.”

I think those were connected.
I don’t think that we should view them as independent acts. Marty laid down a marker. He started programs and
John Mattingly, [the commissioner] at ACS [the city’s Administration for Children’s Services], started
programs that have reduced the number of kids we put upstate by 62 percent. That’s an extraordinary reduction
in state commitments from New York City. And now we’re down to 300 kids left from New York City, in OCFS facilities.
And the end is within sight.

WOLF: That’s Office for Children
and Family Services facilities?

SCHIRALDI: That’s right. That’s
the state institution system.

WOLF: What is wrong, what has been
wrong with the state’s centralized bureaucracy?

SCHIRALDI:
What’s wrong with New York’s state centralized bureaucracy, called OCFS, is the same thing that’s
wrong and has been wrong with almost every state-centralized bureaucracy for juvenile institutions since the history
of these 220 years ago, which is that they turn into loveless, mediocre at best, often far less than that, brutalizing
at times, but dehumanizing almost always, environments for kids that get shipped far away from home, who come back
certainly no better and often a lot worse than they went.

In New York you hear about the justice
department’s lawsuit, kids getting their teeth broken and bones broken for things like asking for extra dessert
or talking in line, or putting too much sugar in their orange juice—silly stuff like that. And those are the highlights,
but—or low lights—but it’s also the day to day sort of lack of love. And I think what’s been said that
the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s apathy. And I think that that’s really what characterizes most
of these training schools around the country and certainly in New York.

That and this enormous
distance between where these kids are and where they end up going—to the Finger Lakes and Adirondacks, and all these
crazy training schools—I think adds to it. I think if the kids were home we could have community vendors and community
institutions like churches and youth groups working with them so that when they come out, they are already engaged
with those folks.

WOLF: Your job involves also not just young people,
but 27,000 adults who are on probation as well. Maybe you can talk a little bit about innovations that you’re
pursuing there.

SCHIRALDI: We have, like you said, 27,000 adults
that we’re supervising at any given time, and what we’re trying to do it take a lead from the National
Institute of Correction’s playbook, which talks all about evidence-based interactions between probation officers
and people on probation, to try to do what the research says should help people: Get a good risk-assessment instrument,
find out who’s high, medium, and low, do very little with the low, with the medium and high really focus resources
on dealing with the issues that matter from a crime-control standpoint. What should really correlate with re-arrest,
right?

We’re going to train all our staff on how to do that, we’re going get an evidence-based
risk assessment instrument to help them, right? But the thing I think that will be different from us, that we’ll
do than the NIC playbook is we’re gonna take a lead from the Center for Court Innovation’s playbook, and
we’re going to do all of that in a very community-based, community-development setting, right? One of which
we hope we’ll do together with you guys in Brownsville, right?

So we’re saying, yes
it matters that we follow evidence as to how we interact with people. But it also matters that people reintegrate
into their own neighborhoods, which by the way, characterizes the vast majority of jurisprudence in the world prior
to about 150 years ago.

Prior to about 150 years ago, most times people broke the law, it got
solved—it happened within a few blocks of where they lived, a few miles, a few feet, and it got dealt with right
in that neighborhood.

We have professionalized that and moved everything to downtown courthouses
and downtown probation departments and upstate prisons, and I think by doing that we make things worse. I don’t
think we make things—I don’t think we make things uniformly better. There were some things that got better,
but I think the part where the community actually has a stake in what happens to its miscreants, if you want to call
them that, right? We lost that. And that, I think, matters.

So like CCI has brought that back
in places like Red
Hook and Greenpoint
and Harlem,
we want to do that too and we are overtly standing with you guys and we thank you for allowing us to do so.

WOLF:
Well, it’s exciting to think about the Brownsville project, which is one of our newest projects in planning—a new
community court with a youth-focus.

I’ve been speaking with Vinnie Schiraldi, the commissioner
of the Department of Probation. Thanks so much for coming by our office today to give a presentation to staff and
spending some time to talk with me.

SCHIRALDI: Thanks Rob, it was
a really good way to end the week.

WOLF: And I’m Rob Wolf, director
of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. If you want to find out more about our work, visit our website
at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

May
2011

Solving and Preventing Homicides through Collaboration Apr 27, 2011

Mallory O’Brien, a researcher at the Public Policy Institute at Duke University, describes how the Milwaukee
Homicide Review Commission brings together law enforcement and public health to solve individual homicides.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and today
I’m speaking with Mallory O’Brien who’s the founding director of the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission. She’s
also a researcher in the Public Policy Institute at Duke University. Thanks, Mallory, for taking the time to talk
with me.

MALLORY O’BRIEN: Thanks for having me.

WOLF: Today we are in Los Angeles and we’ve just concluded a day-long executive
session that brought together public health experts and law enforcement representatives, including several police
chiefs from around the country for a conversation about what public health can teach law enforcement. This is sponsored
by the Community Oriented Policing Services Office at the U.S. Department of Justice and The California Endowment,
who hosted the session, and the Center for Court Innovation.

First off, I thought you could just
describe what exactly is in Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission, maybe give a little of its history and how it came
about.

O’BRIEN: I’m trained as a public health professional. I’m
an epidemiologist. I have been working in the field of violent injury for the last 15 years—started out creating
a local system to track firearm injuries, went to the national level and worked with the Harvard Injury Control Research
Center on developing the National Violent Injury Statistics System, which is a surveillance system on how you track
violent injury and death, worked with CDC on the development of the National Violent Death Reporting System.

While I was doing all of this, I lived in Milwaukee; I’ve always lived in Milwaukee. My husband is actually
a prosecutor. So when the city was interested in figuring out how we deal with homicides, they asked me if I would
sit down and help them think through a process. So we met in 2004 with the mayor, the police chief, and the district
attorney—kind of hashed through a process. I relied on all the experience I’ve had over the last few years figuring
out how do you develop a national surveillance system, and how do you make it real time, and how do you really apply
it to a local community, and came up with this review process that we have in place now in Milwaukee. That’s basically
a four-level process and it’s multi-disciplinary, multi-agency, so that we get a real detailed picture of homicide,
what’s going on in homicides in the city, and through that analysis we can determine risk factors, and we can then
focus the limited resources that we have from a law enforcement perspective, as well as from a social service provider
on violence prevention, we can really focus those on identifiable risks. So we created this process where you had
the immediate response by law enforcement to do the investigation, but we’ve also included a referral mechanism so
that there are services offered to the family immediately, the victim’s family. The second level of the process is
really to pull together the entire criminal justice community to really look at the homicides. So we meet once a
month. We talk about the prior month’s cases. We do a really detailed analysis of what’s going on.

WOLF:
And let me just interrupt you there. Who’s at the table at these monthly meetings?

O’BRIEN:
So we have the cop that may have responded to the incident. We have the community prosecutors, corrections, ATF,
FBI, U.S. attorney, city attorney, juvenile corrections, public schools, ICE, the housing authority—anybody that
you define to be in the criminal justice world is at the table for those discussions. So at the end of the discussion,
we oftentimes come up with recommendations for change. They might be recommendations that revolve around a particular
case and it’s follow-up that needs to be done. It might be a recommendation on a policy change that the
Department of Corrections should be implementing. It might actually be a policy-level change that needs to be done
by the legislature. So we run the gamut from an individual to a real population-based policy change.

WOLF:
So to be clear, you’re talking about a specific case and you may brainstorm among this whole group of people from
these diverse agencies. And will they share information and actually try to make suggestions about how further the
investigation of a particular case? Is that also one of the by-products?

O’BRIEN:
That is one of the by-products. So not only is it developing prevention, intervention, and suppression strategies,
but it’s also helping to clear a particular case. So for example, we may have a witness in a homicide who we learn
at the Homicide Review is actually on paper with Corrections. Well, the Corrections agent can then leverage that
witness to be more cooperative with the law enforcement. So that’s it, a case-specific example.

WOLF:
And so, then, to the point of prevention which is a key, I think, component of any public health approach, emphasizing
prevention, as you say, you also collectively try to come up with broader policy recommendations or changes. I wonder
if you could give any examples of those that might illuminate how this collaboration can maybe come up with a creative
solution that no one on their own, no individual agency might have come up with.

O’BRIEN:
Well, I think what these reviews do is they actually create a forum not only for information sharing but strategy
development. And this didn’t happen overnight. And we had to develop trust among all of the agencies to start sharing
the information because it’s not a public meeting but we’re all in a room together and we’re all sharing some of
our faults. So that took a while, but once we got to the point where we had developed that trust, that’s when these
discussions start to develop. So before we get to me answering your question, let me just make—let me tell you the
rest of the process and then I’ll get to your—

WOLF: Sure. Absolutely.

O’BRIEN: So we do the criminal justice review once a month, but we also do
a community service provider review. And we do that review every other month, and there we pull together the community
service providers in the neighborhoods. We pull together the community liaison officers, the community prosecutors,
the faith community—specific agencies that might have touched the victim, the suspect or even the location that the
event occurred. So when we talk about creating a really in-depth picture of the homicide, we’re talking about criminal
histories. We’re talking about, do we know anything about their attendance at school?; do we know anything about
the property?; were their calls serviced?; did the Department of Neighborhood Services respond?; were their license
premise violations ?—all of those kinds of things to try and develop different types of strategies so that we’re
not just focusing on a purely law enforcement response but a collaborate response. So to answer your question, let
me give you an example. One thing that I did a couple of years ago is I pulled together a sub-committee where we
were focusing specifically on gun violence reduction. So, at those meetings I have the U.S. attorney—no, not the
U.S. attorney but a representative from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, ATF, district attorney—

WOLF:
Alcohol, tobacco, and firearms?

O’BRIEN: Sorry. Yes. The prosecutors,
the city attorney’s office, the office of violent prevention, the health department; corrections is also there. We
brainstorm about different things each agency could be doing themselves and collaboratively. While we were analyzing
some of the data that is available through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and Explosives that relates
to firearms—and who were the individuals that purchased the firearms?; how long did it take for the gun to be purchased
and then end up in crime?; who were the associates involved?; what kind of crime?; was the firearm recovered—those
kinds of things. We were analyzing that information and I was looking at firearms with the short time-to-crime. ATF
uses a definition of two years or less. I use a definition of one year or less. So I was really looking at those
guns that made it into the hands of criminals in a very short period of time. And what I noticed when I was doing
the analysis was that there was a disproportionate number of young black females that were purchasing firearms and
then they were ending up in crime. Now because we had the health department at the table for those discussions, they
came up with an initiative, an education campaign to target women, specifically women of color, and they went to
the beauty parlors. They developed a campaign and it was implemented at the beauty parlors, trying to reach the women
that they felt were most likely to purchase a firearm for their man. And the message was, “Don’t buy for your guy.”

WOLF: So that’s an interesting example of bringing in a health department or
public health expertise in the area of public education. And you’re using them to deliver a message that serves both
the public health by lowering violence but also a criminal justice end because obviously violence generally is connected
to criminal behavior as well. So that’s a great example. Was there a measureable impact? Were you able in any way
to evaluate it?

O’BRIEN: Well, I haven’t looked at the data, but
that was done relatively recently.

WOLF: I’m speaking with Mallory
O’Brien who is the founding director of the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission. I wanted to ask you really one
other question because I think you have a very unique position where you’re a public health expert who is a consultant
working very closely with law enforcement, in this case the Milwaukee Police Department. And I wonder when you bring
your public health eyes and your academic background as a researcher in Duke University to this sort of paramilitary
organization that, you know, perhaps operates very differently, what are you seeing? What have you learned and what
lessons can you offer about creating successful collaborations between public health and police agencies or law enforcement
agencies?

O’BRIEN: One of the things early on was finding the right
people within the organizations that you’re trying to work with because law enforcement and public health don’t seem
like, on face value, don’t seem like logical partners. And part of it is that law enforcement, in my experience,
has been—they have been skeptical about sharing their detailed information on what goes on in their cases, especially
open cases. So, what I found to be one of the keys was finding the right people in the agencies that I needed to
deal with and developing a relationship, developing trust so they felt as like they could trust me, that I wasn’t
going to harm their agency in any way, that I was there to be a neutral convener to assist all of the agencies in
developing strategies. So when I look at success, I think the reason why we have been successful, not only in initiating
the Homicide Review Commission, but in sustaining it over time is that we have developed these trusting relationships.
We have been able to move strategies forward, so if we develop a strategy, we actually do something with it. And
then, we can say, hey, this worked or it didn’t work, because we’ve been collecting all this information for so many
years that we’re in a position to assisting and evaluating the outcomes.

WOLF:
Well, it’s been fascinating talking with you, and I wish you continued luck in your work. I’ve been talking with
Mallory O’Brien who’s the founding director of the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission. She’s also a researcher
in the Public Policy Institute at Duke University. And we’ve been speaking just outside of the meeting room where
we spent the day at The California Endowment here in Los Angeles, where leaders in public health and in law enforcement
were meeting to discuss basically what they could learn from each other. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications
at the Center for Court Innovation. To find out more about the Center for Court Innovation, you can visit our website
at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

April 2011

What Can Law Enforcement Learn from Public Health? Mar 11, 2011

Anthony Iton of the California Endowment talks about the public health approach to crime and safety problems.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, the director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation
and I’m in Los Angeles today with Tony Iton, who is the senior vice president of Healthy Communities, which
is an initiative of the California Endowment. And in fact we’re here at The Endowment, at a round table or what’s
been called an executive session that’s bringing together leaders in law enforcement and in public health to
talk about basically what public health has to teach law enforcement.

And you gave a fascinating
presentation at the outset about the public health approach. You broke it down into four components and I thought
maybe you could just say briefly again what those are.

ANTHONY ITON:
Yeah the framework that I offered is really a disease response framework which is sort of at the heart of public
health, it’s basically trying to stamp out new and emerging disease. So the framework is four components. The
first is one is surveillance, trying to figure out the who, what, where, when.

When a new disease
comes on the horizon you’ve got to characterize it, understand who’s vulnerable and how the disease might
move through a population. The second component is disease control: How do you interrupt the cycle of transmission?
What are the basic strategies that will interrupt its movement? And that may be vaccines. It may be pharmaceuticals.
It may be physical measures like quarantine and isolation. It may be using things like education, condoms, needle
exchange, what have you.

The third element is coordination. And it’s probably the most important
element in public health. It is to essentially figure out what resources to bring to bear to mitigate the problem,
you know, during and afterwards.

And then, finally, the fourth is communication. And that’s
typically thought of as the three P’s: How do you talk to the politicians and policymakers? How do you talk to the
physicians? And how do you talk to the public?

And so that’s the framework and it has applicability
to law enforcement, as well, particularly the surveillance and control aspects, but also the communication and coordination.

WOLF: It’s interesting. There are some obvious parallels: Surveying
the community; identifying where crime is. But the point you made which I thought was fascinating was that public
health doesn’t just stop at: “Oh there’s an outbreak here. Let’s treat the people.” You
try to dig down and find the source.

And I think law enforcement at times has tried to do that,
and increasingly so tried to do that. But it’s not as much part of the DNA of law enforcement and I wonder if
you could talk about that a little bit.

ITON: Yeah, so that’s
the challenge, really. To be purely reactive is really to just operate constantly in that model of surveillance-control.
Which is trying to interrupt the cycle, but isn’t necessarily trying to prevent future incidents of the disease
or looking at the vulnerabilities-the conditions that make a population more susceptible to a particular type of
disease.

And so public health has evolved, and has started to look much deeper at what is sometimes
referred to as the social determinates of health: looking at the quality of housing, for instance, that might make
a disease more easily able to move through a population, if there’s housing overcrowding, for instance.

Look
at the quality of education: What people know and their ability to, essentially, to navigate, you know, information-to
be able to acquire the kinds of information they need to protect themselves. Looking at the quality of employment:
I mean, if people are for instance working at jobs that are very low pay, and they don’t have things like sick
days, paid sick days, then they are much more likely to come to work sick. Much more likely to spread those diseases,
you know, at work, which could have a much more profound impact on the population.

So trying
to get at some of the underlying drivers of vulnerability in a population is as critical as sort of acutely interrupting
the cycle of transmission. Because if you just interrupt it, it’s like, as I like to say: If you go into a community
and fires are burning and you just put out the fires, well, you’ve done a good service. But if you come back
the next day and fires are burning in the same place, and all you do is put out the fires again, well then you’re
not doing such a good service, because you’re not recognizing that there’s something that’s making
those sites more amenable to burn. And if you don’t tackle that issue, then you are just going to be putting
out fires day-in, day-out.

WOLF: And how do you see that mindset
and that approach transferable, if at all, to law enforcement? And I’m thinking of, you know, law enforcement
already looks at data, CompStat, you know, they’re quick to look at trends. What more can they do or what can
they take things from public health and your approaches that do seem to go deeper and look at more fundamental causes
of disease, but in their case crime and safety issues?

ITON: Well,
part of it is how law enforcement is held accountable. Law enforcement is held accountable for homicides and violent
crimes and sort of a reactive kind of mentality. And I think that that’s understandable but a little bit unfair,
because law enforcement didn’t create the conditions that lead to the crime. They’re just trying to put
out the crime once it starts. So law enforcement would benefit from partnerships with public health, at a minimum,
to try to be able to understand the root causes or the drivers of high crime. And then would certainly benefit from
getting credit for preventing crime as opposed to just suppressing crime–if, in fact, the crime statistics go down.

Now, I think that they are different disciplines with different focuses, but the synergy between
the two disciplines is substantial. And what typically does not happen is that law enforcement doesn’t spend
a lot of time with public health and public health doesn’t spend a lot of time with law enforcement. So there’s
this sort of foreignness of the territories that leads to this sense that, you know, “we don’t do what
you do; you don’t do what we do.” And the more time, and the jurisdictions where I’ve been, and those
that I’ve seen that have had successful collaborations, actually just spend a lot of time together, so they
understand each other’s sort of relevance to their own discipline.

And there’s a huge
amount of potential, particularly when it comes to data analysis and some of the community oriented policing strategies,
to borrow from public health strategies that are much more deeply rooted in community and in prevention than the
typical suppressive approaches that many law enforcement agencies are forced to adopt.

WOLF:
I can see how you talk about, you know, prevention, maybe in terms of environment for transmission of an illness-
like you gave examples of not enough sick days and people going to work. How would that translate to something that
is more overtly criminal justice related? Shootings. Any kind of pattern of–I don’t even know if it even does
apply–robberies, car break-ins, truancy perhaps? You know, even smaller things, but maybe that are entry level criminal
issues for young people?

ITON: One of the things we know that correlates
extremely well with crime is essentially idle time. Kids that get out of school at 1:50 in the afternoon or 2:10
in the afternoon, every day, and have nothing to do between that time and when their parents get home at 7 o’clock
or whenever. We know–all of us have been through this, we were adolescents at one point–that you are much more
inclined to engage in mischief if you are unsupervised and you have nothing constructive to do.

So
we know, for instance, that a public health approach to that problem is essentially trying to figure out youth development
strategies. And, very simply, you can look at thinks like boys and girls clubs; you can look at after-school programs–a
whole host of things where young people are essentially exposed to graduated responsibility. They’re asked to
engage in some civic participation. They’re held to very high expectations.

All of those
things are associated with a much lower likelihood of engaging in the behaviors that are associated with crime and,
by the way, with illness. Like sexually transmitted diseases, car accidents and the like.

The
ability for law enforcement to participate, to forge relationships with young people in communities at that stage–and
it’s sort of a pre-adolescent stage quite frankly–is the most optimum time for that kind of relationship to
develop. So that the youth not only is actively engaged in constructive activities, like the Police Activities League,
and a variety of other, you know, police oriented after-school programs, but they also have a different perspective
on law enforcement. And they don’t necessarily see them as a threat. They don’t necessarily see them as
the enemy.

They’ll see aspects of leadership in law enforcement that they may want to emulate
themselves. And that of itself is a crime prevention strategy.

It’s just a very simple example
of a kind of public health approach to crime prevention. Certainly many police agencies around the country have already
invested in these kinds of activities for young people. Typically, for kids that are a little bit older-and we think
that getting into that preadolescent state is really critical-but that’s an example of a public health approach
to crime prevention.

WOLF: And I’m just thinking of one other
thing. When you speak about public health, when I think of when there is an innovation, a vaccination, or a strategy,
and if it’s proven to work, it just seems like it spreads like wildfire. Everyone does it. It’s understood
to be the best practice. You’re not going to let a disease spread if you understand how to handle it.

Whereas
in law enforcement, it seems to me, you can look at, and someone said here at the meeting, Director Malekian, director
of the Community Oriented Policing Services office at the Department of Justice, said: “If I say to someone
‘what’s community policing?’ If you do it, all the chiefs are going to raise their hand. But if I
ask them to write down what it is they’re doing, they’ll all say something different.” And I wonder
if there isn’t something there, as well, that they can learn from public health. In terms of it being more of
a science and you sort of accept, I may not be articulating it well, but it seems to me that there’s a very
cultural difference there. That you’re dealing with a very fractured understanding of how to do things, in terms
of law enforcement vs. public health.

ITON: You know, I think there
is some truth to that. I do think that public health and health in general is much more scientifically rigorous in
the approaches that it pursues. That’s not universally the case. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff done in
health and in public health that is still kind of anecdotal. But in law enforcement there doesn’t seem to be
as great a culture of, essentially, peer review. You know, scientific rigor. And there’s a much more sort of
anecdotal flavor to a lot of the approaches that people take, and there’s, I think in the sort of the political
sphere, there’s much more emotionality about law enforcement issues, about–crime can be very emotionally rending
and people want sort of very immediate solutions that don’t necessarily look at long-term investments to reduce
likelihoods of youths’ participating in those kinds of activities.

WOLF:
I want to thank you for taking the time and you’re off to do something else. I’ve been speaking to Tony Iton, who’s
senior vice president of Health Communities, w hich is a program of The California Endowment, which is one of three
co-sponsors of the executive session that we’re at today here in Los Angeles. The other co-sponsors are the Center
for Court Innovation and the Community Oriented Policing Services Office of the Department of Justice. I’m Rob Wolf,
director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. To find out more about the Center for Court Innovation,
visit our web site at www.courtinnovation.org.

March 2011

What Victims Really Need: A Conversation with Author and Victim Advocate Susan Herman Jan 12, 2011

Susan Herman, who served for seven years as the executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime,
talks about her book Parallel Justice for Victims of Crime.

The
following is a transcript

ROB WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director
of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome to another New Thinking podcast. I’m here with
Susan Herman who is an associate professor at Pace University, and formerly the executive director of the National
Center for Victims of Crime in Washington. She has been involved with, in some form or another, working with victims
of crime for nearly 30 years. She recently has published a book called “Parallel Justice for Victims of Crime,” which
presents an approach for integrating victims into the way we think about crime in the United States, and how we can
respond to crime, how we should include victims in, as the title suggests, a parallel justice, so Susan, thanks for
taking the time to speak with me.

SUSAN HERMAN: You’re welcome. It’s great to be here.

WOLF: Why don’t we just start out with you explaining to me a little bit about your experience focusing
on victims issues and how they brought you to this place where you’ve come up with this book and the ideas behind
it?

HERMAN: Many years ago, before I went to law school, I started out as a self-defense instructor
working with victims of sexual assault and rape crisis counselors. I saw firsthand what the trauma of crime can do
to people, how debilitating it can be, how the reactions of people can last for a long time, and can produce more
limited and more unproductive and satisfying lives in people. I started thinking about what our response to victims
of crime should be, how we can respond better as a society, how we can respond as government, as community members,
and as individuals. That’s what Parallel Justice is all about. It’s a set of principles and values that
provide a framework for communal response to victims.

WOLF: I’m going to ask you a little
bit more about those principles in a moment, but let me ask you how you engage in a nuanced discussion about victims
in a world where there seems to be generally the sense that you have victims over on this side, and if you’re
doing something good for victims it means locking up as many offenders as you can, and being as punitive as you can,
or if you’re on the side of the offenders, you’re really looking at preserving their rights. I mean, there’s
a whole spectrum of responses to offenders, but somehow there is not a dialog between these two camps. It’s
…

HERMAN: There’s very little dialog between these camps, and when there is, sometimes
it’s quite poisonous. It’s really fear-based politics. There’s this sense that if you listen to victims’
emotions, or understand their needs, that the whole process is going to become too irrational, too emotional, maybe
too retributive. There’s a sense that if we devoted more resources to victims, that means we’re taking
away resources from offenders. In my view, we have arrived at this polarized conversation because we have neglected
to see a few things. We’ve neglected to really understand the full impact of crime and the cost to our society,
the connection between victimization and drug and alcohol abuse, the connection between victimization and homelessness,
poverty, poor academic performance, and it leads to, in many cases, offending behavior.

If you
look at juvenile delinquency, for instance, the greatest risk factor in juvenile delinquency is not what people think.
It’s not drug or alcohol abuse. It’s not teenage pregnancy. It’s victimization. The most prominent
risk factor that’s recognized in the research leading to juvenile delinquency, which later leads to adult criminal
behavior, is victimization. We don’t address victimization, in my view, at our peril. I think victim assistance
could be one of the greatest crime prevention strategies we could employ.

WOLF: I understand that
one of the greatest challenges you face as a victim advocate is that so many people who are victims don’t even
report crimes.

HERMAN: Why would you report a crime if you think that the only thing that’s
going to happen has nothing to do with you? If what you need, if you’re a person who’s afraid, you’ve
been beaten up in your neighborhood and you’re afraid to go home, and your laptop and your cell phone have been
stolen, and you can’t function anymore on the job or at school, if you don’t think that reporting to the
police is going to address any of those problems, and all it’s going to do is make you take time off to go to
court, or try and find somebody, and the police have said that they don’t have a lot of evidence and nothing
is going to happen anyway, why report?

We have to create a process where victims feel that we
care about the impact of crime. We care about what’s happened to them, that we acknowledge that what’s
happened to them is wrong, and that they believe we’re going to do everything we can to help them. We don’t
have that now.

WOLF: Will they get their laptop and their phone back or will they be compensated
for that?

HERMAN: Who reports? You know, people have their cars stolen or damaged report, because
unless they report they won’t get any insurance, right?

WOLF: Right.

HERMAN:
There’s a goody that comes from reporting.

WOLF: Right.

HERMAN: I think we have to have this mindset that there has to be some response that addresses the
needs of victims. Otherwise, why should they tell us about this? That might be more compensation. That might be counseling
and support. It might be helping them fix the broken window that the burglar went through right away. You’re
actually addressing their need to be safe rather than just saying, “I see you have a broken window. That’s
how he got in. I’ll see if I can find him.”

WOLF: I’m speaking with
Susan Herman who’s formerly the Executive Director of the National Center for Victims of Crime. She’s an
Associate Director at Pace, and the author of the new book, Parallel Justice for Victims of Crime. Tell me about
some of the principles that you referred to earlier?

HERMAN: One of the things that we know from
research is that when you’re a victim of crime, and this is really across the board, almost any kind of crime,
you are more vulnerable to crime for a short period of time at least, than you were before that crime occurred. You
are vulnerable to what we call “repeat victimization.” One of the principles of Parallel Justice is the safety of
victims would be a high priority. That means for the police, for the prosecutors, for the courts, for healthcare
people, for anyone who is responding to that victim. They would take the time and do what they could to prevent repeat
victimization. For instance, instead of the first responder just determining whether there was a crime that occurred
and gathering evidence, you would take the time to figure out what that victim might do to make it less likely that
another crime was going to take place. Another principle is that victims would be presumed credible unless there
is reason to believe otherwise. That’s pretty fundamental that when someone comes to you and says, “This
happened to me,” that we treat them with the respect and dignity they deserve by believing them until or unless
there is a reason not to, rather than starting out as skeptical, or non-believing, or trivializing, or dismissing
what they say.

WOLF: Is that common? I mean, I would think that most places would formally say
their policy would be to, you know, at least the police departments would say …

HERMAN: Most
people would say their formal policy … sure, except if you look at police departments across the country who are
under great pressure to have their crime statistics as low as possible, and then you talk to victims who feel that
their complaint either wasn’t taken, or it was downgraded, that violates that principle of parallel justice.
They were not presumed credible.

WOLF: Is there a hierarchy of victims, where people who have
been a victim of a violent crime versus a non-violent, or identity theft versus rape, or, I mean, obviously there’s
things are more severe than others. But does the system also see it that way too and treat victims differently in
a way that you feel perhaps should be corrected or is not appropriate?

HERMAN: Yeah, I think over
the last 30 years we’ve created a statutes at the state level, federal laws, thousands and thousands of victims
rights, pieces of legislation that are primarily directed at victims of violent crime. Two-thirds of victims of crime
in this country are victims of property crime, or non-violent crime, and they are left out of most victims rights
legislation, which means we know that victims of property crime take days off from work, lose money, often have the
same financial, psychological, sometimes even physical responses of violation and depression, and mental illness
that victims of violent crimes do. Just imagine if you’re the victim of crime on the street, somebody’s
knocked you down and taken your wallet, and taken ten bucks out of your wallet. You have the right to be notified
of the proceedings, to know what happens to the offender, to know where he or she is in the system. You have the
right to speak in court. If you are the victim of identity theft and your entire savings has been wiped out, you
may not have those rights. Does that seem fair?

WOLF: Wow, no, not when you put it that way. Can
you offer some examples of programs or jurisdictions that have begun to incorporate the ideas in Parallel Justice?

HERMAN: I’ve seen a lot of positive change. Vermont is doing a lot. Vermont has created a resource
bank where there are 45 business that are providing free or discounted services to victims of crime, anything from
food to massages. Things that are just nice extras, you know, “We can help you feel better,” to necessities
like clothing and furniture to help you set up a place that’s been destroyed.

WOLF:
Who coordinates that stuff?

HERMAN: The Vermont Center for Crime Victim Services
and the Parallel Justice Project there, which is run out of the police department, and the Community Development
Organization in town.

WOLF: That’s in Burlington?

HERMAN: That’s
in Burlington, thank you. They’re working with the Chamber of Commerce there.

WOLF: They’ve
adopted the term “Parallel Justice?”

HERMAN: They use the term. They have a parallel justice specialist
who works out of the police department, actually right next to a traditional victim advocate, and so they’re
very clear that they’re distinct roles. One, the victim advocate, is helping you understand what the criminal
justice process is like. The parallel justice specialist is helping you rebuild your life. It’s saying, “What
do you need? Do you need child care while you’re at court? Do you need help cleaning up the crime scene? We
can do that with you.”

WOLF: As you have said, the idea, and as embodied in the name, Parallel
Justice, really is not necessarily in any way dependent on the criminal justice response.

HERMAN:
Not in any way.

WOLF: It can exist wholly apart from the …

HERMAN: That’s
right. Parallel Justice really involves a separate set of responses to victims that it’s not just about reforming
the criminal justice process. It’s saying that whenever a crime is committed, there would be a separate and
distinct set of responses that flow from the government, from the community, and from individuals regardless of the
status of the offender. It shouldn’t matter whether we ever identify or convict an offender. That should have
no impact on our decisions to help a victim of crime once we believe that they are a victim of crime. You can have
a victim who really doesn’t need much and you still may want to prosecute the offender, and you can have a victim
who really would appreciate to be relocated, to have psychotherapy, to have someone to talk to every once in a while
regardless of whether the offender is ever caught.

There’s some wonderful examples of really
being open to what victims need that have come out of this Vermont work. For instance, there’s a woman who was
sexually assaulted while she was going for her run in the park, and she didn’t really want to be a part of a
victims’ support group. She didn’t really think she needed psychotherapy. If you asked her, “What do you
want?” She said, “I want someone to run with me because I’m too afraid to run by myself at this point.”
That’s where the Parallel Justice and the Resource Bank come in. They worked with a running shop in town to
find people who would be appropriate to escort her for a while.

WOLF: Susan,
how can people find out more about Parallel Justice, and where can they buy your book?

HERMAN:
Oh, great questions. Here’s the website, paralleljustice.org. You can certainly buy the book through that website,
individual or bulk rate, or you get it on Amazon. Either one, but I hope people see this as a positive image of justice
and something that everyone can take a part in implementing.

WOLF: I hope so too. Thank you. I’ve
been speaking to Susan Herman who is formerly the executive director at the National Center for Victims of Crime
in Washington, D. C. She’s also an associate professor at Pace University, and she’s author of the new
book, “Parallel Justice for Victims of Crime.” I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court
Innovation. To find out more about our work at the Center for Court Innovation you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.
Thanks for listening.

Problem-Solving Justice in Indian Country: The Navajo Nation Plans a Pilot Community Court Dec 22, 2010

Court Administrator Susie Martin and Chief Probation Officer Lucinda Yellowhair explain how the Navajo Nation’s
pilot community court will draw on their culture’s traditional restorative justice principles.

The
following is a transcript.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. The Navajo
Nation covers 27,000 square miles and has more than a quarter million people and is in the process of developing
a pilot community court for their Aneth District Court. Recently, a group of visitors from the Navajo Nation spent
several days at the Red Hook Community Justice Center. I, along with Aaron Arnold who is the director of our Tribal
Justice Exchange at the Center for Court Innovation, had an opportunity to sit down and talk with two of the visitors,
Susie Martin who’s the court administrator for the Aneth district court, and Lucinda Yellowhair who’s the chief probation
officer for the Navajo Nation. At the outset of our conversation, I asked Susie Martin to explain the kinds of cases
the Aneth district court handles.

SUSIE MARTIN: We handle pretty
much a wide variety of cases. It could be anything such as civil case where domestic violence is involved, could
be temporary protection order; or it could be a name change, a simple name change case. We handle juvenile cases,
as well as criminal cases, adult criminal cases—anywhere from battery to sexual assault, assault.

WOLF:
So maybe since you’re here visiting the Red Hook Community Justice Center, you could explain what interest you have
in developing a community court.

MARTIN: Well, how this all started
was the chief justice of the Navajo nation with some other judges came out about a year ago I believe, maybe a little
bit more than a year ago, and decided to look at their community court and they thought it was really interesting
how their concept follows the actual traditional Navajo concept. They’re willing to give the person another chance,
allowing the person to speak for themselves, instead of just hammering them down with “this is what you’ll do, you
don’t have a voice in this” and just being adversarial, allowing the person to have a say in their rehabilitation.
It’s more or less restorative justice, and that’s how the Navajo concept is. So that’s what they saw and they said,
“well, why can’t we do it; this is part of our culture.” And that’s why she volunteered to have it as a pilot project
for the Aneth District Court. That’s where we started from.

WOLF:
And that’s Judge Irene Black, right, who’s also here on the tribal visit.

MARTIN:
That’s correct.

WOLF: Maybe you could describe to me how you might
integrate some of what you’ve seen here into what you’re doing.

LUCINDA YELLOWHAIR:
The chief justice’s emphasis is to get out of the Western formalities of the legal system in our courts and the Navajo
courts and into what he saw here he thought was very interesting. He’s trying to get away from the Western adversarial
system and be able to bring our people in and say let’s try to use the restorative justice in this innovative court,
you know, environment.

WOLF: So just so I understand the court system,
even though you have these traditions that are very much like what you’re seeing here in Red Hook, the court as it’s
practiced right now sort of evolved and adopted a lot of the Western traditions even though they’re not your traditions.
And so, then, coming here and seeing this is sort of a way to—it’s sort of like a circle. You’re going back and saying,
“Wait, wait, wait. We—this is in our traditions, as well. We can not only—we’re not just borrowing from Red Hook;
we’re actually using Red Hook to get back to what we already know and what we do.”

YELLOWHAIR:
And enhance it.

WOLF: And enhance it.

MARTIN:
There’s a former justice, Raymond Austin, refers to it as “back to the future.”

YELLOWHAIR:
Right.

WOLF: I see. Well, so I wonder maybe it’s too soon, but I
just wonder after you’ve been here for two days, what kinds of takeaways you’re getting. What are you seeing that
you like and you think you might be able to adapt? And perhaps you’re seeing some things you don’t—you don’t think
would fit.

MARTIN: We’re so used to the adversarial system where
everything is procedural. Everything is we have to do it in a certain way and it has to be done according to a schedule.
But we need to relax. We need to realize that in order for people to feel comfortable, you have to allow them to
be themselves and so that they can express themselves freely, but at the same time there needs to be some control.
So we have to find that balance I think. Right now we’re too set in this adversarial system where we feel like it’s
got to be procedure; it’s got to be authoritative; and we have to bring the hammer down. That’s what we’re believing
right now, and we need to come out of that mode.

YELLOWHAIR: And
I think by coming here and seeing the other side of that, we were going to take back the you know observation that
we saw and say, you know, this could work like Susie said. We’re going to be able to take it back and see if we can
balance that, talk to chief and say, “Okay, now chief, this is what’s going to happen and this is what we saw. Are
you ready for that?” One of the other things that I’ve noticed is the bar right here in front, you know, right in
front of the gallery. Okay. And in the other court, formal court setting, it’s closed out. There is a gate, you know,
a half door.

WOLF: Right.

YELLOWHAIR:
This, there’s none. And I think chief would like this idea because right now our chief justice does not wear a robe
when he’s on the bench. He doesn’t believe that. And so, his bench is lower and he doesn’t wear a robe.

MARTIN: And just to add to that, one of the newer courts that was built, Delcon
Court, which is in Arizona, they don’t have a bench there at all. It’s just an open—it’s shaped in a hogon style.
And the judge is sitting on the same level as the defendants, and they’re in an open setting. So they’re more or
less moving away from the concept of the adversarial system, the formal, the judge sitting higher and the defendant
is down here. They can’t speak unless they speak through their attorneys. We’re trying to move away from that.

WOLF: I wonder, you know, here there’s sort of this balance between sort of
breaking with tradition by linking defendants to services and trying to, you know, an emphasis on healing or trying
to restore them. But there’s still the use of court as an authority, for instance through monitoring. I wonder if
any of that resonates with you as well, where you sort of have both, to have authority but you also have an emphasis
on healing.

YELLOWHAIR: Yes. I think now I see why—there’s two new
courts that are going up. And in the building planning of these two buildings, I was thinking about it earlier this
morning as, you know, when the clinical portion of the court is right across the hallway from the courtroom.

WOLF: Yeah. Here in Red Hook.

YELLOWHAIR:
Right. And I remember thinking back, the new buildings, the schematics, the design of the new building does have
that setting where the social workers and the clinical physicians that are going to be coming aboard have an office
right next to the courtrooms. And I thought, okay, somebody was thinking ahead. And I’m thinking, okay, puzzles are
actually fitting. And then I thought, oh my God, is it possible that one day we’ll be able to just walk across the
hallway and get an assessment within an hour rather than a month and a half that we actually—

WOLF:
It takes a month and a half?

YELLOWHAIR: Realistically, today, it
takes a month and a half.

WOLF: And is that because of
the distance I heard referenced to before or just a resource issue?

YELLOWHAIR:
The lack of resources issue and the distances, yes.

WOLF: Both.

YELLOWHAIR: Yes.

WOLF: Wow.

YELLOWHAIR: And so, maybe this whole concept of innovative court system is
actually—it’s coming. We just didn’t realize it.

MARTIN: Of course,
we’re going to be a little bit different because we don’t have the resources readily available. But we have to find
ways to make this happen. And one unique program I think we have is peacemaking, which Red Hook doesn’t have. But
we can use that; that’s a resource. And we have to find our own resources to try and fit into this program. And that’s
what we need to do, and those are the ideas we’re receiving from this visit we had.

YELLOWHAIR:
Not only the peacemaking but the case manager officers for juveniles that are in the facility right now. We have
case managers and the grant—it’s funded under a grant right now, but chief justice would like for it, for the program
to eventually come on board to the court system. And they call it nahamdebahasla; that means
kind of taking a whole—the whole thing. But these are—this is regarding kids that are in custody right now.

WOLF: And I just think it’s very exciting to hear you talk about it. And it
just sounds like an exciting time. And I just wonder if Aaron who’s familiar with Red Hook and has visited you and
seen things, I wonder what observations you have about potential for community court concepts to work in the Navajo
Nation.

AARON ARNOLD: Well, I certainly couldn’t say it any better
than Susie and Cindy have already said it. But the one thing that I have taken away from this year and a half long
learning experience, this sharing experience, is that there are aspects of the Navajo court system that are light
years ahead of where we are. They have resources; they have history; they have traditions; they have foundations
that we don’t have. In some ways they’re way ahead of where we are in the state court systems. And in other ways,
the state court systems, you know, have things that we learned to our work that we can share. And listening to these
two wise women speak now, it really is great for me to hear because I think we’re all on the same page realizing
that this tribal community and tribal communities in general have so much foundation, history, and tradition that
they can use and they already are using. And just by adding those little pieces that the state court system has honed
and has learned through the problem-solving court movement is a way to kind of blend tradition and formality. It’s
a way to blend the adversarial process with the traditional process in a way to bring together the best of both worlds
to strengthen everyone’s court system. So it’s terrific for me to hear. And the one thing I wanted to ask Susie and
Cindy is, you know, we’ve talked a little bit about how the Bureau of Justice Assistance is really thrilled that
Chief Justice Yazzi approached us and we had this ongoing collaboration over the last year and a half. And I know
that when we travel to conferences and with other tribal communities, other tribal communities are starting to get
wind of this and they’re getting excited to see how it turns out. And I’m wondering how it makes you both feel or
how you both react to know that there are people who are really excited about this collaboration or anxious to see
how it turns out.

YELLOWHAIR: Well, what’s happening and what has
unfolded here before us, as you remember, Aaron, when you came out the last time you were out there, Susie and I
sat there and looked at each other and we’re like, “Oh my God, this is something we’ve already been doing.” You know,
these are things that we have already used and techniques we’ve been using over the years. And I remember back then
being in probation, helping people is very difficult, and especially when you acknowledge them or when they acknowledge
you through their kinship. Like a little boy that said I’m your dad, or a little child that says, “You’re my mom.”
I don’t have a mom and you become their mother. And back then we used to say wow, what are the possibilities of the
things we’re doing now? What if it unfolds one day and somebody actually sees it, and we see it happening. Well,
it’s happening; it’s happening. It’s something that was just a dream one time ago, something that we just thought
who is out there that would pick up the concept that we’re using; who would it be to do that. And it’s happening
today. And I think that’s what’s so rewarding. We just feel like everything you worked for, everything you said,
pleading with your clients—children and adults, grandfathers of plus-70 years old that I used to say to them, “What
are you doing here, grandpa? You’re supposed to be teaching me. Why are you here, me scolding you?” You know, and
then it’s here; it’s reality now. And when we get back, we’re going to say, “Wow, so, long years of work, hard work,
that has finally unfolded and somebody finally said, ‘Hey, I have an idea. Why don’t we put this into reality?’”
And I hope someday when we get it back to the Nation, we will be able to sit there when we’re 80 years old in our
rocking chair and say, yeah, we took part in that and be very proud of ourselves and knowing that we had a hand in
it.

ARNOLD: It’s such an honor for us to be involved in this whole
thing. We’re happy that we can do this all together and looking forward to see where it takes us.

WOLF:
I want to thank you so much for taking the time to share with me and, you know, people who visit our website. I’ve
been speaking with Lucinda Yellowhair who’s the Chief Probation Officer of the Navajo Nation; and Susie Martin, the
court administrator of the Aneth District Court, Navajo Nation; and Aaron Arnold who is the director of the Tribal
Justice Exchange of the Center for Court Innovation. And I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for
Court Innovation. Thanks for listening.

Dallas Community Courts Make Cleaner, Safer Streets a Top Priority Nov 01, 2010

Dianne Gibson, the manager of the community courts in Dallas, Texas, explains how the South Dallas Community
Court uses a combination of partnership and problem-solving to link homeless with services while eliminating neighborhood
eyesores.

ROBERT V. WOLF: This is Rob Wolf, director of
communications at the Center for Court Innovation. I’m recently back from Dallas where the Center for Court Innovation
sponsored with the Bureau of Justice Assistance Community Justice 2010, the first international conference of community
courts. Today I’d like to share with you a conversation I had with Dianne Gibson, who is one of the hosts of the
conference as the manager of the three community courts in Dallas. My role at the conference was to interview participants
for a video about community courts that the Center for Court Innovation is producing with support from the U.S. Bureau
of Justice Assistance. On our way to the South Dallas community court, which is one of three mentor community courts
in the United States, Dianne and I stopped at a parking lot near a carwash that had been once the site of a homeless
encampment. She described to me the conditions that used to exist there and how the community court collaborated
with various partners to address the problem.

DIANNE GIBSON:
This building here was one of the actual camp sites for homeless encampment. Also, the carwash used to have all kind
of activities. But thanks to our mayor, Mayor Tom Leppert got involved. Our councilperson, Councilwoman Carolyn Davis,
and our Southeast Dallas Police Department, the best division in Dallas, they all got involved with us, with the
city attorney, and we have made that a much better place, actually much better, much safer. And it’s really a carwash
now—not a flea market—it’s actually a carwash.

WOLF: And when you
say flea market, was it stolen goods?

GIBSON: Everything.
I mean one Saturday I came over, and I was like you guys, there’s actually a chuck wagon over here. And it was—they
were selling everything. They were selling movies; they were selling shoes. I was like you guys—I called Ros and
told her, you cannot believe what I am looking at.

WOLF: Ros Jeffers?

GIBSON: Uh-huh. Ros Jeffers, which is the executive assistant city attorney
that’s over community prosecution, over community courts. But I just couldn’t believe it. I was like anything you
want to buy. And my joke was, girl, I think I can buy my house over here.

WOLF:
And how did that impact quality of life in the neighborhood?

GIBSON:
It had a total impact. The neighbors were all complaining and they were brought to our attention. We have one neighbor
that’s a property owner next to the carwash. He actually brought a video to the court to show us that the video showed
us on the weekend, on Saturdays and Sundays, that there were actually just so many cars you couldn’t even come down
Martin Luther King Boulevard. You couldn’t get to the carwash. They were parking on his property and damaging his
sprinkler system, damaging in his grass and everything.

WOLF: How
did you respond to the problems?

GIBSON: What we did was is that
we actually teamed together. They came in and cleaned out the entire camp. Those that had active warrants, I’m sorry
to say had to be actually transported. Those that needed housing, we were able to try and locate them housing.

WOLF: So when you say “to clean it out,” what did the team consist of? And
how did you do it? Was it a one-time thing? You came in, in one day?

GIBSON:
No. We’ve done it several times. We had to do it several times in order to actually get the message across that this
is not a place to actually set up an encampment. So you have to do it at least several times before they actually
get the message that you know what, we’re going to have to move somewhere else because each time we set up, they’re
going to come back through and clean it up.

WOLF: And so, who was
actually involved? Were the police here? Were social service agencies?

GIBSON:
Yes. Dallas police department, social service agency, TXDOT, and the community prosecution. It was all a team effort.

WOLF: And you came down at night or during the day?

GIBSON: No, during the day; during the day.

WOLF: And what’s TXDOT?

GIBSON:
TXDOT is the highway—that does the bridges, the highway bridges and what have you. They’re the people that manage
that part of it.

WOLF: When you responded,
you said you, you know, some people with warrants had to be incarcerated or processed through the justice system.

GIBSON: Right. We tried to get an assessment. If it was treatment,
try to get them in treatment. If it was housing, try to locate housing for them.

WOLF: Maybe you could put this in context for me. So the court
was involved, which for a traditional court would be probably an unusual thing. But for a community court, it’s kind
of part of doing business, isn’t it?

GIBSON:
It’s everyday business with community courts because each person that comes into community court, there’s a certified
case worker there that does an assessment. Once they have been arraigned and they enter a plea of not guilty or no
contest, that person then sees a case worker. And the case worker would do a full assessment on that individual to
find out what are the underlying problems, what are some of the needs. Once they’ve identified those needs—and those
needs could be just anywhere from the fact that I just need some proper identification or I need treatment for drugs,
alcohol, job placement, job training, maybe it’s disability, or maybe it’s just somebody that needs housing—and so,
whatever that need may be, then the case worker and our job is to try and find some of our community partners to
address the need.

WOLF: One of the principles
of community court is combining punishment and help. So in addition to providing links to services and helping people
address their underlying problems whether it’s drug addiction or homelessness that might fuel criminal behavior,
how do you—where does punishment come in?

GIBSON:
The punishment phase comes in if they can’t afford to pay the fine in court costs, then they have to come back to
this very community and actually do community service projects. Like some of our community service people
will actually help us clean up and keep these lots clean. And that’s what they will actually come back and do. They
will come back to the very community that they committed the crime to do the cleanup. And that’s part of the punishment
phase.

WOLF: And how long has Dallas had
community courts?

GIBSON: Six years. We just
celebrated six years, September 30th.

WOLF:
And you recently opened your third community court.

GIBSON:
We recently opened our third court April 2010. Thanks to our mayor, Dwaine Caraway.

WOLF: So clearly, the Dallas community responded positively to the community
court experience.

GIBSON: Yes. Thanks to
our Mayor and city council people. They have been tremendous; I mean, excellent supporters.

WOLF: And the residents like the gentleman you mentioned whose
sprinklers are being damaged by the cars and stuff, do you get support from the people who live in the community?

GIBSON: Yes. We get excellent support from the community people
especially our homeowners association president. We have a group that we call the Golden Girls. And these are just
these little senior citizens that make sure they keep us abreast of everything that’s going on. They either
are going to call the community prosecutor. They’re going to call the court. But anything that’s going on to deteriorate
their neighborhood in any way, they’re going to let us know. We actually bring city hall into the community.

WOLF: How has the South Dallas neighborhood changed since the South
Dallas Community Court opened?

GIBSON: One
of the things that we are most proud of is the fact that now we have a 93 percent compliance rate in South Dallas.
So we’re just really excited. And in addition to that, vacant lots that used to be so, just an eyesore in the community
are no longer eyesores. In addition to that, those people that needed help, that was on the streets, that needed
treatment, that needed other services, we were able to help some of those people get off the street. And so, naturally,
we haven’t saved everybody, but we haven’t stopped trying either. But those that we did make a difference in their
lives, they are now going from being in the streets to now being productive members of society. And so, we want to
say that we made a difference in their lives. In addition to beautifying the community, like one thing is working
on that carwash now, people now on weekends can ride up and down Martin Luther King Boulevard without the traffic
congestion now. Thanks to no-parking signs and what have you. They can now actually go to the carwash and really
get a carwash.

WOLF: That’s great.

GIBSON: Yeah.

WOLF:
Imagine that.

GIBSON: Yes. So those are some
of the things. And so, hopefully, we have actually reduced the crime in this area. Thanks to the southeast police
division and working in partnership. So all together, what we’re trying to do is not only making a beautiful neighborhood
but making a safer neighborhood.

WOLF: Thanks,
Dianne. It’s been really interesting talking to you. And I’ve been talking to Dianne Gibson who’s the manager of
the three community courts in Dallas, Texas. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications of the Center for Court Innovation.
Thanks for listening.

David Kennedy: Innovating New Approaches to Justice (Part II) Jul 30, 2010

Professor David Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention & Control at John Jay College
of Criminal Justice, shares some of what he’s learned about new approaches to addressing gang violence and open-air
drug dealing.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi. I’m Rob Wolf, director
of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. This month’s podcast is the second in a row to offer excerpts
from a presentation given to Center for Court Innovation staff by Professor David Kennedy, director of the Center
for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Kennedy spoke about his work helping develop
the Boston Gun Project, Operation CeaseFire, and the Drug Market Initiative. All of these projects, to some extent,
harnessed informal social control to help change offenders’ behavior. In fact, Kennedy says, mothers and neighbors
and friends could do far more to influence behavior than police patrols and fear of justice system and consequences.

DAVID KENNEDY: The mothers matter more than the cops. When my own
soul doesn’t guide me properly, and my mom and my friends and my girlfriend do that all that’s more important than
what the cops do, they don’t have to restrict it to a level of juvenile offenses. You don’t have to wait for somebody
to be arrested. The basic insights of the restorative justice are just true; you can take them and use them.

WOLF: Kennedy went on to talk about the importance of legitimacy. His point
and a point he said that is also made by fellow academics, Tom Tyler and Tracey Meares, is that the more legitimacy
police and the criminal justice system have, the more effective they and the law are.

KENNEDY:
But the basic notion here is that even bad guys mostly obey the law. I have these conversations with people in my
world who say guns have become the preferred method of dispute resolution. No, they’re not. Everybody would be dead
if that were true. Even the worst guys behave pretty well most of the time, and they don’t do it because they’re
afraid of the cops; they do it for all kinds of other reasons. And that the more the agents of the state are viewed
as legitimate, the more effective they are. When they make mistakes, it matters less; the more power the law has.
And in these communities, law enforcement has next to no legitimacy. And this is where stop snitching’s coming from.
This is where the withdrawal and placing these communities is coming from. That turns out to be something that can
be directly addressed. And it is driven by at least two correctible things. It is driven by actual bad and offensive
police practices, which can be changed. And it is driven by out-and-out misunderstandings which can be addressed.
And it turns out that in practice they can be addressed quite directly.

WOLF:
Earlier in the discussion Kennedy pointed out some of the misperceptions that fuel mistrust between police and the
community. At the conclusion of his remarks, however, Kennedy pointed out that the police and the community and even
offenders, although they may not realize it, actually have a lot in common.

KENNEDY:
At root there turns out to be broad and fundamental and important common ground here, so I began with police and
communities—I will add to that now because this is the way I’ve come to think about this—offenders like the three
core groups involved in all of these are law enforcement, communities and offenders. And it turns out that all three
groups agree on very important things. Nobody wants anybody who doesn’t absolutely have to go to jail. Everybody
agrees on that—almost. There’s a small, small departures in each of these areas. But in many places at any rate,
most of all these constituencies agree on all this. And nobody wants anybody who doesn’t have to, to go to jail.
Nobody wants people to get hurt. Nobody doesn’t want even seasoned bad guys to turn their lives around and succeed.
The hardest bitten cop unless he’s a bit of a sociopath would rather somebody get a job than go to federal prison.
They may not believe that that’s possible. But if they’re faced with a choice, that’s the way they feel about it.
Everybody it turns out—and this is hard to articulate for many people, but it is, in fact, true—everybody would prefer
that any remaining criminality be non-violent and non-intrusive. So nobody really thinks that we’re going to get
rid of all misbehavior. And if you have a choice between misbehavior at a certain level, accompanied by high levels
of public chaos and gun violence, and that same misbehavior, absent the public chaos and gun violence, most people
are willing to say that B is better than A. And that’s a lot of what’s happened in New York.

I
got in enormous trouble at the National Network Conference in December by standing in front of the room at a plenary
presentation and saying “I have been in friends’ apartments in Manhattan when the weed guy came by.” And I thought
he was another guest; he wasn’t. He was somebody very, very neatly dressed with a beautiful silver Halliburton briefcase.
And when he opened it on my friend’s kitchen counter, it was full of beautifully packaged, very expensive weed. So
there’s lots of dope in New York still. There’s very little public drug dealing south of about 160th Street and outside
East New York and Brownsville. That’s a good thing. And it’s very, very hard for especially people in law enforcement
to take this as anything but surrender or an implicit dirty deal or something like that. It doesn’t have to be any
of those things. There are lots and lots of and lots of places in which there is rampant criminality and the communities
fundamentally safe. And a lot of the reason that’s true is because serious bad guys aren’t stupid enough to do drive-bys
over their girlfriend’s new boyfriend because it’s bad for business and it brings heat. And this is a conversation
you can have with chaotic thugs. You can say do you think the Mafia behaves like this? No, they don’t. They don’t
do it because they’re good people; they do it because they know it’s stupid. If you’re going to be a thug, be a smart
thug. And they get it, right? And you can have that conversation without surrendering. It’s not a dirty deal; it’s
just true. And you can, in fact, say to the—everybody’s playing both ends against the middle on this. Everyone in
the community says there’s just as much dope in the suburbs as here, but you guys are racists because you’re only
kicking their doors in. The true answer is nobody’s getting killed in the suburbs; and that’s true. So if we can
create suburban conditions here, that would be just fine. And everybody thinks that, in fact, it’s not just fine,
but it’s better than where we are.

And at root it turns out that everybody’s miserable right now.
We may not know it because we’re so used to it. But the cops are miserable; the prosecutors are miserable; the judges
are miserable; and probation officers are miserable. The thugs are getting killed and hurt and nobody’s getting rich.
The people in the community are scared and intruded upon. Nobody’s having a good time. And it turns out
that you can recognize that; you can say it out loud; and you can go through what is in fact a reconciliation in
truth-telling process that says all of these things are true; here’s the way it’s really working. Nobody likes it.
Can we agree on the following? Can we agree that the small, hard core that’s driving the worst stuff should be identified,
should be spoken to, should be put on notice about what further misbehavior will bring, that we should avoid to the
extent humanly possible leading with enforcement and actually we should try to keep them out of prison, we should
help them if they’ll take it, and that they should hear from people they respect that they are loved and valued but
that certain aspects of their behavior are wrong and need to stop. You say that to people and virtually nobody says,
“Well, actually, I like it better the way we’re doing it right now.” And then you can do this stuff and things change.

WOLF: That was David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and
Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice sharing some of what he’s learned through his decades of experience
innovating new approaches to gang violence and open-air drug dealing. He was speaking during a presentation to staff
at the Center for Court Innovation. You can hear more excerpts from his presentation by listening to last month’s
New Thinking podcast. To learn more about the Center for Court Innovation, visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.
I’m Rob Wolf. Thanks for listening.

David Kennedy: The Story behind the Drug Market Initiative (Part I) Jun 30, 2010

Professor David Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention & Control at John Jay College
of Criminal Justice, explains how the Boston Gun Project laid the groundwork for the Drug Market Initiative pilot
in High Point, N.C.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi. I’m Rob Wolf, director
of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. For this month’s podcast I’m going to share with you some excerpts
from a presentation given to Center for Court Innovation staff by Professor David Kennedy, director of the Center
for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Next month will be part two of Kennedy’s
presentation. Kennedy spearheaded a number of justice innovations, including the Boston Gun Project’s Operation CeaseFire
and the Drug Market Initiative. The strategy share common elements and they also build on each other as Kennedy and
his collaborators learn as they go. In this first excerpt, Kennedy talks about the development of the Boston Gun
Project and how its success led Kennedy to start thinking about how to shut down open-air drug markets.

DAVID KENNEDY: Many of you will have heard about Operation CeaseFire and the
Boston Gun Project and all that sort of thing. When we did that work in Boston, it identified on the basis of stories
that we were told by frontline law enforcement, and which we were then able to apply some very simple research tools
to, it identified about 60 drug groups in Boston that turned out to be responsible for probably two-thirds, three-quarters
of the youth homicide in Boston and 50 percent of all homicides citywide. We also learned from the frontline cops
something that they have been doing to calm down particular groups, a crackdown—a very sophisticated robust but actually
recognizable crackdown. What was unusual about what they did, in addition to that, was they also had community partners—black
activist churches and neighborhood groups and such like that—who they would also focus on these groups to say to
them, “This is dumb; there’s a way out; here is access to other opportunities to mediation and interruption,” and
that sort of thing. And they had built bridges to employers and agencies in the city so they could offer
concrete services and job placement and that kind of thing.

But they did all of these on a context
that while this was all being focused on the group, they would say to the group we are doing this because you are
shooting the place up. And if you want us to go back to business as usual, not to what you do whatever you want but
just to go back to the status quo, the shooting has to stop. What we added to it was an attempt to take it citywide.
So rather than doing it one group at a time, we identified probationers and parolees from all the groups in the city;
we had them brought to a meeting as a condition of their supervision; we read this basic script to them in the meeting
and said to them, look the next group that kills somebody after you all leave the room, that’s where this crackdown’s
going to happen, and if you want that kind of attention, let somebody you run shoot somebody. And after two meetings
the shootings stopped for all practical purposes, and that was the Boston Miracle. So effectively, what CeaseFire
did was discipline the drug crews and that left behind the next most important toxic public safety issue in these
neighborhoods, which is at that point untouched open-air drug market. There is nothing short of open public violence
that’s more of an insult to a community than a street drug market. And so, naturally enough, we started chopping
logic on whether this new set of ideas we’re working with might fit this problem. My recollection is that I had the
core of the drug market operation in my head by late 1996 or early 1997.

WOLF:
That was Professor David Kennedy explaining how the Boston Gun Project laid the groundwork for the Drug Market Initiative.
It took him seven years to find a jurisdiction willing to test the strategy. That jurisdiction was High Point, North
Carolina, which applied the strategy to a neighborhood called West End in 2004. In this excerpt Kennedy explains
how the strategy focuses on the market rather than the drugs.

KENNEDY:
So one idea was that this was about drug markets and not about drugs. When I taught this at the Kennedy School, my
favorite moment was coming into my graduate seminar and closing the door and saying, “Okay, you’ve all spent the
last week doing readings about drugs and drug markets, which was all trouble neighborhood, street minority stuff.
So let’s talk about drug markets. Show of hands, who can buy drugs in this building?” And my graduate students would
look shocked. And every single time, two-thirds of them would raise their hand. And then we had a discussion about
why the Todman building at the Kennedy School government was a drug market which it is, of course, as schools are.
And then about why nobody thought about the Todman building at the Kennedy School, when we started talking about
drug markets, and the reason for that, of course, is that there’s no street-walking; there are no guns; there is
no drive-through buying; there are no groups of young men terrifying the residents. And that’s the difference between
framing this as a drug issue—and what that implies is we need to get rid of the drugs—and framing it as a drug market
issue, which says there are more toxic and less toxic forms of drug markets. Now what the West End was doing was
the most toxic form of the drug market. And if we could change that drug market even without doing anything at all
necessarily about drugs as such, that would restore the core community conditions.

WOLF:
Another key element of the Drug Market Initiative is the banked case, which is a case that’s prepared against the
key drug market participant and then effectively pocketed for a rainy day. The idea is to create a certain consequence
if the offender insists on continuing to participate in the drug market after being warned. But here’s Kennedy explaining
it better than I can.

KENNEDY: If we do the investigation, have the
case, keep the arrest available, that means we can say to somebody the next time you go out, your prison risk is
one in one; and because we have that ready to go now, we can put you on prior notice. And one of the astonishing
things to narcotics enforcement people is that guys who they believe don’t care about going to jail because that’s
what they say when you got them in handcuffs, when they’re put on prior notice like this, they don’t want to go to
jail at all. And this turns out to have a very, very powerful deterring impact.

WOLF:
In his presentation to the Center for Court Innovation, Kennedy also talked about other elements of the Drug Market
Initiative, including the importance of informal social control, that is, having community leaders and drug dealers’
families come out in unison and say, “We want you to stop dealing in drugs.” He also talked about the importance
of offering services to drug dealers to help them get jobs and skills. And he also dealt at length about one of the
key steps in the initiative, which is bridging the wide gap between law enforcement and community perceptions of
each other. As Kennedy explains it, the gap was so wide that when he initially tried to interest jurisdictions in
the Drug Market Initiative, they basically laughed him out of their offices.

KENNEDY:
The main reason that turned out that people thought this was beyond laughable was because both key, or so I saw at
the time, both key partners in this—and I was thinking them at the time as law enforcement and what we usually call
the community, which is good people in the community—both of those groups had entirely written off the other. And
if you are the way I am about this, which is the way most of us are about this, you have heard this and either you
identify with one side or the other or you just can’t take it in. And I was in the latter camp. I have
been hearing it for 20 years, and it had bounced off my consciousness and fallen on the ground with a big clank because
I just couldn’t—I couldn’t deal with it. And it’s pretty simple. On the community side, when you talk to
the community about drugs—and I’m talking about for the most part very, very long-term historically damaged, presently
devastated African-American communities—at best the community has written the police off. They have not done us any
good. We call; we plead. We still got drug dealers on the corner; we still got the crack house next door. The next
step from there, which is prevalent in all communities and dominant I think in most to them, is a belief that law
enforcement is either behind or actively taking advantage of the drug trade in order to do the community deliberate
damage. And this is the idea that the CIA invented crack and pumped it into the neighborhoods with Ollie North.

And everybody looked at this lady in the back. You are doing what we do when we hear this. We smile; we
roll our eyes; we nod, right? And sorry, I pick on people. But this is what happens, right? People who are not of
this set of beliefs smile and roll their eyes and nod, and nobody knows what to say about this. It’s too insane for
words to actually believe that the government is doing this on purpose as a deliberate intervention to do racially
motivated harms in these communities. And that is, in fact, what many in many communities—most people actually believe.
And the first time I ever set foot in a drug market, I heard this from black residents in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s
and I’ve been hearing it ever since.

If you have that same conversation in law enforcement circles,
what law enforcement believes is the drug dealers are psychopaths. They are doing incredible damage to themselves,
their community; they don’t care. Their families are broken or they wouldn’t let their kids do the stuff. There is
no moral backbone left in the community because nobody stands up against what’s going on and says there’s right and
there’s wrong and act like it. Everybody plays the victim card at all times. And the cop kills the kid and there
are 5,000 people marching on city hall. But that’s not what’s driving the body count. And when a black kid kills
another kid, nobody says a word.

And you start a sentence—and this is a true story from Richmond,
Virginia where we were trying to get some of the stuff going—you start a sentence which begins it’s very hard to
work with the communities on this; and my second clause was because they are historically so angry at the rest of
us, and the narcotics guy, and this is what he did in Richmond, jumps in and says because they are all living off
drug money and that is what the cops really believe. So I love my narcotics cops, friends; I really do.
They are amazing people and they are destroying the village in order to save it. They don’t mean to, but that’s what’s
going on. They stop everybody that moves; they kick on doors.

Anybody who’s ever done street drug
enforcement in any of these neighborhoods knows that rampant illegality is the norm; it just is. People get stopped;
they get searched; they get handcuffed; they get put on the ground; their rights are violated. There’s no respect
for probable cause. It is just the way it works. And the community does not like this. We work in areas like the
West End. We arrest cohort after cohort after cohort of young men. Majorities of males end up with criminal records.
They will never get a decent job. They have no reason to finish school. The collective objective damage of drug enforcement
on the neighborhood is catastrophic. And the cops know they’re doing it in order to protect the community. And they
are and I accept that and they believe it. The community looks at that and says this is just the Klan by other means.
And there’s this weird symmetry, right? The cops look at the crack dealers and say they’re not getting rich; it’s
not working for them; they’re not getting anywhere; they’re doomed. Everybody knows this isn’t going to work. They
keep on doing it, so obviously, they’re, you know, irrational and psychopathic. The community looks at the cops and
says they do the same thing over and over again; it doesn’t work and they know it doesn’t work. Obviously, they’re
corrupt and racist.

WOLF: You’ve been listening to David Kennedy
talking about the incredible misperceptions that can separate law enforcement from some of the communities that are
trying to help. He was speaking during a presentation to staff at the Center for Court Innovation about the Drug
Market Initiative, which he piloted in High Point, North Carolina. Next month we’ll hear excerpts from the rest of
Kennedy’s presentation. In the meantime, if you want to find out more about the Drug Market Initiative, you can visit
http://drugmarketinitiative.msu.edu. To learn more about the Center for Court Innovation, please visit our website
at www.courtinnovation.org. I’m Rob Wolf. Thanks for listening.

Red Hook Community Justice Center Marks its 10-Year Anniversary Jun 07, 2010

This podcast includes observations from the presiding judge, Alex Calabrese, and short interviews by Director
of Communications Robert V. Wolf with the Brooklyn D.A.’s Chief Assistant District Attorney Anne Swern and Captain
Kenneth Corey, commander of the 76th Precinct.

ROBERT V. WOLF:
Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. When the Red Hook Community
Justice Center was created in the year 2000, no one could predict its impact or how long it would last. But 10 years
later, we have some idea.

Crime is down significantly, countless people from around the country
and the world have visited, and the Justice Center continues to innovate.

What is the Justice
Center? At its core, it’s a multi-jurisdictional courtroom that combines housing, family, and criminal cases
before a single judge, who has at his disposal not just conventional sanctions like fines and jail, but an array
of on-site social services to address issues like addiction, employment, and housing.

Justice
Center staff hosted a small reception in April to celebrate the center’s 10 year anniversary. Among the speakers
was Judge Alex Calabrese, who talked about the remarkable drop in crime in Red Hook.

JUDGE
CALABRESE: Most importantly, in 2006 and 2007, the 76 precinct, our local precinct, had the highest
percentage in New York City. And the 2008, 2009 numbers have remained relatively flat and low.

And
so when people feel safer, it raises public confidence in the justice system. And so when the traditional court system
had an 88 percent unfavorable rating before we opened, in a 2004 survey, 78 percent of the community gave a favorable
rating to the Justice Center and in a 2009 survey that number increased to 94 percent of community members giving
the Red Hook Community Justice Center a favorable rating.

That’s an amazing number if you
think about it. In fact, maybe it’s time to retire because there’s only one way that number can go

WOLF:
After the judge and other speakers, I caught up with two people whose agencies are key collaborators in the center’s
work: Kenneth Corey, Commander of the 76th precinct, and Anne Swern, First Assistant District Attorney to Brooklyn
D.A. Joe Hines. First Commander Corey.

COREY: The Justice Center
is a tremendous asset for us, you know, from the host of programs that they provide to the alternative sentencing,
and just being a partner to us in this ongoing battle, so to speak, to keep the community safe. Just having this
one-stop shop, you know, where you know, the low-level crimes and the sentences, and the housing issues all get worked
out together by the same judge. The results speak for themselves. It’s truly been tremendous.

WOLF:
Well let me ask you, how long have you been a police officer?

COREY:
22 years.

WOLF: So 22 years ago, when you started, you know, what
was your thinking about how much influence the criminal justice system could have on quality of life in the community
and crime?

COREY: 22 years ago, we didn’t, we didn’t focus
on community, on quality of life crimes at all. You know, it was all violent felonies and that was about it.

You
know, we used to term it ‘Big Justice’ because you’d lock somebody up, they’d go through the revolving
door and be out the next day. You know, when I was—actually in the mid-90s I was a sergeant in the 72nd precinct,
which also sends cases here. And one of the biggest quality-of-life-type crimes we had was street prostitution along
3rd Avenue under the Gowanus Expressway.

I had a team of cops, and we would lock up, without
exaggeration, more than 100 a month of prostitutes. And we’d lock them up on Monday night, and we’d lock
them up again on Tuesday night, and on Wednesday night and everything else.

So in 2005 I actually
went back to the 72nd precinct as the executive officer. That’s one of the first things I noticed is that the
prostitutes were gone. The problem had largely been eradicated. And you know, I come to find out that a lot of that
had to do with the Justice Center and getting these people drug treatment, job training, and things like that.

WOLF:
It must be very exciting to be a police officer at this time.

COREY:
It’s wonderful, it really is. I mean it’s – and again, it’s completely different from what it was
20 years ago when I started.

WOLF: And what do you think are the
key elements of, of what has made the difference? What are the ingredients? If someone wanted to package it, you
know, what would you put in that package?

COREY: Well you know,
I’ve always believed that one of the most important things is that the police and the community, in this case,
the court, all have to work together. You know, the police can’t be viewed as an occupying army in a community;
they have to be partners with the community.

The community has to tell us what their problems
are and work with us to solve their problems, and we have a lot of that going on. There are a lot of people who are
actively involved in the community, from coaching a little league baseball team, to other kinds of volunteerism and
again, just letting us know what’s going on so that we can address their concerns.

WOLF:
Just one more thing, the remarkable turnaround in terms of the number of murders in the, in this area, like what
do you attribute that to, because that’s such a – that seems so much removed from the quality-of-life business
that comes through the Justice Center.

COREY: Yeah, but a lot of
that was just – it is far removed from it, but it was the same people. It was, you know, the problems with the kids
hanging out on the corner which affected quality-of-life problems; those were the same people who may have either
been the perpetrators or the victims of a homicide.

You know, it escalated as a dispute and instead
of fighting with their fists, they went to guns. So the crackdown on the quality-of-life crimes removed a lot of
guns from the street, either because they got arrested or people were afraid they were going to get arrested and
left the gun in the house, and by the time they went and got it, cooler heads may have prevailed.

WOLF:
Great, thank you so much. That was Kenneth Corey, commander of the 76th Precinct.

Afterwards
I spoke with Anne Swern, first assistant district attorney to Brooklyn D.A. Joe Hines.

What has
changed in terms of the potential you feel a prosecutor has to make a neighborhood safe? ANNE SWERN: Well, I think
Red Hook signifies some of those changes that are more global. Red Hook, for example, uses a lot of drug treatment,
uses a lot of alternative sentencing. Looks at the collateral consequence of a conviction to see—Does it undermine
a person’s ability to get a job, or to be employed? Does it help with employment?—All of those things to create
an environment where people can succeed after their case, become productive for their communities and their families,
and create a safer neighborhood.

So all of those things occur in Red Hook. Hopefully they occur
downtown. One of the wonderful things about Red Hook is that everyone here is really committed to excellence. The
building is committed to excellence; the people within it are committed to excellence; all of the wraparound service
providers are committed to excellence.

WOLF: With crime rates going
down, down—in the ’90s they went down and everyone was like ‘Wow, look what we did. Let’s pat ourselves
on the back.’ And then they have continued to go down. I wonder how far, knock on wood, how far can we go with this?

SWERN: Well first, I’m happy to report that since 1990 serious
crime, the index crimes, is down almost 80 percent in Brooklyn. So people should know that. And we are much safer
and much more secure in our persons, and our property, and much freer to walk about, play about, go about, establish
businesses, establish lives, and families, and residences here than ever before.

How far can
it go? I would like to say no crime. I would like to say, no homicides, no robberies, no rapes. But unfortunately
I don’t think that’s possible.

I think the best thing we can do is hedge against it.
Have proactive programs for education, preventive programs, so that we look at people most likely to offend or get
into trouble and give additional services to those people, and warn against it so that it doesn’t spike again.

How low can it go? I wish 100 percent. What I’m most concerned about is keeping it low and
doing the best that we can to keep it low, and I think we do that with preventive programs and targeting people most
likely to re-offend.

WOLF: One last thing. I just want to ask you
in this climate of budget cuts—national, state, city—are we at risk, perhaps, of, just because there isn’t the
money there, going backwards? I mean is there a way to consolidate these gains and move forward with the knowledge
we have learned and the experience we’ve acquired in fighting crime?

SWERN:
I would hope that we’re all smart on crime and smart on public safety and smart on public policy. But some of
these things, like this beautiful Red Hook court cost money.

When we’re talking about replicating
it, there are things you can and can’t do if you don’t have the money to do so. If the social service providers
are not given adequate funding. If the court system is not given adequate funding, if prosecutor and defender offices
are not given adequate funding, how do you staff a place like this? How do you build a place like this?

So
while we’re smart on consolidating and using resources wisely, there is a point where the rubber meets the road
that is resource-based. And we all have to decide where our precious few resources belong in order to keep us safe
and keep us productive and thriving.

WOLF: That was Anne Swern,
first assistant district attorney to Brooklyn D.A. Joe Hynes. We’ve been talking about the Red Hook Community
Justice Center, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. To find out more about the Justice Center or the
Center for Court Innovation, visit www.courtinnovation.org. I’m Rob Wolf, thanks for listening.

Confronting Gender Violence in Afghanistan Apr 08, 2010

Kristine Herman of the Center for Court Innovation spent three months in Afghanistan helping the attorney general
establish the nation’s first unit dedicated to prosecuting cases of violence against women. She spoke with the
Center’s Director of Communications Robert V. Wolf about her experience.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi. I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. And today
I’m talking with a colleague of mine, Kristine Herman who’s the director of Global Gender Initiatives and also our
associate director of Domestic Violence Programs. Kristine spent three months in Afghanistan from September to December
2009. Thanks, Kristine, for taking the time to talk to me.

KRISTINE HERMAN:
My pleasure.

WOLF: Tell me about this. You went to Afghanistan for
three months. What brought about this trip?

HERMAN: Well, there
is an international organization called the International Developmental Law Organization, and they had reached out
to me here at the Center to ask if I’d be interested in going to help the attorney general of Afghanistan create
the first violence against women prosecution unit.

WOLF: So tell
me, how do you go about designing and establishing a unit like this? What sort of resources are at your disposal?
What about the laws? What about staff? And perhaps this is too much for one question, but what is it like for you
coming in internationally, not speaking the language, and not even necessarily knowing their particular legal system?

HERMAN: Right. Well, I mean that is a very big question. I think
in some respects this was a perfect project for me to be able to do coming from nine years at the Center for Court
Innovation and the expertise that we have here because the skills and the principles in creating a specialized project
of any kind were very transferable.

So the issues, you know, that come up in creating this and
the challenges and the process were not that different from working with folks in Australia or in Michigan or, you
know, really those kinds of things were perfectly transferable. I was able to do a process that was step-by-step
what I would want to do in any jurisdiction.

WOLF: Just give me
a quick overview what some of those steps are and you’re landing, you had three months.

HERMAN:
Yeah, yeah.

WOLF: So what are some of the steps that you went through?

HERMAN: So the very first step was having a planning team created.
And so, some of that is sort of who we would identify as needing to be at the table to plan this, but also having
the Attorney General’s Office decide who are they appointing to be part of this planning process and working closely
with them.

Then, of course, what we do at the Center all the time, we wanted to look at what’s
happening right now with any of these cases: what happens, what’s the current practice? so finding out what
the problem looks like there on the ground from the victim’s perspective, the social service providers’, you know,
and then how many cases make it to the police, then the prosecutors, and then eventually the courts.

And
what’s interesting trying to do that kind of analysis in Afghanistan is there’s no data-collection system. So there
isn’t an ability to do a caseload analysis for someone who’s looking up in a database, how many cases were reported
last year. This really required us to have individualized meetings with every piece of the process and ask them questions
about what they do keep as far as data, which is all on paper, and what anecdotally they think is happening.

And
some statistics and numbers exist. The Attorney General’s Office keeps some loose statistics in one department for
one area what it’s sort of, you know, and you can kind of infer from that what the problem really is.

The
next part of the process was really a combination of logistics like supports around space, office stuff, supplies,
the idea that they will need to have staff, how many staff?

In addition to that kind of logistical
stuff, we set apart to really draft protocols and procedures and policies around every issue that’s meaningful to
a specialized unit. So this planning document envisions what are the screening processes, what is the case eligibility
requirements, how they will flow through the unit from referral all the way to disposition and appeals.

Every
step of the way that I’m talking about was done through translators. Every piece of paper was written in our
native languages, translated through a translation department, and then given to the other partners to comment on
in their native language, and translated back into the other language.

WOLF:
How many languages were you working with?

HERMAN: Well, a grand
total of three although the dominant one was there was Dari, and then my language English, but there were some folks
who speak Pashto.

WOLF: You didn’t mention anything about having
to change the laws. And I know from previous conversations, you said that in fact the laws are on the books to protect
women. But perhaps you could talk to me about some of the cultural obstacles you encountered or the observations
you have about the culture or the lack of enforcement for these laws in the past.

HERMAN:
Yes. Absolutely. I mean the fascinating thing about Afghanistan is that on the books, on the face of it the laws
are really good. The constitution is new and cutting edge. It’s very, you know, egalitarian and anti-discrimination;
so it’s really a powerful constitution. And in fact, while I was there, right before I got there, they passed a Violence
Against Women Act.

So they have a law now that’s specifically around eliminating violence against
women which even specifies further crimes against women, very detailed; so forced prostitution, child marriage.

What’s
interesting about it is that despite these laws being on the books, there has been in the past zero enforcement of
these laws because of really traditional cultural practices and attitudes and beliefs about the status of women in
society.

WOLF: So for example?

HERMAN:
So for example, there are some traditional cultural practices called “baad” and “badal”. And what those—each of those
means respectively is that if you have a dispute with your neighbor, with a person in another village or there’s
a land dispute or a fight between families, one way to settle that is to trade daughters.

Those
daughters who are traded become not just servants and slaves within the new household, but then they’re also married
off to some much older male family member within the home often. So you’ve got, you know, forced labor; you’ve got
child or forced marriage. And that’s a cultural practice that exists. Selling of girls and daughters, it’s also
a traditional practice.

The number one reason women in Afghanistan are in prison is for a crime
that is not on the books—of running away. So running away from home is a crime simply because you don’t have the
right to not be in the home that you live in or were bought into or sold into. So that’s some of the cultural practices
that are in direct conflict with the law.

WOLF: So the law says
you, a woman, can choose where she wants to live.

HERMAN: Absolutely.
The law says that practices of baad or badal are illegal. The law says you cannot beat your wife, for example. However,
it is a very common practice to beat your wife in Afghanistan; and it is culturally acceptable if she behaves in
a way that you don’t find acceptable, that’s your response.

WOLF:
The law now protects them. How recent are these laws? Is this all a result of the Taliban being removed?

HERMAN:
Right.

WOLF: And under the Taliban’s code, it affirmed these cultural
practices?

HERMAN: I think that the Taliban really reinforced, perpetuated,
and even hardened some of these cultural practices. You know, some of the laws that are good laws aren’t actually
brand new. I mean the constitution is new, but some of the criminal laws are actually from the 60s and from earlier
times.

And so, you know, in the U.S. when we talk about domestic violence, we are necessarily
having to create a new law. In New York you are prosecuted for assault, right?

WOLF:
Right.

HERMAN: And similarly, in Afghanistan they could always apply
that crime in a case of violence against women. There’s been a horrific assault or beating or, you know, some of
the horrible cases where I interviewed women who had their nose chopped off by the husband’s family and their ears
chopped off by the husband’s family. Those family members were never prosecuted.

And of course,
under the law, even from the ’60s they could have been prosecuted and they were not. So it’s really application of
existing law that is lacking there and that sort of cultural will to address violence against women in a meaningful
way.

What was – I want to not be too negative here. What was very, very, very promising and optimistic
was that women in society 100 percent recognized this chasm between on the books and application. And they 100 percent
were totally self-aware of the problem culturally and traditionally with the practices that women and girls were
being subjected to and what they deserved under the law on a basic human rights level. They understood that huge
difference.

And so, there is a very big community of women who are working on this issue in Afghanistan,
who are writing about this issue, who are opening up shelters to help women victims of violence.

And
you know, there is not a lot of attention paid to it as sort of on the larger political sphere. But it is definitely
not something that’s been imposed from the outside, but it’s something that within the country itself that, you know,
50 percent of the population is well aware that there is maltreatment.

WOLF:
You finished your work in December. The unit—you established it. I understand when you came back that they have yet
to actually have a case. What’s the latest word that you’ve heard from your colleagues in Afghanistan?

HERMAN:
Right. So in January they finished a 20-hour training for the nine Violence Against Women prosecutors and an additional
seven key defense attorneys that we wanted to be really, really aggressively trained on violence-against-women issues.
These are defense attorneys who frequently are the attorneys for the women because often these issues get very muddied
and muddled and women victims of violence often are prosecuted (a) for running away, or (b) if they’re a victim
of rape but they can’t prove the rape case but you can prove intercourse outside of marriage, then the victim herself
is the one who goes to prison.

So you’ve got frequently the women victims of violence have their
own attorneys to help them with this very complicated issue of criminal issues and family issues and divorce issues
because you really can’t easily divorce or separate in Afghanistan or leave home. And they opened a unit, and
they started receiving referrals. I think the first two big cases they got were both cases of rape of children, girl
children within families; so by some extended family members, by brothers-in-law and multiple uncles. And so, by
taking these early cases that are really so egregious that most people would look and go, ‘This isn’t an okay practice.
Culturally, it’s not okay. You know, society is not okay.’

WOLF:
Because it’s involving young children.

HERMAN: Exactly. It’s a little
bit more of a sympathetic population.

WOLF: Right.

HERMAN:
You know, it’s helping to set the tone that these cases are important and we should be taking them seriously and
they’re going forward with those. So they started to receive their first cases. We’re pretty excited about it.

WOLF:
Do you think you’ve taken anything back with you, whether it’s lessons learned, things that didn’t work?

HERMAN:
Well, there’s certainly two things that come immediately to mind. The first one is simply that you can do a lot in
a short amount of time if you have very willing partners. So you know, we often, at least in the projects I worked
on, engage in a planning process that can take six months, nine months, 12 months. But truth be told, I really found
out from my experience there that you can do a lot in three months if you are meeting three times a week and five
days a week you’re trying to, you know, draft new agenda, you know, exchange documents, give each other draft versions
of things.

We did in three months what it normally would take me back here, you know, 10 to 12
months. So I felt very comfortable and confident that we can do a lot more with what we’re doing if we decided that
we wanted to and that we had partners who are really engaged as much as we’re engaged. So that’s a really exciting
thing.

WOLF: And you were cut off from family and friends.

HERMAN: Yeah. And then the other lesson I guess I learned was one I knew going
into it, but it was just so reinforced coming back. It was the importance of the community engagement piece.

And
I think that no one there really knew or thought that there was that much value in engaging the community as part
of the process for planning the unit. And I kind of had learned from my experience with the Center that this is something
we do, and there’s a real valid reason for doing it. And I don’t know if I could articulate it as well as I can now,
which is that, you know, the success of this unit hinges upon victims of violence against women and their lawyers
or their shelter workers.

And so, if we hadn’t engaged the community on an aggressive level by
meeting with them individually, by doing focus groups with women victims of violence, by visiting the shelters, by
us laying the groundwork to really have the community feel like they helped shape it, it would be a unit that existed
with no referrals.

WOLF: I’m very curious to know what life was
like for you there. Can you give me a sense of what your day-to-day life was like?

HERMAN:
Sure. Sure. Well, first off, as a woman there, it was very important to be respectful of the culture. So for that,
it meant that I always covered my hair. I always wore very loose clothes that often came to my knees.

Towards
the end of my time there at the Attorney General’s Office, the head of the Violence Against Women unit actually gave
me a head scarf as a present. And she said she was so thrilled to see that I was wearing head scarves throughout
this planning process. It just made her more comfortable like we were on – I was willing to come to some common ground.
It didn’t hurt me to do it. And she was – it basically opened the doors a little bit for us to talk.

So
the streets of Kabul are fascinating because you can’t walk on them if you’re an international. There’s generally
rules that you cannot and should not ever walk on the street. And in fact, with the organization I was with, you
could be sent home if you walked on the streets because the risk is so great for kidnapping and death.

So
you don’t walk anywhere. You drive everywhere or you’re driven I should say. You’re driven everywhere. And so, on
the one hand, I really relished the times when I got out and got to go to meetings. And when you drive to the streets
of Kabul, I would see daily life and see people shopping and doing what they do. On the other hand, it’s also very
nerve-wracking because it’s a really the most dangerous times as a foreigner when you’re in the roads.

WOLF:
I have a million more questions, but we’ve run out of time. I’ve been talking to Kristine Herman, a colleague of
mine here at the Center for Court Innovation. She’s director of Global Gender Initiatives and the associate director
of Domestic Violence Programs here at the Center for Court Innovation. And she was talking to me about her recent
three months in Afghanistan where she was helping the Attorney General’s Office create a specialized violence against
women unit.

HERMAN: Thanks for having me.

WOLF:
I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. To find out more about the center, you
can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

Addressing Crime and Conflict in Baltimore through Community Conferencing Mar 01, 2010

Lauren Abramson explains how the Community Conferencing Center, which she founded and leads, provides communities
with the structure and support they need to address certain crimes and conflicts on their own.

Manhattan’s New District Attorney Supports Reentry Initiatives Mar 01, 2010

District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., following his keynote address at a Harlem
Parole Reentry Court graduation, answers questions about reentry, crime prevention, and community prosecution.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. This
is New Thinking, a podcast about innovations in justice. At the beginning of 2010, Manhattan, which is where the
Center for Court Innovation is headquartered, got its first new district attorney in 35 years, Cyrus Vance, Jr. After
less than two months in office, Vance served as the keynote speaker at a Harlem parole reentry court graduation ceremony,
where parolees receive certificates for successfully completing the reentry court’s requirements. In his remarks,
Vance expressed strong support for reentry initiatives and explained that he was establishing a new bureau called
Crime Prevention Strategies.

CYRUS VANCE, JR: Reentry is that area
of the law that I am most convinced we can do the best job, in terms of helping people succeed. And to that effect
I have asked, in my office, for us to start a bureau called Crime Prevention Strategies.

WOLF:
After the ceremony, I asked Vance a few questions about his interest in both reentry initiatives and community prosecution.

WOLF: Tell me, why reentry? Why is a prosecutor like yourself interested in
the issue of reentry when that really comes at the end of the criminal justice system and your role, traditionally,
as a prosecutor is towards the beginning to after the arrest.

VANCE:
Well I think there are several reasons and they really are related to the job as a prosecutor. I mean the job of
a prosecutor, ultimately, I think like all law enforcement professionals, is about reducing crime and public safety.
And that’s our responsibility, and when we are successful with people in reentry programs, that obviously has
a direct impact on reducing recidivism. So, to the degree to which our office can support those efforts, we reduce
crime. And then there’s, of course, there’s the human responsibility. I believe that every time we send
someone to prison, we have a responsibility as a criminal justice community to have an exit strategy. And so without
an exit strategy, and an exit strategy when they come home, as they all do, uh, we aren’t really doing our job
as humans responsible for not just the case that we prosecuted, but for success in the life of everyone we deal with
in the system.

WOLF: And what role do you see your office playing?
You did mention that you created a new division or a new area of responsibility about crime prevention strategies.

VANCE: We will work in reentry to have our office involved, supporting
the work of reentry providers, helping in ways that are useful—understanding who’s coming back, how can our
office provide assistance in matching them up with services, and I think Joe Heinz has given us a model to you know,
to look at, and I believe we’ll—I want to build on Joe’s work and make sure that we, we’re helping
4,500 people coming back to New York City so that they don’t re-offend.

WOLF:
And how do you incorporate the idea of alternatives to incarceration into the everyday working responsibilities of
your assistant district attorneys?

VANCE: I think that as we handle
cases, we need to look at what offenses can be better sanctioned through programming ATIs as opposed to incarceration.
And so I think simply, number one is education. It’s making the assistants aware that I, as the district attorney,
support their looking for the end game. We obviously have to address the victim concerns, but it’s not a success—the
greater success is to pursue that sentence which reduces the chance of recidivism because that is a public safety
issue.

WOLF: Let me ask you one more question about community prosecution
philosophy. What is your feeling about community prosecution and do you have any plans to incorporate some of those
strategies?

VANCE: I do. I think community prosecution is something
I embrace. And by community prosecution, there’s a whole range, obviously, of community prosecution strategies.
I embrace the idea of our assistant DAs, as lawyers, becoming involved in understanding the communities that they
serve—we serve, we’re privileged to serve—and working closely with them. I believe as a strategic matter, having
our office lined up with communities so that we can effectively understand crime patterns and crime prevention strategies
block by block, building by building. And so if we remain downtown at One Hogan Place, and don’t engage the
community, we miss an opportunity to do our job better as crime prevention experts and as people involved with our
decisions as prosecutors that affect people’s lives.

WOLF: Do
you plan on having, for instance, neighborhood prosecutors opening offices in the neighborhood?

VANCE:
I’ve talked about opening up an office in Washington Heights, which I do intend to do. We have an office in
Harlem and I don’t know if we’re gonna have neighborhood prosecutors, in a sense that every neighborhood,
but I do believe we are going to have prosecutors who are responsible for geographic zones—not necessarily all the
prosecutors in the office, but making sure that we have a, you know, strategic understanding of what’s going
on in the neighborhoods so that that can inform our prosecution strategy and handling of individual cases.

WOLF: And also, inform I suppose prevention efforts too—

VANCE:
Very much so, yeah. Very much so.

WOLF: Thank you very much for taking
the time. And thanks for coming to this event.

VANCE: My pleasure.

WOLF: You’ve been listening to an interview with Cyrus Vance, Jr., who
was the keynote speaker at the February 23rd graduation ceremony at the Harlem Parole Reentry Court. To learn more
about the reentry court or other Center for Court Innovation demonstration projects, visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.
I’m Rob Wolf. Thanks for listening.

Shutting Drug Markets in High Point, North Carolina Dec 15, 2009

Gretta Bush and Bobby Davis of High Point Community Against Violence explain how the Drug Market Initiative–a
program developed by David Kennedy of John Jay College of Criminal Justice–offers a sustainable and effective strategy
for ending the violence associated with open-air drug markets.

ROBERT V.
WOLF: Hi, this is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. And I’m
in High Point, North Carolina, speaking with Gretta Bush, who is the president of High Point Community Against Violence.
Ms. Bush has played an integral role in a program called the Drug Market Initiative, which is designed to close overt
drug markets. Thanks so much for taking a few minutes to talk to me.

GRETTA BUSH:
You’re more than welcome, glad to do it.

WOLF: What is the
Drug Market Initiative?

BUSH: The Drug Market Initiative is an endeavor
taken on by the citizens of High Point, along with the High Point Police Department, to deter drug buys, sales, violence
in our community, to stop the drug initiative on the street.

WOLF:
And it was initially started in the neighborhood called West End. Can you tell me what conditions were like there
in 2003 before the Drug Market Initiative?

BUSH: Before the Drug
Market Initiative, our West End was the hottest spot in High Point for anything negative that dealt with drug markets
in the High Point area. Gun play, murders, assaults, domestic violence, prostitution, you name it, it went on. And
it was our hottest area and the highest crime area for the High Point area. And it was identified for that reason.

WOLF: Who first told you about the Drug Market Initiative and what
did you, as a citizen of High Point, think of the idea?

BUSH: We
were approached as a group, somewhat semi-organized, trying to just tackle violence in High Point. We found out that
drugs was the biggest entity that was a part of the violence that was occurring here in High Point and with the research
and a gentleman coming to High Point to work with the High Point police department, Mr. Kennedy, we took a plan of
action and worked with him to initiate this in the High Point area to see if it would work.

WOLF:
So David Kennedy brought this idea to you? Could you tell me how it differs from the kind of old-fashioned or traditional
police approach to drug dealing in a neighborhood?

BUSH: Well usually
in a community where you have negative activities such as drugs, the police don’t ask the community for their help
as far as confronting an individual.

In this particular case, working with the police department,
we actually sit down with the police department. We actually sit down with the police, evaluate the situation, put
a plan of action in place. The police department reaction to this is to the community: how can we better serve you?
How can we better do what we do in our policing? And in turn we learn what the police do.

It’s
not just about putting handcuffs on someone and arresting them. It’s research toward a solution toward the problem,
to help make sure that the violent offenders are not going back to the street and we’re continually working
together to deter the negative drug activities going on in the High Point area as well as West End and the individual
communities.

WOLF: One of the key features of the Drug Market Initiative
is something called the “call-in.” Can you tell me what the call-in is?

BUSH:
The call-in is a notification given to violent offenders in the community that are dealing drugs. They are identified
and called-in by the chief to the station to meet with law enforcement and the community.

Once
they’re there and identified, we give them a spiel or a conversation about their activities and identify them,
telling them that we do not want it to continue to happen and offer our services and our connection to resources
in the community as an alternative.

The other spiel they are supposed to—what law enforcement
would do if they do not change their way of life—so they have a choice that night to make a decision to either continue
to sell drugs and eventually end up in jail, dead, or change their lifestyle to do something positive in the community.

WOLF: We’re being joined now by Bobby Davis, who is a retired
police officer and also a board member of High Point community Against Violence and thank you, Mr. Davis, for joining
us.

BOBBY DAVIS: Yes, you’re welcome. My pleasure.

WOLF:
So what is it you actually say, Mr. Davis, when you’re at the call-in and you stand up before these group of
people who have been identified as troublemakers in the community, people who have broken the law, that are being
offered a second chance? What do you say? What’s the message you send?

DAVIS:
One of the things that I say, I let them know in the very beginning that they are human beings but just went a different
way to the extent that they felt like they—it was in violation. And the reason we are there as it was fore stated
that certainly we are there out of concern for them and to let them know that we are concerned and we—yes we do live
in the neighborhood and you too can live a type of life, if once you decide you’re gonna turn your life around,
and if you do decide to do such, whatever reason or whatever can cause you to – or whatever your needs are, we are
there to assist you in those needs.

And we try to stress that because—and we let them also know
that certainly we are in partnership with the police department, as well, so if you do not choose to take our assistance,
then so be it, law enforcement-wise.

WOLF: The program has been
very successful, hasn’t it? The Drug Market Initiative?

What difference has it made in the
four neighborhoods in High Point where it has been applied? Initially in West End in 2003, and since then I understand
it’s been in three other neighborhoods. What changes have you seen in those neighborhoods after the Drug Market
Initiative?

BUSH: We found out statistically-wise that the felons
or the offenders are definitely not going from one community to another. They take the message.

We
don’t have a 100 percent turnover and a success rate, but we have at least a 50 to 75 percent success rate,
so we know everybody’s not always gonna hear and understand clearly what the alternatives are, but you also
have to make believers out of some, so –

WOLF: So you’re saying
50 to 75 percent of people actually get the message and stop… ?

BUSH:
And stop.

WOLF: … dealing drugs? And another, and the other 25 to
50, maybe don’t and they end up going to jail?

BUSH: They end up
in jail, and we’ve had several that have actually lost their lives, you know, after the notification because
they continued in the drug market, and that violent life actually takes them out, so –

WOLF:
And how has life in these neighborhoods changed as a result of this? I know in West End, you know, there was open-end
overt drug markets and people on the street selling drugs, and prostitution. What is that neighborhood and other
neighborhoods like now?

DAVIS: Mr. Wolf, that’s overwhelming
because people feel more relaxed and more comfortable and enjoying their environment and since the environment is
a clean atmosphere to the extent that you’re rid of these violators, they feel comfortable in sitting on their
porches and coming in their yards, and even children outside playing and just outside activity has increased because
of this Drug Market Initiative program, to the extent of clearing of, clearing this activity up in these neighborhoods
that people just feel comfortable, and they feel comfortable in seeing the police riding in their neighborhoods because
they realize that it’s still enforcement being enacted to the extent of making sure that this type of clearance
continues.

They just feel, the attitude toward the – from the community toward the police department
has changed tremendously.

WOLF: And before people didn’t trust
the police.

DAVIS: Not to the extent of—no, not at all.

BUSH:
There was a lady that came to visit from the Washington, D.C., area home, in one of the initiative areas, which was
South Side, and she did not know her neighborhood. And she was actually talking to my sister –

WOLF:
She was from, she was originally from South Side and she came back to visit?

BUSH:
Right, from the South Side, and she actually went through the Ville, (Inaudible) Street area, she didn’t see
the same type of activity, she didn’t see the same people. The atmosphere had totally changed and she actually
had to look at street signs. She said “I couldn’t believe this was South Side”. And she was talking to my sister
and she was like, “I couldn’t figure out what was going on. She said, where did all the people go?” And I began
to explain to her what had happened. She was like, you know, “This is fantastic.”

WOLF:
And so now the Drug Market Initiative is being replicated in 25 cities at least around the country. How do you guys
feel about being the role model for other places?

DAVIS: Wonderful.
It makes us feel good and it even allows us to know that we’ve done something that has attracted the attention
of others, and the program works to the extent that they want to be a part of it and they, too, can clean their communities
up as well.

BUSH: Most definitely. It’s like a good recipe,
where you try something and it comes out great, you want to share it so everyone’s getting a taste of it.

They’re
adapting it and we’re working together to make sure that their program, you know, footmarks after what we’ve
done but we don’t want to get to a point where we feel like what we’ve done is okay, it’s working,
and we get relaxed. It’s an everyday endeavor, things that you have to continually grow and tweak, and we even
visit and take information from other cities that are trying things that are new and different, so that we can continue
to have the growth in the positive way that we’re having.

WOLF:
I guess you can’t ever just sit on your laurels, you have to keep working.

DAVIS:
You have to keep working at it and you have to be willing to be involved.

WOLF:
Well, I want to thank you both very much for taking the time to talk to me. I’ve been talking to Bobby Davis,
who is a board member of the High Point Community Against Violence and a retired police officer after 30 years on
the High Point police force. That’s quite an achievement.

And I’ve also been talking
to Gretta Bush, who is the president of High Point Community Against Violence and she’s also a 30 year veteran
of the High Point Parks and Recreation Department as a Senior Park Supervisor.

BUSH:
Recreation Center Director.

WOLF: Recreation Center Director.

BUSH:
Right.

WOLF: All right, thank you very much. I’m Rob Wolf with
the Center for Court Innovation in High Point, North Carolina. Thanks for listening and to find out more about the
Center for Court Innovation visit www.courtinnovation.org.

Will Prison Overcrowding in California Inspire Positive Change? Nov 02, 2009

Joan Petersilia, a law professor at Stanford University explains what ex-prisoners need to successfully reintegrate
into society, and how California’s correction system–once a national model–lost its way.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi. I’m Rob Wolf, and welcome to “New Thinking,” a podcast produced by the Center for Court
Innovation. Today I’m talking to Joan Petersilia, a law professor at Stanford University and one of the nation’s
foremost criminologist.

She’s the author of 11 books about crime and public policy. And her research
on parole reform, prison reintegration and sentencing policy has fueled changes in policies throughout the nation.
A criminologist with a background in empirical research and social science, Dr. Petersilia is also faculty co-director
for the Stanford Criminal Justice Center.

Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me.

JOAN PETERSILIA: My pleasure.

WOLF:
It seems to me that California is the perfect place to be for someone with a professional focus on parole reform
and prisoner reintegration. You, in fact, have described California’s prison system as a paradox of excess and deprivation.

I gather you mean by that and I’m quoting your article that appeared last year in the University
of Chicago’s journal, Crime and Justice, “no other state spends more on its correction system and gets back less.”
I thought maybe you could elaborate a little bit on that idea for me.

PETERSILIA:
Well, California spends $49,000 a year per inmate and that’s compared to the annual national average, which is about
$24,000.

So we spent twice as much and yet our recidivism rate is 70 percent, meaning that 70
percent of everybody who leaves the California prisons will come back to prison within three years. And that compares
to a national average of about 40 percent.

So we spend more and we actually get less in terms
of reduced recidivism and reduced crime. And that was what I meant by kind of a paradox. You would think if you’re
spending the most, it would in fact be doing the best. But we’re spending the most and doing the worst.

WOLF:
Maybe you can bring me up to date on what has happened in California regarding this recent federal court ruling that
requires the state to bring the prison population down from about 158,000 to 115,000. And I understand that would
still leave the state’s prisons at about 137 percent of their designed capacity.

PETERSILIA:
You will find two court cases that we have had in litigation for over 15 years in California that finally reached
kind of the end point in terms of the judges saying enough is enough. They have asked the Department of Corrections
to basically give better medical care and dental care. So that’s what the two cases revolve around.

And
the courts have said that the overcrowding in California prisons is such that there’s no way an inmate can get adequate
medical care or dental care. So the case has evolved but now become a test of overcrowding. And so, courts have ruled
that in order to be able to deliver the adequate medical care, the prison system must in fact become uncrowded. And
in the judge’s opinion, that means reducing from about 170,000, which is what we have today, to about a 135,000 or
so within the next two years.

WOLF: You have recognized in your
research and your writing and advocacy that prisoners suffer disproportionately from health problems, mental illness,
addiction; and clearly, would benefit and need medical care. But I imagine you feel that just releasing them without
any kind of treatment services doesn’t really address the underlying issue or the deeper issue of reintegration.

PETERSILIA: Well, prisoners, as you’ve said, are an incredibly sick
population. They are physically about 10 years older on average. If you take a 50-year old, (their health) will look
like a 60-year old.

So what’s happened to the U.S. prison population as sentences have gotten
longer and as the population has aged, and as medical costs, all medical costs, not only for prisoners but for people
outside of prison, have escalated over the last decade, this has just kind of become a perfect storm.

We
actually spend in California $14,000 per inmate for medical care. In the outside free citizens the average is about
$4,000.

WOLF: It’s interesting because again that’s another example
I guess of your – the paradox of excess and deprivation. I mean to spend so much more on prisoner healthcare and
yet get so little really.

In your research, in your work, you know, you focused a lot on prisoner
integration. What’s at stake here? Why is it important to focus on this issue and is it being lost now in the budget
crunches that so many states, including California, are facing and issues like overcrowding?

PETERSILIA:
Well, through that article that you mentioned—and I love the word “excess” leading to kind of less than public safety
because another example of this is in the parole system, which we’re now addressing.

California
is the only state that everybody who leaves prison goes on formal parole supervision for one to three years; usually
an average of about two and a half. Other states, again, send maybe 30 to 40 percent of prisoners to parole. So when
people get out, they in parole in most states select the most dangerous, put them on parole supervision, drug test
them, watches them closely, and then violate them if they commit a new crime or serious violation of parole.

California
has, again, incredible excess. Everybody—and that means 120,000 people who leave prison in California each year—goes
on parole supervision, which means that nobody really gets watched very closely.

So again, we
have excess of kind of what you would imagine kind of legal control, but very little public safety because it really
means, you know, one size fits all ends up meaning one size fits no one.

Here we saw a classic
example of Phillip Garrido, a sex offender who, you know, abducted Jaycee Lee Dugard and kept her as a – I guess
you’d have to call it a sex slave in his backyard and he fathered two of her children. And people have to ask the
question: how is it that he was on parole for 10 years and nobody knew he was doing this kind of thing?

And
when you know the parole system, it didn’t – wasn’t surprising to me at all because of the 120,000 people in California
the parole agents are trying to watch, and we only have about 5,000 parole agents, so they’re just simply spread
too thin

WOLF: I actually had read something a few years ago; I
think it was in 2005. California was experimenting I thought with putting fewer people on parole.

PETERSILIA:
Well, we are actually right now as we speak, our legislature is voting this week on a major, major – I mean it’s
the most important thing I think that has happened to California corrections in at least 20 years. Our legislature
is now voting on a parole reform package which will do three things.

It will place only high
risk people and moderate risk people on active parole supervision. Then it will shorten the length of time that people
are on parole. So people who are doing well on parole can actually discharge their parole at one year instead of
three years.

And then, probably most importantly, is the third aspect: if you violate parole
in California and your violation is only a technical violation, meaning you tested positive for drugs, let’s say,
or missed an appointment, you no longer will be sent to prison. You’ll only serve time in a local jail. That will
cut our prison population significantly.

WOLF: Are you concerned
that in cutting the number of prisoners on parole the result will not necessarily be higher quality supervision for
those who are still on parole, but it will just be the same kind of supervision that’s already being delivered?

PETERSILIA:
Well, I think the next major issue that criminologists and those interested in crime control have to face is that
what happens when prisoners are released back to communities where the services that are necessary for their success
are in fact being cut. And so, many of us who studied re-entry know that it wasn’t just about getting them off parole.
That really was not the intent.

The intent was to get them simply off surveillance and getting
them into some services plus surveillance. We know that what works is not simply sending somebody to treatment alone.
That hasn’t worked, and also, doesn’t work if you simply, you know, put them on electronic monitoring without services.

So a lot of the research shows that you must combine treatment with a kind of deterrence or surveillance.
Unfortunately, what is now happening is in most states, because of the pressure to reduce people from prisons, we’re
all going to see a lot of releases. We’re going to see releases from prison; we’re going to see releases from parole;
and we’re going to see technical violators not being sent back to prison.

Now I’m in favor of
doing that if the offender is low risk. But I was never in favor of it to simply let them out without anything. And
that doesn’t do anybody any good and threatens public safety, so the plan was always to provide services. So what
we’re getting is kind of half of the plan but the key ingredient missed.

WOLF:
You’ve participated in discussions here at the Center for Court Innovation that explored the topic of failure and
what we can learn from failed initiatives. With that in mind, I was wondering if you could tell me what re-entry
reforms have you tested in California that you think work or perhaps don’t work but tell us important lessons.

PETERSILIA:
Well, I’ve become involved in a small project that is counted across California as being one of the most successful
re-entry projects at a local level. And I’ve learned the lesson about what it takes to make re-entry successful.
And it’s more than simply programs. You know, an offender is more than the sum of his program.

And
we used to think if we just got them into the right program, whether it be a drug treatment facility or an employment
or work training, that that would be enough. It clearly isn’t enough. Even once you get those three things, and I
think the three keys of re-entry are addiction under control, stability and housing and a job. If you get all those
three things going, it’s still kind of isn’t enough we’ve learned. And you’ve really got to have kind of that community
support.

And with law enforcement, with children, with families, they’re all part of kind of
this network or constellation of support for offenders who eventually go straight and stay straight. We have some
success of what it means to get somebody to go straight in the short-run. We actually have pretty good success at
getting somebody to go straight for 12 months to 24 months, even 36 months.

The real challenge
is getting somebody to refrain from crime for the rest of their lives. And what we’ve learned about that is it eventually
is about families and children and parents and a broader community. And when it really works, all of that kind of
comes together.

So we know a lot about what it takes. The problem is it’s not easy and it’s not
inexpensive; and we need to acknowledge that. Community corrections, if done right, is actually probably as expensive
as prison in the short-run. But what we’re looking for is those lifetime cost benefits.

WOLF:
I think it’s fascinating that California once had what was considered the nation’s premier corrections system. I
guess that was from about the ’40s to the ’60s. So I’d like to ask you, in your view what happened? What can we learn
from where California is today? And do you think California will ever get back to that?

PETERSILIA:
Well, California, as you said, used to be a national model. And in fact, many of the programs that are being used
today, not only in California and the United States, but internationally, in fact, came from ideas developed in California
corrections in the period between the ’50s all up through the end of the ’70s. So there was a 25-year period where
California was really a model system of how to treat juveniles, in particular, as well as adults and how to bring
community into sanctioning, if you will.

And then you have to ask, well, how did it go from this
model to now I would think what everybody would recognize is probably one of the most dysfunctional systems we have?
And I think nobody could have foreseen how we just chipped away at it at every level. We chipped away at it in terms
of giving control over to a huge prisoner guard union so that, in fact, their money became very “money still talked.”
They were able to give large amounts of money to legislators running for office. Those legislators turned around,
ran on tough-on-crime platforms, passed things like three strikes, lengthened sentences, sent more people to prison.
And as a result, funding for programs had to be reduced.

So we were simply building, building,
building and cutting programs. And so, over the years what we go was, in fact, overcrowded, dangerous – 50 percent
of our prisoners never participated in any program at all for their entire stay in a California prison.

WOLF:
Ultimately, I guess we can see it as a blessing, the kind of overcrowding, in a way because it encourages a search
for alternatives. And hopefully, I guess we would hope effective alternatives that guarantee or promote the public
safety and a successful reintegration of ex-inmates into communities.

PETERSILIA:
Well, I think I see the current times as a crisis for sure. But in every crisis, there’s the potential for opportunity.
And I would like to think that what this does do for us is it makes us rethink and realign who should be in prison.

And I think most people and the public want dangerous, violent people in prison. And they’re
willing to pay for it. And they kind of really are also—the public opinion polls—willing to rethink what we do with
non-violent, particularly drug offenders.

So I think that we will be having those debates and
the poor economy kind of got those debates to the forefront. But the real question is “what do we do with the third
of the prison population that are there primarily for drug use, drug addiction, drug sale?” We simply can’t let those
people go without any treatment or any programs. Then we will simply have kind of a short-term gain and a long-term
blip in the crime rate, which will happen two, three, four, five years out.

I think we’ve got
to really think hard about “if not prison, what?” and that to me is the key question that we now need to address.

WOLF: Well, it’s been fascinating talking with you. And I really
appreciate again your taking the time. I’ve been talking with Joan Petersilia, a law professor at Stanford University,
the author of 11 books and an expert in the area of parole reform, prisoner reintegration and sentencing policy.

PETERSILIA: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for
Court Innovation. To learn more about the Center for Court Innovation, you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.

Giving the Community a Role in Corrections Oct 09, 2009

Derek Miodownik, restorative systems administrator for the Vermont Department of Corrections, talks about the state’s innovative experiments
in community and restorative justice, including Citizen Reparative Boards, which give panels of community members
a role in working with misdemeanor offenders, and Circles of Support and Accountability, which link community members
with parolees convicted of serious crimes.

ROBERT V. WOLF:
Hi. This is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and welcome to another New Thinking
podcast. Today I’m speaking with Derek Miodownik who is the restorative systems administrator for the Vermont Department
of Corrections.

DEREK MIODOWNIK: Hi. Thanks for having me.

WOLF:
Absolutely. Vermont has quite a reputation for innovative thinking in the area of corrections. And so, I was wondering
if you could tell me a little bit about the philosophy that guides you and about some of the interesting things that
you’ve been working on.

MIODOWNIK: Absolutely. Yeah. I think Vermont’s
a state that’s had to play to its strengths, and one of our strengths is our relatively small size that we still
have a real sense of community and town, and active citizen participation in all sorts of civic life.

But
specific to corrections, one of the ways that’s becomes expressed for years now has been through citizen reparative
boards that have been operating since at least ’95, I think, here in Vermont, where individuals who’ve been convicted
of misdemeanors have for a long time now been required to appear before a volunteer citizen board. So, of course,
you’re talking about a restorative justice approach and philosophy that has really taken roots here in Vermont.

And
we have, over the past several years, begun to apply that not only on the low level of the offense scale but also
on to the more severe cases, and specifically, the re-entry process.

WOLF:
So you started with the reparative boards in Vermont, which focused on misdemeanor offenses. Is that correct?

MIODOWNIK:
That’s right. I’d say that’s where, as a state, we kind of cut our teeth.

WOLF:
And how widespread are they now? MIODOWNIK: We’ve got 76 individual community reparative boards.

WOLF:
What does that consist of? These are volunteers who do what with the offender?

MIODOWNIK:
Well, it’s really predicated on the notion that the person is showing up and at the very least saying
“Yes, I did it.” So they’re not fact finding. The conversation begins from the perspective of “How do you think other
people were harmed?” And it’s done not in a didactic way but I would say in an educational and informative and
a very personal way. And then, “What do you think you have to offer in the way of repairs?”

And
if they’re individual victims who’ve chose to participate in this process, first and foremost, what do they want,
what are their needs?

WOLF: Give me some examples of the kinds of
the kinds of misdemeanors and then the kinds of responses that panels come up with.

MIODOWNIK:
So yeah, again, we’re talking primarily about low-level offenses. That can include shoplifting, DUIs.

WOLF: And what would the sanctions perhaps be?

MIODOWNIK:
An example might be—I know there is a guy who had shoplifted from a video store. This is a guy struggling to keep
his store going. He came to the board and expressed just that, that this isn’t just a business to him, but that it’s
a business that’s hard for him to run, that he built at a time when that medium, frankly, was a lot more popular,
that he’s got children.

So all of a sudden, when you have somebody removing the barricades of
their life and saying “Hey, your decision to take six DVDs? Let me tell you about my 16-year-old daughter and let
me tell you about my 18-year-old that I sent to college.” And you know, all of a sudden, in a way a gift is being
offered, a gift of connection.

You know, in this case, ultimately, the guy who ran the store,
he needed some help. He needed some help at home. He was working a lot. He had injured his back, which prevented
him from mowing his lawn.

And you know, an agreement was reached that this guy would work off
his obligation through, you know, through a prescribed number of hours, just showing up, mowing this guy’s lawn.
In terms of a happy ending on this one, a fairy tale ending, this guy ended up getting a job working at H—- Video
in South Burlington, Vermont.

WOLF: And H—- Video was the victim?

MIODOWNIK: Yes.

WOLF:
The victim owned that store?

MIODOWNIK: That’s right. That’s right.

WOLF: Well, it is a happy ending because I was going to say that
it sounds like a lot of effort on all parts to resolve something that sounds like a rather minor offense.

MIODOWNIK:
You know, on one hand, there is definitely an outlay of effort. But on the other hand, the absence of that helps
to contribute to some pretty larger-scale matters that we see play out time and again with folks who don’t respond
very constructively to low-level misdemeanor sanctions, and ultimately, either continue at the same level of severity
or sometimes ultimately escalate.

So from a prevention perspective, it’s effort and the time
well spent, and it’s primarily driven by volunteers who are doing that because, again, they live in that town, and
it’s not academic to them.

WOLF: We’ve been talking about the response
to misdemeanor –

MIODOWNIK: That’s right.

WOLF:
…offenses and the Department of Corrections of Vermont is also addressing re-entry issues, offenders who have committed
more serious crimes who are right now returning to the community. You’ve developed a program there that’s also rather
creative and involves the community as well. So maybe you can tell me a little bit about that.

MIODOWNIK:
We responded in 2002 to what was called the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative. This was a federal initiative
to provide states with money specifically to enhance or promote their best thinking around offender re-entry. And
to us, it became a natural extension to build upon this culture of restorative justice, of relational justice, if
you will, and apply that where frankly the stakes are higher.

So we have, over time, created
an infrastructure of what we call community justice centers. And these are actually the places where many of the
volunteers that I mentioned on these reparative boards are organized and trained. So basically, we sub-granted the
first round of money to justice centers to do a design phase.

WOLF:
So did you end up with different programs all across the state?

MIODOWNIK:
Well originally, there was some variation. Yeah. And to some degree, there’s still some. One community adopted a
mentoring approach. But several other locations began to get excited about a model that was coming out of Toronto
called COSA.

COSA stands for Circle of Support and Accountability. And basically, some folks
up in Toronto began working with sex offenders who had maxed their sentences and were being released with no support
whatsoever or no accountability for that matter either. And so, the COSA model is rooted in the notion of “no more
victims”. And the COSA methodology is rooted in a blending of accountability and support.

Again,
this goes back to some pretty basic restorative principles that say if you provide a lot of support for somebody,
i.e., encouragement, positivity, but accountability so direct limit setting, having to answer for, you know, in this
case your whereabouts or your behaviors. Then you’re into an area that has the greatest potential for effecting positive
change.

WOLF: So how has it played in Vermont? How many of these
teams, these COSA teams do you have, and are they, in fact, working with sex offenders?

MIODOWNIK:
We didn’t restrict them just to sex offenders although we definitely worked with many sex offenders.
But we took a look at just what was the level of connectivity that these folks have when they’re coming back
to a place of very few connections. That was the main kind of driver of whether or not it made sense to invest that
type of volunteer resource.

Basically, about 50 individuals who came out during 2005 through
2007 were involved for at least a year. Out of that original 50 most, over at least a year period, were very successful.

Guys who had come in and out many times before were staying out far longer than they ever had.
Those who were re-incarcerated were re-incarcerated for really harm reductions behaviors and I actually think that
this is one of the best things that COSA is doing, frankly. They preempt the more severe offending behavior by virtue
of their knowledge and relationship to the offender so that if the guy has a condition that he can’t drink but goes
out and violates, he may tell his COSA “I went out, you know, I had beers last night.” Or they may start asking him
questions that yield that information. And that’s actionable information.

There is no secret
kept between the “core member,” who’s the offender, if you will, and the volunteer. So people have been but back
in jail but not because they went out and reoffended, but rather because they began to engage in the behaviors that
had, at another point, may have very well led to a re-offense. And that’s how you create no more victims.

WOLF:
Do the COSAs still exist now that the grant money has long expired?

MIODOWNIK:
Well, yes, several of the justice centers had very robust programs and coordinators that were hired, who ultimately
were not able to stay on. Several other programs were still develop COSAs for one or two offenders who they just
feel it’s the right thing to do, and even though they’re not being supplementally resourced for it, they, frankly,
have the knowhow and the volunteer base to do it.

WOLF: Well, let
me ask you. It seems to me one of the big advantages of the program is that you have volunteers who are doing a lot
of the work.

MIODOWNIK: Absolutely.

WOLF:
So where’s the cost? I mean why can’t – why isn’t this more easy to replicate or sustain beyond an initial startup
grant period?

MIODOWNIK: What we found is that you really do ideally
need a singular coordinator who really could work effectively between the volunteer world and the corrections world.

WOLF: So the cost is the staff person who’s there to support the
COSA, the volunteers who are making up this team of support and accountability.

MIODOWNIK:
Yup. And you know, for the cost of what it takes to incarcerate one person a year, that’s what we would actually
get, you know, frankly, that $50,000 will get us a full-time coordinator, who can really kind of tread both of these
waters very effectively.

WOLF: Right. And hopefully, prevent, who
knows how many countless repeat crimes.

MIODOWNIK: Oh, yeah. The
math is a no-brainer when you do it. Yup.

WOLF: So give me a sense.
I mean we sort of ran out of time, but I would like to get a very quick sense of what it is like for a volunteer
who’s participating on a COSA team. I mean here’s someone who’s actually volunteering to develop a relationship with
someone who, for instance, might have sexually abused a child.

MIODOWNIK:
Yes.

WOLF: What does that consist of? I mean is it like “Come on
over to my house for dinner?” Or is it just, “I’ll drop by once a month with a checklist and make sure that you are
following a curfew or thus and such?” I mean how intimate do they get and what is the relationship like?

MIODOWNIK:
You know, I think like in any relationship, Rob, it progresses and they probably set the typical boundaries.

One
of the strengths of this model is the strong connection back to corrections and back to the probation or parole officer.
So a volunteer might think “hey, you know, I’ve been working with John for eight months. You know, my wife and I
would like to have him over for dinner.” Again, going back to the coordinator—they’d probably run that through the
coordinator. The coordinator will call the probation officer and say “what do you think of that?”

And
you know, we talked about sex offenders a little bit before. Sex offenders, you know, broad topic. To begin with,
there’s lots of typologies and a lot of MOs, if you will. So depending on a specific offender, something like “come
on over for dinner” may be a no-go because, yeah, you know, sometimes there’s somebody who lives in that house
that fits the original victim profile or it may not be a problem at all.

But basically, what’s
happening is that a personal relationship is being developed through reciprocity. Our volunteers have had tremendous,
tremendous experiences. I mean I think it’s a testament to the strength of the volunteers that several are still
doing this, like I said, even though we haven’t had a full-time coordinator so that the directors themselves have
taken over that coordination responsibility in some cases. But people tend to really – people who signed up for it
get a lot out of it.

WOLF: And just to be clear, I mean we’re talking
about teams here, so people aren’t being asked to have a one-on-one relationship with people. There’s a team of people,
of volunteers working together with one offender.

MIODOWNIK: Yes.
Usually, a COSA consists of at least three and sometimes about three to five individuals. Now sometimes within that
structure, maybe just one of them will get together with that core member for coffee or something like that. But
the primary structure is that they all get together as a group.

And they start that before the
person comes out ideally. That’s no small detail, too. There’s also just some public information too that we do,
Rob, which is the fact that people have to come out. And you know, like it or not, over 92 percent of people, I think,
nationally who are in prison are coming out of those prisons, right? So you can only be an ostrich for so long before
one of these folks is going to be your neighbor.

And at that point, are you better off knowing
them and having them care about what you think? The answer, you know, ultimately for many people in Vermont is yes.

WOLF: And Derek, if people want to find out more about what you’re
doing in Vermont, where can they go?

MIODOWNIK: Go on to the Vermont
Department of Corrections website, doc.vermont.gov. Now that doesn’t have any www in front of it. It’s just http
or double backslash.

WOLF: Okay. Well, thanks so much, Derek. I
appreciate your taking the time to talk to me.

MIODOWNIK: It’s my
pleasure. Thank you very much, Rob.

WOLF: I have been speaking with
Derek Miodownik who is the restorative systems administrator for the Vermont Department of Corrections. I am Rob
Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, www.courtinnovation.org.

Harry Belafonte Congratulates Harlem Reentry Court Graduates Sep 14, 2009

Legendary entertainer Harry Belafonte congratulates graduates of the Harlem Parole Reentry Court for satisfying
the program’s rigorous requirements.

ROBERT V. WOLF:
The 10^th graduation of the Harlem Parole Reentry Court featured a special guest.

HARRY
BELAFONTE: I was born in Harlem. I grew up in Harlem. I’m in my 82^nd year of
life and I’m still alive.

(APPLAUSE)

WOLF: That
was Harry Belafonte, singer, actor, and activist as he congratulated the Reentry Court’s graduates on satisfying
the program’s rigorous requirements.

BELAFONTE: And I am grateful,
very grateful to be here to meet you for the first time. You bring a gift. It is my responsibility to wrap my arms
around your gift, to make this program, this courtroom, all of the people you see here, feel that they have been
rewarded in the investment they make to get people to come out of the incarceration system.

WOLF:
The Harlem Parole Reentry Court helps parolees returning from incarceration make the transition from life in prison
to responsible citizenship. The court, housed in the Harlem Community Justice Center, and operated in cooperation
with the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services and the Division of Parole, links parolees to a wide
range of social services. To promote increased accountability, participants are required to return to the Justice
Center frequently to meet with case managers and parole officers and appear before and administrative law judge who
closely monitors their compliance with court orders. Judge Grace Bernstein outlined some of the graduates’ accomplishments.

JUDGE GRACE BERNSTEIN: You have really accomplished major things. At some point
within yourself, you have decided that you wanted to move on with your life. You have been able to stay away from
the lure of easy money, the lure of drugs—

WOLF: In addition to being
a top selling singer, Emmy and Grammy winner, Belafonte’s long been an outspoken advocate for many causes. He was
active in the civil rights movement, he served as a Goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, he’s helped to raise money and
awareness across Africa about AIDS, poverty, and the needs of children. Closer to home, he makes regular visits to
prisoners in Sing Sing.

BELAFONTE: I am very much engaged in the
criminal justice system, and I got involved with the politics of America. I got involved with racism and became an
activist. And in that activism, I saw what was happening to us in the justice system. So I figured I’d focus on that.

WOLF: Belafonte told those assembled in the courtroom at the Harlem Community
Justice Center on 121^st Street about some of the hardships he faced growing up in that very
neighborhood.

BELAFONTE: I was a high school dropout. I never finished
high school. As a matter of fact, when I left high school I could hardly read or write. The compelling circumstances
and the opportunity to meet people who are indigenous to my community, who have done a lot with their lives, gave
me a chance to see alternatives.

WOLF: Other speakers at the graduation
included Program Director John Megawl, who described some of the challenges the reentry court’s graduates had overcome.

JOHN MEGAW: Our ceremony tonight is about 17 men who have made changes and
make decisions every day since they were released from prison that will allow them to remain free and enjoy the rest
of their freedom. But not everyone who started our program has made it. Some are back upstate thinking about bed-check
or writing a letter home. I wish they could be here with us. But for these men, it has meant returning from a series
of correctional facilities upstate, often after many years of incarceration, figuring out where to live, how to afford
the rent, how to find a job when you have a broken work history, staying away from drugs and alcohol, building relationships
with your children, your brothers and sisters, and your mother and father.

WOLF:
As they handed out graduation certificates, parole officers Devon Oliver and Carmen Levine spoke movingly about the
specific achievements of the participants, including the jobs they’d found, apartments they’d located, and their
studious observance of curfews and other rules.

CARMEN LEVINE: This
is a special group because a lot of you have shown me that, you know, you’ve taken a lot of initiatives. A lot of
you have gotten jobs, a lot of you have gone back to school, which is wonderful.

WOLF:
That was the voice of Parole Officer Levine at the 10^th graduation ceremony of the Harlem
Parole Reentry Court, which took place on September 1, 2009, and I’m Rob Wolf, director of Communications at the
Center for Court Innovation. For more information about the Center for Court Innovation or the Harlem Parole Reentry
Court, visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.

Drug Courts: Past, Present, Future Jul 30, 2009

West Huddleston, CEO of the National Association of Drug Court Professionals, talks about his group’s new
web site, why the nation’s 2,300-plus drug courts reach only 10 percent of the people they’re designed
to help, and what’s next on the horizon for the drug court movement.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi. My name is Rob Wolf and I’m director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation.
Today I have the pleasure of talking with West Huddleston who is the executive director of the National Association
of Drug Court Professionals.

WEST HUDDLESTON: Thanks, Rob, for the
opportunity.

WOLF: I thought maybe we’d start off talking about
the new website for the National Association of Drug Court Professionals. The address is www.allrise.org.
HUDDLESTON:
That’s right: allrise.org.

WOLF: What’s the thinking behind the
name and behind the new look for the website?

HUDDLESTON: Well,
the short story is although I’ve worked here at NADCP for the last 11 years, I’ve never – until three years ago when
I took the helm as the CEO, I was really not put in a position to sell drug courts to the general public.

When
I became CEO three years ago, I realized that those two words “drug court” or even if you put “treatment” in the
middle, “drug treatment court,” it still sells a problem; it doesn’t sell a solution. And it basically creates a
whole lot of questions.

So what I sought out to do is to find a public brand, if you will: if
our industry brand is drug court, you know, what would be a brand for the general public that would sell the solution?
And it struck me about a year ago that the two words “all rise” really do that for us.

I was
sitting at a drug court graduation one night in Jackson, Mississippi, and as the bailiff bellowed out those two words,
it struck me that those—that “all rise”—really carries with it an implicit and solemn promise that drug courts will
help those that come before it.

WOLF: You’ve always been an advocacy
organization to some extent, but are you putting advocacy and sort of promotion of the drug court concept more front
and center than in the past?

HUDDLESTON: Yeah, Rob. You’re hitting
it right on the head. You know, we’re 20 years old; drug courts are 20 years old. And the National Association of
Drug Court Professionals, which started in 1994, did exactly what its name implies, which was to focus on professionals,
focus on the courts, change the system from within.

What I wanted to do when I became CEO is,
in addition to that, which we will always do as a primary function of NADCP, but in addition to that, you know, it’s
my belief that drug courts are deeply under-utilized, are the most effective strategy for drug-using offenders and
need to be put within reach of every American in need.

And so, if we’re only serving 120,000
at any given time, and there are 1.2 million who need it, we need to tell our story to the general public. We need
to tell our story to the media. We need to tell our story better on Capitol Hill and in state capitol buildings.

WOLF: Before we continue, I guess I’m taking it for granted that
people listening know what a drug court is. But maybe in the simplest terms, could you just explain what the typical
drug court model is?

HUDDLESTON: Sure. In essence, someone who is
charged with a drug-driven offense, that could be anything from drug possession to burglary, theft, even drunk driving,
those types of charges can be pled into a drug court.

And in essence, are objective is to get
people into treatment quickly and to keep them long enough for treatment to actually benefit them. We hold them accountable
by requiring them to come before a judge on a weekly or bi-weekly basis at first, and then it’s titrated down to
maybe monthly or quarterly. And the participants are rewarded for doing well and sanctioned for not living up to
their obligations.

WOLF: You know, with all the research that has
shown how effective drug courts are in reducing recidivism, I wonder why you think drug courts have sort of hit a
wall. I mean they really grew very quickly, expanded to many, to all states in the United States and are spreading
internationally now.

And yet, as you say, they’re reaching only 10 percent of the potential population
who could benefit. And their growth seems to have slowed and I wonder what factors you think have played a role in
that. I wonder if the current economic crisis is having any impact. If you think the Obama administration policies
might have a positive impact down the road. What are your thoughts on this issue?

HUDDLESTON:
Well, I think that drug courts definitely stalled. And it was kind of shocking to us in that as the research, as
you said, was coming out in clear fashion that they reduced substance abuse significantly, they reduced recidivism,
and they saved money.

The funding for drug courts at the federal level went from 40, for instance,
at the Department of Justice, $40 million really all the way down to right at $10 million just three years ago. The
economy coupled with the federal investment dropping really hurt drug court’s ability to take on more clients, take
on more participants.

So what do we look like in the future? Drug court funding started to hit
back up under the former administration and certainly because of Congress. And funding last year was restored at
the federal level—went from about $10 million to $15.3 million two years ago. Then it was increased to $40 million
last year. And this year where we stand this afternoon, drug court funding at the Department of Justice, $64 million
which is a historical high.

And there’s another roughly $24 million at the Center for Substance
Abuse Treatment at SAMHSA. In the president’s budget for next year, it even looks better. The president requested
a total of about $120 million for drug courts and other problem-solving courts at the Department of Justice and at
CSAT.

I think that the new administration and the Congress in place recognizes that these courts
return a significant cost benefit. And by investing upfront, we’re going to see, you know, some significant return
anywhere from $3.36 to $12 depending on what variables you count for every dollar invested.

So
yeah, I think the future looks very good for drug courts and other problem-solving courts like mental health courts
and domestic violence courts and all the other types of courts that, you know, your own organization really helped
us think through.

WOLF: I’m wondering about all the research that’s
gone into drug courts. And we do some of that here and we also research other problem-solving courts. One thing some
of our researchers are trying to do are isolate some of the factors. Is it the role of the judge and the interaction
the judge has with the defendant that is one of the key ingredients? Is it the monitoring? Is it the kind of treatment,
and sort of trying to hone the model and find out what are the key elements. And I wonder as elements are identified
as being paramount or the most effective, I wonder if the money that’s coming in can be spent in such array to sort
of invest strategically in those things that work best.

HUDDLESTON:
Well, you know, we think a little bit differently about it. There was a remarkable report published March of last
year by NPC Research out of Portland, Oregon—So that’s Dr. Mike Finigan and Dr. Shannon Carey. This report explored
the 10 key components of drug courts which were written and published in 1997. And it is what defines a drug court
from any other court, distinguishes our model.

And it’s a comparative study of 18 drug courts
on, you know, practices, outcomes and costs. And what that study tells us is that the 10 key components, the courts
that follow the 10 key components do far better in terms of outcomes and costs than the drug courts that don’t.

And
so, what this study has taught us and what we’re, in turn, teaching the field is that you can’t water down the 10
key components. If you do, you will start significantly losing your impact.

WOLF:
Are they saying that all the components are equal though? I mean if someone has limited resources, and they want
to do eight of the components perhaps, are you saying that they shouldn’t think that way, the should… ?

HUDDLESTON:
That’s right. If you want good, if you want extraordinary outcomes, maintain the 10 key components. I am not convinced
that you can select, you know, drug testing, regular drug testing and treatment, which are two of the 10 key components.
I’m not convinced you can take those two key components and distill down or import them into everyday court practice
and expect to have very good outcomes.

What drug courts need to do is reorient themselves from
low-level offenders to a high-risk, high-need population meaning people with long histories of substance abuse, long
histories of criminality, people who really need this level of intervention because it’s very intensive. So you know,
I think our best outcomes according to NIDA’s research that Doug Marlowe published, you know, really looked at who
fares best in drug court. And the clear answer to that are individuals who need it the most, high risk-high need
people, people who failed out of treatment multiple times, people who have a long, you know, criminal record, those
are the people who do the best in our model.

WOLF: Are a lot of
drug courts avoiding that population for whatever reason?

HUDDLESTON:
Well, they certainly did at the beginning. I mean it’s, you know, much more politically palatable to take low-level
offenders and low-risk offenders, first time possession charges. That’s where drug courts started 20 years ago.

WOLF:
So I mean it’s an interesting irony I guess that the population that initially seemed most attractive politically,
drug courts are least effective with.

HUDDLESTON: Yeah. I mean that
is a 100 percent accurate statement according to the literature, according to the research.

You
know, I think the good news is drug court professionals are in that business to make a difference. And when they
were introduced to this research, I believe it was three years ago, maybe two and a half years ago, we really saw
a shift in population, in a drug court population, target population.

I think the tough road
is still ahead of us because assessment for risk and need is not done before disposition typically. Typically, disposition,
the court decides on what happens to the offender, and then the assessment kicks in. Well, it’s too late. You really
don’t know who you have sitting in front of you. If you’re really going to have what we know as evidence-based sentencing,
we’ve got to do assessment upfront at pre-trial level before the court decides or the prosecutor decides where the
individual goes.

WOLF: So you’re saying …

HUDDLESTON:
That’s a very radical change.

WOLF: But you’re saying right now
the problem is that quite often they’re saying “You’ll get a year of treatment; okay, and this is the jail alternative
if you don’t complete it. OK, agreed. Now let’s assess you if you really need a year or not”?

HUDDLESTON:
That’s exactly what happens. It happens as a result of, you know, plea bargain. And it happens because the justice
system tends to create eligibility criteria, not just for drug court but, you know, for DTAP, or any – for – pick
your alternative.

WOLF: You’re talking about other alternative sentencing
programs for drug treatment.

HUDDLESTON: Other alternative sentencing,
even probation, OK? Eligibility is based on the crime, not on the person. So assessment is thought of as kind of
“what are their clinical needs after we figure out legally where they belong?”

And you know,
we’re really wanting to see the justice system do it almost opposite of that, that individuals need to be assessed
for what they need and what is their risk and then make an appropriate decision on where they go.

WOLF:
That sounds like it’s going to be awfully hard to bring out or bring a change around that.

HUDDLESTON:
You know, it will be; it will be tough. But you know, we’ve added a million prison beds in this country in the last
20 years.

I mean it doesn’t make sense what we’re doing now. So I mean we’re – I think we’re
at a real tipping point. If not now, when will this tipping point occur, you know, where there really does need to
be some radical change in terms of who really does need to go to prison and jail versus who needs to go to a community
alternative and which community alternative?

WOLF: I appreciate
your taking the time to share your thoughts with me. I’ve been speaking with West Huddleston, the CEO of the National
Association of Drug Court Professionals, which can be found now on the web at www.allrise.org.

HUDDLESTON:
Yeah. It’s a real pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on.

WOLF:
Good luck with your work.

HUDDLESTON: Very good. Thanks so much.

WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for
Court Innovation, which can be found on the web at www.courtinnovation.org.

July 2009

The Challenges of Differentiating among Domestic Violence Offenders Jun 23, 2009

Ronald B. Adrine, the administrative and presiding judge of the Cleveland Municipal Court talks about differentiating
between defendants who are habitual batterers and defendants who are one-time perpetrators (such as those acting
in self defense).

ROBERT V. WOLF: How, I’m Rob Wolf, director
of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Today I’m speaking with Ronald B. Adrine, who is the administrative
and presiding Judge of the Cleveland Municipal Court. And he’s here in New York at the Center for Court Innovation
at our open house, visiting some of our projects and meeting people involved with domestic violence courts and domestic
violence dockets around the country to share ideas and share best practices. Welcome to New York and the Center for
Court Innovation.

JUDGE RONALD ADRINE: Thanks, Rob. Thanks for having
me.

WOLF: I wanted to ask you about some of the interesting work
you’re doing in Cleveland. I thought we could start with how you first got involved with the dedicated domestic
violence docket. I understand that you volunteered to assume leadership in the docket when it was first created.
Maybe you can tell me about that.

ADRINE: Well I’ve been active
in the area of trying to come up with effective interventions revolving around domestic violence issues since the
early 1990’s, and actually before that. I’ve been on the bench since 1982 and have had domestic violence as
part of my docket ever since. Beginning in the early 90’s I’ve been working at it on a national level. So towards
the end of the 90’s an opportunity came to Cleveland to receive some money from the federal government to put together
what, for all intents and purposes, was a vertical prosecution pilot program. The police and prosecutor’s office,
as well as the Witness Victim Service Center in Cleveland, had all agreed to handle misdemeanor violations of the
domestic violence laws in such a way that the same detectives, the same prosecutors, the same advocates would all
service a certain percentage of cases. So when I heard that they were gonna do that, I volunteered outside the grant
to allow them to have all of those cases to be heard on my docket because otherwise they would have gone to 12 judges
throughout the courthouse and it would have just been maddening to try to keep up with the whole lot. So that’s
how it started.

WOLF: So I understand that recently, the program
has been expanded and you’ve added to it an interesting element—the deferred judgment initiative, which as far
as I know is unique to domestic violence courts and domestic violence dockets around the country. So maybe you could
explain to me what that is.

ADRINE: The deferred judgment portion
of the docket came about as a result of some conversations I’d had with a lot of people. I’ve worked in
the advocacy community, as well as in the prosecution and, and the police community, which pointed out that there
were people who were being arrested, charged, and convicted of domestic violence who clearly were not batterers.
And in my mind, the domestic violence laws in the United States were put together specifically—not to reach every
person that involve themselves in violence in an interpersonal relationship—but those people who were using violence
for purposes of control and power. A lot of other people get swept in because of the definitions that are used across
the country of what constitutes domestic violence. So, for instance, if I know that a person that I’m involved with
has been building up towards striking me, and they come towards me with their fist balled up, I might pick up a pot
and I might strike them before they strike me. Technically speaking, I’m guilty of domestic violence, even if
there are years that have gone on when I’ve just taken it. So knowing that there are some people who are out there
who fall in those—that kind of a category—the real challenge is to try to look at every domestic violence situation
and determine whether or not we’re dealing with someone who is truly a batterer, or whether we’re dealing
with someone who is reacting to stimulus that they know is going to result in their own injury.

WOLF:
How do you get the knowledge you need to differentiate?

ADRINE: What
we did was we created a series of screens, beginning with the police, who are the first responders. Asking that they
fill out a very short kind of checklist questionnaire that would identify whether or not somebody is likely to have
been the primary physical aggressor. The prosecutor can then compare what they got against the police report and
make a second screen as to whether or not the right person has been charged. If they decide that the wrong person
was charged, they can indicate that this person should not be the primary physical aggressor and move on. Their lawyer
has the opportunity to agree with the police, and the prosecutor could ask that the court take a look at this situation
and see whether or not their client is eligible for the deferred judgment initiative. We then give it to the probation
department, which conducts yet another screen to make a determination as to whether or not this is an appropriate
person. And then they give it to the court, and the court goes to the final screen. There’s only a small number
of cases that are going to have all the predicates on the front end that will cause them to get a second look past
the police department’s initial determination.

WOLF: I see.

ADRINE: So it’s only those cases where you know, there’s no prior
history of violence, there is no history of emotional battering that we’re able to determine. There is no history
of, of severe problems in the individual’s background, because all of those things are done by the probation
department at the final check to make sure that we’ve got people who are unlikely to engage in the kind of conduct
moving forward. Because what we’re trying to do with that group is to save them the types of problems that they
otherwise would face if they are convicted of domestic violence. That is, they could be prevented from engaging in
certain kinds of occupations, like healthcare. They might be prevented from getting certain kinds of licensing and
bonding in certain states. They may be cut off from certain kinds of federal assistance. We’ve got a list of
close to 20 different collateral damages that can be done to individuals convicted of domestic violence. So if somebody
is a batterer, I don’t have a problem with that individual having to deal with all of that. But if you’ve
got somebody who really is not a batterer—and worst case scenario is really a victim, who on one occasion has decided
to fight back, I’ve got a problem with that individual having to suffer that long list of collateral damages.

WOLF: And is it always—do they always fit that category, if they do pop up
with the program? That they were predominantly a victim, except in this situation?

ADRINE:
It might be a situation, for instance, where you’ve got a couple of folks that were involved in an argument
that actually got out of hand. Where—just to use as an example—one person pushed another, maybe against a wall, and
as a result, a picture fell and there’s a cut on the head. Okay. Bad business, no doubt about it. But one shove,
resulted in an injury, technically guilty of domestic violence, actually guilty of domestic violence under the way
that the law is posited. But is this person likely to engage in that kind of conduct again? Well, maybe yes, maybe
no, but that’s the reason to do the scrutiny on the front end, rather than letting this person go all the way
down through the system and ultimately end up with this kind of conviction. In Ohio, for instance, once they have
a domestic violence conviction, you know, if it’s for a first degree or misdemeanor or higher, they can’t
come back into court later and ask that that record be sealed or expunged. So they’re stuck with that record,
you know, forever more. So that being the case, I think that we want to be careful as to who we put in. And we’ve
been extremely careful. I think in the close to two years that we’ve had this deferred judgment initiative,
only about four people out of the several hundred that we’ve seen have qualified for placement.

WOLF:
You’ve made a persuasive argument that there are clearly people who would benefit from this and who should benefit
from this. I wonder why it’s not more common that we hear about this, more—programs like this, you know, trying
to make that differentiation between types of defendants.

ADRINE:
In the last two years, there has been an awful lot of discussion, particularly in the advocacy community, but I think
also in other parts of law enforcement and the criminal justice community about the context of violence between intimate
partners. And the one constant in all that is how difficult it is to make these determinations. And I think that
the reason why you’re not seeing efforts to do this is that a lot of people are saying, “We don’t think
we could make those determinations.” The thing that I guess I was doing with regard to this program, and it’s
the thing I’ve had to explain to judges who have followed me going in, is that a program like the deferred judgment
initiative is an exclusive program, not an inclusive program. When I’m looking at individuals, I’m looking for
reasons to put them into the regular criminal justice process, not reasons to put them into the deferred judgment
initiative. This deferred judgment initiative should only be for a limited number of people who we are confident
that we have screened in such a way so that within the parameters of human fallibility, we are pretty sure that they
are not going to engage in any more violent conduct. If we can’t say that almost to the high standard of beyond
a reasonable doubt, then they shouldn’t be placed in the program.

WOLF:
Let me ask you just about your experience here in New York. What have you found most valuable over the last couple
of days here?

ADRINE: As always, it’s an enlightening experience
because the things that you learn here are cutting edge. Yesterday we were looking at Integrated Domestic Violence
Courts, it was really interesting to see how both criminal and civil cases can actually be melded together and the
issues involving one family be heard by one judge, in a way that allows for a constriction of the number of court
appearances, and which allows that one judge to know just about everything that he or she needs to know about the
dynamics of that family to make good judgments, not only in the criminal case, but also in matters having to do with
custody, having to do with the matrimonial thing—that is, divorce—and all in one shot. It’s really kind of phenomenal.
And the complexity of trying to put that together in a way to make it work, and the dedication of the judges and
the other court actors, from the public defender’s office to the prosecuting attorney’s office, to the
court officers themselves, it’s just—it’s breathtaking. So I mean it’s been a really eye-opening experience.

WOLF: I’ve really enjoyed talking to you. This is Rob Wolf, I’ve
been speaking with Ronald B. Adrine, who is the administrative and presiding judge of the Cleveland Municipal Court.
I hope you have a safe trip home.

ADRINE: Thanks, Rob.

WOLF: It’s been a pleasure.

ADRINE:
Same here.

June 2009

Herb Sturz Works Behind the Scenes to Spark Innovation May 26, 2009

Herb Sturz–the subject of a new book, A Kind of Genius, by New York Times reporter Sam Roberts–talks about
innovation, the power of private-public collaborations, the founding of the Midtown Community Court, and his current
work at the Open Society Institute.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi.
This is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Today I’m at the Open Society Institute with Herb Sturz. It’s difficult for me to even begin
to describe who he is because he’s done so much. What draws me to him today in particular is a new book out by Sam
Roberts called A
Kind of Genius: Herb Sturz and Society’s Toughest Problems, published by PublicAffairs.

Your
career has spanned so much over the last four decades or five decades. The Vera Institute of Justice, for instance: you spearheaded its creation and
led it. And Project Renewal,
the Center for Court Innovation… Maybe I should start out just by thanking you for having launched the Midtown Community
Court which led to the creation of the Center for Court Innovation, which has been my home for the last 10 years.

HERB STURZ: I’m delighted.

WOLF:
I thought I might begin with a big picture question, which is, in your incredible experience with public policy and
government, what are the biggest changes that you’ve seen in terms of people’s attitudes about what government can
do and just the most important changes in public policy that you have seen?

STURZ:
It’s a large question, Rob. I don’t think I’ve seen a great change over the 50 years as it relates to what government
can do. I think we—back then people thought that government could do almost anything. One felt really that it took
the government to do things, and the role of the private sector was less out front than it is today. And I think
there’s been a much greater awareness both on the private, non-profit side or business-side and government that you
could do a lot more when you marry private non-profit and government together. They’re not necessarily on the opposite
sides of the line. In fact, they add to each other.

The Center for Court Innovation is a kind
of perfect example where you started with one experiment working closely with the court, police, D.A. It wasn’t always
easy, but it took both sides and a lot of finesse and thought and understanding on both sides. To that extent, I
think it just opened people’s eyes more rather than saying ‘it’s a new role for government,’ if you want to call
it a new role, as government has helped welcome the private sector. And that’s something that Vera helped certainly
start early in the sixties. I doubt it that it was original, that it never happened before. But we made that very
central to the way of modus operandi in those years and I think to this day.

WOLF:
You have had an extraordinary talent, it seems to me, to connect with the right people, to bridge differences between
people. I wonder what your secret is.

STURZ: It is not a secret.
What I have done and do to this day is I’m persistent. If I care about a problem, I stay with it and I try to understand
it. I try to understand it from everyone’s point of view. And you’re arresting somebody or stopping and frisking
someone down on the street, what is the impact on the person who’s stopped? What’s the impact on the person’s family.
From the police point of view does this really cut down serious crime, as they would suggest, by making it more certain
that people would leave loaded weapons or hard drugs home or not? But those are the – so you’re trying to understand
what is at play and what are the collateral effects and what’s more central. And so, it’s really a way of looking
at a problem and not assuming you have a lock on knowledge, and also trying to understand, I guess, the motivation
of individuals. And certainly in government, what do they need versus the private sector, non-profit sector, and
trying to uncover what’s involved in a problem.

WOLF: So much of
public policy, criminal justice especially, is fraught with ideologies and things are interpreted through, you know,
left and right, and conservative. How do you get people to see beyond that into just the practical aspects?

STURZ:
Not difficult. On paper they see it in the ideological side. But my experience with police has been – say, with skid
row derelicts, they didn’t like being thought of as street cleaners picking up the same drunk down on the Bowery
every day; nothing of value happening. Administrators there are aware that it doesn’t do the court system any favor
or anyone else including the skid row derelict to have them hauled into the lower courts everyday. It could be done
two, three times a day and nothing of value coming. I think defense lawyers or prosecutors realize they’ve lost dignity
dealing with an issue as important as this if, back then, you know, I think a third of all arrests were this skid
row-type in the City of New York.

WOLF: You’re talking about the
1960s when you developed Project Renewal.

STURZ: That was then called
Manhattan Bowery Project. It evolved to Project Renewal. And the police became our allies. The Correction Department
understood it and soon became our allies. It’s not like on all these things that everybody’s going to become your
ally. You have to go at a problem also, at times, when you’re going to have groups that are not sympathetic–in their
perspective for good reasons. You have to be very careful how you articulate something for sure. But you can articulate
it in terms of—and we did, certainly—both fairness and efficiency, and they’re not contradictory.

I
think if Vera and its off springs from the beginning just put it as ‘All we care about is the maltreatment of defendants,’
we would have done some good things, but we never would have taken it the next step to understand and open up doors
that weren’t all that hard to break down. A good idea, it takes you away. Then you have to be I will say a little
smart and persistent, again surrounding the problem, and how to articulate it.

WOLF:
So it sounds like seeing from the perspective of all the players allows you to find common ground. I mean you know
what the police, how they’re seeing this problem, you can find a way to come up with a solution that …

STURZ:
Often. Not always.

WOLF: Okay.

STURZ:
Not always. And there will be problems in anything. You may have to put it off a month or two months or three. Or
you have to figure out what the entry point is to get support. And it differs. There’s no rule. You have to get the
feel of the situation, the feel of what the public policy person has to—what his or her needs are at a certain time—what
politics of the government is.

WOLF: Well, so let me ask you: Have
you ever been arrested? Have you ever been through the justice system?

STURZ:
Well, let’s see. When I was about nine, I was sort of arrested. Someone stole a bicycle that was in our garage, my
first bike. And they left an old used bike in there. And so, that was all there was. And so, one day a few days later
I was driving the bicycle on the street, and I felt somebody grab my arm and said that’s my son’s bicycle. And they
took me, believe it or not, to the police station, and they put me behind the bar. I was about nine. I couldn’t remember.
They called my family and I was – you know, it wasn’t real traumatic, but I was so scared. I always remember most
the police bringing me in there and that arm and hand grabbing me and his saying, ‘You stole my son’s bike.’

WOLF:
It’s an interesting story because it is – it’s a complicated story, you know. It’s not like you were entirely – you
were innocent in a sense, but on the other hand, you understand that it was probably a stolen bike.

STURZ:
I did understand it, but also you get back to – I was nine.

WOLF:
Right. Yes.

STURZ: How much did I understand?

WOLF:
Well, right, right.

STURZ: And I had support from my family that
didn’t know the nuance of that. And then I was arrested, as it were, at the University of Wisconsin, when a friend
of mine, who later became deputy police commissioner of New York, and I were trying to earn some money with our variation
of “simonizing” carwash business. And we put on up and down the street, putting on a little tag on people’s windshields
saying ‘here’s your ticket’ to getting a good “simonizing”.

WOLF:
Right.

STURZ: The police took us and brought us into the police
station in Madison, Wisconsin. And then a third sort of thing was in Chicago where I went for a weekend just to feel
what it was like to be, knowing it was a phony in a way, what it’s like to be kind of poor. I went with old clothes
and no money. And I spent a weekend sleeping one night in a flophouse and another in a police station and spending
it during the day in a sawdust covered saloon, getting a feel of what it was like to just drink beer and all that
sort of thing.

WOLF: Well, let me ask you, I know I’m sure you’ve
told the story many times, but since I am from the Center for Court Innovation, maybe you could take a few minutes
and just talk about what led to the creation of the Midtown Community Court, you know, what you were thinking at the time.

STURZ:
Well, I really was sensitive to the idea of community and justice and working in the community. That was consistent
with certainly early work with the Bowery, with Wildcat. I also played a role in the redevelopment of Times Square
when I was chairman of the Planning Commission. And then I got to know Gerry Schoenfeld. I met him first in City Hall when we came to see Mayor Koch
and I was deputy mayor.

WOLF: And Schoenfeld is the theater owner,
Broadway producer.

STURZ: He was the head of the whole Shubert Organization.

WOLF: Right.

STURZ:
And it was really over I think breakfast, I was always complaining about panhandlers and such, and the mess-up in
Times Square, and what can be done about it, and no one cared but the theater. Whether he first said it or I first
said it, I’m not sure, but let’s say he did about doing something with the courts. It just was not necessarily original,
the concept, in Times Square. And I do remember very well saying to Gerry, “Gerry, you know what? If you give me
a theater, I’ll give you a court” because I knew he’s so dramatic and that we could do it and that will take care
of a place in Times Square. He offered it rent-free for three years.

WOLF:
This is when you were a planning commissioner.

STURZ: No. This is
while I was doing housing, working for Mullen Corporation.

WOLF:
So you weren’t in government. You weren’t in the judiciary, but you were promising you’d give him a court.

STURZ:
Yes. And one of the first persons I went to was Bob Keating. And Bob, whom I knew, I mean who in fact had followed
me as coordinator of criminal justice –

WOLF: I’m sorry, and Judge
Keating was the –

STURZ: City Administrator Judge of Criminal Court.

WOLF: Right.

STURZ:
And Bob was welcoming, but we got overwhelmed by opposition from neighboring real estate owners, from theater preservationists.
We had opposition from the New York County district attorney. We had a mixed response from the police at different
levels. The defense bar was concerned about ‘will this be a plea factory?’ and so on.

And ultimately,
we had to change the venue from the Long Acre Theater to the current home on 54th Street. There I started with no
money. I think I raised $5,000 or $10,000, not more than that I know, from the Shubert Theaters. And then I knew
I needed more money so I went to see Peter Goldmark who was then president of Rockefeller, very shortly or around
that same time, I hired John Feinblatt because then I had the nucleus of some money.

WOLF:
Right.

STURZ: Not a lot.

WOLF:
Right.

STURZ: But it started with like nothing.

WOLF:
And you had to get the courts backing, too.

STURZ: Well, not just
one. We had to get the state administrative judge. We had to get ultimately Chief Judge Judith Kaye and, you know,
of the story of her coming the night before.

WOLF: Right.

STURZ:
In her jeans to help whitewash the walls of that court. Midtown Community Court and Red Hook and then Center were
blessed with two really extraordinary persons to really make it work, which was John Feinblatt and Greg Berman, two
great people.

WOLF: And so, maybe you can tell me a little bit about
the kinds of work you’re doing, how you’re occupying yourself here at the Open Society Institute?

STURZ:
I guess I’m spending most of my time working on the mortgage foreclosure problems. George Soros asked me to try to look at this and what collateral impact on
young people is when they get thrown out of school, have to move or lose their homes.

I helped
set up something called the Center for New York City Neighborhoods ,which became a not-for-profit that was set up
by Shaun Donovan, now secretary of HUD and the mayor and Christine Quinn, head of the City Council. But I also went
back to my past and helped them to start something called the Neighborhood Improvement Project. Taking the elements
of supported work, we put people, in this case welfare recipients and homeless people, and capture their welfare
entitlements through the city’s Human Resources Administration and put them out in work crews. And ironically the
first group that received an award to do that from HRA was Wildcat
Corporation.

WOLF: Which you had started.

STURZ:
And so, what I did was change the concept and bring it up 30 years later to a whole other big problem, which was
mortgage foreclosure. And the idea is can you use people like this as a sort of mini-WPA, you might say, in the neighborhood,
not to go necessarily to the houses that are foreclosed but at the surrounding houses.

WOLF:
And do what?

STURZ: Remove the graffiti, remove debris ranging from
old refrigerators to cars, re-sod the lawns, fix broken fences.

WOLF:
You know, with Obama in the White House, I just wonder what your hopes are for this administration, what you see
that might be different.

STURZ: My thoughts are just filled with
hope. I love to turn on the television and read the paper and see Obama in action talking. I love to see Michele
Obama and the two kids. It gives me a great expanse of feeling when you have high, real quality people in the White
House trying to do hard stuff. I have no wild expectations. There’s a lot of stuff that would be out of his control.
But I feel there’s a real intelligence and a big heart going for him.

WOLF:
Well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking to you. I learned a lot. I’ve been talking to Herb Sturz who is
the subject of a new book, A Kind of Genius: Herb Sturz and Society’s Toughest Problems, by
Sam Roberts ,who details all of Herb Sturz’ amazing achievements whether he’ll call them that or not from the founding
of the Vera Institute of Justice to the Wildcat Corporation to Project Renewal to the Center for Court Innovation
and Midtown Community Court. The list is quite long and it’s still being added to. So thank you for taking the time.
This is Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Thanks for listening.

May 2009

Community Policing and Community Courts Apr 08, 2009

After visiting the Harlem Community Justice Center, Katherine McQuay and Zoe Mentel of the U.S. Department of
Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) talk about reentry, community policing, and
the stimulus package.

ROBERT V. WOLF: This is Rob Wolf,
director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome to another New Thinking podcast. I’m here
today at the Harlem Community Justice Center with Katherine McQuay who is a supervisory policy analyst with the Office
of Community Oriented Policing Services, and with Zoe Mentel, a policy analyst also with the Office of Community
Oriented Policing Services, otherwise known as the COPS Office. You came to learn a little bit about the Harlem Reentry
Court. Maybe you could tell me what interested you in it and what you thought about what you saw.

KATHERINE
McQUAY: Sure. The COPS Office is all about community policing, so we’re all about partnering, problem
solving, organizational change, and reentry is tailor-made for community policing because it’s all about partnering,
it’s law enforcement, with the community and the social service agencies, with other criminal justice agencies. And
we’ve been involved with reentry to a small extent in the past. We had a pilot program where we funded five pilot
reentry sites, and we’ve required community-based or faith-based organizations to partner with law enforcement agencies,
and faith-based mentoring is the centerpiece of those programs.

WOLF:
I know maybe it’s too soon. You’re still processing what you’ve seen, but are there some takeaways here, things that
you learned or think you might be able to apply?

MCQUAY: Well, I
think it really fits with everything we’ve learned over the years. Someone today said, you know, it’s all about partnering,
which, you know, that speaks to us, and it’s knowing what everybody else is doing and seeing how we can collaborate
because it’s not – no one person can do it alone.

ZOE MENTEL: And
what about other lessons that we’ve learned from hearing the parole officers is that offering services isn’t just
one more thing that you have to do in the course of your job. It’s something that’s going to make your job easier
or make it easier for you to have a positive impact.

McQUAY: And
I think that the discussion afterwards emphasized the need for law enforcement involvement because law enforcement
can be a detriment to these efforts or a great plus to these efforts.

WOLF:
I see.

McQUAY: And I think it really points to the need to partner
with law enforcement, to let law enforcement know what you’re doing with these efforts and to try to get them on
board so you can work in a coordinated fashion. We’ve talked to jurisdictions; there aren’t many but there are few
who do have law enforcement officers and probation-parole officers going out together, so really presenting a united
front and working together. And that seems to be a really good idea that’s starting to catch on.

WOLF:
As opposed to cross-purposes, it sounds like you can have different goals where the parole-reentry attitude sort
of encourages a certain amount of perhaps forgiveness with technical, very technical violations, and the police might
be presuming something else along the lines of zero tolerance.

McQUAY:
And the reentry parole officer talked about, you know, even if there is a technical violation of parole-probation,
that doesn’t mean they’re automatically going back to prison, so there seems to be a new attitude here where you’re
really trying to work with that individual and giving them every break possible to help get them on the right road.

WOLF: So why don’t you tell me a little bit about the COPS Office?
Tell me about its history.

McQUAY: We were created in 1994 as part
of the Violent Crime Control Act under President Clinton. And we were initially known for putting a hundred thousand
community policing officers on the street. And since then, we’ve done that and much more. We’ve created a network.
We call them the RCPIs: the Regional Community Policing Institutes that provide training and technical assistance
to law enforcement and the community on a variety of topics. We have a research and evaluation division that does
a lot of publications for us on a variety of subjects. We just distributed our 2 millionth publication. And we cover
everything from reentry to law enforcement agencies, internal affairs department, to hiring and recruitment to domestic
violence, to innovative ways for law enforcement to partner with the community. So we offer a lot to law enforcement
and the community on ways to work together.

WOLF: And is that the
theme that runs through all your work, the community-oriented element where you’re trying to build bridges between
law enforcement and the community?

McQUAY: Exactly. And the three
elements of community policing which are partnering, problem solving, and organizational change, getting across the
idea that, you know, it’s not enough for law enforcement agencies to say this is our community policing officer.
It really has to be a philosophy that goes through the department.

MENTEL:
And it’s a philosophical change from moving away from a reactive stance to a proactive stance. And that’s one of
the commonalities between community policing and the community justice movement. There are a lot of similarities,
especially when you hear community justice people say that most of the courts out there are doing some form of community
justice but not calling it by that name. We have the same sort of phenomenon happening with law enforcement agencies
where they’ll be doing community policing and maybe they won’t even know that’s what it’s called but just through
innovations that they kind of fall into it.

WOLF: So in what direction,
what’s new in the agenda going forward here in 2009?

McQUAY: Oh,
we were pleased to be a part of President Obama’s stimulus package. So the COPS Office has a billion dollars that
will go for funding officers. It’s all hiring money. But we have to hire quite a few officers across the country
with that money and we think that’s a great way to help revive the economy and create jobs, and at the same time
increase public safety and reduce crime. So we were very excited about that.

WOLF:
About how many people does a billion dollars pay for?

McQUAY: You
know, we’re not sure. But when you take it over three years because it’s a three-year program and then you add on
benefits, maybe around 5,000 and that’s a very rough estimate at this point.

The COPS office
always has tribal money, methamphetamine money, technology money. So we’re involved in a lot of areas. And then our
area of the office is currently looking over the things we would like to focus on this year. And we haven’t nailed
those down yet, but certainly, violent crime would probably be among those. Youth violence may be among those. The
effect of the worsening economy on crime may be among those,

MENTEL:
Urban violence.

McQUAY: Urban violence. So a lot of key things we
have to look at in 2009, 2010.

WOLF: Interesting.

MENTEL:
Busy.

WOLF: Busy, absolutely. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for
taking the time.

McQUAY: Thank you. It’s great to see this today
and see how it works.

WOLF: It’s very nice to meet you. I’ve been
speaking with Katherine McQuay, supervisory policy analyst with the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services
and her colleague, Zoe Mentel, a policy analyst also with the COPS Office. This is Rob Wolf, director of communications
at the Center for Court Innovation. To learn more about the Center for Court Innovation, you can visit www.courtinnovation.org.
Thanks.

April 2009

Addressing Vacant Properties through Prevention, Enforcement and Redevelopment Mar 13, 2009

Roxann Pais, an executive assistant city attorney in the Dallas City Attorney’s Office, describes how prosecutors
across the U.S. are responding to the crisis in foreclosed and vacant properties.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi. This is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome
to another New Thinking podcast. I’m here with Roxann Pais, who is the executive assistant city attorney with the
Dallas City Attorney’s Office and the special assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas. And she
and I have both been in Washington a few days before President-elect Obama’s inauguration—but that’s not why we’re
here—to discuss mortgage fraud and the foreclosure crisis and how they are affecting communities and what law enforcement,
prosecutors and police can possibly do about it. Roxann, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me.

ROXANN
PAIS: Absolutely, Rob. How are you doing today?

WOLF:
I’m doing great.

PAIS: We have some friends here in Washington.

WOLF: Yeah, we have. It’s been very interesting. I’ve learned a
lot.

PAIS: It’s been so exciting to be able to see people so passionate
about their work and the hope of a new era.

WOLF: You know, when
I think of foreclosures, I associate that within a problem for individuals who are perhaps having problems paying
their mortgage and with the banks. Tell my why prosecutors should be interested in foreclosures and why you and the
Dallas City Attorney’s Office have become interested in it.

PAIS:
The prosecutors are in the business of ensuring that quality of life is improved in their neighborhoods. They are
in the business of reducing crime and prosecuting crime. They are in the business of making sure that justice is
served to the fullest extent possible under our laws.

If you take a look at the mortgage crisis,
the foreclosure crisis, what you’ll find is that this results in vacancy of structures on blocks. And typically,
these vacancies are occurring in some of the most crime-ridden, poorest neighborhoods in our country. And as a result,
crime begins to flourish with vacancy. Austin, Texas did a study where they found a block that had a vacant structure
on it had crime two times more than a block next door that didn’t have a vacant structure on it. So you could imagine
the cost that police incur in addressing crime with vacant structures on the block.

WOLF:
What kinds of crimes are we talking about?

PAIS: The drug dealing,
the gangs. The National Fire Protection Association estimates that about 6,000 firefighters are injured every year
just to put out fires in these abandoned vacant structures. There’s been a lot of talk about domestic violence increases
as a result of the foreclosure crisis and the stress that it has placed on families. There’s been talk about juvenile
delinquency and the amount of pressure that it’s putting on children who are being torn from their neighborhoods
and put somewhere else where they don’t know anyone.

WOLF: And is
it true that if you have a vacant property that that can lead, that can generate more vacant properties?

PAIS:
It’s an extreme domino effect and it can lead to potentially serious, serious problems not only resulting in crime
but even in city budgets, for example. We have a vacant structure. The value of the property is less than if it was
occupied. So when cities have lower property values, their tax base is lost. And when they have a lost tax base,
the municipal budgets are lower than they were in the preceding year. When you have a lower budget, municipal budget,
you have less services, such as police and fire services.

WOLF:
Well, so tell me, what can prosecutors do in response to this crisis and to prevent this crisis?

PAIS:
I’ve had the great opportunity to actually look across America and study various jurisdictions to see what they’re
doing. It’s important as we discuss a holistic approach to solving problems that we look at making sure that a jurisdiction
has prevention methods to prevent foreclosed or vacant structures, that they have enforcement methods, and that they
have a plan to reuse the property. And I’ve studied probably 80 different jurisdictions and have come up with about
80 different ideas on how to attack the problem through prevention, enforcement and reuse methods.

WOLF:
Wow. And so, there is a lot going on.

PAIS: Prevention methods,
for example: we have jurisdictions that are having to hire vacant property coordinators because there’s really not
a sophisticated method in place for municipalities or districts or counties to identify where vacant structures are
located. So they’re actually having to be pretty sophisticated in terms of gathering information from their fire
inspectors, their code inspectors, the U.S. Post Office.

WOLF: So
you’re saying they hire a coordinator who then specializes in this because …

PAIS:
Correct.

WOLF: Prior to this crisis, they didn’t know even where
to begin to …

PAIS: Correct.

WOLF:
To identify where these properties were let alone what to do with them.

PAIS:
Some creatively are even looking at the foreclosure dockets [to] identify where the vacant structures are located
and being foreclosed on. Some are actually looking in the newspaper to get identification of the structures that
are being foreclosed upon and their public notice.

WOLF: In the
legal notices. And what do they do when they identify, you know, so they know where the properties are?

PAIS:
Well, a lot of these vacant structures that have been foreclosed are actually owned by the banks. And many banks
are not taking care of their properties. So prosecutors are beginning to hold the property owners, which are the
banks, responsible for making sure that those properties meet minimum housing standards and are boarded up and secured
so that we can avoid any kind of violent crime occurring on the property.

In terms of enforcement,
many jurisdictions around the country—and I would say Chicago, Illinois is leading this effort; Dallas, Texas also
just recently passed one—there’s an ordinance called the Vacant Registration Ordinance, and this is where the municipality
places the burden on the property owner of the vacant structure to register the vacant structure with the city. They
usually have to pay some sort of registration fee and they have to file an application that identifies all the information
that a city would need to know to contact the vacant structure owner if there are any problems on the property.

WOLF:
Because this is not information that is readily available?

PAIS:
Correct. Usually, there are also very specific ordinance requirements for these vacant structure registration ordinances.
Many cities are requiring these property owners to have security lighting or alarm systems or fire sprinkler systems
as a way to encourage public safety and discourage vacancy. Some jurisdictions are actually even requiring vacant
liability insurance so that if you have a vacant structure, they’re going to mandate that it be insured. And many
jurisdictions have gotten really creative on their reuse methods. And some cities are actually taking vacant lots
and selling them at a very nominal price. For example, Columbus, Ohio can sell their vacant lot for $500, but they
enter into an agreement with the purchaser that they’re going to do certain things to that property to improve the
development in that neighborhood. And if the property owner doesn’t comply with that agreement, the property reverts
back to the city.

Other jurisdictions, for example, have a side yard program. These may actually
be properties where the vacant land is too small to redevelop. And so, they offer the lot to the neighboring property
at a very nominal price so long as they keep it up..

WOLF: So someone
who – a non-vacant owner who is responsibly taking care of their property can then annex this side yard as long as
they are committed to maintaining it.

PAIS: Sure. And other jurisdictions
are even becoming more green and allowing non-profits and neighborhood association groups to purchase land for a
dollar as long as they turn it into some sort of garden.

WOLF: Wow.

PAIS: For beautification purposes. There have been other very creative
methods. Some non-profit organizations are actually purchasing the land and house, and they keep the land and sell
the house so it makes the house sale more affordable for people to buy. The creativity involved among prosecutors
and those at the table working with them is pretty phenomenal.

WOLF:
It sounds like – it sounds very encouraging. It sounds like there’s a lot of good ideas out there to respond to this
what is now a growing crisis. I want to thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me.

PAIS:
In Washington D.C.

WOLF: In Washington D.C. I have been talking
to Roxann Pais, an executive assistant city attorney and special assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District
of Texas. Thank you so much. This is Rob Wolf. Thank you all for listening.

March 2009

Fighting Mortgage Fraud Feb 09, 2009

Ann Fulmer, a lawyer and community activist, explains how mortgage fraud harms neighborhoods—including her own
community outside Atlanta, Georgia—and what residents can do to stop it.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi. This is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome
to another New Thinking podcast. Today I’m with Ann Fulmer who is a vice president at Interthinx, and she’s also
the co-founder of the Georgia Real Estate Fraud Prevention and Awareness Coalition. And we just spent a couple of
days in Washington D.C. at the Bureau of Justice Assistance at a focus group discussing the impact that foreclosures
are having and mortgage fraud is having on communities around the country and various law enforcement and justice
system responses. First of all, welcome.

ANN FULMER: Thank you.
Glad to be here.

WOLF: Happy to have you here. You are a dynamic
speaker and that’s one reason I invited you. And you’ve been doing some interesting work. I wanted to ask how mortgage
fraud, which maybe people associate or think of as a white collar crime, think of it as something involving the financial
world, how that actually impacts crime and impacts communities?

FULMER:
Well, mortgage fraud is literally bank robbery without a gun. But it brings other crimes and other really negative
effects into a community. When you have people who are acquiring properties and mortgages with the intent of taking
money and not occupying the home or rent it out to people who are criminals—because a lot of times we see that, you
know, it’s a way to launder cash—there’s a whole cascade of events that happen.

When you have
inflated values, the tax assessments go up. People who move into the neighborhood later are going to pay more than
the houses are really worth because on paper, in the real estate listings and in the tax digest, the properties look
like they’re worth more. But because it’s bank robbery without a gun, these properties inevitably go into foreclosure.
And foreclosures, as you know, have a negative impact on all the surrounding properties in the immediate vicinity.
And then you have underwater borrowers. You have vacant houses; you have blighted houses. And as you know, vacant
houses invite crimes like prostitution, vagrancy, arson, drug dealing, those kinds of things.

WOLF:
Well, so tell me about your personal experience because I’m interested in how you as a community member became aware
of this and actually became very involved in fighting it.

FULMER:
Well, I’m a recovering lawyer. And I was at home on the mommy track after my children were born in a very high end
– well, maybe not very high end, but a very nice neighborhood in the eastern suburbs at Atlanta. Yes, it was a suburban
neighborhood. And back in 1996 we started noticing, and I started being told because I was involved with the community
association, that people were buying houses in our community and walking away with a lot of money. And I thought
how did they do that because I haven’t bought that many houses but I’ve always written a big check; what am I doing
wrong? Over time I started to notice that houses in our neighborhood were selling twice on the same day and for hundreds
of thousands of dollars on the second transaction.

WOLF: Wow.

FULMER:
There were a couple of houses on my street that sold for about $300,000 more than they were worth at the time. And
one of the things that—one of the houses was never occupied. So that’s what the FBI would call a clue. When you have
somebody who’s paying too much money for a house and they don’t bother to move in, you might have a problem with
mortgage fraud. The other house, which was directly across the street from that one, and that’s one of the reasons
fraud is such a problem because they tend to cluster. And the other clue that I had was this house right across the
street from the one that was never occupied, even though UPS was delivering packages, which turns out that they were
delivering drugs to these houses and picking them up at night. The other house across the street was occupied, but
the people moved in, in the middle of the night with the teeniest little—and this is like a 6,000 square foot house—so
the teeniest little U-Haul you’ve ever seen and everything they owned they carried into this house was in 30-gallon
trash bags.

Well, the next thing you know there’s kids from the school who are living in this
now 600,000, 500, $600,000 house 12, 15 years ago who are going to our elementary school. And all of a sudden, the
school’s asking me what do you know about your neighbors because here’s these kids, they live in a $600,000 house.
Grandma, who is now a convicted felon, by the way, is driving a Jaguar or a brand new Jaguar, and these kids are
on free lunch. What’s up with that? And because these things were happening and because of my work in the community
people were telling me about other houses, I started to look into these transactions.

And I discovered
this really very typical web of transactions where you have a few people who are buying a lot of houses all over.
And I realized it wasn’t just, you know, the 20 or so houses that I ultimately identified in my neighborhood, but
it was happening all over Atlanta. And as I kept trying to get someone to address the problem, which at first they
wouldn’t do because I was dismissed as a bored housewife who needed a better hobby, I started finding out that it
was happening – it wasn’t just Atlanta; it was all over the country.

WOLF:
Now without going to too much detail, what’s the basic principle here? I mean this person moved in with trash bags
and yet could afford this house. How did this person profit from this transaction?

FULMER:
The people that moved in with the garbage bags were actually ex-cons who were friends of what we call the orchestrators.
The orchestrators are the people who are the brains behind and who profit most from these transactions.

WOLF:
I see.

FULMER: And they were recruiting people who were coming out
of the Georgia prisons to act as what we call straw buyers to stand, to actually fill out the paperwork. So they
were profiting because they were getting paid five to $10,000 per transaction that they lent their name to and showed
up at the closing to sign the paper. And this particular group used a lot of identity theft too. So these guys were
standing in for people in Michigan and in Florida who had no idea that they were buying overpriced property in Georgia.

The orchestrators are profiting because let’s say you have all – I’m not good with numbers so
I’ll just use low simple numbers. But say you have a house worth $100,000. If you can flip it for $200,000 by getting
a bad appraisal or a bad appraiser to say that it’s worth $200,000, then there’s a $100,000 profit there.

WOLF:
Right.

FULMER: One of our cases the closing attorney was getting
$4,000 per transaction under the table when the normal fee’s about $500. And these people were walking away with
anywhere between $30,000 and $60,000 per transaction.

WOLF: So they
don’t pay off the mortgage. These people do temporarily until the bank foreclosed or something.

FULMER:
Like I said in the beginning, it’s bank robbery without a gun. There’s no intention to pay for the property.

WOLF:
What’s interesting to me is how can community play a role in assisting law enforcement prosecutors, people who are
attempting to address this problem. You as a citizen, you went ahead and you started …

FULMER:
GREFPAC?

WOLF: Right. The Georgia Real Estate Fraud Prevention and
Awareness Coalition. Maybe not everyone can do that, but maybe you can tell me what GREFPAC encourages people to
do.

FULMER: Right. And with the banking crisis, one of the things
that’s happened now is people who are in danger of being foreclosed or fallen victim to a whole new world of scams
that are designed to take advantage of desperate borrowers like that.

I think that there’s a
couple of things. One, when we’re talking about spotting fraud, people who are in neighborhoods are the canaries
in the mine because you know when somebody gets a hundred thousand dollars more than their asking price. You know
because you hear through the grapevine that somebody came in and, you know, the house is on the market and somebody
made an offer, sight unseen. You hear these kinds of things, or that the seller got $75,000 back or that the borrower
got a bunch of money back. So in that sense, you know, you can be the first eyes and ears for your law enforcement
community.

One of the things community associations need to—can do—is cultivate relationships
with law enforcement agencies because these crimes do bring in street level crimes. A lot of these houses get turned
into meth labs. They get turned into “grow” houses so they’ve got a pot farm in the basement. If they’re not occupied,
you have arsonists; you got prostitution; you got drug dealing; you got vandalism; you got fires – all this kinds
of stuff.

WOLF: So it really behooves community members to inform
themselves about this and for community groups to do it because it really can have a tangible impact on their very
quality of life and their safety, public safety.

FULMER: Absolutely.
And you need law enforcement to help you with that. But the other thing, the other side of the equation I think is
education because one of the ways that my community ultimately shut down the flipping was by engaging the community
in dialogue about what mortgage fraud is. We didn’t know the whole scope; we didn’t know the whole panoply of damages
that were going to happen. But we started talking about what we were seeing. And one of the things we were able to
do was to educate sellers so that they would be wary when somebody came in and made a weird offer. Instead of just
saying “Wow, somebody wants to me a hundred thousand more than I’m asking, cool; where do I sign,” they would stop
and they would ask. And we could say yeah, that’s a huge red flag for mortgage fraud.

We educated
the realtors who farm our neighborhood because realtors like to have a specialty in an area. We worked with closing
attorneys. We worked – I mean, basically, we made a whole lot of noise and said, “you know, not in our backyard.”
But it really is a lot about education.

WOLF: Wow. Well, you know,
I want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. And it was a pleasure to meet you. Once again, I’ve
been speaking with Ann Fulmer who’s a vice president at Interthinx and a co-founder of the Georgia Real Estate Fraud
Prevention and Awareness Coalition. And I don’t know if you have a website or something that you might want to refer
people to.

FULMER: Well, Interthinx is at interthinx.com and GREFPAC
is at grefpac.org.

WOLF: Wonderful. This is Rob Wolf and thanks
so much for listening.

February 2009

Giving Youth a Voice in Justice Policy Jan 08, 2009

Linda Baird discusses the Youth Justice Board, which brings together high schoolers across New York City to
study and make recommendations about justice policies that affect their peers.

Addressing Domestic Violence in New Orleans Dec 05, 2008

Mary Claire Landry, director of Domestic Violence Services for the Catholic Charities in New Orleans, discusses
the challenge of rebuilding effective responses to domestic violence in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: This is Rob Wolf with another New Thinking podcast from the Center for Court Innovation.
Today I’m with Mary Claire Landry, who is the director of Domestic Violence Services for the New Orleans arm
of Catholic Charities and also serves as the Secretary of the Louisiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Thanks
so much for joining me today.

MARY CLAIRE LANDRY: Thank you for
having me.

WOLF: I wanted to talk about what’s happened with
domestic violence services in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina. Maybe you could take me back three years. Obviously
Katrina was devastating to the entire city, devastating to the infrastructure.

LANDRY:
Well I think after Katrina, what we experienced is just, as you know, just a community just broken in so many ways.
We knew immediately when we got back into the city a couple of months after Katrina and we were able to re-inhabit
the city, that we had to find new and different ways to identify victims of domestic violence and find those places
that we knew they would start showing up.

We knew people were not going to know where to go for
services, and we knew that people were going to be experiencing domestic violence in ways that they had not, maybe
not been exposed to before. We knew that we were gonna have a lot of situational domestic violence, which is not
your typical control-type of long-term, escalating violence, but just really related to coping, the lack of coping
mechanisms, of coping support systems, of couples that had been married, 20, 30, 40 years and never experienced domestic
violence coming in with very severe cases, very kind of primal responses.

Not only did we see
an increase, but I think it exposed the domestic violence that was already there. They won’t call the police, they
won’t go to the court systems. It got really exposed after Katrina when those systems went away.

WOLF:
What happened to the resources you had? You had had shelters, you had had some, obviously programs running prior
to the hurricane.

LANDRY: Absolutely. We ran the traditional emergency
shelter in New Orleans. We lost one of our buildings to fire, and one that flooded substantially and we couldn’t
use it. So we were down to one building. The other partner that did a lot of the work traditionally in domestic violence
for 30 something years, the YWCA, flooded substantially and that organization didn’t recover. They did not re-open.
So we took over a lot of the services—a lot of the non-residential services—that the Y operated prior to Katrina.

We lost all of our funding contracts after Katrina, and we had to go back and fight because what
I heard immediately after Katrina is ‘There’s nobody living in New Orleans, there’s no domestic violence,
you know, you lost your shelter, so you know, we don’t feel we need to fund you.’

WOLF:
And those were local funding sources?

LANDRY: It was federal, state,
and local. And I basically had to say, ‘You know, even though I lost all my staff, we are recovering. We’re
rebuilding our infrastructure and domestic violence is not going to go away. It’s going to be, it’s ever more
critical that we get our services back up and we need your support.’ And fortunately, it took me about six months
to recover all of our funding grants.

WOLF: So it sounds like you
almost had a clean slate after, I mean no funding, resources gone, and you mentioned your staff…

LANDRY:
… Was all over the country. I came back to New Orleans with three employees. I mean, when I came back and I saw my
building burned, and saw the ashes and saw my car in ashes, and saw my home, you know, while it really just was very
disheartening and difficult and the loss was tremendous, I also saw tremendous opportunity. I saw us really having
an opportunity to redesign services the way we always wanted to.

We were starting from scratch,
and how many people in a lifetime have an opportunity to, to just rethink, start from scratch and say, this is what
we know, we have the expertise, we know what’s going to work and what doesn’t work? And if we’re going
to spend all this time and money in putting back an infrastructure, let’s do it the right way. Let’s do
it, let’s look at all the best practices and design a system that’s really going to be responsive. And
that’s what we’ve done.

WOLF: So tell me about that. What
does it look like now? What have you created?

LANDRY: Well, it’s
been incredible. I mean what we created, we redesigned how we provide housing. We no longer do the shelter model.
We provide hotel vouchering, we provide safe houses that we lease in Catholic Charities names that are located throughout
the city so that if people want to stay in their community they can stay where they feel comfortable and where they
feel safe.

WOLF: Mmm-hmm

LANDRY:
They like the independence. You know, we really wanted to get away from congregate living because that’s very
difficult for women who are in trauma and who are moving away from a control issue, to move into a congregated living
situation where they have to follow rules. And other people are making decisions.

So we really
want to be able to respect their need for independence and control over their own lives. We identified every entry
point that we knew that survivors would show up for services: healthcare, emergency rooms, police, court systems,
and we put trained advocates in all those systems to make those linkages. Very, very effective.

But
the most exciting initiative is the Family Justice Center because it just makes so much sense to locate everything—especially
people who are in trauma, especially in a disaster area where everything that’s familiar is gone, to really
have one place that we could direct women and families or anybody who’s a victim, to get all those services
and to really get the partners on board to work with us, to redesign this vision. And that’s what the Family
Justice Center has enabled us to do.

WOLF: Describe the facility
for me. You picked a location and started from scratch?

LANDRY:
We were very fortunate. At one point we were really actually thinking of putting the Family Justice Center in FEMA
trailers. That’s how desperate we were. At the end of June the city came forward with a city-owned building
that was vacant, that had not been flooded. It was an old firehouse from the 1850s, one of the first original firehouses
in New Orleans, and we had our grand opening two years to the date of Katrina. And we just celebrated our one-year
anniversary.

WOLF: And so describe it to me. What is there? What
happens?

LANDRY: What we have on site is the New Orleans Police
domestic violence unit, we have the district attorney on site, we also have city attorneys, and then of course we
have Crescent House. We have a whole range. We have an NOPD advocate, we have a legal advocate, we have a number
of case managers that are on site.

WOLF: So Crescent House is the
Catholic Charities’ domestic violence package of services.

LANDRY:
Correct.

WOLF: That used to be a shelter.

LANDRY:
Right.

WOLF: …per se and now it’s –

LANDRY:
We will get them to safety. We do the safety plan, you know, it really wraps services around the survivor when she
comes into the Family Justice Center, we provide all of those social services.

WOLF:
And what are the advantages of bringing everyone together in one location?

LANDRY:
Well I think it just has given us the leverage to be able to look at domestic violence as a community issue and to
look at community solutions so that it’s not just Crescent House going, saying ‘What should be the criminal
justice response to this? What should be the law enforcement?’ Because as you create that holding place, which is
the Family Justice Center, it really brings those partners in, and it brings buy-in. And so that, you know, it’s
not just one system that is working or not working. We’re all working toward really looking at how this is impacting
the survivors.

WOLF: Are there things you can tell me about, things
that have changed as a result of the insights that you have come to or the collaboration that has come about as a
result of being co-located in the center?

LANDRY: Absolutely. You
know, the domestic violence detectives now have protocols that we use so that we can work with them so if a woman
or a victim does not know how to navigate the police system and she’s distrusting of the police system, that
we can establish, re-establish that relationship. The relationship between the police and the district attorney,
the relationship between the city attorney and the district attorney, to make sure that those communications—so that
if we need to get a case moved from a misdemeanor charge to a felony charge, the Family Justice Center provides that
avenue for that to happen very quickly, and funding the Family Justice Center has really enabled us to bring more
prosecution resources to the table.

So one of the things that we’ve done is we’ve funded
some investigative positions to assist the police. We’ve actually funded some city attorney positions. We’ve
actually funded the district attorney position. And that was one of the things that we negotiated with the Office
of Violence Against Women when we were in the initial discussions because our criminal justice system was just devastated
after Katrina. They were down to one city attorney.

WOLF: So it
sounds like there was, in a way, a silver lining. It sounds outrageous to say about something as devastating as Hurricane
Katrina, but you’ve been able to take advantage of the circumstances, the starting from scratch, and create
something that sounds like it’s better than what it replaces.

LANDRY:
Absolutely, and I just, for myself personally, to stay in New Orleans and help the recovery, my commitment was if
I was gonna stay and do this, and rebuild this, why would I go back and rebuild a broken system? It just doesn’t
make any sense. We have this incredible opportunity. We had the support of the federal government, the Office of
Violence Against Women could not have been more helpful in bringing resources to us, to help our city to do that.

WOLF: And so you’re up here with a team of people visiting
Brooklyn, and you’re here with the Brooklyn D.A.’s Office and their Family Justice Center, and you’ve
seen the domestic violence courts operating here, and you’ve seen the traditional criminal court. And I wonder,
I don’t know if it’s too soon, if you’ve been able to process it, have you seen things that you want
to take back with you or lessons you learned?

LANDRY: Absolutely.
I mean we look at some software and tracking systems that we definitely can implement, that they have shared with
us. The Center for Court Innovation is going to provide us with a tool kit to help really create this domestic violence
court. The judge that is with us is really interested in doing this.

WOLF:
Really great. Well you know, I’ve really enjoyed talking with you and learning what’s going on in New Orleans.
We read about it all the time in the paper, and I can’t imagine going through that, and it sounds like you’ve
really been able to do something positive.

LANDRY: Well, it’s
been an incredible journey and it’s been exciting and, you know, I tell people it’s like being part of
the wild, wild west. We had this incredible opportunity. It’s quite challenging, but it’s also very rewarding,
so I’m very grateful for what we’ve been able to create.

WOLF:
Well thank you for taking the time and sharing your ideas and what you’ve been doing.

LANDRY:
Thank you.

WOLF: I’ve been speaking with Mary Claire Landry,
who’s the Director of Domestic Violence Services for the New Orleans Arm of Catholic Charity. And she also serves
as Secretary of the Louisiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence. I’m Rob Wolf and this has been another New
Thinking podcast, produced by the Center for Court Innovation. And to find out more about the Center for Court Innovation,
you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.

December 2008

A New Court in California: An Interview with Judge Wendy Lindley Nov 07, 2008

Judge Wendy Lindley offers a preview of the Orange County Community Court, which is scheduled to open in coming
months.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi, this is Rob Wolf, director of
communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and I’d like to welcome you to New Thinking, a podcast produced
by the Center for Court Innovation. With us today is Orange County Superior Court Judge, Wendy Lindley. I’m
sorry for the background noise, but we’re in a hotel lobby. Welcome to New York.

JUDGE
WENDY LINDLEY: Thank you very much; it’s great to be here.

WOLF:
So let me ask you, I know you’re doing a lot of interesting stuff in Orange County. Can you fill me in on your
background? You preside over a lot of different kinds of problem-solving courts. So maybe you could tell me what
those courts are.

LINDLEY: Certainly. I’ve been very, very fortunate
to have been involved in what we call collaborative efforts for many, many years. I’ve been a collaborative
court judge for drug court for 14 years, for a criminal mental health court for almost seven years, for a DUI court
for about two years, and a homeless court for about six years. I’ll be opening up a veterans court in November
of 2008.

WOLF: How did it come to pass that you’re at the crossroads
of so many of these collaborative courts?

LINDLEY: I think that I
came out of the district attorney’s office and my first week on the bench I looked at things in a completely
different way and it dawned on me that jail wasn’t solving problems and that I, I felt compelled to try to look
at a different way of conducting business. And in the beginning, I just had people come back and see me, bring their
AA cards, bring family members, and had a kumbayah court. The problem was it didn’t work. They were picking
up new cases and I couldn’t understand why. And that was when I learned about the drug court effort started
by Janet Reno in Florida. And when I learned about the techniques that were successful, such as drug testing and
the more counseling, and oversight, I made overtures to work with other community members to set up a true collaborative
effort, about an 80 percent of those individuals don’t ever pick up anything again, including a driving on a
suspended license, which is about the lowest case you can get. So it’s been very exciting.

WOLF:
And so over the years you’ve expanded your involvement by creating these other kinds of courts, and now you’re
about to start a veterans court, and I understand you’re also about to start something that, as far as I know,
doesn’t exist anywhere in the country. It’s a community court, which of course exists in other
places, but it’s a different kind of community court. And so I wonder if maybe you can tell me a little bit
about the veterans court and then about this new kind of community court.

LINDLEY:
We decided we wanted to have a more coordinated effort to work with people who’ve served this nation and as
a result we will be opening up our veterans court specializing in PTSD, traumatic brain injury, substance abuse,
and mental illness, specifically for individuals who have served in a combat arena on behalf of this nation.
So we’ll be using the same collaborative efforts that we’ve used, the same model that we’ve used since
the inception of our collaborative courts, the research-based drug court model with this new court as well, that
of course as always, when we open up different kinds of courts, we’ll be bringing in different community partners.

WOLF: So like all problem-solving courts, people who are coming into the court
are involved in the criminal justice system in some way, so they’re facing some kind of charge but you are offering
them an alternative to incarceration through treatment and collaborating with community services to try to get them
back on track, but presumably if they don’t do well, because you’re following the drug court model, there
are sanctions and there are other penalties. Is that right?

LINDLEY:
Exactly. You’ve described it beautifully. We follow the graduated sanctions and rewards and we are a court that’s
really based on positive reinforcement and it’s a very fun, wonderful place to be. We clap, we are enthusiastic,
and we reward good performance. We have mentoring programs that also assist our clients staying on track, and if
they don’t do well, we have flash incarceration, which is, you know, a pretty severe sanction, and we do occasionally
have people who terminate.

WOLF: And when you say terminate, then
they face some other penalty?

LINDLEY: They go back to basically
the regular criminal justice system.

WOLF: So tell me about
the community court. How did the idea come about? And what is it and what stage is it at?

LINDLEY:
Well interestingly enough, the idea started with the prior presiding judge, Judge Fred Horne had come out through
an invitation through the Center for Court Innovation to see Red Hook. And he was so enthusiastic about that, that
he came back to California and was able to get a grant from the AOC to work with the Center for Court Innovation
on creating a community court for our community. So it’s a stand alone court that will have one courtroom in
it, one judge, and 30 ancillary services all on site. We have a full time social worker that will be there every
day. We have full time paralegals from the public defender’s office that do outreach with our clients and link
them, not only with cases that they have in the system, but also with services. We have a medical doctor that will
be there certain hours, we have a psychologist that will be there. We have a psychiatrist that will be there. We
have outreach and engagement for mentally ill, which is a team that is comprised of law enforcement and psychiatric
nurses that go out into the community but they’ll also have an office on site on our, in our facility.

WOLF: And they go out into the community, presumably not to arrest people,
but to offer services?

LINDLEY: No, to do outreach. And also if there
is an altercation with a regular police officer, they will call this team in—and they believe the client is mentally
ill—they’ll call this team in and this team will work with the mentally ill person. They are specially trained
to do outreach for the mentally ill. It’s a fantastic program. We also have a children’s chambers. And
the children’s chambers is a beautiful room which will be served by agency, another partner called Victim Witness,
where they’ll have full time staff on site to take care of the children while the parents are in counseling,
and our theme there is reading. And every child that goes in will be read to while they’re there. We don’t
have a television. And they will leave with a book of their choice. They can choose any book in the room. We’re
hoping that while we have the children there, the doctor and psychologist have a room right there in the next office,
that we’re gonna be able to meet the needs of these kids that come in and suffer so much by the bad decisions
of their parents.

WOLF: And you are going to be the judge.

LINDLEY: Very fortunate, yes, that I get to be the judge there. It’s a
labor of love.

WOLF: And just give me a sense of how it works. So
you go in in the morning there and then you have say a drug court calendar in the morning, and then a veterans court
in the afternoon, and then the next day a homeless court?

LINDLEY:
Exactly. There’ll be a specified court every morning and every afternoon, every day.

WOLF:
In the same court room but you sort of put on a different hat and have different people coming in.

LINDLEY:
Different hat, different team. For every single court we always have a public defender, a lawyer, the district attorney,
healthcare agency, which is our healthcare, county healthcare provider, the probation department, who is a wonderful
partner in all of our efforts except homeless court, and then all of our ancillary agencies.

WOLF:
When I think of Orange County, I’ve always been told it’s a very conservative place. Were there some people
who were, perhaps, critical of this approach? And if you did face those kinds of challenges, I wonder how
you addressed it?

LINDLEY: Well, I think it’s important for
individuals in the community to understand this isn’t about some, you know, drug user or mentally ill person.
This affects the kids. The majority of my clients are parents because I do adult programs. So this, this is a huge
factor in our community and the way that it affects young people. Plus with all the wonderful studies we have, showing
that we save, you know, 10 dollars for every one we spend in a program like this, it’s a pretty easy sell, really,
both economically and socially, to most people if you have a chance to sit down and really talk with them about the—and
the great end results we have in the researched-based programming that we do.

WOLF:
So when is your opening day?

LINDLEY: Justice George, who’s
Chief Justice in our state, he is going to come down and do a grand opening on December the 5th.

WOLF:
Sounds great, and I look forward to hearing more about it as it progresses. And thank you so much for taking your
time.

LINDLEY: Certainly. It’s nice to meet you.

WOLF:
This is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. You’ve been listening to my
interview with Orange County Superior Court Judge Wendy Lindley. To find out more about the Center for Court Innovation
visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.

November 2008

Community Justice in Baltimore Oct 27, 2008

University of Maryland Law Professor Terry Hickey discusses Baltimore’s new Prostitution Court and other
community justice initiatives.

ROBERT V. WOLF: This is Rob
Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. I’m here today with Terry Hickey, who is
adjunct professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and is deeply involved in an interesting project that
they have been collaborating on, called the Community Justice Initiative. Terry, welcome to Brooklyn and the Red
Hook Community Justice Center.

TERRY HICKEY: Thank you
very much. Good to be back. It’s my sixth time with the law school, I think out of eight times we’ve come.

WOLF: I thought maybe a way to start off is to ask you to explain to me, what
is the Community Justice Initiative?

HICKEY: Sure. Well I think you
guys know that one of the big questions everybody asks when they leave here is, gee, can we do this at home? The
Community Justice Initiative I think started on that wave length. What can actually be done in Baltimore, you know,
with our politics, with our government, and you know, within our judicial system and how big do you start? The law
school at the University of Maryland had a clinical program where law students get a chance to practice real law
with real clients, both individuals and communities. Professor Brenda Blom, who was the founder of the concept of
the clinic wanted to see if there was some way we could take this community lawyering concept, marry it to problem-solving
justice, create this community justice initiative, use law students, use resources from the law school, combined
with all of the different agencies within the justice system, within our communities, bring them actually all together
to the same table, and actually finally answer that question, can we do this where we are?

WOLF:
I assume the answer is yes, it can be done because you’ve been doing it for many years. So I wonder if you could
maybe describe to me how it’s manifested?

HICKEY: Sure. It started
by developing what we call the Community Justice Task Force. All told, I think there were over 100 plus entities,
government agencies, and people involved in the task force. Building off of years of community discussion around
prostitution, which has been epidemic in Baltimore, the law school, the task force, and many others that are actually
on this trip now to Red Hook, were able to get together and form an advisory committee for the formation of a prostitution
problem-solving court. We’re probably within the last two months of being able to kick this off. A judge is
being selected. The group has received funding for a full-time social worker to be the gatekeeper and the idea is
to start out, literally, with the top three or four police districts for concentration of prostitution cases will
be redirected to this court. The whole idea is to get offenders who plea into the court to be put on various tracks,
to provide them with housing, job assistance, drug treatment, in exchange for going through that path, your case
would not be included in record or would be dismissed. While at the same time enlisting the health department to
start a Saturday school for johns, for instance, and to bring back programming in which neighborhoods can report
license information and descriptions so the police department can send letters to the registered owner of the vehicles
letting them know that their vehicle was seen in a high prostitution area, sending the message that communities are
being proactive. So that’s the community side of community justice. And then the court becomes the justice side
of community justice.

What’s been amazing about this, and I think this is what community
justice has come to mean to me and several of us—you have prosecutors, vice cops, law students, law professors, community
members sitting at the same table with advocates who work on the streets, with prostitutes, and refer to prostitutes
as victims of what’s going on, whereas the police may have referred to them only as offenders or perpetrators.
And we’ve all done this amazing, I think, process of learning from each other and about all the elements. And
it’s never seen like this is a way of being soft on offenders. It’s never seen like, you know, this isn’t
going to have any teeth to it, but the folks working with prostitutes know that this is gonna give them another option,
and the folks in the courts know this is gonna stop the revolving door, and the police know that they can stop arresting
people for their own good only to have them back on the street the next day, and nothing’s happened. So like
I said, this is a couple of months away from being reality and I think it really sprung from those initial sort of
community justice thoughts that people got from coming here to Red Hook, combined with community members who have
been sitting at the table for years saying, this has to stop. You put those two together and it’s a real-life
situation that looks like it’s really gonna happen.

WOLF:
Tell me about the role the students play in this, and just in general in the community justice initiative.

HICKEY: Sure. If you’re a law student at the University of Maryland
and you take this course, which is the Community Justice Clinic, it’s a major, uh, they spend roughly 30 hours
a week working on this. It’s a major undertaking for them. They all receive a community client so on one hand
they learn how to represent communities, how to work with community members by representing a wide range of transactional,
you know, other things, incorporation issues, working with their Boards of Directors, the things that you wouldn’t
think of community lawyers doing.

WOLF: When you say community
client, do you mean civic organizations?

HICKEY: A community association—

WOLF: Not a specific person?

HICKEY:
Nope, nope, a community association—

WOLF: The community at large
is their client.

HICKEY: Incorporated entities, neighborhood associations,
community development corporations, groups such as that, you know, acting as their attorney, helping train their
board of directors working on legal issues. But broadening that so that they can conceptualize these—how crime and
violence and maybe a lack of impact of the justice system impacts those communities. And by learning those issues
they’re also placed in various other areas. A group of law students are working with the prostitution court.
Another group is being split up to work either on liquor board cases representing communities in actions against
problem bars and liquor stores. Another group is working on what’s called a vacant house receivership program,
where they’re helping communities work with the housing department to have something done with vacant houses,
which is, again, a significant cause of crime in neighborhoods.

One of the main reasons we keep
coming back to Red Hook, even though some might say we’ve seen everything there is to be seen, when we come
back we give these law students a chance to take this synthetic idea of community justice that they may have sort
of heard about—it’s a very interesting clinic and you’ll get to do all these things in court—to, wow, this
is really happening and this is something that I can see a little piece of at home. Or even just, okay I get it now.
Let’s get back to Baltimore and I want to get working on that project again. As you go through law school you
tend to, uh, the inspiration tends to get dulled a little bit from when you come in and I think it’s trips like
this that expose them to the fact that there’s so much more really going on out there. I think what’s different
now from the first time we came here is that in the beginning it really was a theoretical—boy I wish we could do
something like that, but that’s just never gonna work back at home. Now I think, through the Community Justice
Task Force and the clinic and the hard work of everyone involved, I think we’ve got a foundation so you can
take, you know, it was always inspirational—that’s why we love coming here—but now I think we can take the inspiration
of the day, get on the bus, take the long ride back to Baltimore, wake up the next morning, and actually engage them
in something that’s going on as opposed to trying to build something from scratch. And that’s why I’m so
hopeful moving forward.

WOLF: It sounds
great, very interesting. I wish you the best of luck.

HICKEY:
Thank you. We’ll keep plugging away and eventually—every little bit, right?

WOLF: Well thank you and I’ve been speaking with Terry Hickey, an adjunct
professor at the University of Maryland School of Law. This is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center
for Court Innovation. Thank you for listening.

October 2008

Member of Parliament Discusses Community Justice Sep 29, 2008

Member of Parliament Nick Herbert talks about his work as Britain’s shadow justice minister, the Conservative
Party’s prospects in the next election, and the importance of problem solving.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: This is Rob Wolf and I’m welcoming listeners to another podcast produced by the Center
for Court Innovation. With me today is Nick Herbert, who is a member of Parliament, conservative member of Parliament,
and currently the shadow justice secretary. Let me first welcome you to New York and to Brooklyn.

NICK
HERBERT: Thank you very much for having me.

WOLF:
I wanted to just wonder if you could indulge me just for a little bit and give me a little civics lesson and explain,
what is a shadow minister?

HERBERT: Sure. Well, we have the British
Parliament, which comprises the elected House of Commons and the unelected House of Lords and the general election
to the House of Commons determines who will form the government. Whichever party has the biggest majority forms the
government. And for the last 10 years, the labor party has held the majority and has formed the government, first
with Tony Blair as prime minister, and now with Gordon Brown.

There will have to be an election
within a couple of years and my party, the Conservative Party, which was led by Margaret Thatcher and is now currently
in opposition is hoping to win the election next time. And our government also has ministers. One of those ministers
is the justice secretary, what’s called the secretary of state for justice, who is responsible for prisons,
courts, probation, oversight of the judiciary, and we have shadow ministers from the opposition party who shadow
the government and hold them to account.

And actually, we are formally called the opposition,
Her Majesty’s Official Opposition. And our job is to oppose the government and hold the government to account
with regard to the public.

WOLF: And how does that work? Do you
have a critique on every action and decision that the government makes?

HERBERT:
Well, I expect visitors will have seen the House of Commons and, you know, you have the governing party sit on one
side and we sit on the other, and we discuss things, debate things across the floor.

WOLF:
I’ve seen lots of shouting when I’ve seen it.

HERBERT:
It’s quite lively. But, you know, it’s deliberately a confrontational chamber where we get to the bottom
of issues by discussing them in a fairly robust manner. So we debate issues in the House of Commons, we vote on legislation,
and naturally also we debate issues through the media. And we have to test the government’s legislative program,
make sure they can justify it, and hold the government to account for the way in which it’s running the prison
service, running the probation services.

And at the same time as holding them to account, we
have to come up with ideas of our own, positive ideas for how we would like to change things that we would put to
the British public at the next general election.

WOLF: And are there
opportunities for your ideas to be incorporated into the government or are they sort of, you’re sort of in a
gestational period while you wait and you sort of develop your ideas? You critique what they’re doing but you
wait until you are returned to power?

HERBERT: There is a partisan
debate as there is in the United States, which isn’t always constructive. But actually what tends to happen
is that the government will then pick up the ideas that it wants to and take them on. I think there is probably more
that we agree about as political parties in the United Kingdom than disagree.

WOLF:
And so I understand you’re interested in the concept of community justice, such as it’s practiced in Liverpool,
as I understand it, and some of that taken from ideas that have been generated here in the United States. And I wonder
what interests you about it and how does it fit in with what your priorities are as far as reforming and improving
the delivery of justice?

HERBERT: Well I’m hugely interested
in the community court, as have other people been in the United Kingdom, and many of my colleagues from all parties
have come over and seen the community court here. And as you say, it led to the formation of the experimental community
court in Liverpool back in the U.K., and I’ve been up there and met the judge, and seen all of that too.

And
I think what drives our interest is that we have a rising prison population back at home, not absolutely at the same
levels as the United States but nevertheless, it has risen very sharply. We also have rising rates of re-offending.
And I think that there is, I think that there is now a general acceptance that you cannot allow the prison population
simply to rise indefinitely and that what you should worry about, in particular, is rates of re-offending, where
we have offenders who are cycling back into the system very quickly.

The recidivism rates for
adult offenders are 60 percent within two years and going back into prison amongst youth offenders it’s much
higher. And what we are interested in is the extent to which we can try to intervene at an earlier stage to secure
more effective justice, you could say smarter justice, that is actually going to prevent re-offending, stop people
entering the custodial system in the first place or, once they have been in the custodial sentence, try and rehabilitate
those offenders and prevent them from re-offending.

And what is intriguing about the community
court here and in Liverpool is a different approach to courts, where courts become problem-solving, pulling together
a lot of the resources that are necessary to try and help offenders go straight.

WOLF:
Are there ideas that you’ve seen or that you’ve tossed around that you’d like to see, that you feel
confident should be implemented, or you’d like to see implemented, given the opportunity to implement them?

HERBERT: I don’t think that we can divorce any ideas from the
question of cost and that seems to me to be one of the real obstacles to the further development of community courts
in the United Kingdom and that’s, you know, an issue that we’re going to have to look at very closely.
But certainly, I am very attracted to the notion of accountability, of making sure that when a disposal is handed
down by a court, that it actually is meaningful in terms of securing an outcome. The courts aren’t just handing
down short-term custodial sentence or a fine or a community order which in some way is not effective. A fine, because
it is not paid, as happens in our country. A community order which is ineffective because it is not properly completed
as happens. A drugs rehabilitation requirement which is ineffective because it isn’t completed and the offender
remains on drugs.

What I like about the approach we have here is that there is a different perspective,
which is cases coming back to the court, where the judge is actually, effectively accountable for whether an offender
has gone off drugs, whether a community service was completed satisfactorily. Not just drawing together resources,
but also introducing that accountability to make sure that an offender is dealt with properly.

WOLF:
And I noticed that you had started, before you became a member of Parliament, a think tank called Reform. Can you
tell me a little bit about that and the work it does?

HERBERT: Yeah,
well it hasn’t escaped my attention that Reform is currently sort of one of the buzz points in the United States.
We started Reform a few years ago because there seemed to be only one kind of analysis around in the U.K. and that
was an analysis that said that our public services were starved of investment and what they really needed was more
resources and that would make them more effective.

And there certainly was a case that some of
our public services, including our health system, did need more funding. But we were very concerned that the analysis
was a very shallow one and that actually what mattered also was how our public services were organized, to what extent
they were accountable, and whether the big funding increases would deliver higher productivity and value for the
money, for the taxpayer.

And in the main, I think there’s a wide acceptance now in the U.K.
that the very big increases in public spending that we’ve seen over the last decade have not yielded the improved
performance from our schools, from our hospitals that is proportionate to those spending rises. And the taxpayer
has paid a very hefty bill for the increase.

And so we wanted to come up with ideas to drive
value from money in our public services. And that may mean introducing principles of choice and competition into
public services. It may mean that in terms of monopolistic public services holding them, finding mechanisms to hold
them properly to account.

Reform is a non-partisan organization which promotes its ideas to political
parties of all persuasions. And what we’ve found is that these ideas have increasing traction in the U.K. as
politicians are confronted with very difficult decisions. They cannot just go on spending more money on services.
They have to focus on the outcomes whether the services are performing well.

WOLF:
Just one last question. So what are the prospects for the Conservative Party? HERBERT: Well, at the moment, having
been out of office for a considerable period of time, over 10 years, the Conservative Party are favorites to win
the next general election, which has to be held at the latest by June 2010. So in a couple of years time, or it could
be before that.

Having said that, we are not complacent. We have a highly effective young leader
of the opposition now, David Cameron, who was just featured on the cover of Time magazine, which is a kind of tribute
to the fact that he is very much seen as the coming political figure. He’s a hugely impressive leader of the
opposition, and clearly has the makings and the look of a prime minister.

But we have an electoral
mountain to climb. We have a lot of ground to make up, and in spite of the unpopularity of the current government,
which is perhaps not surprising after it’s been in power for 10 years and we’re now moving into an economic
recession, which never makes governments popular, it’s very important that we, as the Conservative Party, earn
the trust of the British public, that we demonstrate that we have the ideas and the vision to govern the country
effectively.

It’s in the search for these ideas that I find myself here in the community
court, Red Hook, and looking at how things can be done better, be willing to learn from countries where things have
been done differently, in an entirely non-dogmatic basis, on the principal that if it works better, we should be
willing to consider it.

WOLF: Very good. Well it’s been very
nice talking to you and I hope you enjoy the rest of your visit to New York and the United States.

HERBERT:
Thank you very much indeed for having me here.

WOLF: Thanks. This
is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. I’ve been speaking with conservative
Member of Parliament Nick Herbert. To find out more about the Center for Court Innovation you can visit us at our
website, www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

September 2008

Harlem Parole Reentry Court Jul 15, 2008

Staff of the Harlem Parole Reentry Court discuss how they help ex-offenders make the transition from incarceration
to the community.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi. This is Rob Wolf,
director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and welcome to another episode of New Thinking, a
podcast produced by the Center for Court Innovation to highlight practitioners, researchers, and others who are experimenting
with new approaches to justice.

Today I’m in the Harlem Community Justice Center with some
people who make the Harlem Reentry Court a reality. The reentry court, which was launched in 2001, is one of many
experiments around the United States seeking to address the fact that within three years of their release from state
or federal prison, about half of ex-offenders return for either a new crime or parole violation.

With
me today are Administrative Law Judge Grace Bernstein of the Division of Parole, Senior Parole Officer Alfonso Camacho,
Reentry Coordinator Nigel Jackson, and Deputy Project Director of the Harlem Community Justice Center John MeGaw.
Welcome everybody.

ALL: Hello.

WOLF:
So let me start off with a straightforward question. What is the Harlem Parole Reentry Court?

JOHN
MEGAW: Rob, we opened up in 2001 and it was an effort by the Division of Parole, which sort of acknowledged
the difficulty of men and women who had gotten out of prison staying out of prison. Nigel and Al Camacho’s staff
go into prison prior to the release of the inmate to get a lot of information. Then when they come out on the day
that they’re released, they appear here and they appear before Judge Bernstein.

And the idea
is that they will—they need to be more accountable, and we help them get to jobs, we help them get into treatment
programs, and every other week review how things are going.

We work with them for six months,
but if they successfully make it through their first six months after release, then we have a big graduation ceremony
and celebrate their success.

WOLF: Generally, how long have they
been in prison? Is there a wide range?

ALFONSO CAMACHO: Our parolees
consist of violent and non-violent offenders that can vary in time of incarceration from a year to five to 10. One
individual in particular just spent a significant amount of time in jail for 20 years; and he’s doing well by
the way.

WOLF: So I would think that someone who’s been in
jail that long has a tremendous number of needs, you know, housing, job, I mean just getting reoriented into the
community. And John referred to the kinds of services, but, I mean, how do you really get in there and support someone
like that?

CAMACHO: Well, unlike the traditional services where
mostly everything is done by referral, here at the Harlem Reentry all the agencies involved are anticipating this
person’s arrival with more or less a coherent plan in store for them with the goal hopefully that this individual,
the needs are already known by each inter-dependent agency and therefore to lead to the same basically common result
of hopefully providing services this individual may need.

GRACE BERNSTEIN:
Last year we’ve had a number of individuals who had served a significant amount of time, 20 years I think, some
even more.

When they come out of prison, they’re very motivated, but they come out of prison
sometimes with no place to go. We provide them immediate housing.

One guy said he didn’t know
anything about a Metrocard when he got out. And he actually went back to school. And these are men in their fifties,
these are not young people, some are in their forties.

And you know, we give them what they need,
and there’s a very supportive environment here. But that, you know, a supportive environment and everything
isn’t what does it. What does it is the immediacy of the services; that’s what does it, and parole officers
and senior parole officers who really want this to succeed and work very, very hard with the individuals because
it’s not always “Oh, he comes in after six months. It’s perfect.”

WOLF:
And I imagine that there are some people who have been in prison a long time. They’ve been involved with the
justice system, and then they’re brought to a courthouse after their release. Do some people, I don’t know,
react negatively or have some issues around that, being brought before a judge again when they thought they were
done with judges.

NIGEL JACKSON: I would say yes. They definitely
have a problem with seeing a judge. Ninety nine percent of the people, you know, they have a big problem coming to
see a judge as well as a parole officer. Maybe I’d give them a 20-minute talk to everyone that we’re interviewing
before individual interviews. There’s a lot of apprehension. So at one point I asked, “Yo, what’s
the problem?” And he said, “Every time I see a judge, I go to prison.” So at that point, I changed
my whole spiel and I let them know how Judge Bernstein is. She’s their biggest ally and they have to meet here
before they judge what type of person she is and what her role is. And I let them know the only person they can violate
you first is yourself and your parole officer. And Judge Bernstein is there to help you. And if you need a kick in
the butt, she’s going to kick you in the butt.

WOLF: So Judge
Bernstein, I understand that you spend a good part of your week actually at Rikers—that’s not part of the reentry
court—where you are looking at parole violators perhaps.

BERNSTEIN:
I do parole violators. And if somebody violates from here, then they know if that has to happen, then we tell them
this is the whole purpose, for to not send you back to jail. That’s my opening statement: “We’re here
not to send you back to jail,” that they know they’re going to come before me. And they know when I tell
them it’s not a Chinese menu where you can choose some of your conditions like part of A and not B, that you
have to do everything; if there’s a problem, come in and talk to us. We try very hard to work with them as long
as they’re working with us.

There was one incident yesterday, if I can have a minute, which
I think really says a lot about the program. I was in the waiting room where people stand and I’ll talk to them
and they’ll tell me their problems; they’re doing well enough; whatever. But this particular individual
said his son graduated high school and is in and will be going back to where he lives and to college. And he wanted
to bring his son here to meet everybody. And he wasn’t sure—could he come in next week even though it’s
not his regular day to meet his parole officer and bring his son? You know, every once in a while there’s something
that says everything. I think that says everything.

WOLF: Well,
let me ask you. Your role is very different when you’re here. Do you feel different as a judge? You’re
doing something different; your function is different.

BERNSTEIN:
Yes. I feel sometimes that it’s at the finish line and I’m coaching, “You can do this just a little bit
more; you can do this,” and sometimes to say to them you care, sometimes you make them feel that they can do
something, that they can have confidence in themselves when they fall to move forward again. I feel that my purpose
here really is to make sure that they do not violate and go back to jail. This is why I’m here; this is why
I want to be here.

MEGAW: The irony to your earlier point about
their reluctance, resistance to see a judge when they first hear about it from Nigel and the parole staff in Queensboro
before they’re released, the irony is that when they complete their six months, very few want to return to regular
parole supervision. They all want to stay in this program.

Unfortunately, we can’t continue
because there are new parolees that need to come in. But it’s a complete turnaround in that time because of
the attention that they get here.

WOLF: Do you find it a challenge
sometimes to find them housing or jobs because people are reluctant to house ex-offenders or employ ex-offenders?

CAMACHO: We do have agencies that can accommodate at least this
particular group of individuals because, again, we have established relationships with other agencies like Palladia
that can take our undomiciled offenders. So we do have things in place for that.

MEGAW:
It’s temporary housing. There’s no question that housing is tight especially for someone who is working a low-level
job and doesn’t have the money to be able to afford an apartment in Manhattan.

Jobs, actually,
the other part, you know, jobs is one of the other stumbling blocks. We have a – the Division of Parole works with
and we work with an agency called the Center for Employment Opportunities. So we set up—and again, it’s the
immediacy of the services—the parolees begin transitional work right away. And so, they are going each day, getting
into a routine of getting up in the morning, getting to a job, working, and they get a paycheck at the end of every
day. So they have a little money in their pocket to begin to support themselves and to provide for their families,
something they may not have done before for many years. We also work with agencies in this area by encouraging them
to hire ex-offenders.

WOLF: And so, have you observed certain characteristics
that the most successful participants have? I mean what makes for a successful participant in the reentry court?

BERNSTEIN: I think what it is, is real determination not to go back
to jail. “I’m not going back to jail and I’m going to do whatever is necessary.” And persistence: “I’m
not getting discouraged.” And the problem is the drugs though; that’s a whole separate issue. I’ll let you address
that.

CAMACHO: There’s a renewed sense of responsibility for their
actions. I mean this is a short-term program for six months. But to just instill certain behaviors that can carry
on to their next PO because when they leave here, they do get transferred to a regular field PO. But unlike that
field PO getting a fresh individual out of jail with all these needs, these individuals have probably achieved or
reached most of their needs. So it becomes actually a pretty decent transition for them to continue their life with
parole as part of it, remain working, stable residency and, of course, absence new drugs. Those three things, are
basically the most common factors to recidivism that I’ve seen in my years as a P.O.

BERNSTEIN:
Some parolees react very positively when they have extra responsibilities thrown on them. They’re all of a sudden
responsible for a child that they didn’t think they’d be responsible for and they know they have to get
themselves together; when somebody in their family is ill and they know they have to be there for that person.

CAMACHO:
Just finding that a motivating factor.

BERNSTEIN: Yeah. Something
that says “I’m going to do it.”

CAMACHO: It’s no longer
“do it for parole or you get locked up.” That premise is out the window.

WOLF:
Nationally, I understand there’s a trend towards more attention on reentry. That’s a focus. What’s
your sense of that?

MEGAW: Fifteen year ago the term “reentry”
was not really in the vocabulary of criminal justice experts and policy folks. The fact is that about 600,000 men
and women are released from state and federal prisons each year. And there’s a recognition that about half of
them—there’s the problem—about half of them end up in jail or prison within three years.

And
so, in 2001, I think 2001 was really the year in which, not just in New York State, but other states as well, where
they started to look at the rate of recidivism and the approach to dealing with that problem.

And
so, New York State and this court in particular was – I actually thought we were the first in the United States.
It turns out I think we’re the second or the third reentry court that started. But 2001 is when the other courts
started as well. Now I just learned, actually a couple of weeks ago at a conference in St. Louis, there’s about
50 reentry courts around the country.

WOLF: What kind of results
have you seen? Have you been able to track participants and see if the lessons that they’ve learned here have
stuck?

MEGAW: Here, since actually 2006, we’re proud to report
that over 85 percent of the men and women we worked with have been successful. So that means that they haven’t
violated or had new arrests.

CAMACHO: And I can even add more recently
to that. Our graduating class here—we’re going to have a graduation soon—from the beginning of the year, January,
quite frankly I totaled I think about three year arrests from the whole population of over 70 parolees, give or take.
That’s amazing.

WOLF: That’s great.

CAMACHO:
What I’d like to see is really agency, cooperation, and coordination combined with individual determination
resulting in positive numbers that you see here.

WOLF: Well, I wonder
if any of you have any final comments you’d like to share with others who might be thinking about ways to ease
the transition from prison to the community.

JACKSON: Like everyone
says, the coordination with different agencies that provide the services, the service providers. You have to have
some sort of collaboration. And when we come together at our monthly meetings, this also makes the person be responsible
because they know that we’re talking, they know they can’t go and jive us: “Oh I went to the program.”
No, we get a report every week.

So these are the things that I –the programs are very important
as well as our collaborations and the responsibility that the parolee has, that he knows that we are speaking to
each other every week or everyday.

CAMACHO: Communities, localities,
more or less, do have to take a responsibility of the population that’s coming in from jail to their immediate
districts or residences, whatever. And with that in mind, their parole officers can more or less help these people
reach a successful completion of their sentence by having immediacy, what we have here, but is so lacking in the
general parole population as a whole.

WOLF: Right. Right.

JACKSON:
The word I was looking for is “accountability” that the parolee has when he knows that we’re all in communication
with each other. They can’t lie. If we have a problem with someone, and the world is so small …

CAMACHO:
For this one little community, this one little area and this one project going on here, I really think it does more
or less give a model to what should be the new 21st century view of criminal intervention and changes in social behavior.

BERNSTEIN: About the program, one of the big things is the continued
innovation in the program. The program started originally with a very small amount of people in it, very small case
loads, all non-violent. We now have people who are violent. And for the first time, we’re now taking women.

So there is constant innovations within the program itself, and the one thing that I think needs
to be worked on is jobs, jobs, jobs, and the community being open to hiring people.

WOLF:
Thank you, all, so much for taking the time to tell me about your work here at the Harlem Parole Reentry Court.

I’ve
been talking with the Administrative Law Judge Grace Bernstein from the Division of Parole, and Senior Parole Officer
Alfonso Camacho, and the reentry coordinator, Nigel Jackson; and the deputy project director of the Harlem Community
Justice Center, John MeGaw. Thanks so much to all of you.

And to learn more about the Harlem
Parole Reentry Court, you can visit the Center for Court Innovation’s website at www.courtinnovation.org. At
the bottom of the home page you’ll see a tab labeled “reentry” and you can subscribe to the New Thinking
podcast through iTunes or you can visit us on the podcast page at www.courtinnovation.org. I’m Rob Wolf, director
for communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Thanks for listening.

July 2008

Youthful Offender Domestic Violence Court: Working with Teen Victims and Abusers Jun 03, 2008

Judge Miriam Cyrulnik explains how the court–the first of its kind in the country–addresses the unique needs
of adolescent domestic violence victims and perpetrators.

ROBERT V. WOLF:
Hi, this is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and welcome to another episode
of New Thinking, a podcast produced by the Center for Court Innovation to highlight practitioners, researchers, and
others, who are experimenting with new approaches to justice. Today I’m in the chambers of King’s County
Criminal Court Judge Miriam Cyrulnik, who presides over the Brooklyn Youthful Offender Domestic Violence Court and
also the Adult Domestic Violence Court and Criminal Court. Although today I’d like to focus on Youthful Offender
Domestic Violence Court. I thought I’d start out by asking you a little bit about the differences between the
adult court and the youthful court. I’m a little more familiar with the domestic violence courts that work with
adult offenders and the goals of those courts, as I understand them are victim safety and accountability, which is
all about increasing monitoring of defendants to make sure they abide strictly by court orders. The youthful offender
domestic violence court, I understand, works with young people as the name suggests, 16 to 19 years old. Is that
correct?

CYRULNIK: Correct.

WOLF:
So I thought I would ask you, are the goals in your court the same as they are in the adult version of the court?

CYRULNIK: First of all, it’s good to be with you today. In many ways the
courts are the same because it’s still a court of law, there’s still a presumption of innocence, cases
have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to convict a defendant. What’s similar is, as you said the goals
of victim safety, batterer accountability. The part works with teenagers, as you said, ages 16 to 19 who are in dating
relationships where there are allegations of violence. We have some same-sex couples, but predominantly male and
female. We have a designated victim advocate who works with the district attorney’s office to do outreach to
teenage victims. We have a dedicated batterers program that’s targeted towards the behavioral learning and I
guess psycho-social development of teenagers. It is a bridged program, it is free, it’s a 12 week batterers
program that’s free, as opposed to the adults who will go for 26 weeks and have to pay for the program. And
I will probably see these kids more often when I ask them to come back to court for monitoring, etc. Those are the
main differences.

WOLF: And how do the types of offending differ
from your typical adult domestic violence case, to a case involving a teen defendant? And this, of course, is in
the context of both situations we’re talking about misdemeanors, is that correct?

CYRULNIK:
My jurisdiction is over misdemeanors and violations, which for those who may not be familiar, a misdemeanor is a
criminal offense, the maximum penalty is a year on a misdemeanor. The kinds of cases that we see are very similar.
You get a certain percentage of young people who are charged with actual assault, where there is an allegation of
striking or injuring the complaining witness. You have menacing threats to that person, harassment, threats to the
other person. We’re starting to see, of course, technology being what it is, we’re starting to see more
cases involving text messages and emails that are perhaps threatening or alleged to be threatening. And I’m seeing
that with regards to adults as well, but of course kids are much more technically savvy so you’re more likely
to see it there. But there are some cases in which there are allegations of physical assault. No different than any
other.

WOLF: I was looking at some statistics about the court and
I thought it was interesting to note that although you speak of dating relationships, in about 50 percent of cases
the victim and the defendant have a child in common?

CYRULNIK: Yeah,
they do. And there’s a small percentage, probably under 20 percent I think where they may actually have a second
child, two children in common. And that was surprising, that was shocking to us, and it presents lots of challenges,
particularly in terms of working with the victims—shelters are not geared towards teenaged kids into the shelter
system, particularly with children. We have a number of situations that we come across where the young girl, perhaps
after the child is conceived or born, her parents do not want her in the house and often she’s living with the
defendant and his family. These kids lead very complicated lives.

WOLF:
I know that an important component of what you do is to offer services to the victims, so I wonder what kinds of
services you do offer.

CYRULNIK: Most of the services that might
be offered to victims probably would be through the Family Justice Center, through the district attorney’s office.
The court itself does not offer services to the victims. There is an outreach made to every single complaining witness
in these cases. I don’t want to speak for the D.A., but their goal is to get the complaining witness, the victim,
to sign a supporting deposition so the case can go forward. But if she’s not cooperative, they will still try
to offer her services and counseling, including shelter issues, if there are immigration issues. The Family Justice
Center has a huge array of services available.

WOLF: How are these
situations handled before?

CYRULNIK: Most cases involving teenage
couples who are in a dating relationship, they were treated as any other domestic violence case. I mean certainly,
10 or 12 or 15 years ago, domestic violence cases were not given any special attention so the majority of those cases
used to just get dismissed. The problem of teen dating violence was really no one spoke about it, no one looked at
it.

WOLF: And what’s the advantage to having a separate forum
where you focus on teen dating violence as opposed to the adult domestic violence?

CYRULNIK:
First of all, frankly, even in terms of the batterer’s program, no one thinks it’s a good idea to have
a 17-year-old teenager who may have had one incident, sitting next to a 50-year-old career batterer. The kinds of
discussions in the batterers program are going to be totally different. Their development is at a different stage,
their brain capacity is at a different stage, physiologically. So there are all kinds of issues to separate the teenagers
out from some of the adults. It also sends a message to any of the teenagers who happen to be in court or who hear
about it that we take it seriously. Victims get the message that we take it seriously. We’re willing to listen
and it’s certainly very important in terms of their feeling satisfied with the outcome or safe in going forward,
or just making arrangements that will assist them in their safety plan.

WOLF:
When this court started, and it started in 2003? Is that correct?

CYRULNIK:
Right.

It was really one of the first. I think there might have been one in California, but then
it was the second of these courts, domestic violence courts that focused on youthful offenders. And I wonder, you
know, do you feel like the idea is catching on? Have there been replications? Do you get inquiries? What’s your
sense?

CYRULNIK: We get them all the time. The one in California
was a family court model. My understanding was that this was the first in a criminal court setting.

WOLF:
Oh, okay.

CYRULNIK: There is now a youthful offender court in the
Bronx. There are plans to open them in a number of different jurisdictions, and we get inquiries all the time. We
get people from around the world who are coming in to watch what we do at YODVC.

WOLF:
And I wonder, from your perspective as a judge, do you have a different experience from before for the adults versus
the teens?

CYRULNIK: Absolutely, absolutely. I talk to them differently.
I am much more likely to—they are all represented by counsel—but I am much more likely to actively engage them in
conversation. If they’re in the program, if they come to court, they’re gonna get that positive reinforcement
right up front, which in our part consists of my promise to them that we call their cases as the first one on the
calendar. And they respond to the fact that court begins at 2:15 and they may be done for the day at 2:30. And that’s
a real concrete reward. And a lot of them focus on that and I make sure that we honor that. I will sometimes take
notes in the file about if they have had a child, if they are in school, if they are graduating, and I’ll ask
them how the child is doing, if there’s no order of protection, obviously. I also talk pretty sternly to them
if there is a problem and they watch how I handle everyone else’s case too, if there’s any problem. They wait
to see what the result is gonna be.

WOLF: What’s your sense
of their understanding of domestic violence? I mean I, obviously they must have thought this was a way to engage—a
normal way or an appropriate way to engage with their partner.

CYRULNIK:
I’m sure. That, that is what I’ve heard anecdotally from some of the facilitators who do group. They’re
exposed to domestic violence at home, they’re exposed to violence generally in the street. They’re exposed
to negative stereotypes of women in music, videos. All these things help to convey the message that you’re the
man and it’s okay if you control her and tell her what to do. And we have immigrant populations here and there
are cultural issues that come up. So there are a lot of different things that we have to deal with to sort of get
the message across that it is not acceptable.

WOLF: And what are
the consequences of non-compliance?

CYRULNIK: There are a number
of different options. Whenever I take a plea, I make sure that the defendant knows that he—and most of them are men
so I’ll say he—that he knows that he is facing 15 days in jail on a violation, up to 90 days in jail on a B misdemeanor,
or up to a year in jail on an A misdemeanor. And those are some serious jail sentences for someone of their age.
If they’re in the batterer’s program, if they’re kicked out one time, they are eligible to be reinstated
to the program with a three class penalty. So they have to finish a total of 15. If they don’t do it the second
time, they go to jail. And there is nothing that makes the point more crystal clear to the guys in the audience than
when cuffs get slapped on someone else. And they’re told you do it or you don’t. You don’t: you go
to jail.

WOLF: It’s obviously very challenging work and I wonder
if you enjoy it.

CYRULNIK: I always tell people it’s hard to
put the words ‘enjoy’ and ‘domestic violence’ in the same sentence, but I like what I’m
doing. I’ve been doing it for almost four years, and it’s tough when I have to put somebody in jail, but when
I see a young man who has really seemed to get it, and when you have a chance to actually make a difference in somebody’s
life, it’s a wonderful thing. It’s a wonderful thing.

WOLF:
Well thank you very much. I’ve really enjoyed talking with you. I’ve been talking with Judge Miriam Cyrulnik
of the King’s County Criminal Court. To learn more about the Brooklyn Youth Offender Domestic Violence Court,
you can visit the publications page at the Center for Court Innovation’s website. The main site is www.courtinnovation.org,
and there’s a tab at the top of the page labeled publications. And on that page, in addition to all kinds of
interesting articles and white papers, you’ll find a publication called Youth
Dating Violence: Can a Court Help Break the Cycle? by my colleague Christine Herman, which gives more background
on youthful offender domestic violence court. You can subscribe to the New Thinking podcast through iTunes or you
can visit us on our podcast page on www.courtinnovation.org. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the
Center for Court Innovation, and thank you so much for taking the time. And thanks, thank you to everyone who’s
been listening.

Brooklyn Mental Health Court: Linking Offenders to Treatment May 08, 2008

Judge Matthew D’Emic and others explain how the Brooklyn Mental Health Court links mentally-ill offenders
to treatment and rigorously monitors compliance.

ROBERT V. WOLF:
This is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Today we’re going to take a
look at the Brooklyn Mental Health Court, the first court of its kind in New York State to link mentally ill offenders
to treatment as an alternative to jail. Judge Matthew D’emic has presided over the Brooklyn Mental Health Court since
it was created in 2002.

MATTHEW D’EMIC: I’ve had defendants
who were accused – one defendant comes to mind– who plead guilty to arson and the D.A. insisted on a mandate of
there years with the court in order to take the case and he graduated last year. No doubt he would have been in jail.

WOLF: To do this work, D’Emic had to learn about more than the law.
He also had to learn a thing or two about psychiatry. He met for an hour each week with the court psychiatrist to
get a feel for medical terms, diagnoses, and medication. But he emphasizes that he still leaves medical decisions
to the experts.

D’EMIC: I know my boundaries. I’m a lawyer.
I’m not a mental health professional. So as much as I would not let the mental health professionals impose any
kind of a legal mandate on me, I rely on their expertise and don’t try to diagnose anybody or act like a mental
health professional in my own work.

WOLF: On Tuesdays, D’Emic spends
his time with clients in the courtroom. Procedures are very different here than in a conventional courtroom.

D’EMIC:
It’s a very informal atmosphere in the court. I mean my clinical team, which I’m lucky to have, consults
with the lawyers and the defense lawyers, the district attorneys who are also at the proceedings, and, you know,
we get to go through things very efficiently, and yet I think very fairly with justice being done. Every defendant
gets a chance to talk to me. If they want to approach the bench, they are allowed to approach the bench, which you’d
never see in a conventional courtroom.

WOLF: The judge is alternately
stern and welcoming, serious and jovial, depending on each client’s record of compliance with his orders and
their treatment regimes. Those who are doing well receive certificates of achievement when they complete a phase
of their court-ordered treatment.

D’EMIC: How are you? Alright?

WOMAN: I am fine.

D’EMIC:
Good. So come on up. I have your Phase IV certificate. (APPLAUSE).

WOLF:
Jail sentences are imposed on those who fail.

D’EMIC: Why is she
not on her medication? Why is she not on time for her program?

WOMAN:
Sir, um…

D’EMIC: I thought that going to jail might …

WOMAN:
No, I don’t want to go to jail tonight.

D’EMIC: I thought that
might wake you up a little but it hasn’t.

WOMAN: No, can you please
understand that I looked at my watch and I there was a misunderstanding with the watch.

D’EMIC:
No, I don’t understand that.

WOMAN: Okay, it won’t happen
again.

D’EMIC: OK, come back next week then.

WOMAN:
I’m sorry sir.

WOLF: Judge D’Emic uses the computer on his
desk and a technology program customized for the Brooklyn Mental Health Court to take copious notes on each client.
When clients appear before him, D’Emic strives to make a personal connection.

COLLEEN
MORRISSEY: He keeps notes on his cases and when a client comes up, you know, if she had knit a sweater
on the last date, he might have jotted that down. We all kind of do, you know. You wore this sweatshirt or were going
off to this Yankee game: How was that? How was your birthday? And I think that that personalizes that. And you know,
even you know, note-taking, however somebody does it, the fact that they’re acknowledged and that they’re
important to him. And they also know when they disappoint him.

WOLF:
That was defense attorney Colleen Morrissey of the Legal Aid Society, who noted that the entire treatment team plays
a role in her client’s recovery.

MORRISSEY: With the treatment
team and with their knowledge of substance abuse and relapse and mental health and relapse, and to a certain extent,
clients who may not be taking their medication or – those issues, they’re very familiar with that and I think
that they have a way of educating the court as to what these issues are as well. And that’s very helpful.

WOLF:
For clients like Stephanie, the Brooklyn Mental Health Court is a second chance, one that offers her an opportunity
to not only avoid jail but learn how to live with her mental illness.

STEPHANIE:
Originally my case was downstairs in the regular criminal court trial and when I came up here they said, “We’re
gonna give you a chance, we’re gonna work with you.” I was like “God, I am so happy!” You know, someone’s
going to work with me and help me. So I’m very happy with the program.

WOLF:
What kind of treatment did you have?

STEPHANIE: Oh it’s wonderful.
They sent me to a day program. It’s a clubhouse. I will go there, I go there five days a week and they have
cooking, they have computers, they have interfacing with a client and dealing with the staff. But it’s also
a hands-on program because you get to do a lot of things on your own like answer the phones, and they give you a
lot of responsibilities. So it’s great therapeutic work, so I like it.

WOLF:
What have you learned from your experience?

STEPHANIE: I’ve
learned that the courts of the United States want to work with people, they want to see us in a satisfying, comfortable
situation, as opposed to sending us to the, you know, the jail system and always looking down on us as though we’re
not able to be productive citizens. They’re giving us a chance to actually turn our situation around and become
productive.

WOLF: Lucille Jackson is Director of the Brooklyn Mental
Health Court.

LUCILLE JACKSON: The cases can range from you know,
drug-related offenses to assaults, to, on a case-by-case basis, arson. Also stalking.

WOLF:
Brooklyn District Attorney, Charles Hynes’ Office has been closely involved in the development of the Brooklyn
Mental Health Court. n choosing which cases to bring to the mental health court, Assistant District Attorney David
Kelly says public safety is a top consideration.

DAVID KELLY: We’re
worried about, when we talk about public safety in the context of the mental health court is really future dangerousness
or future criminality, and also, you know, recidivism—getting arrested again and coming back through the system again.
The psychiatrists here do a very good job of giving us, you know, a psychiatric risk assessment, the likelihood of
future dangerousness. And down through the years, we’ve rejected a number of defendants because the doctor was
concerned about the defendant’s future behavior.

The other element is once a defendant has
pled out, he usually has a pretty substantial jail alternative hanging over his head and that ought to be a strong
influence for good behavior in the future. And then, in addition, we never really adjourn a case in mental health
court more than one month into the future if you’ve been doing well. And in the beginning, if you’re brand
new to the court, then we’ll see you almost on a weekly basis, which is almost unheard of in most courtrooms.

WOLF: To find out more about the Brooklyn Mental Health court, visit
www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening. This has been Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for
Court Innovation.

UK’s Justice Secretary Visits Red Hook Apr 21, 2008

Jack Straw, the United Kingdom’s justice secretary and lord chancellor, experiences a judge’s-eye view of the
courtroom, quizzes staff about operations, and meets with a group of ex-offenders who have gotten their lives back
on track during a visit to the Red Hook Community Justice Center in February 2008.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: The courtroom of the Redhook Community Justice Center is, in many ways, like countless courtrooms.
There’s a gallery for witnesses and litigants waiting to appear before the judge, there are court officers.
There are defense attorneys on one side, prosecutors on another. But then you hear this:

(APPLAUSE)

WOLF: That was Judge Alex Calabrese leading the courtroom in a round of applause
for a defendant. Calabrese was congratulating the defendant for doing well in drug treatment, which he’d ordered
her to participate in. Another unusual thing is that Judge Calabrese often isn’t alone at the bench. He often
hosts visitors interested in learning about the justice center. Today, he’s joined by Jack Straw, Great Britain’s
Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, who stopped by to see the Red Hook Community Justice Center in
action.

JACK STRAW: I’m looking at how this justice center works
to see whether we could replicate it in England. We’ve already got one, two projects—one of which was prompted
by Red Hook, which is a similar sort of area to Brooklyn—port area, and has its share of problems, and it’s
quite a tough waterfront sort of place.

WOLF:
Straw met with staff, planners, and also had a chance to meet face to face with a group of ex-offenders who explained
how their contact with the justice center changed their lives.

TINA:
I was a heroin and crack addict and I was in the streets for about eight or nine years.

WOLF: Tina went on to explain that Judge Calabrese ordered her to participate
in drug treatment. Although Tina got sober, eventually she relapsed and, after a series of arrests, asked to be brought
back to the Red Hook Community Justice Center.

TINA:
I asked to come back to this court as opposed to going to central booking. And so the police had brought me, they
brought me here. And that day he, Judge Calabrese—Judge Calabrese afforded me the opportunity to go back to that
treatment facility, but I would remain there for a year. And I was glad that he said that. I went and I never looked
back, and I stayed in the program for three years because that’s what it took for me. And now I work for that
program.

WOLF: Before he left the Red Hook
Community Justice Center, Straw reflected on what he learned.

STRAW:
I’ve got a sort of sense of the texture of this court. Visits like this help to both give you information about
models that could translate across the Atlantic and indeed to some extent are, but also just get you to see things
about your own system in better perspective, so a couple of days across the Atlantic or just looking at other people’s
systems really can help to clear the mind.

WOLF:
The day after his visit, Straw had an op-ed in the Guardian, noting how Great Britain had opened
a justice center modeled after Red Hook first in North Liverpool, and later 12 other sites across England and Wales.
“We should not be so proud that we are unable to learn lessons from others,” Straw wrote. “In New York
they have recognized that the courts cannot do it alone. Without the cooperation of the community, many offenders
simply repeat the cycle of offending and detention.”

WOLF:
To the justice center’s staff, Straw’s visit was all in a day’s work, according to James Brodick,
director of the Red Hook Community Justice Center.

JAMES
BRODICK: We host visitors on a weekly basis from all around the country and around the world. And
as you know, Red Hook has been a model for many jurisdictions, both in the U.K. and Canada. So we’ve had a lot
of visitors come through the justice center’s doors.

WOLF:
This is Rob Wolf, director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. To learn more about the Red Hook
Community Justice Center or the Center for Court Innovation, visit our web site at www.courtinnovation.org.

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