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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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