Center for court innovation
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The Center for Court Innovation[1] is a non-profit think tank that helps courts and criminal justice agencies aid victims, reduce crime and improve public trust in justice.
In New York, the Center for Court Innovation functions as the court system’s independent research and development arm, creating demonstration projects that test new ideas. The Center’s projects include the Midtown Community Court[2] and Red Hook Community Justice Center [3] as well as drug courts, reentry courts, domestic violence courts, mental health courts and others.
Beyond New York, the Center disseminates the lessons learned from innovative programs, helping criminal justice practitioners around the world launch their own problem-solving experiments.
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[edit] History
The Center for Court Innovation grew out of a single experiment in judicial problem solving. The Midtown Community Court was created in 1993 to address low-level offending around Times Square. The Midtown Court combines punishment and help, sentencing offenders to perform community service and receive social services. The project’s success in making justice more visible and more meaningful led the court’s planners, with the support of New York State’s chief judge, to establish the Center for Court Innovation to serve as an engine for ongoing court reform in New York.
While the Center’s model of combining research and practice has antecedents in organizations like the Vera Institute of Justice, it is the only one of its kind in the country: an independent unit broken out from day-to-day court administration that works to find new ways to improve how courts do business.
The Center works within the court system, but is administered as a project of the Fund for the City of New York, a non-profit operating foundation. Because it is not a formal part of the court bureaucracy, the Center enjoys the best of both worlds: the knowledge and access of inside operators and the independent perspective of outside observers. The Center is an ongoing resource, working intensively with judges and sparking new conversations among court personnel. At the same time, the Center’s freedom from day-to-day operational responsibilities enables it to move quickly, testing new ideas, creating new partnerships and raising funds from sources that have never supported the court system before, including foundations, corporations and the federal government.
In recent years, Center planners have gone beyond the borders of New York, helping, for instance, government leaders in Great Britain replicate the Red Hook Community Justice Center in North Liverpool, or court officials in California who are interested in spreading the idea of problem-solving justice throughout the state. Through its national and international work, the Center spreads the word about New York’s innovations, helping to solidify New York’s reputation as an international leader in criminal justice reform.
The Center has received numerous awards for its efforts, including the Innovations in American Government Award from Harvard University and the Ford Foundation, and the Prize for Public Sector Innovation from the Citizens Budget Commission.
[edit] Demonstration Projects
The Center for Court Innovation creates new programs that test innovative approaches to public safety problems. Underlying this work is the concept of “problem-solving justice”—the idea that, rather than simply processing cases, the justice system should seek to change the behavior of offenders and improve public safety. While the Center’s model projects cover a broad range of topics—from juvenile delinquency to the reentry of ex-offenders into society—the approach is always the same: rigorous, collaborative planning and an emphasis on using data to document results and ensure accountability. The Center’s projects have achieved tangible results like safer streets, reduced levels of fear and improved neighborhood quality of life.
Aside from the Midtown Community Court and Red Hook Community Justice Center, the Center’s projects include: Harlem Community Justice Center; Bronx Community Solutions; Queens Community Clean Up; Brooklyn Treatment Court; Manhattan Family Treatment Court; Brooklyn Domestic Violence Court; Integrated Domestic Violence Court; Youth Offender Domestic Violence Court; Youth Justice Board; Red Hook & Harlem Youth Courts; Harlem Juvenile Intervention Court; Bronx Juvenile Accountability Court; Brooklyn Mental Health Court; Harlem Reentry Court; Crown Heights Community Mediation Center; and New York City Family Court Blueprint for Change.
[edit] Assisting Practitioners
The Center for Court Innovation helps cities across New York, the U.S. and the world create their own criminal justice reforms.
Its foray into the world of technical assistance began with a boost from the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the arm of the U.S. Department of Justice responsible for nurturing new ideas. In 1996, the Bureau of Justice Assistance awarded the Center a grant to help cities across the U.S. develop their own community courts. Over time, the Center has also won national “requests for proposals” to provide technical assistance in a growing number of areas, including community prosecution, domestic violence, drug courts, technology and institutionalizing problem-solving justice.
The Center’s technical assistance takes many forms. From 1996 to 2006, more than 1,800 visitors—including representatives from 50 countries—toured Center projects. These site visits to the Red Hook Community Justice Center, the Midtown Community Court and other projects are structured learning experiences that provide visitors a chance to interact with their peers and see new ideas in action. Notable visitors to Center projects include U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, New York City Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, and the home secretary, lord chief justice, lord chancellor and attorney general of England and Wales.
More than a dozen community courts have opened in South Africa, and staff from the Center have also worked with officials from Scotland, Japan, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and Canada on adapting the community court model.
The Center has also sponsored roundtables, which have explored a wide range of topics, including ethical challenges facing lawyers in problem-solving courts, and how to improve communication between criminal justice researchers and practitioners.
The Center has published dozens of how-to manuals and best practice guides for criminal justice officials, culling the lessons from successful justice innovations and disseminating them to the field. All of the Center’s white papers are available on www.courtinnovation.org, which has become one of the leading resources for reform-minded justice practitioners.
The Center also regularly conducts trainings throughout New York for judges and staff working in problem-solving courts. In recent years, the Center has also helped organize trainings for judges in general court calendars to educate them about problem-solving principles. In 2005, for instance, the Center helped convene two dozen upstate judges for a day-long training exploring how approaches used in problem-solving courts might be adaptable to general calendars. The training was the first of its kind in the country.
Finally, the Center works closely with technologists at the Office of Court Administration in an effort to promote the use of innovative technology and support the expansion of problem-solving justice. In particular, the Center’s technology team is helping adapt elements of computer applications it has developed for problem-solving courts to a new system that will ultimately be used by all criminal courts in New York State.
[edit] Research
Data from Center for Court Innovation projects are regularly analyzed and results are fed back to staff in the field who can use the information to make mid-course adjustments.
Researchers from the Center spent three years documenting the performance New York’s drug courts. The resulting impact evaluation found significant reductions in recidivism at all drug courts (urban, suburban, rural) —an average of 29 percent over a three-year post-arrest period. When researchers looked at just drug court graduates, the numbers were staggering—a 71 percent reduction in recidivism.
The findings, released in 2003 and reported widely around the country (including an article in the Sunday [[New York Times]]), were significant because they were among the few studies to track participants in multiple drug courts over a long (three-year) study period.
In another study, Center researchers followed over 400 domestic violence offenders from the Bronx in a randomized trial and found that batterers programs had no discernible impact on recidivism. This finding, which calls into question the efficacy of batterer programs, could eventually lead to changes in how misdemeanor offenders are handled, not just in New York but across the country.
In another groundbreaking study, Center researchers explored whether problem-solving justice always requires a specialized court or if core principles and practices from these specialized courts are transferable to conventional courts. After interviewing judges, attorneys and representatives from probation departments and service providers, researchers concluded that a number of principles—such as judicial monitoring and linking offenders to services—could be transferable. The study, conducted in cooperation with the Collaborative Justice Courts Advisory Committee of the Judicial Council of California, was the first of its kind in the country and has been featured in Judicature and The Justice System Journal.
Other Center research projects include a national survey seeking to determine how and why courts use batterer programs to hold domestic violence offenders accountable; a comprehensive evaluation describing the Brooklyn Mental Health Court model; an in-depth study of the implementation and early results produced by the Brooklyn Youthful Offender Domestic Violence Court; a study of the Suffolk County Juvenile Drug Court’s effects on recidivism; a study examining the degree to which criminal defendants processed at the Red Hook Community Justice Center believe they were treated fairly; and a five-year national study with the Urban Institute and the Research Triangle Institute that is expected to shed light on which aspects of the drug court model are most important.
In 2005, The New Press published Good Courts: The Case for Problem-Solving Justice[4]. The first book to describe the problem-solving court movement in detail, Good Courts features profiles of Center demonstration projects, including the Midtown Community Court and the Red Hook Community Justice Center, portraits of practitioners in the trenches and a review of research findings. “Sociologists and those within the legal system will no doubt be intrigued by this accessible and provocative call for change,” Publishers Weekly said in its review. All authors’ proceeds from the book, which is being used in law schools and public policy classes, benefit the Center for Court Innovation. The book is already being used in law schools and public policy schools, thanks in part to a law school course on problem-solving justice[5] that the Center piloted at Fordham Law School.
