Professor Edward J. Latessa, director of the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati, discusses
the importance of evidence-based practices and the challenges of implementing reform. (April 2014)

Edward J. Latessa
conducts a session on Evidence-Based Approaches to Alternatives to Incarceration at Community Justice 2014.

ED LATESSA: I always tell people you know,
you think it’s easy to change behavior, try to change it around, it’s not an easy thing to do. And that’s
certainly true when you’re trying to change a staff or an organization.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi,
I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation and I am here today at the International
Community Justice Summit in San Francisco, and I have the pleasure right now of speaking with Ed Latessa, who is
a professor and director of the School of Criminal Justice, and the University of Cincinnati’s Correction Institute.
Let’s talk about evidence based practice. How has it come about, that we now recognize that evidence based practice
are an important component of any new initiative, and why are they important?

LATESSA: Well, I
think that the evidence based movement had its origins in other fields. For example, medicine is often considered
one of the leaders in moving in this direction. In the case of corrections specifically, I think there were a couple
things that helped the movement. One was through techniques like med analysis. Researchers became better at sifting
through lots and lots of studies, and so we really started to see where there was a cumulative effect of studies
in certain areas. Second, the National Institute of Corrections, 20 some years ago, really began to promote this
work. I remember for many years I did workshops with Don Andrews from Canada, and we spent a lot of time in those
days trying to convince people that we actually knew something about correctional programs. What’s interesting
now is I don’t really have to convince people. It’s really around implementation. The same, if you think
about, you know, basically the use of data to help make better decisions applies in policing, it applies in crime
prevention, and we’ve really seen almost the entire field embrace evidence based practice. I think there’s
a lot of reasons that the message has caught on. As I said, other fields have embraced it. I think more recently
the financial difficulties that states and jurisdictions have faced, some very, very conservative states and legislators
have looked hard and what they’re spending money on, and what they’re getting in return. And that, of course,
has helped fuel the demand for more effective programs and interventions. You know, in Texas they say it’s not
about being tough on crime, it’s about being smart on time. And I think that when you have a state like Texas
that has embraced this kind of work, that sends a powerful message to others.

WOLF: You used the
word implementation as being important, so maybe you could talk a little bit about that. You might have a study that
shows a certain strategy works. Are you saying that may well be true but if you don’t implement in properly,
it won’t work?

LATESSA: Yeah, there’s no question that that’s our biggest challenge.
I always tell people you know, you think it’s easy to change behavior, try to change it around, it’s not
an easy thing to do. And that’s certainly true when you’re trying to change a staff or an organization
that have been doing thing a certain way, they’ve hired people for certain reasons and now, you know, someone
like me comes a long and says what you’re doing isn’t very effective. Once they get past that initial kind
of shock of that, we’re talking about, in many cases, a major paradigm shift, and that requires training, coaching,
quality assurance. That’s a lot of work. That’s not easy. What we have found, in our work, and the research backs
this up, that training alone is not a very good way to change behavior. It’s not very effective. People take
what they like from the training and they ignore the rest. So in some ways, what that’s saying is information
alone isn’t enough. You’ve got to go to that next step, which is coaching staff, just like you would coach
someone who’s trying to learn a new skill, a child trying to learn a sport, an offender trying to learn a new
way to behave. Coaching, giving feedback, collecting data, showing where it works, showing where it doesn’t.
As you put that together, you really become and evidence based organization, and not just someone who uses some evidence
based programs. And I think at the end of the day, that’s where we want to be.

WOLF: So you
can’t have someone drop in and coach you for a week, it sounds like you have to integrate into your functioning
a way to make coaching an ongoing part of the program.

LATESSA: Yeah, with our model, we really
focus on supervisors. We think they’re the key to kind of long term sustainability. You’ve got to have,
obviously, support at the top, but it’s the supervisors where most staff take their cues. And so in some models
we have them training, we not only train everyone, we make the supervisors use the model, they then are trained as
coaches, they then are trained in quality assurance. Because I think for years we spent, you know, millions of dollars
on training staff. You name it, I mean motivational interviewing, cog assessment, and we haven’t necessarily
given the systems the ability to sustain it over time. And I always tell folks I work with, you know, you’re
gonna get trained on something, you need to ask will they train trainers? Will they give us ongoing support? Because
what happens when they leave? Or, of course what happens is most folks, when they roll out some new intervention,
they get everybody trained and all excited and then two years later they’re not gonna spend any more money on
training. And so it becomes quality starts, fidelity starts to slip because they’re basically saying, watch
me and you’ll figure it out. So I’m really convinced that you’ve got to stay with that agency and work
with them, and give them the capacity to stay over time. The other thing it does is as new staff get hired and folks
come on board, they think it’s how you’ve always done it, you know? It all becomes a lot easier to sustain
it, and to do it well.

WOLF: So what are some of the more exciting evidence based practice that
people are beginning to integrate into their work with correction or more broadly in the justice system?

LATESSA: Well, I think there’s some exciting work in a number of areas. I think that we continue to
do work and assessment, and not just looking at assessment tools, but helping folks link those assessments to case
plans and to interventions. A lot of work being done there. We’ve got a new model that we call EPICS, Effective
Practices for Community Supervision, in which we’re training probation, and parole, and case managers, on how
to use core correctional practices, to work differently with their clients. And we’re very excited. We’ve
been doing this work around the country, it’s based on Canadian work that Jim Bonta did, and it really changes
the whole nature of the officer/client relationship. We’ve known for a long time that how many times you see
them doesn’t really matter. Case load sizes don’t matter. It’s what you do when you interact with
an offender. It’s teaching the officer how to develop a relationship, how to use authority appropriately, how
to model, how to teach that offender new skills in a very short structured intervention. We’re very excited
about that work. We’re actually testing something called Family EPICS, with juveniles, where we go out with
the probation and parole officer into the home, and train the parent or parents on how to work differently with their
child. And I’m convinced that if we can change the way we supervise and handle people we can have a profound effect
on reducing recidivism. So that’s exciting work. We’re now starting to look at work with misdemeanants
in pre-trial, some assessment work being done, some work that the center is doing, looking at misdemeanants. This
has often been kind of an overlooked, neglected group because we don’t think they’re serious, but in fact
it includes drunk drivers, and domestic violence offenders, people that can turn very deadly very quickly. And so
that’s exciting work that I think in the next few years we’ll start to see some movement there.

WOLF: Let me ask you about the idea of community justice, which is really the underlying theme of this conference.
Do you see that as something that fits in as an evidence based practice somewhere? Is it something that you can even
really measure when you’re talking about making a community engagement, collaborating with community stakeholders,
a component of what you’re doing? Some of what you described sounded a lot like procedural justice, which has
emerged a lot from community justice programming. So I just wonder how you see community kind of supporting, or not,
the movement to integrate more evidence based practices into justice.

LATESSA: Well, I think at
the end of the day it’s about looking at the data and looking at the studies. And so, you know, the concept
of community justice is a valid one, but I have the same advice I give anyone that works in this field. We have to
follow the data. Are there interventions? Are there groups that are appropriate for that type of model? Yes. Will
it work everywhere? Probably not, and it certainly will not work with every type of offender. But it has a place.
But again, we have to look at the data, we have to determine, you know, how do we get stakeholders engaged in meaningful
ways, and not just superficially, how do we bring victims into this process so that they feel like they have a voice?
And we have to be clear that, you know, there are interventions that are not gonna be effective with high risk offenders
and we are, they are going to have to be in deeper system kind of programs. So I think it’s part of the system,
and we need to, again, collect data and we need folks like, you know, the Center for Court Innovation to kind of
lead the way and help us understand how these processes work.

WOLF: Well, I want to thank you
very much for taking the time to speak with me about your work. I’ve been speaking with Ed Matessa, who is a
professor at the University of Cincinnati. He is the Director of the School of Criminal Justice and also the University
of Cincinnati’s Corrections Institute. I look forward to seeing your work evolve as time goes on.

LATESSA: Thank you, Rob.

WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center
for Court Innovation. To learn more about the Center’s work, you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org,
and you can listen to our podcasts there and on iTunes. Thanks for listening.

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Judge Braden C. Woods of the San Francisco Community Justice Center discusses the practical implications
of expanding the court’s caseload to include low-level felonies, and he reflects on his first year on the job. (April
2014)

JUDGE BRADEN WOODS: This is a great assignment
because every day I’m enthusiastic about going to work and trying to help somebody get out of the system instead
of just recycling themselves at the hall of justice and at our county jail.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi,
I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and I am in San Francisco today
at Community Justice 2014. I am lucky to be speaking right now with Braden C. Woods, who is the presiding judge of
the San Francisco Community Justice Center.

JUDGE WOODS: Thank you for having me, it’s great
to be here, great to be at the Summit.

WOLF: I thought it would be interesting to talk to you
about both the five year evolution of the San Francisco Community Justice Center and also your more recent experience—you’ve
been the presiding judge for the last year. Let’s talk about how the San Francisco Community Justice Center
has evolved from a court that initially accepted just misdemeanors, to one that now is dealing with low level felonies.
Why the change and what does it mean?

JUDGE WOODS: We’ve learned, stolen from other programs
that are doing a great job, and we felt comfortable enough after doing just misdemeanor cases for approximately two
and a half, almost three years, that we could expand the program when there are so many other people who are catching
felony cases, low level felony cases, that need the same support, services, that we’ve been giving the folks
on misdemeanors. And our program was established with our partners from the Department of Public Health. They gave
us more resources to expand the program, more case management resources, and with that added help, we were able to
start taking on more cases, more serious cases of folks who are now committing felonies.

WOLF:
And what kinds of felonies?

JUDGE WOODS: So we take pretty much all low level felonies here in
California—that would be car break-ins, commercial burglaries, car theft, all drug cases, low level drug cases, mostly
folks who are selling their own legal prescription to get money to buy other drugs, multiple priors can make a theft
case a felony, so we’ll take them into our program.

WOLF: And are you applying the same strategies
and tools, and principles of punishment and help, and having people do community service while also linking them
to services? Or are there additional features or strategies that come with working with low level felony offenders?

JUDGE WOODS: Same strategies on its most basic level. We’re dealing with a harder population. Some
of these folks have mental health issues, even more long-term drug addiction issues, so the program is the same,
but folks are in the program much longer than on some of the misdemeanor cases. We don’t transition them to
our community service portion until we’re really on solid footing in terms of their drug or alcohol addiction,
abuse issues. So the programming in terms of classes and meetings is much longer before we feel confident and comfortable
to then transition them to the prosocial community support, community give back portion of it.

WOLF:
And someone asked a question when you were on a panel this morning about—when you were on the panel that focused
on the next generation of community courts. And someone asked, how did you work with the community to prepare them
for the fact that you’re going from misdemeanors, that maybe people felt less threatened by, or less concerned
about how they were treated, or could be enthusiastic about giving them services, and maybe some people were less
enthusiastic about offering the help to people who had committed more serious crimes.

JUDGE WOODS:
Communication is the key and so we did give the community a heads up that we were going to maybe go down this path,
and we sought their input. Some folks were like no, forget about it, felons have to go to jail. But a lot of folks
were on board, wanted to give it a try because those are the felons, these low level felony folks, who are hurting
themselves and hurting community, and not individuals. And they were open to the idea of getting these people into
services to help break the cycle. So based upon the charges that we were gonna do, and handle, a lot of folks were
enthusiastic about it because those are the people—some of these lower level felony people, who were affecting the
community directly, and who they were seeing on a daily basis, or maybe a weekly basis. They see the police arrest
them, the person would come back a week later and they’d go to their police captain, or go to the district attorney’s
office and go, what happened? The person plead guilty, he accepted responsibility. He’s on probation and he
did his time. And they’re like, well he’s doing the same thing. And so by shifting them to our community
justice center and getting them into treatment and services, we’re trying to break that cycle. And so when community
members see the person and they’re not up to no good, they’re anecdotally like oh, it’s working, as
opposed to just the recycle of jail, out, jail, out.

WOLF: And so let’s talk about your evolution
as a jurist. What was it like for you beginning to reside over this court? What have you learned over this past year?

JUDGE WOODS: It’s been a great year. I’ve actually been a judge just for a year, also. This was
my first assignment as a judge and we sometimes rotate every year to new assignment, and when the presiding judge
asked if I wanted to stay, enthusiastically I was like, very much so. I have unfinished business, as they say. But
I was a local prosecutor here, in San Francisco, I live here in the city. I’ve lived here for 15 years and I
got to see the difference between hard core criminals who are hurting other people, and low level criminals who are
hurting themselves, and see sort of the spectrum. And this is a great assignment because every day I’m enthusiastic
about going to work and trying to help somebody get out of the system instead of just recycling themselves at the
hall of justice and at our county jail. So the evolution, for me, has been a good one to see it from a different
perspective, and I hope to continue to expand our current program, as well as some other programs here in San Francisco.

WOLF: And what do you think are the biggest challenges to evolving the criminal justice system so that it
incorporates evidence-based strategies, procedural justice, these things that we know work, but perhaps the system,
for lack of funds or lack of training, or just habit, is maybe slow to incorporate?

JUDGE WOODS:
The biggest challenge is trying to get everybody to the table. We’re slowly but surely getting there in San
Francisco. We’re sort of there in terms of district attorney, public defender, the police chief, the mayor’s
office, which funds, obviously, a lot of the programs that we use here in San Francisco and the non-profits Trying
to just get everybody in the same boat and rowing in the same direction. So we’re good with that. The biggest
challenge I see with us, I think it’s nationwide, is dual-diagnosis, the mental health issue. We’ve spent
a lot of money and time and best practices trying to figure out drug and alcohol issues in programming and best practices,
and we do a good job of that, but trying to find this other niche, folks with mental health issues, as well as drug
and alcohol, is something that I find to be a challenge, just in terms of finding programs, and enough beds, and
enough people who have training in both. One size does not fit all when it comes to mental health and drug and alcohol
issues. So that’s where the challenge of melding those two and working together.

WOLF: What
do you think is going to happen if and when you move on to a different role as a judge? Are you going to take some
of these strategies or things that you’ve learned with you into new settings? And what if it’s a setting
that isn’t—if it’s not a community justice center that doesn’t immediately have the tools to assess,
or to link to services, or send someone to community service? What would you do?

JUDGE WOODS:
No offense to them, I’d educate some of my other public judges at the hall of justice, in terms of you can get more
bang for your buck with a huge segment of population that does come through the hall of justice into the criminal
system. So just exposing them to what I’ve been doing for the past year, it’ll be at least two years before
I see them again, and some of the other judges who have come before me, have run the community justice center, and
just giving our knowledge to our other brethren who have only been at the hall of justice, or only been at the civic
courthouse, and just let them know that there are alternatives and better ways of doing things. Even though I’m one
of the junior members on the bench, I think I can educate some of my brothers and sisters on the bench.

WOLF: Judge Woods, thank you so much. I really appreciate your sharing your insights and your experience
with me. It’s been very interesting.

JUDGE WOODS: Rob, thank you very much. I really appreciate
it.

WOLF: I’ve been speaking with Braden C. Woods, who is the presiding judge of the San
Francisco Community Justice Center, and we are both here today at Community Justice 2014, it’s being held, actually,
at the office of the California Courts, here in San Francisco. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the
Center for Court Innovation. To find out more about the Center for Court Innovation, visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.
You can also listen to our podcasts there, and you can also find us on iTunes. Thanks for listening.

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Denise O’Donnell, director of the Bureau
of Justice Assistance, discusses the Bureau’s strategic mission and holistic approach to justice reform.
She also outlines the Bureau’s new suite of Smart on Crime programs.

Denise
O’Donnell, director of the Bureau of Justice Assistance, delivers the keynote address at the opening of Community
Justice 2014.

(April
2014)

DENISE O’DONNELL: We see reducing recidivism and
reducing unnecessary confinement as going hand in hand with making our communities safer.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi, this is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. I am here today in
San Francisco at Community Justice 2014, and our national summit focusing on community justice, and I am very pleased
to welcome Denise O’Donnell, who is the director of the Bureau of Justice Assistance, part of the Department
of Justice, who gave a keynote address here this morning at the opening of the conference. Welcome to the New Thinking
podcast.

O’DONNELL: Well it’s great to be here, Rob, and it’s great to be at this conference.
The room is electrified. There’s so many innovators in the room, judges who’ve been working and championing
community justice programs and community courts, district attorneys, prosecutors, service providers, and representatives
from 10 countries who are really focusing on community justice, so it’s a great summit. 

WOLF: Well, in your opening remarks, you laid out what the Bureau of Justice Assistance has been most recently
interested in, and I heard you describe sort of an evolution in the Bureau’s thinking, and what you’re
focusing on. I thought maybe you could share some of that now with our listeners. 

O’DONNELL: Well thank you. you know, BJA adopted a new strategic plan last year that I think does refocus
our mission more holistically on justice systems reform and our mission overall is to reduce crime recidivism and
unnecessary confinement, and support a safe and just criminal justice system. And that’s changed and evolved
over the years, where we see reducing recidivism and reducing unnecessary confinement as going hand in hand with
making our community safer. And so we’ve taken an approach that really looks at the research that we have, amassing
the data that we have available in the criminal justice system, and forging creative and innovative solutions that
make our community safer.

WOLF: You have a whole suite of new initiative, pre-trial is one of
the focuses, and calling the initiatives smart prosecution, smart pre-trial. So maybe you could explain a little
bit about what those are, and a little bit about your interest in tackling pre-trial issues.

O’DONNELL:
Sure. Well, we have created a smart on crime suite of programs, and a few years ago, BGA started an initiative called
the smart policing initiative to really pair police departments with criminal justice researchers to develop new
strategies for fighting crime that are based on research and evaluations, and produce outcomes. And that has been
enormously successful. Police departments focus on a whole gamut of issues, everything from violence reduction to
procedural justice programs, and we are really seeing some of the outcomes, so we feel that it’s growing the
evidence, it’s growing willingness on the part of police departments to innovate. And so given this holistic
approach that BGA has taken, to look at just assistance reform, we decided to expand the smart policing initiative
into a suite of programs. So we now have, for the first time this year, a smart pre-trial program, we have a smart
prosecution program, that was actually supported in the budget this year by Congress, and we have a smart supervision
for probation and parole program. We originally also had a program aimed at indigent defense, called answering Gideon’s
call, and next year we’re going to turn that into a smart defense program. So we’ll have covered the whole
gamut of the criminal justice system, and they have some features in common. First of all, they’re data driven,
so we really look at the data to see what are the drivers in the criminal justice system in all of those areas. Secondly,
they all require a practitioner research partnership, both to help analyze the data but also to evaluate the outcomes
of the program, and third they do require an investment in evidence-based, or at least promising strategies, so that
we can grow the evidence about what works in the system. I think pre-trial is such an important area for everyone
to consider nationwide. 60 percent of the people in our jails, many of which are overcrowded in the country, are
there before trial, and before they’ve been adjudicated guilty. And I think that’s a number that astounds
a lot of stakeholders in the criminal justice system, and certainly the public.

WOLF: We’re
talking about jails as opposed to prisons, so the local facilities.

O’DONNELL: Right, we’re
talking about the local jail. We know that our current system doesn’t work. So high risk, even dangerous offenders,
can get out on bail, and many low level, non-violent offenders stay in jail pre-trial, at great cost and expense,
and certainly not getting any programming or any services that would be of value to them. So this year, through our
smart pre-trial initiative, we’re actually funding pilot programs to take a comprehensive look at their pre-trial
program. Again, using data from looking at researchers who are researching now about what works in the pretrial area.
There are risk assessments, instruments that have been developed and validated in many jurisdictions so that we can
be smarter about the decisions about who should be detained before trial, and certainly some individuals should be,
for community safety, and who should not be. And certainly rectifying any situation where people stay in jail simply
because they can’t afford to post a low level bail for a minor offense.

WOLF: And there are
a lot of negative collateral consequences to being held in jail pre-trial, aren’t there? Especially for people
who are only there because they can’t make bail.

O’DONNELL: It’s true. The Arnold Foundation
has recently published a research study that I think has caught a lot of attention in the criminal justice community,
which indicates that it’s more likely individuals who are detained and will be sentenced to longer periods of
incarceration, even for similarly situated people, depending on their particular individual dangerousness to the
community, and more likely to recidivate, which is also another dimension that we really haven’t looked at before.
And so we can really be making people worse – low risk offenders – by actually keeping them detained on a pre-trial
basis. So there’s a lot of good reasons, I think, for community safety to examine our pre-trial programs nationwide.

WOLF: Let’s talk a little bit about community courts, which is a significant focus of the summit here
in San Francisco. How do you see community courts fitting into the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s goals as you
described them, to reduce recidivism and reduce unnecessary incarceration. Do they fit in here?

O’DONNELL:
I think they are a wonderful innovation and it’s really gratifying to see how the concept has taken off, because
we have a number of mentor community courts represented here, at the summit, and the jurisdictions that they have
worked with, who have started other community courts as a result. It’s also interesting that the first community
courts in Midtown Manhattan, and then in Redhook, that the Center for Court Innovation obviously was instrumental
in starting, are really focused at low level and quality of life offenders, and it’s been fascinating to see
how the concept has grown, and that jurisdictions essentially kind of mold the concept to fit their unique circumstances.
So some of the courts that we’ve heard from, now are focusing on non-violent felony offenses because they think
that there is a lot of opportunities to intervene with low level and non-violent felony offenders, rather than go
through the entire incarceration and adjudication process, and also the fact that it’s so much more productive
in terms of individuals who are addicted, individuals who have other kinds of mental health needs, and so many opportunities
that can be achieved through a community court, that the focus on the community engagement and how the community
is invested in what goes on in their community courts is also so important. And then there’s really exciting
new research and evaluations that show the contribution that community courts make in the whole area of procedural
justice and fairness, and while maybe that wasn’t the original concept behind community courts, it certainly
has been part of the DNA that community judges are very engaged with the community, they interact with the people
before them, many times look at their entire family circumstances, so it’s understandable that the evaluation
is showing that people that go through the community court experience are more likely to succeed, have lower recidivism,
and are more engaged in the outcome of the system.

WOLF: Well, I thank you so much for taking
time to talk with me. I’ve been talking with Denise O’Donnell, who is the director of the Bureau of Justice
Assistance at the Department of Justice, and we are at the Community Justice Summit 2014 in San Francisco. I’m
Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. To learn more about community justice, visit
www.courtinnovation.org, and you can listen to our podcast there and on iTunes. Thanks for listening.

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The Stopping
Hate and Delinquency by Empowering Students (SHADES) program is a teen court focusing on bullying and bias
incidents. The program is run as a partnership of the Los Angeles Superior Court, Department of Probation, and the
Museum of Tolerance. In this episode of New Thinking, David S. Wesley, presiding judge of the Los Angeles Superior
Court, and Camilo Cruz, director of community relations for the Los Angeles Superior Court, discuss the growth of
the city’s teen court program and unique features of the SHADES program.

David
S. WesleyCamilo Cruz

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Judge
Stephanie L. Rhoades, who helped found and has presided over the Anchorage Mental Health Court since 1998,
and Kathi
R. Trawver, associate professor of the School of Social Work at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, discuss
the court’s origins, accomplishments and lessons. They co-authored “Homesteading a Pioneering Mental Health Court: A Judicial Perspective from the Last
Frontier” for American Behavioral Scientist.

ROBERT
V. WOLF:  Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and welcome
to New Thinking, the podcast where we interview justice reformers and innovators. Today I have on the phone two experts
who are well versed in the intersection of mental health and justice. They are Judge Stephanie L. Rhoades, who has
presided over the Anchorage Mental Health Court since the court was created in 1998, and Kathi R. Trawver, associate
professor of the School of Social Work at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. I know you’re both very busy,
so I really want to thank you for taking the time to talk today.

JUDGE RHOADES: Thank you, Robert.

ROB WOLF:  I thought we could focus on the article you both recently co-authored in American Behavioral
Scientist, where you draw some lessons from the experience of the Anchorage Mental Health Court.  The article
is Homesteading A Pioneering Mental Health Court: a Judicial Perspective from the Last Frontier.
And I’ll put a link to it on the podcast page, although I think people need to be a journal subscriber to actually
download it. You note in the article that there are about 300 mental health courts in the U.S. today, but back in
1998 there were only a handful and Judge Rhoades actually created the Anchorage court without ever seeing a model
in action. So Judge Rhoades, can you describe some of the motivations—and I know there were some personal ones and
professional ones—that led you and a special commission to explore creating one of the first mental health courts
in the country.

JUDGE RHOADES:  I will.  Some of the motivation was exactly
what are the motivations for all the courts that are developed, which are the over representation of people with
mental disorders in corrections, basically. And the frustration of judges who would sentence folks on low-level misdemeanor
offenses, and they were committed largely because people are disordered, homeless, they’ve got other challenges,
and the sentences really don’t have an impact because these folks go out the back door of the jail the same
way they come in the front doors. And so nothing’s really changed and there was a kind of a harmonious convergence
of the Department of Corrections in Alaska getting some technical assistance nationally to form a Criminal Justice
Assessment Commission, which was a policy-level group to think about how to reduce the number of people in jail. 

So one of the issues that they explored was the over representation of people with mental disorders. Meanwhile,
in my personal life, I have a brother who has both intellectual disability and some mental health issues. And I recognize
that, you know, if anything like this had happened to him and he’d gotten arrested, that he would have certain
needs that nobody in the system was ever going to be able to fulfill. And that is basically what got me thinking
about a mental health court, which is a way to have people be helpful to individuals who were going through the criminal
justice system, to hook them up with treatment and other resources that would, hopefully, address the underlying
issues that brought them before the court, and to prevent them from returning.

WOLF: 
The Anchorage Mental Health Court, one of the many things that’s interesting about it is that it was the first
problem-solving court in Alaska.  And to my knowledge, most of the time that states have created a mental
health court, they’re usually already familiar with linking defendants to services through their work with drug
courts. I’m wondering how you presented the concept to other court players, and prosecutors, and defenders,
without having, you know, a drug court to point to or some other kind of problem-solving court to point to as an
example.

JUDGE RHOADES:  Well, I’ll take that one on, Robert.  It’s Judge
Rhoades here. You know, there’s a great saying up here in Alaska: “We don’t do it like they do it outside.”
And we were, in fact, I think the last state to get a drug court, which is sort of funny.  

You
know drug courts were top down planned courts.  They were federally funded, the start-ups were federally
funded, and the way the mental health court started here, basically, was more of a ground floor response by people
who were experiencing this frustration. I think the deal here is that, generally speaking, our prosecutors have more
understanding that—and more sympathy, perhaps—for people who have mental health disorders, who get caught up in the
system, than they do for people who have addiction disorders. 

I think there’s still
quite a bit of thinking about drug and alcohol addictions that basically these are voluntary and that all you have
to do is just say no, but I think the prosecutors definitely got the fact that there are some people who have mental
disorders who just are, you know, really—you can’t punish the disorder out of them.

WOLF: 
I imagine that you, with your personal connections with your brother, had a greater credibility to present the need
for this kind of court.

RHOADES:  Frankly, Robert, I never divulged to anybody that I
had a brother.  It’s a small town here and he lives here, so that really wasn’t something that
anybody knew about me. I think what was really helpful was judicial leadership. You know, when a judge calls somebody
and says ‘let’s have a meeting,’ they show up. That didn’t happen when I was a lawyer. It didn’t happen
when I was, you know, in any other profession and so judges tend to have this really wonderful opportunity to convene
people, to get stakeholders together.

WOLF:  Professor Trawver, maybe you can put mental
health courts in context. With the rate of mental illness so high among the justice-involved population, why are
mental health courts significant?

PROFESSOR TRAWVER:  Good question.  I guess
I can preface my answer by saying that I think, along with other folks, that we don’t really believe, necessarily,
that mental health courts are the only answer or the best answer, but still a really significant contribution to
the continuum of potential diversion opportunities, and I think that they are important in several ways. 

First, I think they offer an improved court-based process for individuals. Second, there’s strong evidence
that mental health courts improve access to treatment, even—funny—even when treatment is already available. So they’re
already actually entitled to it, but they seem to still improve access. And I guess the third—another thing that’s
significant about mental health courts is that there’s a strong developing evidence base that mental health
courts result in reduced rates of recidivism. And finally with the development and expansion of mental health courts,
I think they’ve raised awareness about the intersection of mental health and criminal justice involvement. So for
example, in the Anchorage Mental Health Court, all the nursing students who go through UAA are required to come to
watch the mental health court during their psychiatric rotation.

WOLF:  One of the key
goals at the outset for the Anchorage Mental Health Court, as you describe in your article, was to try, to some extent,
to decriminalize mental illness and get the mentally ill out of the justice system. Judge Rhoades, why is decriminalization
so hard to achieve, and have you been disappointed or frustrated that you haven’t been able to move further
in that direction?

RHOADES:  The premise was that we believed mental illnesses basically
were the direct cause of criminal justice involvement, and really it turns out that it’s very few people for
whom that’s true.  It appears now, from more recent research, that mental illness is a reason why people
can’t necessarily change as easily as other people. Really they are just as susceptible, and perhaps more susceptible,
to what we call criminogenic risks and needs.  Anti-social behaviors, anti-social personality patterns,
anti-social thinking, anti-social associates, you know, being close associates with people who aren’t law abiding. 
Having poor family or marital relationships, not having education or work opportunities, not having pro-social leisure
and recreation, and substance abuse.  I think that, unfortunately, people with mental illness tend to experience
these factors perhaps more than other people.  

You know, for example, substance abuse
is very highly associated with people who have mental illness. These factors are things that we really did not dig
down into and look at when we first started the court, and now that we are informed by some of this information,
we have begun to actually measure these things on validated instruments to see where people are experiencing high,
medium, or low risks and needs in these areas that predict recidivism. By doing that, we can be more effective in
terms of how and what we are linking people up with, so that they can actually, you know, reduce their recidivism. 

WOLF:  I think there are probably many unique things about Alaska, and I wonder if, in particular,
relating to the population you’re working with, are there unique challenges regarding the mentally ill?

TRAWVER:  There’s a long list.  First is just geographic challenges.  If
you sort of think about how huge Alaska is, and many people live off the road system in rural areas and in conditions
that I am pretty sure that most New Yorkers would consider Third World conditions. Social problems—Alaska has the
distinction of ranking very high among states in a lot of contributing social problems.  For instance, we’re
number one in our rate of adult drug use, number two in alcohol consumption, number two in rates of suicide across
the board, very high rates of trauma and family violence, and that’s disproportionately true among Alaska natives.

Third, I would say access to behavioral health services is a major problem in Alaska.  So we do
have some innovations in terms of tele-behavioral health which is interesting and used by a lot of paraprofessionals,
behavioral health aids in remote and rural areas, and housing is just a major barrier in many communities, and there’s
still a great deal of stigma and nimbyism, particularly in some of the larger communities.

RHOADES: 
I only want to add one other thing about what makes Alaska’s court different. We take a very broad diagnostic
group, much broader than, I think, most other courts.  because we are serving people who have any mental
health disorder, and co-occurring substance abuse disorders, so long as they can be linked and matched with services
in the community, that means for us that we have to become competent at linking and monitoring people in the intellectual
disabilities community as well as the mentally ill community, as well as the substance abuse community. And Alaska
experiences very high rate of traumatic brain injury and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, which are very difficult
disorders to link with treatments.

WOLF:  What are the takeaways?  What lessons,
Judge Rhoades, do you have for other judges?  And Professor Trawver, what do you think, from your perspective,
are the take-aways from the Anchorage Mental Health Court?

TRAWVER:  I have some things
I would say about Judge Rhoades.  I view her as a true pioneer. Even though she made it sound really simple
when she was talking about how she started the court, I know that she struggled and actually sacrificed a great deal
professionally to create the Anchorage Court.

JUDGE RHOADES:  It is true that it was
a long road getting started, but my advice to other courts would be a couple things. One is you really have to get
an education about different diagnoses and what the behaviors are that go along with those, so that you can understand
the perspective of each of the people that come before the court. Judges really need to learn how to talk candidly
to people about mental illness and about other kinds of disabilities because you know it’s really important
to note that they have strengths and challenges, and that they can do really well. And I think the other part of
it is that in terms of the structure of any court, what I would give as advice is that like any project, you’ve
got to have a mission, you’ve got to have policies and procedures that are clearly stated and enforced, and
understood by everybody, most especially the participants, and you really have to go back and every time that there
is a decision to make, because there are many decisions to make that pose ethical dilemmas, every one of those decisions
should really hearken back to whatever your stated mission is. 

These courts really have
been put together without much research to guide them. So it’s very easy, under circumstances like that, to
get off the reservation, especially from a very paternalistic point of, you know, let me do good for you, I’ll
put you in jail these five days because you didn’t take your medications. Well, that’s not meeting your
mission if your mission is decriminalization, or reducing the number of days they spend in jail.

WOLF: 
Well thank you very much for both of you sharing your experience and knowledge. I’ve been speaking with Judge
Stephanie L. Rhoades, who have presided over the Anchorage Mental Health Court since the court’s very beginning
in 1998, and I’ve also been speaking with Kathi R. Trawver, who’s an associate professor of the School
of Social Work at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.  So thank you both very much.

RHOADES: 
Thank you, Robert.

TRAWVER:  Thank you, Robert.

WOLF:  And
for folks who are interested in learning more about the Anchorage Mental Health Court, you can read the article that
they co-authored, that is in the American Behavioral Scientist.  It’s called Homesteading
A Pioneering Mental Health Court: A Judicial Perspective from the Last Frontier.  And there will
be a link to it on our podcast page at our website, www.courtinnovation.org.  I’m Rob Wolf, Director
of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation.  Thanks very much for listening.

(March
2014)

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QUEST Futures is a juvenile mental health initiative that seeks to establish a comprehensive, coordinated response
to youth with mental illness involved in the juvenile justice system in Queens, New York. Here, researcher Josephine
Hahn discusses the findings of an impact
evaluation of the program. (February 2014)

SARAH SCHWEIG: Hi, I’m
Sarah Schweig, of the Center for Court Innovation, and today I’m talking with Josy Hahn, the author of new research
about a special program that works with kids with mental illness, who are involved in the juvenile justice system.
The publication, Mental Health and Juvenile Justice, records
the findings of the impact evaluation of QUEST Futures. Thanks for speaking with me today and welcome.

JOSY HAHN: Thanks, Sarah.

SARAH SCHWEIG: So, QUEST Futures operates out of a community-based
alternative to detention program. QUEST stands for Queens Engagement Strategies for Teens, so this is in Queens,
New York. And QUEST Futures, specifically, works to engage kids with mental illness and their families in specialized
services. So, now that this program, which was launched in 2008, has been in operation for about five years, maybe
you can start off talking a little bit about the model, what the goal of the program was and the structure, and then
we can get to talking about the evaluation.

JOSY HAHN: Absolutely. So the QUEST Futures program
is so important. We know that youth in the juvenile justice system experience mental health illness at really high
rates, up to 70 percent, and that’s compared to 20 to 25 percent of youth in the general population. There is a huge
need, and yet there are very few resources in the juvenile justice system. So, juvenile detention and jail actually
become the default, which is alarming. Here in New York, QUEST was launched by the Center for Court Innovation—and
it was in collaboration with a number of juvenile justice and mental health agencies—and the overarching goal is
to reduce recidivism among youth in the juvenile justice system by addressing mental health needs. And there are
a couple other key features. One is that they engage with families early on in the case: so pre-adjudication phase.
Another is that really comprehensive individualized treatment plan that provides direct services on-site and also
a vast network of referrals. And then finally, the purpose of QUEST Futures is to increase the capacity of the juvenile
justice system to provide alternatives to detention, which is incredibly important.

SARAH SCHWEIG:
Maybe give us an idea of what QUEST Futures looks like.

JOSY HAHN: So, it’s either through a judicial
mandate, so the judge mandates the program, or a voluntary referral. So in our study, all of the QUEST Futures youth
comes from QUEST ATD referrals. QUEST ATD serves youth with juvenile delinquency cases in the Queens family court,
and they are classified as moderate risk of re-offending, or failure to appear in court. And they are deemed eligible
for community supervision, and that can mean anything from curfew checks and school attendance monitoring, to after
school programming and required services in the community. But in terms of QUEST Futures, every single youth is given
a diagnostic predictive scale, and that’s a mental health instrument that screens for 18 different mental health
disorders—mania, bipolar, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety. If they flag on the DPS and meet
criteria for impairment, they are eligible to go to QUEST Futures. So there’s an intake set up with QUEST Futures
staff and youth and families. There’s a full bio-psycho-social assessment, and this includes a psychiatric evaluation
and supplemental information from home visits, and interviews with the youth support system: so, a parent, caregivers,
other family members, teachers, etc. And then, based on all of that information, program staff are working with youth
and families to build trust and collaborate on what works best to meet the needs of the youth. A feature of QUEST
Futures that’s really impressive is how multi-disciplinary its staff is, from the social workers, case managers,
youth developers, court liaison, a consulting psychiatrist and the senior staff, of course. But then also how often
they’re communicating and working closely with the judge, the prosecuting and defense attorneys, and the community
service providers.

SARAH SCHWEIG: There are many moving parts to that. So, maybe you can talk
a little bit about this evaluation. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the kind of data you collected and the
process for that.

JOSY HAHN: Sure. So, there’s very little research on juvenile diversions in
general, and there’s very little research on juvenile diversions in general, and the results are mixed on recidivism,
you know, whether youth in these programs are doing better or not, and there’s even ones on diversions for specialized
programs like mental health. So in this study we wanted to know how effective QUEST Futures was meeting the needs
of youth with mental health diagnoses in the juvenile justice system and we did this by looking at the impact of
QUEST Futures on a number of outcomes. And I’ll mention that we looked at recidivism—that’s re-arrest—at about one
year after program start, and one year after program end, we looked at final case dispositions—so, whether youth
were released into the community or put in a detention facility and placement, and then also the total detention
days served after program enrollment—if they were, and if so, how long? And we looked at data for background information
and outcomes for QUEST Futures youth and also a comparison sample. It was 392 youth altogether. They were all flagged
for some kind of mental health screen, and they were classified as mostly low to moderate risk, according to a risk
assessment instrument that we use in New York City. So, for the 131 youth in QUEST Futures that were compared to
a similar group of 261 youth in three alternative-to-detention programs that are throughout New York City.

SARAH SCHWEIG: What were some of your findings in looking at the group that did go through QUEST Futures
versus the sample that did not?

JOSY HAHN: So overall, the sample was mostly male and black or
Latino, and the average age for both groups was between 14 or 15. They were eighth grade on average. Both actually
had similar mental health screens, they were mania, post-traumatic stress disorder, and any substance abuse—so that’s
alcohol or any drug. And this related to about a third or more kids in the sample flagging for these issues. We use
propensity score adjustment and that is a great technique to balance any differences between our QUEST Futures and
our comparison group so that they would be similar. We also ran a number of tests to make sure what we were seeing
was the true effect of the QUEST Futures program. What we found was that QUEST Futures youth are significantly less
likely to commit felony offenses. It’s actually about a 12 percent difference compared to their counterparts. And
this is at about one year after program start. And this difference held mostly for one year at program end. The significance
was marginal, but the difference was still 10 percent, and so this was a really promising finding. It means that
the goal of QUEST Futures to reduce recidivism did occur. And then we also found that QUEST Futures youth were actually
less likely to receive a probation disposition when their case had closed, but they were more likely to receive other
kinds of dispositions, where they would still be released into the community. So that’s—it was mostly adjournment
in contemplation of dismissal, or conditional discharge. And then we also found that QUEST Futures youth and their
comparison group were equally likely to be detained after they were in program ATD enrollment but when they were
detained, QUEST Futures youth were actually more likely to spend more days in detention, so about five more days,
and that was a significant difference. So that’s definitely not ideal and something we have to look at in terms of
practicing and policy implications. A couple of the reasons might be that this might indicate a greater awareness
of the judge and other court stakeholders in knowing about the complex mental health needs of youth, and so that
contributes to longer detention stays because they might not have the appropriate care in the community. It might
show a potential supervision effect and this means that closer monitoring by the program and also by the court might
lead to longer detention stays. But in general we actually don’t know why the youth were detained in both groups,
we don’t know the reasons for them—whether they were a program violation like breaking curfew or not going to school,
or if they are new arrests after the program end. We also did an exploratory analysis to see if anything else predicted
outcomes of recidivism and detention days, and we did find some results that weren’t that surprising. Females are
less likely to be rearrested about one year after the program. Youth who flag for any substance abuse are more likely
to be rearrested. That’s not too surprising. But an interesting thing was that youth who flagged for suicide risks,
they were more likely to spend more days in detention, but they were less likely to be rearrested. So that actually
gives some support to the fact that more complex mental health needs, like suicidal ideation might mean that youth
will be in detention for longer. It’s still an issue.

SARAH SCHWEIG: Right, just because there
aren’t resources to deal with that?

JOSY HAHN: Right, not immediately given—even in New York with
such a vast network of quality providers, they might not always have the ability to meet the needs of a youth with
an emergency issue. So I just provided a very brief overview of the complex model that QUEST Futures is, but Kelli
Henry wrote up a process evaluation and some initial results for the outcome evaluation where she describes thoroughly
the planning process for the QUEST Futures model—so how the collaborations occurred, what happened in terms of implementation
and program launch—and she also wrote six very thoughtful case studies around different youth and their paths through
the QUEST Futures program and the juvenile justice system. So, a big plug to Kelli’s process evaluation, Kelli Henry,
on the Center for Court Innovation website as well.

SARAH SCHWEIG: Okay, so maybe just as a last
takeaway, what are some of the lessons that you can see from some of the findings?

JOSY HAHN:
Well the main goal of QUEST Futures to reduce recidivism, especially for more serious offending was met, and so these
are findings that give support to collaborative models for specialized diversions and ways to meet youth with mental
health needs in the justice system, which is fantastic. This does add to a small but growing base of evidence around
specialized youth diversions, and it’s critical because the juvenile justice system is definitely looking at alternatives.

SARAH SCHWEIG: Well it was great speaking with you today. I’m Sarah Schweig and I’ve been speaking with
researcher Josy Hahn about mental illness and the juvenile justice system. To find out more about the Center for
Court Innovation, or to download Josy’s report, visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening. 
          

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Judges Carolyn Minder and James Cawthon preside over the Ada County Domestic Violence Court in Boise, Idaho.
The court is one of three domestic violence courts in the U.S. selected by the Department of Justice’s Office
on Violence Against Women to serve as a mentor court, helping other courts develop more effective responses to domestic
violence. In this episode of New Thinking, the judges explain how they divide their duties, work closely with the
community, and promote rapid disposition of cases.

[Opening Music]

CAROLYN
MINDER:  The judiciary doesn’t drive what we do. The community drives what it expects the judiciary to do,
in order to be responsive.

[Music begins to fade away]

ROBERT V. WOLF: 
Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Today I have a chance to talk with
Judge James Cawthon and Judge Carolyn Minder of the Aida County Domestic Violence Court in Boise Idaho. It’s nice
to have you here.

JUDGE MINDER:  Thank you.

JUDGE CAWTHON: 
Thank you.

WOLF:  You are both here at the Center for Court Innovation offices in New
York because your court was one of three domestic violence courts in the U.S. selected by the Department of Justice’s
Office on Violence Against Women as a mentor court. So I thought maybe we could start with the mentor court program.
Judge Cawthon, what’s the idea behind the program?

JUDGE CAWTHON:  The main idea here
is we’ve had a lot of experience over the years with domestic violence courts across the nation being successful
at promoting offender accountability, bringing about behavioral change in offenders, strengthening families, strengthening
communities. And as these courts continue to grow, the idea is that the mentor sites can provide training for domestic
violence courts, provide trainings to jurisdictions and communities who are interested in wanting to set up domestic
violence courts.

JUDGE MINDER:  And it’s intriguing to me that we were selected because
we started differently than how other courts have begun. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the ’70s and so my background
is from community organization and working things up. And so we started with a prosecuting attorney who was deeply
committed to the notion and myself and one other judge, now that’s moved on, talking about what we need to do differently,
but we needed it to be a community response to a very significant community issue, and having the judiciary be responsive
to what the community was saying—this is what we need. And so the judiciary doesn’t drive what we do. The community
drives what it expects the judiciary to do in order to be responsive. So that’s why our court is different.

WOLF:  What role does the community play?  How have you gotten the community to play that
role?

JUDGE MINDER:  They sit at the table and they are real stakeholders. They are heard,
they bring their ideas to the table, they tell us what doesn’t work, what is working, they identify the gaps for
us, and they are free to tell us what they believe that we need to do in order to be more responsive. And concomitantly
with that, we’ve had leaders who are being pushed from their officers in the field to treat domestic violence differently,
instead of the leadership saying no, we can’t make these kinds of changes, we’re not interested in changing our administrative
practices. They are being compelled to address community needs that are bubbling up from victim advocates, from law
enforcement, from the family justice systems.

WOLF:  Why don’t you tell me, then, how
a domestic violence court works?

JUDGE CAWTHON:  The model has a number of different
pieces, all engineered to answer certain problems in the way business had been done. One is, it promotes the rapid
disposition of cases. In other words, the goal is that within 45 to 60 days from the date of arrest, that case is
disposed of in some fashion—plead guilty, found guilty, found not guilty at trial. And the notion here: one, it’s
always better to get an offender into treatment, into counseling sooner rather than later. That’s obvious. But the
other thing is that the use of the contact orders and things of that nature, you really put a family in turmoil when
they’re having to be separated for prolonged periods of time—months and month and months. Victims at risk, children
suffer from that. And so that quick disposition of the case addresses those two things.

The second
thing is we have participants from the judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, probation officers, treatment providers,
evaluators who are all specialized in the area of domestic violence.  It’s a complex issue that has a number
of different facets – comes in many different forms. And so that specialized knowledge, that specialized dedication
promotes a much better disposition of a case.

And the final thing is the notion of having a court
that is focused on dealing with this family that has found itself into the criminal process, and so our court would
deal not just with the criminal case, but a custody case, a divorce case. In the case of Judge Minder’s expertise,
if there’s a child protection issue, neglect, or abuse case. So one judge, one family, a rapid disposition of the
case to promote the accountability and treatment and change of the offender, and to try to promote the stability
of the family.

JUDGE MINDER:  We are really active in terms of judicial monitoring. We
bring these people back and we get these reports to see where people are in the process, and are they engaging or
not.

WOLF:  And if they’re not, you’re giving them prompts or sanctions, or feedback
of some kind?

JUDGE MINDER:  Correct. It’s the place as well, where the victim is finding
out, how is the defendant doing?  Is the defendant holding him or herself accountable?  Is the
defendant doing everything that they’re supposed to be doing in order to help our family heal from this? 
And so it’s a really nice venue whereby the victim is hearing from all of the people involved, who on some level
are more objective than the information coming from the defendant himself, or herself. We have as many number of
female defendants in our court as we do male offenders. The whole point being that the community is helping the victim
understand what they’re doing on probation, how successful are they being?  And then our response to that
is immediate accountability, which would include going into jail because when we sentence we maintain the right to
impose discretionary jail time for non-compliance with probation terms.

WOLF:  Probation
for you is reflected in the active partnership between the bench and the probation.

JUDGE MINDER: 
Very active partnership. They and the prosecuting attorneys offices are in really good contact with one another but
we don’t anything ex parte. All of our information comes on the record. Probation run accountability groups, they
report immediately when there’s new police reports as to their defendants. And so we will see someone typically within
30 days of sentence. If they’re marginal, we may see them a week later because Judge Cawthon and I share the docket,
and if somebody’s off track, we’ll put them on the calendar for the next week expecting that somebody’s gonna go
to those accountability groups, do what they need to do. So probation is absolutely critical to our ability to assess
accountability and safety of the victim.

WOLF:  You both preside over this docket. How
does that work?

JUDGE CAWTHON:  When Judge Minder created the court, we didn’t have the
resources to create the court. And so Judge Minder and another judge, our administrative district judge, Judge Hanson,
decided that they could carve one court out of two judge’s dockets. The way it works is this: one week Judge Minder
is doing domestic violence court and I’m doing my regular criminal court docket. The following week, I’ll do domestic
violence court and she’s doing her child protection docket. And certain cases are assigned to me, certain cases are
assigned to Judge Minder. We obviously work together as exigencies present themselves of hearing cases on each other’s
docket to make sure we’re on top of things and that cases are being processed quickly.

WOLF: 
I’m curious, are your temperaments such that, from the perspective of a victim or an offender who comes into the
court they’d expect equivalent experience?

JUDGE MINDER:  Yes, and I think the reason
for that is not necessarily that we’re exactly alike in terms of our temperament, but we have enough people at our
table and we have enough team meetings, and we are all educated on the same points, that we share a common philosophy
and we share common goals, and we consistently look at what those goals and objectives are, and we can agree with
them. And so we have the ability to treat everyone—not the same, because facts are so unique, but know that no one
would be suffering as a consequence of coming before a female judge more so than coming before Judge Cawthon if you’re
a male defendant.

WOLF:  I wonder, do you think you bring to it—because of your genders,
perhaps—different perspectives or enhanced perspectives because you can work together and share your perspectives?

JUDGE CAWTHON:  Sure. I think where that manifests itself is when we’re having team meetings. Instead
of it just being my input and my ideas, we’re bouncing things off of each other, working together, talking through
issues and it really helps to come to the right resolution about the way to proceed on things.

JUDGE
MINDER:  That, and we do share the probation violation docket. One of us takes the probation violation once
a month and so the month of December, I believe it will be my probation docket that I’ll hear all of the PV’s that
involve the cases that Judge Cawthon has either tried or dispositioned and is currently reviewing. And so we have
a system in place where we take extraordinarily good notes relative to a defendant’s progress. We take notes relative
to the victim’s comments, what their concerns are. So by the time I open a file, I can go through Judge Cawthon’s
notes and he can do the same for mine, and we’re really up to date.

WOLF:  Since you,
as a mentor court, are going to be guiding your courts in developing strategies for dealing with domestic violence
cases in a more effective way, I wonder what advice you’d give them.

JUDGE CAWTHON: 
I think it just takes real perseverance, and real dedication, and patience in talking to people, and figuring out
“What do I have here in my community, and what are my resources, and what can I change?” Even small changes can make
a huge difference. If a judge just decided “I’m gonna judicially monitor domestic violence cases,” that would make
a significant change if a court or a probation department or prosecutor’s office wanted to get together and decide,
“We want to look at the evaluation tools we’re using. We want to do a better job of diagnosing and case planning
what offenders need.” You would make a significant difference.

JUDGE MINDER:  I agree
with you. And I think that it has to be a personal philosophy on the part of a judge in the course of their day-to-day
jobs to say, “What can we do differently without engaging undue resources, without rocking the boat, and without
really asking for the institution to make changes to accommodate me?  What can I do within the context of
the caseload that I currently have, to make life better for the individuals that my life is touching?”

WOLF:  Thank you, Judge Carolyn Minder and Judge James Cawthon, for taking the time to talk with
me today.

JUDGE CAWTHON:  My pleasure.

JUDGE MINDER:  You’re
welcome.

WOLF:  I’ve been speaking with Judges James Cawthon and Carolyn Minder of the
Aida County Domestic Violence Court in Boise, Idaho. They are one of the three domestic violence courts in the country
that was selected by the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women as mentor courts to help other
courts learn about how to develop and make the best domestic violence court that they can. I’m Rob Wolf, director
for communications at the Center for Court Innovation. To find out more about the Mentor Court program, or to listen
to other New Thinking podcasts, please visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

January 2014

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The Harlem
Justice Corps is an intensive career development and service program for justice-involved young men and
women. Project Manager Tai Alex explains how the initiative works, and
participants Elijah Blount and Anthony Brown discuss what they’ve learned so far.

[Opening
music]

ELIJAH BLOUNT:  And I learned the seriousness of working because they say it’s
hard to get a job, but now as I’m going through the motions in business, it’s hard to keep a job. That’s one thing
I learned.

[As opening music fades]

ROBERT V. WOLF:  Hi, I’m Rob Wolf,
director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Today I’m at the Dempsy Center on 127th Street with
Taí Alex, who is the project manager of the Harlem Justice Corps. Hi, Taí.

TAÍ ALEX: 
Hi, how are you?

WOLF:  Good, I’m good. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me today.
I’m here to learn about the Harlem Justice Corps, which combines community service with education for young men who
have some criminal justice involvement. Why don’t you explain to what the program is all about?

ALEX: 
Sure, I’d love to. So the Harlem Justice Corps is part of a larger city effort initiated by the Center for Economic
Opportunity, and we actually work in close partnership with the Prisoner Reentry Institute as well. The program is
designed for 18- to 24-year-olds who are recently released from jail, on probation, on parole, or otherwise recently
involved in the criminal justice system. We actually serve both men and women, and our particular program focuses
on residents of the East and Central Harlem community.

So basically they’re with us for about
six months intensively, where they work on community benefit service projects, internships, and then we work to get
them full-time employment. If they do not have their GED they’re also in educational classes on a regular basis,
and if they do have their GED or high school diploma, we connect them with the college initiative, and we assist
them to get enrolled in college courses. And while they’re in the program, they work directly with a life coach who
helps to keep them motivated, to help keep them on track, and hold them accountable to the promises that they made
to themselves and to us when they started the program.

WOLF:  Tell me a little bit about
what they’re actually doing when they have a work project. Can you give me some examples of the kind of work members
have done?

ALEX: Sure. So basically, in the first two to three weeks they’re in orientation phase,
and in the second week of orientation they start doing what’s called community mapping, where they actually go out
into the community with our site supervisors, and they scope out projects. So the site supervisor may have picked
out about five to 10 suggested projects, and the crew members will actually go and research them, meet the folks
at the site, and decide amongst themselves if they’re going to do the project and before the project even begins,
they actually do a presentation to the community advisory board, which is composed of community members who are invested
in the program.

It’s a PowerPoint presentation and a lot of the groups have never done something
like this before, so that’s an added skill that they get experience with. Some of the past projects include working
at the National Black Theater, at Mt. Zion Church. They also did a project a couple months ago at SCAN-LaGuardia,
which is a community service center in East Harlem, and right now they’re working at a day care at a public housing
building in Harlem.

WOLF:  Is it an opportunity for them to learn new skills?

ALEX:  Usually what the site will need assistance with is rehab work—renovations, things like that.
So a lot of times they might need several rooms painted. They might need the floors redone, tiling.

Some
may come in with a lot of experience, and they might teach the other corps members, help teach the other corps members,
along with the site supervisor, or they may come in with no experience at all and they end up learning while they’re
there. But I think that in addition to sort of hard skills that they learn, they’re really focusing on soft skills,
like learning to show up every day on time, stay for the whole day, check in with their supervisor when they can’t
be there, working with a team, staying motivated, things like that that they maybe haven’t had the experience with
in the past. So those are the kind of skills that we’re really promoting. And then while they’re at that site, they
might learn about what services that site has, so in the case of National Black Theater they were invited to go to
theater productions for free by the director there. He actually brought one of our members who were interns later
on, and invited us to come back since to do other work there.

WOLF:  I’m interested –
you mentioned life coaches before. That sounds like an incredible resource for someone who has made some bad decisions
earlier in life and is now trying to get their life back on track. What does a life coach actually do?

ALEX:  So the life coach basically starts working with the corps member even before they enroll
in the program. Before we enroll anybody in the program, we have them fill out an application and they go through
a series of interviews where they get to talk to us about why is it they want to be here. Once they’ve gone through
that process, they’re assigned a life coach and that life coach actually works with them before orientation, to make
sure they’re going to be here, that they’re going to participate. They kind of know everything they need to know
about the program, and they start to develop a very close bond. They’re basically their primary person and the program
really is modeled after that approach, that each member in the program has their primary person, who is their life
coach. So the life coach will, in addition to sitting down with them to kind of think about long-term and short-term
goals, they’ll assist them with anything that comes up. So whether they need assistance getting benefits, whether
they have family issues at home, whether they have child care issues—the life coach will help them with that, to
try to resolve those issues so that they can be at work full time, and be employed and functioning. The life coach
initially was to be a kind of support system and a motivator. They also serve as someone to be helpful and hold accountable.
So you know, it can be a challenge for the corps members to show up every day and to show up on time, so they actually
help to keep them focused, and that is actually something that could include home visits, it could include mediations
with family members and other corps members, whatever it is, and it’s kind of on a case by case basis.

WOLF:  Let’s talk for a moment about context. The Harlem Justice Corps really is part of this movement
that’s emerged over the last 10 years to offer more support to people who are returning from prison, or who’ve been
under criminal justice system supervision. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that, about how that kind of support
and structure benefits someone who’s transitioning back to trying to lead a law-abiding life in the community.

ALEX:  Definitely. I would agree it definitely is part of a larger initiative, nationally and specifically
here in New York City, because there are other programs. So our program is part of the Young Male Initiative through
the Center for Economic Opportunity. They have other programs that kind of focus on this work. We also partner with
the Re-entry Court, which has been involved in this work for many years. I think that the benefits to having a program
available, particularly for young people coming out of prison is that they are more high risk – they tend to be more
high-risk, just by the very nature of their age, and the other kind of problem that I think everyone is seeing is
that if someone is arrested in your community, they get arrested, they come back to the very same community where
they got into trouble, so to speak. The same friends, the same family members, the same underlying issues that perhaps
led them to make that poor decision. If there are no job opportunities and no educational opportunities, there are
limited options for that person to make any positive changes. So programs like this really are essential to providing
a very basic opportunity – employment, education, economic growth in the community are all very fundamentally important
things to help that individual make a positive change.

WOLF:  Can you give me a sense
of the results you’ve seen so far?  I know you haven’t done a formal evaluation yet, but can you give me
a picture about what’s emerged from people who have completed the program?

ALEX:  Definitely.
We do have, so we’ve completed one full year of programming and most of our corps members who graduated are employed
full time, and if they’re not working full time, they’re working with job developers to obtain employment. We also
have members that are enrolled in college, so they’ve been working towards their degrees. We have a corps member
who just recently graduated and passed the GED, and others that are still working on their GED.

WOLF: 
Great. And now we’re going speak with two participants in the Harlem Justice Corps, Elijah Blount, and Anthony Brown.
Thanks guys for taking a minute out of your day to speak with me. So Elijah, how long have you been a participant
in the Harlem Justice Corps?

ELIJAH BLOUNT:  I’ve been a participant in the Harlem Justice
Corps for about five weeks, going on six weeks.

WOLF:  Tell me a little bit about your
experience. What have you done so far?

BLOUNT:  My experience—basically it’s all new
to me, so I’ve learned a lot of things about myself, besides about just maintaining and community service. I’m learning
that you know, I’ve got leadership qualities in me that I didn’t see before. I’m learning how everything rolls downhill,
you know, you’ve got to delegate responsibilities. Being responsible—I learned that. I learned that punctuality is
everything, says everything about you and I learned the seriousness of working, because they say it’s hard to get
a job, but now as I’m going through the motions of business, it’s harder to keep a job. That’s one thing I learned.

And basically I’m giving something back to my community I can really see helping. Like the day care center,
for example, the small kids they are getting accustomed to seeing us, so they always say hey, what’s up? 
What are you doing?  Ooh cool, what are you doing?  Pointing that out. So they just, you know it’s
real nice, it’s real cool.

WOLF:  And the day care center, that’s where you’re doing
community service?

BLOUNT:  Yes sir.

WOLF:  And Anthony Brown,
how long have you been in the Justice Corps?

ANTHONY BROWN:  If I’m not mistaken, since
about October 7.

WOLF:  What have you been doing? Tell me a little bit about your experience.

BROWN:  Most of the things I’ve been doing at the current work site, I’ve already known. However
working around a large group of people, and sometimes by myself, has really given me a chance to polish my skills
because I could say that I knew it, but I wasn’t as good at it as I am now. And just being able to work with different
people that I don’t know—like he said, be around those children, it’s really a big difference. We finished one room
already and, you know, just the look on the children’s faces when they ran into that room and saw the difference,
it just made me kind of happy.

WOLF:  Tell me about what this community service consists
of. You’re working at a day care center. What is it you’re doing, exactly?

BROWN:  Basically,
we are renovating all of the rooms, like buffing the floors, stripping them. We’re just bringing the room back to
life, basically. You know if they look clean, look new, you’re going to be in a good mood, fresh jumping, you’re
going to be ready to get everything done.

WOLF:  Do you guys have long term goals yet? 
Do you know where you want to be in a couple of years?

BROWN: Well, right now I think for me it’s
more of a transition stage. I’m in between completing short-term goals that I have in life, and putting my foot through
the door to embark on long-term goals, like receiving my OSHA, going back into college.

WOLF:
Elijah?

BLOUNT:  One of my goals is just to work to the end of this year, you know? 
Get ready for the holiday season. But some of my long-term goals? I’ve got a goal that I want to see myself work
at the Department of Sanitation. And I know working through Harlem Justice Corps is going to help me get my foot
in the door, so I can see one of my short term goals being completed in the next six months.

WOLF: 
Great. Well listen guys, you sound great, and I really appreciate you telling me about your experience, so thanks
very much. And thanks, Taí. I really enjoyed learning about the Harlem Justice Corps.

ALEX: 
My pleasure. Thank you for coming.

[Closing music]

WOLF:  I’m Rob
Wolf, Director for Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. To learn more about the Harlem Justice Corps
or the Center for Court Innovation, visit our website at www.courtinnovation. org where you can listen, also, to
our podcasts, and you can also listen to us on iTunes. Thanks for listening.

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Cynthia G. Lee and David B. Rottman, researchers from the National Center for State Courts, discuss some of
the key findings in their new report, A Community Court Grows in Brooklyn: A Comprehensive Evaluation of the Red Hook Community
Justice Center. (November 2013)

ROBERT V. WOLF: 
[Opening theme music] I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and today’s
New Thinking podcast is about research and the Red Hook Community Justice Center. On the phone with me today are
David B. Rottman and Cynthia G. Lee, both from the National Center for State Courts, and they are two of the seven
researchers who have just completed a comprehensive evaluation of the Red Hook Community Justice Center. 
Thanks for taking the time to talk with me today.

DAVID B. ROTTMAN:  Well thanks Rob. 
We appreciate the opportunity.

WOLF:  Well I thought maybe we could start off with a
little overview of what the Red Hook Community Justice Center actually is.

CYNTHIA G. LEE: 
The Red Hook Community Justice Center opened in the year 2000 in an underserved neighborhood in a physically and
socially isolated part of Brooklyn, dominated by the Red Hook houses, which are a very large public housing project.
And there was a lot of concern about drug-related crime in the public housing project, and that’s where the impetus
for this project came from. The court is a multi-jurisdictional court that handles misdemeanor and other low-level
criminal cases, summonses that are citations that don’t rise to the level of a criminal case, juvenile delinquency
cases, and also landlord-tenant cases arising in public housing. And it also offers a whole range of community and
youth programs for local residents.

WOLF:  So the Justice Center, it’s a big place with
a lot of programs and a lot of clients, which makes me want to ask you how you broke down your research into components
that were manageable and measurable. 

ROTTMAN:  The Justice Center is, indeed,
a complex operation, but we broke our work down into trying to answer five fundamental questions. The first question
we asked was, “Did the Justice Center get implemented in the way that its planners intended it to?”  The
second question is, “Did the Justice Center improve upon the results that we see for defendants that are being processed
in the centralized courthouse in Brooklyn?”  We wanted to know in particular, was there lower recidivism
rates at Red Hook than downtown? And also was there a reduction in the levels of crime?  The third question
we asked was, “Did the presence of the court have an impact on how the courts, the justice system are received by
defendants, as well as by the local residents?” Our fourth question was an important one these days, “Is the Justice
Center cost efficient in the view of the taxpayer?”  And the fifth question, and perhaps the most important
one and the most difficult to answer is, “Why did the Justice Center produce any observed results in terms of improving
upon business as usual in the downtown courts?”  So those were our five basic questions.

WOLF: 
Where did you collect the data that would allow you to answer those five research questions?

ROTTMAN:
 Because it was a community court, we did hire a group of urban ethnographers with a lot of experience working
in low income neighborhoods and justice system issues, to help us interview residents in the area, offenders who
had been to the court, as well as to get offenders who perhaps had not been to the court, but what they thought about
it, what they’d heard, what the word on the street was about the Justice Center.  We, ourselves, spent five
weeks in Red Hook interviewing people who work in the court, people in community organizations who have close ties
with the court, to try to understand how the court operates and how it is connected to this neighborhood, and we
also did observations both in the courthouse itself and also in various neighborhoods, and we collected a great deal
of case-level data of court records.

WOLF:  Well you mention that one of your research
questions involved impacts on recidivism, so I thought maybe could jump to that.

LEE: 
Well to answer this question, we compared defendants whose cases were processed at the Justice Center with similar
defendants who are arrested in the Justice Center’s catchment area, but had their cases processed at Kings County
Criminal Court in downtown Brooklyn.  We used a technique that’s called propensity score analysis to make
sure that the people in each sample were as similar as possible in terms of demographics, previous criminal history,
and the current charges. 

So when we look at the re-arrest rates for these two groups,
we found that 36 percent of the defendants who’d been through the Justice Center were rearrested within two years,
compared with 40 percent of the downtown defendants. That’s a decrease of four percentage points or 10 percent in
the re-arrest rate, which is statistically significant. 

And we also used a technique
that’s called survival analysis, that allowed us to further control for factors such as the characteristics of the
defendants in the case and this analysis confirms that case processing at the Justice Center is associated with a
statistically significant decrease in the risk of recidivism. 

WOLF:  So 10
percent lower recidivism two years out, after they’ve left the Justice Center, or was it after they were arrested?

LEE:  It was within two years after arraignment.

WOLF:  Were you able
to come up with a theory as to why the Justice Center was able to achieve lower recidivism among the defendants who
passed through the Justice Center?

CYNTHIA LEE:  Well we started out with three hypotheses
about how the Justice Center was intended to reduce recidivism.  So the first one of these mechanisms is
deterrence.  Here, the Justice Center’s goal is to impose meaningful punishment such as community service
with greater certainty than other misdemeanor courts in New York City.  The idea is that if people know
they’re going to get punished, then they’ll be less likely to commit crimes in the future. 

The second mechanism is intervention.  So here, the Justice Center tries to prevent crime by addressing
its underlying causes, and the Justice Center’s biggest intervention program is treatment for drug addiction that’s
supervised by the judge. 

The third mechanism is called legitimacy.  So the
idea here is that if people believe that the court has the moral right to enforce the law, they’ll voluntarily obey
the law just because they feel like they should, not because they’re afraid of being punished.  One was
that the Justice Center works to establish its legitimacy is by connecting to the neighborhood around issues that
are important to the community, like conditions in public housing and conditions in the local park.  But
any court’s most important source of legitimacy is what’s known as procedural justice—in the interaction between
the judge and the people who appear before that judge in the courtroom. Procedural justice means that people feel
they’re being treated with respect, that the judge’s decision is impartial and it’s based on the facts, that they’ve
had an opportunity to express their viewpoint to the judge, and that the judge is trustworthy and sincerely concerned
about all of the people who are involved in the case. 

When we tested these hypotheses
in our analysis, we didn’t find any evidence that either deterrence or intervention was at work, at least as
we were able to operationalize these concepts based on the data that were available to us. People who were sentenced
to community service were not any less likely to be rearrested than people who got off with “a walk,” and Red Hook
defendants who went through the drug treatment program didn’t really seem to do any better than similar downtown
defendants who didn’t get drug treatment. 

This leaves legitimacy as the most likely
explanation for the decrease that we saw in recidivism. There was a lot of evidence in our interviews and the ethnographic
analysis that people who’d been defendants at the Justice Center, along with people just living in the community
at large, perceived a high degree of procedural justice in the court’s handling of cases, and in its relations with
the community.

WOLF:  Well so that would be the biggest factor—their attitude toward
the court and their feeling that the court was treating them fairly and was, in fact, legitimate even if a decision
might have been adverse toward them?  Your theory is that they were more likely to respect that decision
and less likely to recidivate as a result?

LEE:  Yes, and there’s actually a little bit
of evidence for that in our ethnographic analysis. So there’s a distinction between procedural justice, which is
what we’ve talked about, the perceptions of the processes being fair, versus distributive justice, or the actual
result of the case. And when we first interviewed people who had been defendants, both at Red Hook and at the court
downtown, we found that people who had been defendants at Red Hook were more likely to have a favorable impression
on all of the procedural justice factors, but there was no difference in people’s perceptions of the outcome of the
case, so this really lends credence to the fact that it is procedural justice rather than the sentence or the outcome
of the case that’s having the impact. 

WOLF:  Very interesting.  Let
me ask you about some other results relating to arrests.  Now you noted that crime, as reflected in the
number of arrests, went down in the neighborhood served by the Justice Center. I wonder if you could explain how
big the decline was and if you were able to identify what role the Justice Center might have played in that.

LEE:  Well we compared the arrest trends in the catchment area of the three police precincts that
feed into the Justice Center with several neighboring precincts in Brooklyn.  Before the Justice Center
opened, all of the arrest trends in all of the precincts showed a lot of variation from one month to the next, but
when the Justice Center opened, the number of arrests in each of the three catchment area precincts dropped, and
the trend stabilized, something that didn’t occur outside of the catchment area.

So for example,
between January of 1994 and 1998, and when the Justice Center started taking cases in April of 2000, the monthly
number of misdemeanor arrests in the 76th Precinct ranged anywhere from below 50 to more than 150. After the Justice
Center opened, that line tended to hover right around 50 with a lot less variation.  The data don’t tell
us whether the change in the number of arrests results from less crime in the catchment area or a change in police
practices in the catchment area, but the timing and the fact that we didn’t observe similar changes in the neighboring
precincts both point to some type of association with the opening of the Justice Center.

WOLF: 
Another interesting finding involves an estimated savings that you found per defendant, and I think people would
be very interested to hear what that savings was and how you figured those numbers out.

LEE: 
We’ve identified that our reduced recidivism or reduced victimization from additional crime was the primary benefit
of the Justice Center. So when we looked at the reduction recidivism within a two-year window and averaged it for
all misdemeanor defendants, we found that the processing of each misdemeanor case at Red Hook was associated with
an average decrease of about $1,400 in the victimization cost of property crimes, and a little over $3,000 in victimization
costs for crimes against person, which amounts to a total of $4,756 in victimization cost savings per misdemeanor
defendant.  And the victimization cost estimates we used are a standard set of estimates that are used by
many criminal justice researchers. 

WOLF:  I see.  So that savings
is about the savings accrued—if you put a financial value on the victimization costs, it’s not necessarily money
that goes back into the system’s pocket or into the government’s pocket.  Is that correct?

LEE:
That’s exactly right.

ROTTMAN:  The real meaning is that from the taxpayers’ point
of view in terms of the different ways that taxpayer money could be spent, keeping the Justice Center operational
is beneficial. So the public gains more from the Justice Center than it costs.

WOLF: 
We’re not able to touch on all your findings, but I just wondered if there were any other headline findings that
you have.

ROTTMAN:  Well, I think the main headline finding is procedural justice. 
The ability of a court to generate a belief in a community, among a group of people, that it is showing respect,
that it’s neutral, allows voices to be heard, and above all, that it’s sincerely concerned about people. 
And we know that of the lot of research, that is most likely to result in compliance with criminal justice decisions. 

I think the other thing that I would point out is the coherence of what goes on in the Justice Center—that
you have people who work for the state court system, from different government agencies, or for community agencies.
You have linkages to dozens of community based institutions that provide treatment services, so it’s quite remarkable
that everything holds together so well, that there aren’t turf wars, there aren’t misunderstandings, but it operates
so smoothly.

ROB WOLF:  Well thank you very much for taking the time to explain to me
and basically reducing years of very challenging and fascinating work to a very brief conversation.  I have
been speaking with David B. Rottman, and Cynthia G. Lee, both from the National Center for State Courts, about their
evaluation of the Red Hook Community Justice Center that anyone who’s interested in judicial reform should read,
and they can get a copy of the report on our website, www.courtinnovation.org,
and of course also at the National Center for State Courts website, www.ncsc.org. 
So once again David and Cynthia, thanks so much for talking with me.  I’m Rob Wolf, thanks very much
for listening. [Closing theme music]

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The Center for Court Innovation celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Midtown Community Court with speeches by New York State Chief Judge Jonathan
Lippman, Center for Court Innovation Director Greg Berman, and others.

ROBERT
V. WOLF:  Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Tonight I’m at
the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Midtown community Court. Over
250 people have turned out—judges, city and state officials, representatives of businesses, not-for-profit organizations,
and the community at large, to honor the nation’s first community court.

Founded in 1993, the
Midtown Community Court has been dedicated to developing innovative and effective responses to low-level crime. A
typical sentence at the Midtown Court seeks to both restore the community and also link an offender to services to
help them rebuild their lives and discourage them from reoffending. Errol Lewis, host of Inside City Hall and tonight’s
emcee, said the court would not be possible without public and private entities working together.

ERROL
LEWIS:  We don’t have a theme tonight, but if we did it would be public-private partnerships. Midtown is
the product of many different players from the public and the private sectors coming together to support justice
reform.

WOLF:  Tonight’s honorees included New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman,
the Shubert Organization, which as Broadway’s largest theater owner, provided key early funding support to the court,
and Nicole Robinson, a client of the court, who has made huge strides in turning her life around. Greg Berman, director
of the Center for Court Innovation, introduced Judge Lippman.

GREG BERMAN:  Now you probably
don’t need me to tell you what kind of public servant Judge Lippman is. All you have to do is pick up the New
York Times to figure that out. But suffice to say over the last couple years since he became the chief
judge, he’s taken on a dizzying array of issues that basically no other public leader had the courage to touch, everything
from civil legal services, to human trafficking, to bail reform.

WOLF: Lippman noted how the Midtown
Court serves not only Times Square and surrounding neighborhoods but the entire justice system by serving as a laboratory
to test new reforms. He explained how his recently announced initiative to start special courts for victims of sex
trafficking was initially tested at the Midtown Court.

JUDGE LIPPMAN: The Midtown Community Court
is serving as a crucial test case. Before launching our statewide initiative to really shut down this evil, this
form of modern day slavery, we chose to pilot a new approach to women arrested for prostitution at the Midtown Court.
We learned an enormous amount about how to identify victims, how to link them to services and help them get off the
streets. We are now adapting these lessons to sites around the state, so the victims of trafficking will not be victimized
again by the justice system or by our society.

WOLF:  The final honoree of the evening
gave a human face to the policies being tested at the Midtown Court. The court’s director, Courtney Bryan, introduced
Nicole Robinson. First you’ll hear Bryan, and then Robinson.

COURTNEY BRYAN:  She was
victimized and abused as a young child, abandoned by adults who should have cared for her. Nicole’s story is incredible.
Sadly, it is not the exception. There are countless victims of trafficking who are hidden in plain view. In our schools,
in our courts, in our neighborhoods. Thanks to her bravery and her hard work, and with the support of several individuals
and agencies here in this room tonight, Nicole’s future is bright. She has no criminal record and has legal immigration
status and her own apartment. She’s in a leadership program with GEMS, a wonderful organization that works with survivors
of commercial sexual exploitation. She’s studying for the GED and plans to go to college.

NICOLE
ROBINSON:  When I came through Midtown three years ago, I finally was treated like a person, a whole person
– not as a number or as a criminal, or looked at as a victim, or as any other label. I really appreciated being treated
with respect and felt like my voice was finally being heard. I finally felt comfortable to trust and let people into
my life. And now three years later, those people are my family. If I could say one thing to you all tonight, it’s
to take time to get to know the person before judging them based on a label.

WOLF:  This
was just a sample of the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Midtown Community Court, which took place October
21, 2013 in the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan. To learn more about the court or the Center for Court Innovation,
please visit www.courtinnovation.org. Don’t forget that you can subscribe to our podcasts on iTunes and follow up
on Facebook and Twitter. I’m Rob Wolf of the Center for Court Innovation. Thanks for listening.

October
2013

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