Dan Cipullo, director of the Criminal Division of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, discusses
why and how the court expanded its community court approach from one neighborhood to cover the entire city.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation and I am
in Washington, D.C., at Community Justice 2012, which is the International Conference of Community Courts. And I’m
speaking with Dan Cipullo, who is the director of the Criminal Division of the Superior Court in Washington, D.C.
And I wanted to talk to you, Dan, a little bit about the East of the River Community Court and plans for expanding
it.

DAN CIPULLO: Sure

WOLF:
Maybe you can start by describing the East of the River Community Court, when it started and just a little bit about
it.

CIPULLO: East of the River Community Court started in the early
2000s. We were actually experiencing problems in D.C. We had a zero tolerance in D.C. so we were inundated with a
large number of misdemeanor arrests. We went up about 30 percent in misdemeanor arrests, which led to a lot of delays
in processing cases and a lot of police overtime. So police overtime was the initial impetus of looking at community
courts.

We worked with the Justice Management Institute, with Dick Hoffman there and Barry Mahoney.
And Barry had heard about the community court concept from New York and we got a group together. We went out to see
Midtown [Community Court], we went up to see the community court in Minneapolis and in Portland. And we brought those
ideas back to our city. We said, ‘How do we implement it here?’

The first community court concept
was more of city-wide on the really low-level quality-of-life crimes. Judge [Richard H.] Ringell in our D.C. misdemeanor
court. And then we went and looked at the East of the River community, which is a primarily underserved area, with
high poverty rates, high crime rates, and just generally underserved in social services. And we decided to make that
our project, to start out there. And Judge Noël Kramer, a wonderful, wonderful judge, and I went out there, and we
started it first in the sixth police district, which comprised the northern half of the Anacostia neighborhood, and
the seventh police district was the second side of Anacostia.

And we expanded. We really started
with no services, with no real idea other than to go out there and make it better. And we did a good job. We did
really link with our city agencies, the pre-trial services agency, some city agencies to bring some social services.
And Judge Kramer was just an unending champion of the community court movement out there.

So
we had that running since 2003. In 2010 we actually were able to find some money and do our first evaluation of the
program, and we looked to see whether it was reducing recidivism in the community.

WOLF:
So what did you find?

CIPULLO: Well we worked with the group, Weststat,
they came in and did an independent survey for us, and they found a statistically significant reduction in recidivism
in people who went through the East of the River Community Court as opposed to people who had gone through the traditional
system.

WOLF: I understand right now there are plans for expanding
it or you’re in the process of expanding it.

CIPULLO: We all knew
there was a little bit of unfairness in the city because the only people who really got the diversion opportunities
were people coming out of the East of the River Community Court. The prosecutor was not offering the same treatment
and diversion opportunities to everybody else across the court. And Judge Russell Canan and Judge Robert Morin, our
presiding and deputy presiding judges, had been very, very concerned about that and really wanted to expand that
and make it more fair to every defendant coming into the court. And we decided that at the beginning of 2012 we were
going to expand it citywide.

WOLF: So what would that model actually
look like?

CIPULLO: Well, we created six misdemeanor courts where
the judges will be taking the cases for their own individual police district. So we start in the summer with community
engagement, trying to get the judges out into the community to work with those civic associations, with those neighborhood
commissioners and start talking about the program. We work with the prosecutors and defense attorneys to kind of
align it.

We’ve taken – the court took over, actually, the community service program, too, which
was a big change for us because prior to that, part of it had been run by the pre-trial service agency for the East
of the River people, and then a small amount done by the US Attorney’s Office directly, and now the court’s taking
that over. So it’s been a big change for us in how we handle that community service.

But right
now we’re in the process of trying to line up some of the social services we need, but we do run a really good drug
court, we do run a really good mental health court, so anybody coming into the community courts who need those services
will be referred to those courts. So we’ll be looking at the lower level of drug users and hopefully lower-level
mental health people. So really try to find services that fit them and their needs.

WOLF:
Was it a tough sell, this decision to take the community court that had previously just been focused in the Anacostia
neighborhood to the entire city?

CIPULLO: Our chief judge was so
supportive, Chief Judge [Lee F.] Satterfield has been very, very, very supportive of the idea and the problem-solving
courts.

It’s been a little challenge with our judges because in the past our community court
judge did not do any trials. It was really just a problem-solving court, and that’s our model for our drug court
and our mental health court. So the judges have been very concerned about, ‘How can I be a problem-solver and still
do trials?’ So that’s been one of our biggest sells and we’re really working with our judges on that.

We’re
all really looking, the community’s been very receptive, we’ve been out to all the community meetings. We’ve had
judges out for a couple months now getting to most of the community meetings we can find. And the community is really,
really embracing it. The prosecutors are great partners in that, the pre-trial agency—[all] have been great partners.
So the whole criminal justice system is really embracing it. We’re actually cooperating with the city, and they’re
going to give us, hopefully, personnel to help us in our community service program too. So it’s been a great cooperative
effort so far.

WOLF: And I suppose it’s correct to say that the
experience you had at the East of the River Community Court acclimated all of these agencies, the U.S. Attorney’s
Office who serves as the prosecutor in D.C., the defense bar, even the court system itself to some extent had exposure
with it, so you could point to that positive example when you’re expanding it.

CIPULLO:
Yeah, it’s just been really great, the whole thing. When we first started community court the public defender service
was not a big fan of the community court. They really believed in, you know, the adversarial process and it took
a long time to convince some of them that actually we can do really good justice and not lose the adversarial process.

One of the great things about our court is too, that we have been doing most of our community
court diversions pretrial, so that if you fail in it, you still have the right to trial, which is something that
our public defender has appreciated, our CJA bar has really appreciated too. So some of the challenges we’ve had,
but overall it’s been a great partnership with all the agencies.

WOLF:
Give me a sense of what the expansion means in terms of how many places does the East of the River Community Court
handle annually and going forward –

CIPULLO: Yeah, the East of the
River Community Court was handling two police districts, so around 3,000 cases a year, give or take. Some people
opted out of that community court. They wanted to go to trial instead and that’s still always the option. But as
we expand it citywide, we’ll be affecting over 13,000 cases. The prosecutors estimated that about 70 percent of the
defendants coming in will be eligible for some kind of diversion – either mental health or drug court or community
court.

WOLF: Tell me are there any extra costs or are you hoping
to save money through the change?

CIPULLO: I don’t think we’ll save
any money, but right now we’re not creating any additional costs because there’s just the money there. The big challenge
is, how do we line up, how do we do the assessment for people with social service needs, how do we provide those
social service needs? So that’s one of the big areas we’re really looking at.

We’re going to
send our serious drug abusers to our drug court, people with serious mental illness to our mental health court, but
of course you have other offenders whose problems aren’t quite so severe who still need that treatment, who still
need that help. And we’re really looking at that right now, how do we deal with that? Unemployment’s a big issue
in D.C. too, so we’re really working with our department of employment services to bring employment services into
the courthouse.

We’re really blessed, we actually have a mental health clinic in our courthouse
so anybody who’s showing signs of mental illness, we can send right down. We have a doctor there who can start medication,
can start treatment immediately. So we’re really blessed in some regards, but we really need to expand our resources
to be able to meet the needs of the population we’re serving.

WOLF:
And one final question. Did your experience planning the East of the River Community Court originally in any way
inform or help you as you’re doing the expansion? The lessons you’ve learned, has it made it easier?

CIPULLO:
Yes, so much easier because when we really started East of the River we started with no resources, no real plan,
but we had seen the other programs we thought it was great, and the time was right, we had a very supportive chief
judge, and we had an opportunity to move forward. We just did, kind of built it by the seats of our pants.

So
actually seeing what we did over the years, having worked with our partners over the years, how we saw the rate of
recidivism changing, we thought it was a great opportunity to move forward and that experience has really helped
guide us in trying to expand citywide.

WOLF: Great, well listen,
I really appreciate you taking the time, Dan.

CIPULLO: Sure.

WOLF:
I’ve been talking to Dan Cipullo, who is the director of the Criminal Division of the Superior Court in Washington,
D.C., and we’ve been talking about the community courts here in Washington, D.C., starting with the East of the River
Community Court, and the plans going forward now to expand the model to the entire city. So, good luck to you and
thank you.

CIPULLO: Thank you.

WOLF:
I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Thanks for listening.

February
2012

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Judge Paul M. Herbert of the Changing Actions To Change Habits Court in Ohio’s Franklin
County Municipal Court explains how a problem-solving approach to prostitution treats offenders as victims, giving
them the support and links to social services they need to escape a cycle of exploitation and abuse. 

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Queens County (NY) Judge Fernando Camacho discusses why he created a prostitution diversion
court that helps victims leave a life of prostitution by linking them to counseling and social
services instead of sentencing them to jail time.

SARAH SCHWEIG:
Hi, I’m Sarah Schweig of the Center for Court Innovation, and today I’m speaking with Judge Fernando Camacho. Judge
Camacho is currently a Queens County Administrative Judge for Criminal Matters. He has served as Deputy Supervising
Judge at the Queens County Criminal Court, where he presided over the Domestic Violence Court, and began a specialized
court dealing with teenagers charged with prostitution-related offenses. Today he discusses the beginnings of this
program and the roles courts can take for defendants with histories of trauma. So I wanted to talk a little bit about
what initially gave rise to the prostitution diversion program in the Queen’s County Supreme Court.

JUDGE
CAMACHO: Well, I was sitting in arraignment back in 2002, 2003, and a young woman named Siobhan who
was a runaway from Suffolk County, was in the well about 11:00 at night, and she had been arrested, and she was—I
think she was 16, and she had been arrested three or four times for prostitution. And, and I looked at her and the
offer, I think was plea the charge and 15 days, and I said I don’t want to do this. There’s got to be an explanation
as to why she’s out in the street at the age of 16.

I was working in arraignments just for that
week and I adjourned her case to my regular part for the following week, just to get to the bottom of it. And the
next time the case was on I started asking the attorneys questions, and there were answers that I wasn’t happy with,
specifically that I just didn’t think that she was out there of her own free will and she was making a knowing and
voluntary decision that we should be prosecuting her as an adult for. So from that point on, rather than giving her
a jail sentence I started looking for services for her.

After a couple years, believe it or not,
she kept coming back, she ultimately succeeded. When she came back and actually got into college, she came back and
told me. When she came back to get her driver’s license she came back and told me. And ultimately she turned out
to be a tremendous success story.

But in the meantime, every time I would come across a young
person charged with prostitution, I would ask the same types of questions and I was getting the same answers. ‘How’d
you get into the life?’ ‘Well, I got into the life because I was a runaway or I was a throwaway or I ran away from
home because I was getting physically or sexually abused at home and I ran away, and I was recruited by a pimp.’
And I got the same stories over and over and over again to the point that it became clear, even to me, that it wasn’t
a coincidence: There was something going on out there in our own backyard where young kids who were runaways and
throwaways were winding up in vulnerable situations where they were being preyed upon and recruited by very bad people.
It also became clear to me that once they were in the street that it was not so easy if not downright impossible
for them to leave, and that the way we were dealing with – had been dealing with them traditionally in the criminal
justice system just wasn’t the right way. It wasn’t. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t just, and that’s how it started.

SCHWEIG: You previously worked as a prosecutor. How did your experiences there
help inform this initiative?

CAMACHO: I saw how we dealt with young
people charged with prostitution and back then it didn’t make any sense to me. Jail is not the right place for these
young people. A young person is presumed to be not competent to consent under certain statutory sex offenses, yet
the same young person who is not even capable of consenting is now going to be prosecuted as an adult for engaging
in prostitution and prostitution-related offenses. And that never made any sense. That’s just silly. All of us who
were sitting in that area way back in 1986 understood that these young kids who were being charged with prostitution
were going to jail for 15, 20, 25 days, we were just not doing it the right way. We were just not doing the right
thing for these kids. And then once I got in a position where I had some discretion and I could do it differently,
I ultimately got enough resolve together to say, ‘Look, this is wrong. Let’s do it the right way.’

SCHWEIG:
What do you think are some of the issues surrounding prostitution that the courts and especially judges need to be
aware of as they deal with these cases?

CAMACHO: You know, I’m gonna
give everybody the benefit of the doubt, including myself way back when. I just don’t think any of us realized the
amount of pressure, coercion that was going on: the threats, the violence. I don’t think any of us realized that
if they didn’t go out there and come back with a certain amount of money, they were gonna be beaten. And none of
us, I think, realized that. And I think it’s just such a distasteful thing for all of us to just look at these kids,
these children standing there in these ridiculous looking outfits—and we just didn’t want to face the truth. And
I, I also think in terms of the elected officials who count on the votes of these communities, the community is very
outspoken when they find, you know, used condoms on their street, when they have their kids and understandably so:
They don’t want their neighborhood to be the track. You know, nobody could argue with that. But they put a lot of
pressure to bear upon the politicians. But what I don’t think the response of the people in public service wasn’t
the correct response. The response should have been, ‘I agree with you. The neighborhood should not be where this
stuff is happening, but the way we’ve been dealing with this problem traditionally is just not accomplishing anything
because they’re still there. We can round them all up and put them on a bus and bring them to central booking and
they’ll be out tomorrow and they’ll be back on your street the day after.’ So this is not the right way. The right
way is to, through education, to actually reach out to these kids and to show them that there is a way out of the
life and if this is not what they want to be doing, we will give them the resources, we will give them the ability
to leave the life and to do something different like Siobhan did.

SCHWEIG:
What were some of the challenges you encountered developing this model?

CAMACHO:
What I had to initially deal with was changing that perception. And I’m talking about changing the perception, first
of all with myself, and secondly with the people I work with: my colleagues, with the D.A.’s office, with even the
defense bar, with the police department. I mean everybody had to change the way they looked at these kids. And these
aren’t bad girls who like to do this. Many of them are poor, unfortunate, lost souls who have no choice but to do
this. And then after that, you know, operationally the obstacles were just—I can’t even name them. I mean just in
terms of getting all these kids going to the same part, the pimps hanging around the corner waiting for the cases
to be called, using my quorum as a place to recruit, getting these kids—the security issues—getting these kids out
safely without the, without you know, the pimp waiting outside to throw them in a car and take them back to the track.

There’s an inherent conflict, there always has been between the advocates and the social workers, the people
who advocate for these kids, and law enforcement, and the police department, and the D.A.’s office because the advocates
want the kids to be safe, they want them to get out of the life, but they don’t want them to cooperate with law enforcement
against the pimps because they fear for the kids’ safety and rightly so. On the law enforcement side, on the D.A.
side, on the police side, they want these kids to cooperate and be witnesses. They may not be as concerned about
their safety as the advocates are. So there’s always been that inherent conflict—bridging those differences and those
conflicts was a difficult thing to do because if we didn’t get them all at the same table talking about solutions
to these problems, it wasn’t gonna work.

Once that happened—and I think it has happened to a great
degree—you’re getting these advocates agreeing to have these victims cooperate with the DA’s office in prosecution
against very, very bad traffickers. At the same time, you have these prosecutors who are willing to take a young
kid and put them up on the witness stand and asking the jury to believe them. Traditionally they were reluctant to
put these kids on the stand. Their attitude was, ‘who’s gonna believe this prostitute?’ And, and, and now they’re
understanding that they have to go beyond that and say to the jury, ‘Look, this is not a – this is a kid who had
no choice but to get into this and they had no way out.’ So I think that the prosecutors are now understanding that
they can, in fact, persuade a jury that these kids are credible. Um, in terms of resources initially there were very,
very few resources available. I mean now, thankfully we have many, many organizations who are now working with this
population.

SCHWEIG: So maybe you could talk a little bit about what
some of the lessons learned from the implementation of this program are and what advice you would give other jurisdictions
interested in creating a prostitution diversion program in their courts.

CAMACHO:
I think in terms of just bringing everybody together, getting law enforcement to appreciate that these are—many of
them are—just poor lost kids, they’re not the criminals. And having them have to face these kids and talk to them
and get the story themselves. Because anybody who sits down with these kids and hears their story and hears the same
story over and over again, unless they’re—unless they’re not human, they can’t help but be moved and they can’t help
but to understand that we need to do something about this. Getting the advocates to understand that maybe you can
trust the police. Maybe you can trust law enforcement. Maybe you can, maybe you can counsel your client, the victim,
to really cooperate with the police because maybe that’s the only way that they’re gonna be able to rid themselves
of this person who is just, you know, this shadow that just hangs over them that’s never gonna let them go. So just,
I think just educating everybody, making everybody understand that the goal really is the same, and the goal is to,
is to prosecute the traffickers. The goal is to give these young kids an opportunity to get out of the life.

SCHWEIG: Right. And that in turn would affect the general public safety of
communities, I would imagine.

CAMACHO: Absolutely because we are
having, we have more prosecutions now of traffickers than we’ve ever had ever before, and that’s because of the change
in legislation and that’s because of the change in perception. Also among law enforcement that they’re now more willing
to investigate and prosecute traffickers. And among the victims, who are now more willing to cooperate and testify
because there’s less mistrust. So it’s all a process and the more success stories that you have, the more kids who
are getting out of the life, who are going to college, who are getting their own apartments, who are getting their
job, who are having, you know, having a family, who are now coming back and mentoring these other kids and saying,
‘Look at me. I made it. Look at me now.’

So there is—in this particular area, it is so complicated.
Anybody who tells me on the first effort you’re gonna get these kids to leave the life, they—maybe one out of 1,000
will do that. It’s gonna—they’re gonna fail. They’re gonna fail once, they’re gonna fail twice, they’re gonna fail
three times, and they’re gonna go back. And unless the judge is educated enough to understand that there was a re-arrest
for prostitution: ‘well yeah, I expected that.’ And they’re gonna yell—I’ve been called every name in the book by
some of these kids. You have to say ‘Okay, relax, take it easy.’ And if you’re lucky, the 10^th
time they’ll get it. They have lived 10 lifetimes in their 16 or 17 years of life. And these are kids that you need
patience with, you need understanding, you need experience, you need special resources, you need special people,
you need to train people to appreciate their issues and their problems. Otherwise you’re not gonna reach them.

SCHWEIG: I’m Sarah Schweig of the Center for Court Innovation and I’ve been
speaking with Judge Fernando Camacho about the challenges the issue of prostitution presents to individuals and communities,
and a new approach courts can take with defendants who have histories of trauma. To find out more about the Center
for Court Innovation, visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thank you for listening.

January
2012

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The Center for Court Innovation celebrated its 15th anniversary on Oct. 4, 2011 at the Chelsea Art Museum with
the help of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, Center Director Greg Berman, and
Mayoral Advisor John Feinblatt, who was the evening’s honoree.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communication at the Center for Court Innovation and tonight
we’re celebrating our 15th anniversary. What follows are some excerpts from tonight’s speakers, starting with
New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, followed by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, then our director,
Greg Berman, and finally our evening’s honoree, John Feinblatt, who is our founding director and now serves
as Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s senior advisor.

(APPLAUSE)

JUDGE
JONATHAN LIPPMAN: It seems like only a short time ago that I met with John Feinblatt to discuss what
at the time was an out-of-the-box idea: that the New York State Court System should make a deep investment in research
and development and should do that by creating a new entity devoted exclusively to justice reform.

Fifteen
years later it is fair to say that this investment has paid off, and how. Nearly two dozen demonstration projects
in all five boroughs. Groundbreaking research into the effectiveness of alternatives to incarceration, the value
of procedural of justice, and the importance of trial and error in criminal justice reform.

Since
the Center started, it has employed hundreds of New Yorkers, many of whom are here tonight. These include social
workers who helped troubled young people and struggling adults get back on track; advocates who work behind the scenes
to make sure that victims get the support they need to feel safe; researchers who are responsible for helping set
new benchmarks for the justice system, and so many more.

Over the past generation, we have shown
that contrary to conventional wisdom, it is possible to reduce both crime and incarceration. There are many reasons
why New York has been able to achieve these remarkable results. Certainly, the Center for Court Innovation, with
its support for thoughtful innovation and well-crafted and well-evaluated alternatives to incarceration has been
part of this story.

(APPLAUSE)

MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG:
You know, by giving the judges more options, more carrots, and more sticks, the Center gives defendants a better
chance of turning their lives around and staying out of trouble. We all know about the turnstile justice that we
have; reducing recidivism is one of the toughest things to do in criminal justice, but it is probably one of the
most important and has the greatest impact on crime rate. Everybody wins when it happens. Our streets are safer,
taxpayers spend less money on jail, and people put their talents to more productive uses.

And
I think it’s fair to say that no one has been as effective and finding new ways to reduce recidivism than the
Center for Court Innovation and no person has been more effective in finding innovative criminal justice strategies,
both inside and outside of government, than John Feinblatt.

As many of you in this room know,
John was the founding director of the Center for Court Innovation, and throughout his career, John has been a force
for challenging conventional wisdom and disrupting the status quo. That is the defining spirit of the Center for
Court Innovation.

The Center has been our partner, seriously, on a number of reform initiatives
from improving the return of parolees to Harlem, to reducing juvenile detention in Staten Island and in Queens, to
promoting alternative incarceration in the Bronx. Taken together, these programs really have touched the lives of
hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers and helped us drive crime down to record lows.

(APPLAUSE)

GREG BERMAN: It is my duty and my pleasure to introduce tonight’s
honoree, the great John Feinblatt. I have to say the number one lesson I ever learned from John is that rhetoric
is ultimately meaningless, and that at the end of the day, action trumps talk every day of the week. And we’re
here today to celebrate John’s commitment to really getting things done on the ground. And it’s his commitment
to making things happen in the real world that has given us the Midtown Community Court, that has given us the Center
for Court Innovation, that has given us a reformed juvenile justice system in New York City, that has given us success
in the national fight against illegal guns.

(APPLAUSE)

JOHN
FEINBLATT: You know Mike Bloomberg is an extraordinary person to work for. He asks hard questions,
and he expects answers. But it’s not just the hard questions; it’s that he often asks different kinds of
questions. He doesn’t just ask “How we can do it better?” but asks “Why do we do it this way in the first place?”
I think that’s the same spirit that has animated the Center for Court Innovation. It’s its willingness
to challenge orthodoxy.

I have been lucky to count others as my friends and my mentors, and two
of them are the two remarkable chief judges who are here tonight. From the beginning, both of them embraced me and
were willing to answer questions that I think very few chief judges were willing to ask, like “What is the role of
a judge in a front line state court that’s dealing with people who are addicted and people who are poor and
people who are mentally ill?” They were willing to ask questions like, “How do we actually measure success in cases
that might not be so complicated, legally, but were certainly complicated socially?”

WOLF:
You’ve just heard some remarks from John Feinblatt, our founding director, who was honored tonight at the Center
for Court Innovation’s 15th anniversary fundraiser. He was preceded by our director, Greg Burman. Before that
you heard New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the first remarks you heard were from New York State Chief Judge
Jonathan Lippman.

I’m Rob Wolf, director of communication at the Center for Court Innovation.
To learn more about the Center, visit us at www.courtinovation.org. Thanks for listening.

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Yvonne Byrd, director of the Montpelier Community Justice Center, Karen Vastine, the community justice
coordinator in Burlington,
and Marc Wennberg, director of the St. Alban’s Community Justice Center, explain how volunteers help craft restorative
responses to crime and conflict in Vermont.

ROBERT V. WOLF:
Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and today I’m lucky to have
three guests from Vermont, all of whom are involved with community driven justice centers.

With
me is Yvonne Byrd, director of the Montpelier Community Justice Center, and Karen Vastine, who is the community justice
coordinator in Burlington, and Mark Wennberg, who is the director of the St. Albans Community Justice Center.

Nice
to have you all here.

ALL: Thank you, nice to be here.

WOLF:
So your work in creating and running some of Vermont’s 15 community justice centers has made you guys experts
in involving the community in the delivery of justice. What is a community justice center. Yvonne, I thought you
might want to answer that.

YVONNE BYRD: The community justice center
is charged with delivering restorative responses to conflict and crime, and a restorative response would be basically
having the people involved, with the support of community, come up with the best, the most positive resolution to
a negative situation.

WOLF: Why involve the community in the first
place, Karen?

KAREN VASTINE: Well, I wonder too if it’s just
important to add that victims are a very important component of our community and that they are also involved in
restorative justice. As a matter of fact, it’s an opportunity for the offender to make direct amends to the
victim, if the victim so chooses to be engaged in that way.

And I believe that, in terms of involving
community members in restorative justice and helping to hold low level offenders accountable, or any kind of offenders
accountable, that what it’s about is empowering your community. And I think that it brings the community also
closer to the offender.

So one thing that we know is that if somebody is in isolation, that if
they don’t feel connected to their community, that they are less likely to change their behavior. So having
the community members involved actually shows the participant or the offender that there’s a reason for caring
and wanting to change their behavior. And I think, also, that it helps to link them in a more positive, more meaningful
way to their community if they don’t already have that linkage.

WOLF:
Also, maybe we can be a little more specific about how the community is, in fact, involved in the reparative justice
panels. So maybe Mark can just give a brief description of how, how they work and explain how the community is involved?

MARC WENNBERG: So restorative justice panels or restorative boards
receive referrals from multiple sources. It could be their pre-charge from the police or the state’s attorney,
or post-adjudication directly from the judge or the probation or parole department.

The reparative
panel/ restorative justice board is volunteer-driven, volunteer-led, although there are staff present at the meetings,
in most cases, where, working with the offender and if the victim wants to participate, the victim as well, we identify
what happened, who was affected by what happened, how were they affected, what do they need for the harm to be repaired,
and who’s responsibility is it to repair this harm, as well as what is this person going to do so that something
like this doesn’t happen again? So how are they taking concrete changes in their own life?

They
collectively, and in a consensus fashion, develop a reparative contract, which is a set up specific activities that
the offender is going to go through, is going to complete, in order to fulfill their contract agreement.

And
they typically, typically have about 90 days to complete that, at which time they come back, they meet again with
the group, and talk about what they’ve learned from the process, demonstrate the specific achievables that they
were asked to do, and then they’re at least finished with our aspect of the restorative process.

WOLF:
And what’s a typical sentence? I suppose it depends on the offense.

WENNBERG:
It’s not so much a sentence as an agreement. Often it involves, perhaps, a letter of apology, perhaps a project
that helps them to get a better understanding of how they affected either the victim or the community.

Sometimes
the victim will specifically ask for something that they need from the process. Sometimes it’s community service.
It could be a creative project as well that taps into the offender’s creative abilities.

WOLF:
And are these all low-level offenses or do they cover the gamut?

BYRD:
I guess it depends on how you define the offense. Post-adjudicated, we have people with DUI 2, sometimes DUI 3, which
I think is a pretty serious offense.

WOLF: So when you say post-adjudicated,
they’ve already been found guilty in court and then as part of their …

BYRD:
… sentence from the judge, the judge orders that they participate in the reparative process.

And
in my mind there’s a big difference between a sentence which is punitive and going back to your community and
talking with, sometimes the victim, other affected parties from your community, about what you did.

When
you go through the court process, immediately you become the defendant and that’s what you vigorously do, is
defend yourself.

Either I didn’t do it unless you can prove it, and if you can prove that
I did it, well it’s because of, you know, this, that, or the other, you know? I was drunk or, you know, I needed
it, or – so the actual effect of what you did and what was wrong with it, and the people that you hurt never even
comes into the conversation.

So if you end there, with that sentence, the person has stayed disconnected
from what was wrong with what they did and often come out of the criminal justice system considering themselves a
victim of that system and mostly concerned by how they’ve been impacted by the punishment, by the court process,
whatever. So it’s a very different look at the offense when they come to the reparative board.

WOLF:
What is the commitment you’re asking from the community members who participate in this? How often do they show
up for a panel? How much time does it take? And how long do they usually stick around in terms of their longevity
and participation on a panel?

VASTINE: So this is Karen. We actually
are the busiest justice center and because of our caseload, we typically have six to eight panels of three to five
community members meeting every week. And generally, at a minimum, that’s a 2 1/2 hour commitment every week.

WOLF: Wow, so that’s in Burlington, which is the largest city
in Vermont.

VASTINE: Right, that’s in Burlington and I think
Mark and Yvonne have a much different expectation of your volunteers.

BYRD:
Our volunteers for repair board are asked to come to a two hour meeting twice a month. We schedule new cases for
an hour and review cases for half an hour. So we could have two new cases or a new case and two reviews.

And
sometimes if we’re backlogged we’ll ask people to do a little more in a meeting, but that’s what’s
typical. And in terms of longevity, we have one person who’s been a volunteer on a reparative board since 1997,
’98, and most people stay a long time.

WOLF: I’m speaking
with Yvonne Byrd, and Karen Vastine, and Mark Wennberg, who are all involved in community justice initiatives in
Vermont.

Let me ask you. It sounds like a big commitment and I wonder, where does the enthusiasm
and the interest come from, that people are willing to make this commitment to what sounds like a potentially difficult
and challenging—and in the case of the Burlington boards, somewhat time-consuming—commitment? Does anyone want to
take on that question?

VASTINE: I’d be happy to.

WOLF:
Karen.

VASTINE: Since we also ask more of our volunteers.

So
I think that what’s interesting about Vermont—I don’t think it’s just unique to Vermont—but because
of the scale of Vermont, you know, there’s about 625,000 people in our state, and so the scale of Vermont really
lends itself nicely to participatory democracy, and I believe that that is very alive and well in Vermont.

We
still have town meeting day, which is where a lot of decisions are made in local municipalities, and in Burlington,
for instance, was have something called neighborhood planning assemblies, and those are specific groups that inform
our city government, since we’re a little bit too big to have town meeting day.

And so I
think because in part of this history steeped in citizen engagement, that we see a lot of interest in this opportunity
to have a direct impact on the criminal justice system and then also what’s happening within city government.

And then on top of that, many years ago we had a commissioner of corrections, John Gorczyk, who
we really credit with bringing restorative justice practices to Vermont. He really saw this as a way to keep offenders
in the community and also to keep the community safe, and as a way of really empowering our community.

WOLF:
And so is Vermont just this ideal of community involvement everywhere you go?

WENNBERG:
The birth of the justice centers might have been the brainchild of a few key figures, but it’s become much larger
than that. I think that that had helped to institutionalize what we do.

VASTINE:
And in terms of are we all singing kumbayah and holding hands in Vermont? The answer is no.

I
mean in Burlington, and I know in many other communities, we are challenged to figure out how to diversify our participation
in government. I know that in Burlington, we have spent a lot of time focusing on how to engage non-white, non-educated
individuals, you know, in government. And that’s also true for our justice centers, is that we would also like
to continue to diversify our applicant pool.

BYRD: John Gorczyk,
who Karen referred to, he was one of the longer-reigning commissioners of corrections, and he used his authority
to start reparative boards, and it was based on his belief that he has that government’s role is to provide
assistance, resources, technical assistance and such to communities, and that community’s role is to support
families, and that the family’s role is to support individuals and nurture and grow individuals.

And
that what we have had as a system is one in which government bypasses community and families and is doing the social
service, human resources is like government taking care of individuals.

WOLF:
That’s fascinating. It really speaks to the power of an individual with a vision finding the right fertile ground
to implement his vision.

I thought I would just ask you one more question. If any of you guys
have any tips for people who want to explore some of the models outside of Vermont, what advice might you give someone
who doesn’t necessarily have a visionary leader or a culture maybe of specific community involvement?

VASTINE:
This is Karen. I think that one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned from this is really asking your community
what it wants. And so whether that’s taking advantage of existing infrastructures through community groups and
churches and that sort of thing, or going out there and seeing what are your community members most concerned about?

WOLF: Does anyone have anything to add to that?

BYRD:
Not a lot of people know what the term restorative justice means. There’s a great book that Howard Zehr wrote,
“The New Book of Restorative Justice,” which we pass out to all of our volunteers and potential volunteers. And I
think when you read that you come away with the sense that “Wow, this just makes sense. This is what we ought to
do,” and it’s kind of inspiring.

So maybe disseminating that information in the community
is a helpful prelude to the conversation, and I do think having a champion at a high level is really important.

WOLF:
That’s Howard Zehr. How do you spell his name?

BYRD: Z-E-H-R.

WOLF: Great. Anyone want to add anything more?

WENNBERG:
Only that I think even in communities where there are community justice options, there are a lot of organizations
that are doing work that there is potential alignment to. And so it wouldn’t be so far afield for them to adopt
some of these practices with some institutional support, to begin doing this kind of work.

WOLF:
I thank all three of you for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.

I’ve
been speaking with Yvonne Byrd, director of the Montpelier Community Justice Center, Karen Vastine, the community
justice coordinator in Burlington, and Mark Wennberg, director of the St. Albans Community Justice Center.

I’m
Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. For more information about the Center for
Court Innovation you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thank you for listening.

September
2011

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T.J. Donovan, the state’s attorney for Chittenden County, explains a new initiative in Burlington, Vermont,
that mandates community restitution and participation in social services as alternatives to court or incarceration.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf, director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation and I’m
here with T.J. Donovan, the state’s attorney of Chittenden County, Vermont, which includes Burlington. That’s
the state’s largest city, is that right?

T.J. DONOVAN: That’s
correct.

WOLF: Well, thanks for talking to me.

DONOVAN:
Happy to be here.

WOLF: You’re here at the Center for Court
Innovation today with about 20 people who are participating in a roundtable to share ideas about community engagement.
You guys have spent the morning talking about the different the programs you’ve started or are involved in that
actively involve community members. I thought we’d start out by talking to you about the experiences that have
helped shape your outlook as a prosecutor.

DONOVAN: Sure. You know,
I grew up in Burlington, Vermont, certainly made a number of bad judgments and mistakes as a young person. I was
given the opportunity for second chances numerous times—not that I was a child of privilege, but rather I came from
a two-parent home with some resources, with a family that had been embedded in the community. And I think that reflecting
back on that, I was probably the beneficiary of many second chances for some of my youthful exuberance. And when
I became a prosecutor first in Philadelphia, and then in Burlington, Vermont, it was not lost on me that we were
prosecuting people, both African-Americans and white people, who came from poverty, who came from places with a lack
of resources. They came from marginalized places in the world and I began to realize that we were continuing to marginalize
them through the criminal justice system, whether it be for drug prosecution or mental health illnesses that caused
criminal behavior, often times those individuals who don’t come from a family of resources, the first time they
get that intervention or assistance is through the criminal justice system as opposed to somebody who does come from
a family of resources—that intervention is often happening much earlier in time and they are being kept out of the
criminal justice system.

So, as we continued to work in the court system, some things weren’t
changing. The recidivism rate was extremely high, about 50 to 60 percent in Vermont. The budget for the Department
of Corrections kept increasing and we weren’t getting good results. And we kept seeing the same people, and
the demographic I saw were mostly poor people, people who had lack of education, lack of job skills or job training,
substance abuse issues—both alcohol and drugs—and mental health issues. And where we thought we could engage and
make a difference was by intervening earlier in the process to keep these individuals out of the criminal justice
system. They were committing crimes that—not that we’re condoning any criminal activity—but they were committing
crimes that were low-level misdemeanors. And so the question was, what are we gonna do that’s gonna keep the
community safe and enhance public safety? And we started to say we need to address the root cause of their criminal
behavior. So we were able to obtain funding for a community coordinator whose job was to bring those community groups
into the court system, because in the past what we’ve done is we’ve put people on probation, we load them
up with conditions of probation, and then we push them back out into the community and say you’re on your own.
Often times they come back on a violation of probation and we lock them up. So the community coordinator was to screen
cases as they came in, conduct somewhat informal risk assessments on these individuals, and then link these people
with the appropriate social service agency to address the root cause of their behavior in lieu of prosecution. So
far the results are good. It’s very early in the process but I think we’re seeing that when given an opportunity,
many time this is the first time these people have been given an opportunity. People try to make the most of it.

WOLF: When did you start this project?

DONOVAN:
We started it last September.

WOLF: Who is eligible, generally speaking?
I mean, you described sort of a broad profile.

DONOVAN: Yeah, let
me say who’s not eligible. Obviously we’re not gonna divert any cases that are sex crimes, any cases that
are domestic violence, any cases that are serious felonies, any cases where there are weapons involved, drug dealing
or drug selling. And really any cases—as I like to say the standard is—does it pass the “straight-face test”
for the guy in the street. Because I think the public has to believe in what we’re doing in order to keep the
justice system credible. So generally they are low-level misdemeanors. We have diverted some felonies, and it’s
really on a case-by-case analysis.

WOLF: And these are pre-charge,
right? Is that the idea?

DONOVAN: Yep.

WOLF:
So what is the leverage that you have?

DONOVAN: Well, the incentive
for the individual is to, number one, get some help and not to be prosecuted. The leverage is: if you don’t
do what we ask, you’ll come back for prosecution. You’ll go back on the traditional track.

WOLF:
So then there is follow-up?

DONOVAN: Yes, and that’s, that’s,
frankly, has been a challenge for us, you know? We’ve started on this really limited budget, we got some funding,
but the critical piece here is the infrastructure, the capacity to do that, because I think the most important thing
is ensuring compliance and then tracking outcomes. And so that’s the part we’re working on right now. We
have a couple of interns working on that. It’s tough work, we need more funding, frankly, to build the infrastructure
to make this program truly successful.

WOLF: One resource you have
in Burlington is the Community Justice Center. And the Justice Center is doing all of these interesting things like
restorative justice panels, which involve citizens, and working really hands-on directly with offenders. I wonder
if you can explain to me how you take advantage of what the community justice center has to offer.

DONOVAN:
Well, we view the Community Justice Center as a partner. So often some of the cases we refer from this program will
go to the Community Justice Center. We think that’s the appropriate place in lieu of prosecution. They can go
to the CJC and engage in a reparative board, restorative justice type process. So really what we’re looking
for on the front end is a menu of options because it does a couple of things. I think we’re gonna get better
outcomes that way. We’re going to enhance public safety, and then it’s gonna free up those very scarce
resources we, in the prosecutor’s office, to focus truly on the crimes that affect public safety—homicides,
sexual assaults, drug-dealing.

WOLF: During the morning session,
you used the term “cost drivers,” and I wonder if you could explain what that word means.

DONOVAN:
It’s about identifying the population where we think we can make the most impact, and kind of bend the curve
in criminal justice system that’s gonna enhance public safety, and frankly save the state money—save the taxpayers’
money. Because with a recidivism rate of 60 percent, and in Vermont a corrections budget that’s second fastest
budget item that’s growing, behind healthcare, we can do better. We need to do better because we’re spending
a lot of money. And it’s the same people going in and out. And really the demographic, I think, is the cost
drivers to all of our systems—you know, the cost drivers in the criminal justice system, the cost drivers in the
healthcare industry system because these are the people that go to the ER for their primary care physician, and it’s
the cost drivers in the job training field, because these are the people who we want to be trained and these are
the services we provide. And so it’s the same population across systems. They’re in the court system. The
trick is to identify them. The trick is to conduct an assessment to really understand, what is the root cause of
the issue here, and try to address it.

WOLF: Just to remind people
that I’m speaking to T.J. Donovan, the state’s attorney in Chittenden County, Vermont. I thought I would
just ask you about a question that a defense attorney raised at the morning session, which was really that concern
that some of these initiatives are, perhaps, imposing greater penalties on people if they choose to participate in
this alternative than they would if they just went through the normal process where they, in fact, might just get
time served and they’ll be out in 10 minutes. And the restorative justice process, the alternative might impose
what might be viewed as something more arduous. You may get community service, you may have to get a GED—

DONOVAN: Well yeah, you can go through the court system, you can plead guilty,
you’ll probably get a fine and be out the door in 10 minutes. But you’re not realizing that criminal conviction’s
gonna stay with you the rest of your life and there’s a lot of collateral consequences that go with it. Loss
of eligibility for federal student loans and other collateral consequences. So, I think doing a little bit more work
up front and thinking long term—again, it’s about enhancing public safety, creating a vibrant community for
everybody, giving everybody an opportunity to be successful. I mean I think part of the reason for recidivism is
you take away an opportunity from somebody. Well, you know, somebody who is 19 years old and had a bag of marijuana
on him and he plead guilty and got a $200 fine, how did that enhance public safety when now he’s 29 or 39 and
he’s still answering for that conviction at 19? And that conviction is still preventing him from having gone
to school, getting a job. And so the issues of collateral consequences where you can get out of that courtroom really
quick, but there’s gonna be long-lasting effects because of that criminal conviction. It may be more arduous
up front to do more community service, but we think it’s about accountability, we think it’s about restoring
the harm done to the community, but also giving the offender the opportunity to go on to be a productive, law-abiding
citizen.

WOLF: We’ve run out of time. Thank you so much for
taking the time. I’ve been talking with T.J. Donovan, the state’s attorney in Chittenden County, Vermont,
who’s here today participating in a roundtable at the Center for Court Innovation about community engagement
strategies for the criminal justice system. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court
Innovation. Visit us at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

August 2011

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Barbara Thompson, director of the Department of Defense’s Office of Family Policy/Children
and Youth, discusses the impacts that prolonged deployment of a parent or sibling can have on children.
This is one of three podcasts produced in collaboration with the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

SARAH
SCHWEIG: Hi, I’m Sarah Schweig of the Center for Court Innovation and this is one in a series
of special podcasts the Center is doing with the support and assistance of the National Council of Juvenile and Family
Court Judges, which is hosting its 74th conference in New York in July 2011. I’m speaking with Barbara Thompson,
director of the Department of Defense’s Office of Family Policy, Children, and Youth, which gives her responsibility
over the Department of Defense Child Development and Youth Programs, serving 700,000 children at over 300 locations
worldwide. It’s interesting that we have someone from the Department of Defense at this judges conference. What
brings you to the conference today?

BARBARA THOMPSON: Well I was
invited by one of our legal aides, Colonel Sean Shumake, who felt it was really important for family judges to know
some of the issues that are facing military families and to help them be aware of the support systems that are available.
Less than one percent of our population serves in uniform and so it behooves the 99 percent of us who benefit from
their sacrifice, that we are contributing to their well being, and that takes a community to do that.

SCHWEIG:
And so what types of challenges are service members and their families facing today?

THOMPSON:
These are unprecedented times for the military. We have been in combat for almost 10 years, and the strain and the
stress on the service members and their families is really very high. Many of our service members have faced multiple
deployments for long periods of time, which makes it hard for the stay-at-home parent to deal with all of the issues
as a single parent versus the couple that they were. And children are particularly vulnerable because of their developmental
stages, being separated from an important adult in their life for such long periods of time.

SCHWEIG:
What is the impact on youth and children in these families of military service members?

THOMPSON:
I would like to say first, I feel and I think very strongly that our military families are very resilient, and they
are very proud and very rarely ask for help. And our children, in particular, are sacrificing long periods of time
with one of their parents, which is—or a big brother, even, a sibling, you know? These are important adults in their
lives and to—even though we have Skype and we have computer connectivity, it’s not the same as missing your
high school graduation, missing your birthday, missing the holidays, missing big events in your life that that special
parent is not there with you. And so we are concerned that children are having some challenging behaviors and we
worry about our teens in particular, who are at a point in their lives that they can make risky decisions and engage
in risky behaviors. And again, I would behoove the judicial system, when they have a young person in their court,
to ask if somebody in their family is serving or has been deployed. I think that, again, that’s one of those
indicators that maybe this child just needs some extra help to get through.

SCHWEIG:
So what kinds of supports are available for service members and their families to address these unique needs?

THOMPSON: Well there’s a very robust family support system, especially
for our active duty force. We have a systemic approach and an infrastructure on the installations. What became a
challenge for those of us who serve military families is how do we reach our guard and reservists, who have stepped
up to the plate to be brothers in arms, sisters in arms with the active duty force for Operation Enduring Freedom
and for Operation Iraqi Freedom. So they’re dispersed throughout the entire country and even the four territories,
and we don’t have that brick and mortar infrastructure for them. So we’ve done some pretty innovative programs—one
of them is called Military OneSource, which is a 1-800, 24/7, 365 day-a-year information and assistance call and
website where families and service members, regardless of their activation status, can call and receive support.
A master’s level counselor answers the phone. You never get a recording, and they have varied services, such
as face-to-face telephonic and web-based non-medical counseling. So if you need to talk to somebody about a challenging
issue in your life such as communicating with your teen, or anger management, or stress management, there are licensed
clinicians available to support you. They also offer financial counseling. They offer healthy coaching, and there’s
a wide variety of educational materials on the website that can support military families.

Two
of the programs particularly geared for the guard and reserve: one is the joint family support assistance program.
We were mandated by law in 2007 to set up a program to support the geographically dispersed. We’ve partnered
with the National Guard Bureau to actually set up teams of licensed clinicians, financial counselors, and a Military
OneSource consultant at each state headquarters to support the state family program director. And that way we can
reach out to those families who are located in the states.

We have another program called the
military family life counselor program—again, non-medical counselors. It’s family support, it’s prevention.
We are gonna make sure we have very qualified people to be able to read the red flags. So if it is going to escalate
to something more serious than just life coaching, that they know those red flags and can then refer them to a more
of an intervention with medical professionals. And we augment the yellow ribbon events, which are events that are,
again, mandated by congress to support returning guard and reservists at the 30/60/90 day mark to make sure, hands-on,
eyes-on that they are doing okay, they are readjusting back into society.

SCHWEIG:
Do you want to say something about how these programs maybe team up with those courts? That might be an interesting
sort of innovative collaboration.

THOMPSON: Yeah, I think it’s
really exciting. A new field for me, in particular, is interested in military families and is interested in our young
veterans who are very young, coming back from combat and reintegrating into the civilian society. And they’re
coming back with some issues. And I think the more the court system understands those issues, it can be a support
to find and connect them with the right resources to help them as they strive to reach a level of normalcy that takes
time.

SCHWEIG: We mentioned family court but how do your programs
and initiatives relate to veteran-specific courts?

THOMPSON: You
know, we work very closely with the VA and we know that they have a remarkable and wonderful infrastructure of vet
centers across the country. I think there are over 250. They are staffed with veterans, they’re staffed with
licensed clinicians, and they offer free counseling, not only to the service member, but also to their family. And
again, if the court system knows about these vet centers and knows about the vet courts, they, again, can be able
to communicate the issues that they’re facing, be more aware of some of those challenges, and then find the
right resources. I think it would be very sad that we don’t ask somebody who is in jail, “Have you served? Did
you just get back from deployment?”

SCHWEIG: If there’s one
thing you want professionals and the general public to remember about the time we’re in and military families,
what kind of role the community might need to have?

THOMPSON: We
are just unbelievably astounded by the level of support we’re receiving from the White House, from the congress
on taking care of military member and their families, and Mrs. Obama and Dr. Biden have both made it a part of their
administration that we need to build awareness of the issues facing military families. And two thirds of our active
duty live off of the installation. So they are in our communities. All of our guard and reservists live in our communities.
We need to be asking, “Do you serve? Are you a member of the military?” And know if your neighbor has a deployed
spouse, that you can be there to do some of the little things to take off some of that sacrifice and that burden.
And I think judges are particularly in a position of making the entire community, whether it’s the faith-based
community, whether it’s law enforcement, whether it’s systems in place to be able to say, we need to reach
out to the members in our community who have sacrificed so much for our freedom and our well-being, and we need to
give back to those families.

SCHWEIG: Excellent. If you want to learn
more about some of these initiatives, where do you suggest that the public or court professionals look?

THOMPSON: Well, there are two avenues to find that out. One is just Google
“military homefront,” and that’s our official quality of life portal, which lists all of our programs,
lists all of the regulations and information about military families. And for those interested parties who want to
share resources with military families, I would suggest that they learn about Military OneSource, which is militaryonesource.com.
It’s all one word. And then the 1-800 number is 1-800-342-9647.

SCHWEIG:
Excellent. Well thanks so much for speaking with me today. I’m Sarah Schweig, and I’ve been speaking with
Barbara Thompson, director of the Office of Family Policy, Children, and Youth, about the Department of Defense’s
programs for military families. This podcast was jointly sponsored by the National Council of Juvenile and Family
Court Judges and the Center for Court Innovation. To find more about the National Council, you can visit their website
at www.ncjfcj.org. The Center for Court Innovation’s website is at www.courtinnovation.org. Thank you for listening.

July 2011

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Judge
John Leventhal of the New York Appellate Division and attorney Jennifer White of Futures without Violence describe the misconceptions people have about the
elderly as both victims and perpetrators of crime. This is one of three podcasts produced in collaboration with the
National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation and
this is one of several special podcasts that the Center is doing with the support and assistance of the National
Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, which is hosting its 74th conference this month in New York City, July
2011.

I’m speaking with Judge John Leventhal, who is currently an associate justice of the
New York State Appellate Division and who, before he was appointed to the Appellate Division by the governor, founded
and served for many years as the presiding judge of the Brooklyn Domestic Violence Court which was, in fact, the
first felony domestic violence court in the country.

And I’m also with Jennifer White, who’s
an attorney with Futures Without Violence, which has recently changed its name from the Family Violence Prevention
Fund. And that organization is based in San Francisco and it’s dedicated to preventing domestic, dating, and sexual
violence.

Thank you both for being with me today.

JUDGE LEVENTHAL:
Thank you for having us.

JENNIFER WHITE: Thank you.

WOLF:
And today we’re gonna focus on elder abuse so I thought—and you’re both presenting on that topic here at
the conference. Elder abuse, I’ve heard a lot about recently. It seems to be in the news more and it’s certainly
a lot more in conversations among judicial practitioners and law enforcement, but I think a lot of people may not
fully understand what the term means and so Ms. White, I thought maybe we could start out by you just defining elder
abuse. What does the term refer to, exactly?

WHITE: Sure. A lot
of times when you hear elder abuse, particularly in the media they’re referring strictly to financial exploitation.
But what we know is that more common is abuse that’s perpetrated usually by somebody with whom the elder has
some expectation of trust, so usually a family member or caregiver. It includes any of several forms of maltreatment,
including physical and sexual violence, emotional and psychological abuse, including also financial exploitation.

WOLF: And do we have a sense of how widespread this is? I mean just
because people are talking about it more, you hear about it more, is that because there’s a greater incidence
of it or a greater awareness of it?

WHITE: Well, for one thing,
because the baby boomer population in 2006 hit 75 million over 60 years old. So I think that there has been a lot
of renewed focused on elder abuse because of that population coming into their senior years. The reality is that
there’s not a lot of really strong, good prevalence data. What we do know, according to the national elder abuse
incident survey is that elder abuse is actually about 85 percent of cases go unreported. We are seeing rising numbers
of cases being reported, but we still have this huge gap of victims who are not reporting.

WOLF:
Judge Leventhal, when a case or an issue involving elder abuse does make it into the court system, does it pose unique
challenges?

LEVENTHAL: Well sure, we have a lot of stereotypes in
society regarding ageism and the elderly, that they’re imagining things, that they don’t know what they’re
talking about. People sometimes confuse lack of good hearing with lack of credibility, and ability to think and be
aware of what’s going on around them. So that’s a challenge not only to the courts, but to prosecutors,
to lawyers who represent them.

It is about power and control. People don’t want to live
alone. People don’t want to be alone. They want to be cared for by family members. So that’s one of the
reasons why it’s less reported. It’s a similar dynamic to domestic violence because there’s another
layer on top of it—people with the fear of living alone or being alone. They want someone to care for them. And the
psychological and emotional trauma of turning in a child who’s taking care of them because it’s their child
and they love them, or grandchild. It’s another dynamic on the overlay of domestic violence.

WOLF:
It sounds like these are complicated cases that sometimes touch on civil, sometimes touch on criminal issues. So
where are you most frequently seeing these types of cases? Which types of judges and in which courts are you seeing
these cases?

LEVENTHAL: There are two components. There’s the
criminal component, there’s the civil component. And the civil component usually would be financial exploitation
or someone needs a guardian to help with their property or their person, to make medical and personal decisions for
them. Then you also have the criminal component where someone is physically or sexually abused.

I
think the new standard could be, if we could combine one judge who was schooled in both of those because just coincidentally,
I did guardianships at the same time as I did domestic violence and I thought that was a great fit. And I think that
really is the future in this, in handling elder abuse.

WHITE: It’s
a really good point because I think that in addition to that, one of the things that we talk about is that these
cases, because they’re not being identified very well yet, they really show up everywhere. So someplace where
they’re showing up a lot is in juvenile delinquency because kids who are living with their grandparent would
be, let’s say in juvenile delinquency court because of various things, but you’ll see that the grandparent
is being abused.

I mean it’s really important, I think, for judges that are presenting with
all different types of cases to learn how to identify elder abuse before them because what we hope really – I mean
and I say hope, but – is that victims are gonna come to a domestic violence type-court like to get an order of protection
or something like that but that’s not really where they’re gonna be popping up. I mean they could pop up
in probate court, you know, as I said juvenile court, criminal court, family court, I mean really anywhere, even
civil or small claims court.

LEVENTHAL: Guardianship.

WHITE:
Guardianship. So it’s really anywhere so it’s important for judges to be able to identify the signs.

LEVENTHAL:
And there’s also another stereotype that we have omitted and inadvertently. People think that the elderly can’t
be sexually abused, besides physically abused, sexually abused, and it happens. I have cases where children have
sexually abused their parents. We have a scenario in our presentation today where a grandson raped his 98 year old
grandmother. And on the other hand, there are cases where an elder can be an abuser or sexual abuser.

WHITE:
It’s definitely sort of a misconception. Some of the things that we deal with at the National Judicial Institute
when we give trainings on elder abuse, which Judge Leventhal has taught at the training, is to really help courts
see that some of these assumptions that you make about elders, you know, one being that because you’re of a
certain age you lack capacity to make decisions. It’s a huge misconception, and the other huge misconception
that’s so common is the idea that because you’re of a certain age that you suddenly lose the ability to
cause harm.

So you have a lot of elder perpetrators that are in the court that maybe just start
abusing a spouse, for instance, or have been abusing a spouse for 50, 60 years and the courts won’t, potentially,
hold that person accountable in the same way they would if the person was 35 years old because they’re 65 years
old and they think, ‘oh, this person can’t do harm.’

The reality is how much strength or
ability does it take to, for instance, pick up a gun and shoot somebody? Not very much. So it is something that we
sort of work to educate the judiciary about.

WOLF: So, you’ve
presented a lot of different, described kind of the challenges, I thought, very, very well and painted a picture.
Have courts been responding effectively? Have they been picking up speed as there has been more awareness and more
of these cases coming to the courts? Have you been pleased with what you’re seeing?

WHITE:
I think that in terms of elder abuse, the entire system is really behind. Most people that practice in this field
will tell you we’re probably 20 years behind the domestic violence fields, child abuse fields.

But
yes, I think there has been more focus on it. There’s been some judicial trainings, law enforcement trainings,
and prosecutor trainings nationally, which have been sponsored by the Office on Violence Against Women to get more
of this on the radar.

There are a couple of courts in the country that have elder abuse dockets.
So I know in California, for example, there is a judge that started an elder abuse docket there. In Georgia there
is a compliance review docket for elder abuse cases. So there are a couple but in terms of it being really common
or sort of on the radar the way that domestic violence is now, definitely not.

There still needs
a lot more focus, a lot more awareness, and I think the best way to start that process is, particularly for judges
to exercise leadership in their court systems to really get these coordinated community response teams started the
way that we have for domestic violence, because that seems to be the most effective way to enhance services and to
get justice for elders.

WOLF: So let me ask you about that in a
second, but let me just remind everyone that I’m Rob Wolf at the Center for Court Innovation and I’m at the
annual conference of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, speaking with Judge John Leventhal
of New York, and attorney Jennifer White of San Francisco about elder abuse.

Ms. White, you mentioned
a coordinated community response, which is a term, I think, familiar in the domestic violence world. What is it and
how would that apply as a response to elder abuse?

WHITE: Sure.
Coordinated Community Response—they can be many, many different—there are many, many different kinds. There’s
some that specialize in, for instance, if you have teams that will meet to deal with particular cases, and then some
coordinated response teams are more system-wide.

So it’s really meant to get professionals
from the various systems that impact the case. So let’s say the prosecutor’s office, law enforcement, sometimes
judges will be involved, advocates. For elder abuse cases we hope to see aging services involved, adult protective
services, hopefully geriatric psychologists, psychiatrists are involved so that they can get together and look at
the system and see how they can coordinate, communicate better, to make service delivery smoother and more effective.

LEVENTHAL: And I think, our motto in New York, you can call it a
partnership, you can call it Coordinated Community Response. We have the usual suspects, the D.A.’s office,
parole, probation. We have elder abuse organizations, we have aging –

WHITE:
Services.

LEVENTHAL: …services—adult protective services. We also
have a defense bar and the reason why that’s important is because if the judge is going to be involved, you
have to involve the defense.

And it’s very important when the judges take a leadership role,
these kinds of things happen – parole and probation will be more involved—you’ll get more support than if you
just do it on your own.

So I thought that was very important and I’m really gratified now
that there’s being more attention being paid – not only because I have a 97-year-old mother, but because when
I started doing this thing, you would take elder abuse cases, as you know the domestic violence issues were raised
by the women’s movement and the focus really then was on intimate partner abuse. And elder abuse is kind of
secondarily or an afterthought.

Now you know, everyone has a parent, everyone’s going to
get old, and it’s important. And I always thought that it was important, I always thought there should be more
emphasis on it. And I was not only gratified that we are doing this, I’m gratified that I have an opportunity
to take part in this.

WOLF: Great, well I want to thank you both
for taking the time to talk with me today.

I’ve been talking about the challenges of dealing
with elder abuse in the courts with Judge John Leventhal and attorney Jennifer White. This podcast was jointly sponsored
by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and the Center for Court Innovation.

To
find out more about the National Council you can visit their website at www.ncjfcj.org, and to find out more about the Center for Court Innovation,
you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center
for Court Innovation. Thanks for listening.

July 2011

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Theresa Pouley of the Tulalip Tribal Court, Michael Petoskey of the Pokagan Band of Potawatomi Indians, and
William A. Thorne Jr., a Pomo/Coast Miwok Indian appointed to the Utah Court of Appeals, discuss the  advantages
of transferring child welfare cases from state to tribal jurisdiction. This is one of three podcasts produced in
collaboration with the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and
this is one of several special podcasts the Center’s doing with the support and assistance of the National Council
of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, which is hosting its 74th conference in New York City this month, July 2011.

Today I’m speaking with Judge William A. Thorne Jr., Judge Theresa Pouley, and Judge Michael
Petoskey, all of whom are judges in tribal courts, and they’re all involved with a lot of important issues like
improving and strengthening tribal judicial systems, and the welfare of Indian children.

So you
all have long biographies so I just thought I’d give a very brief introduction for all of you. Judge Thorne
is a Pomo/Coast Miwok Indian from Northern California, and he has served in the past as a tribal judge for numerous
tribes. He’s also served 14 years as a state trial judge in Utah and in 2000 was appointed a judge on the Utah
Court of Appeals.

Judge Pouley was appointed this year by President Obama to the Indian Law and
Order Commission, and she’s currently the chief judge of the Tulalip Tribal Court in Washington, and an associate
justice of the Colville Tribal Court of appeals and a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes in Northeast Washington.

And Judge Petoskey Is the Chief Judge of the Pokagan Band of Potawatomi Indians in Michigan.

So I just want to welcome you all and thanks for taking the time out of the conference to chat
with me.

I thought we’d focus today on children and families and I thought we’d start
off with the Indian Child Welfare Act, which is a pivotal piece of federal legislation. What are the problems that
it’s intended to address?

JUDGE THORNE: It’s a piece of federal
legislation that was intended to remedy the problem of Indian children being taken out of their homes way too often
and unnecessarily. And it takes a couple different tacks to try and solve the problem of removing kids too often.

It raises the standard of proof that’s necessary. It gives an opportunity for extended family
to become the first option for surrogate care, and you remember this was back in the ’70s when most states didn’t
do that. And it provided a mechanism to transfer the decision point to tribal judges, who were more likely to understand
the families in context, and therefore more likely to help them heal and be able to take care of their children.

WOLF: Okay, so that was Judge Thorne. Thank you very much for that
explanation. So it was enacted in ’78 and its 2011 now, and I wonder If Judge Pouley or Judge Petoskey wants
to talk about, a little bit about, if they feel state and tribal systems have a grasp of what the Indian Child Welfare
Act Is and how to apply it.

JUDGE POULEY: Well the Indian Child
Welfare Act really is about making state courts engage in some particularly culturally relevant behavior when dealing
with Indian children. It isn’t a restriction or a requirement on tribal court judges.

Interestingly
enough, most of the recent studies that have been done—and this is true in Washington State—indicate that the Indian
Child Welfare Act, whose goal is to place Indian children in Indian families, to decrease the number of times and
the length of time they’re in foster care, to increase relative placements, that those policy goals are being
profoundly met in state court systems.

So that Indian children actually, in Washington State,
for example, end up in foster care four times more often and four times longer than non-Indian children. That Indian
children in Washington State, for example, are more likely to end up in detention more than children from any other
race, even though their primary issue, of course, is being abused and neglected.

So it’s actually
a little alarming that given the length of time that the Indian Child Welfare Act has been in place, that we still
have so many Indian children who are not placed within their families and within their communities.

With
that said, I think Washington State does a pretty good job of trying to transfer those cases to a local tribal court.
Tribal courts always have a preference for placement of kids in relative families. So, for example, we have probably
150 dependency cases active in our tribal court and of those, about 80 percent of those kids are living either in
their own homes or with relatives in their community.

So that sort of consistency and ability
to place kids with their family really strengthen when you get them back to their community. So I think as more judges,
state court judges become educated about how tribal court judges can help facilitate placement of kids in the home,
I think they’ll see those statistics numbers change.

WOLF:
And Judge Petoskey, are you seeing something similar in Michigan as well, in terms of the number of Indian children
who aren’t in placement, and some of these challenges of educating state judges about the Indian Child Welfare
Act?

JUDGE PETOSKEY: Well I think the nature of the beast is that
education is ongoing. It’s not a one-time kind of thing.

We, as Indian people, carry the
burden of making sure that others understand who we are, so that we can alleviate any fears, any misconceptions they
might have about what a cooperative kind of relationship looks like.

I would agree with Judge
Pouley. We have many advantages in tribal courts and as people become more aware of us being the village. You know,
you hear, ‘It takes a village’; well we are the village.

You know, we’re members
of the community, we’re members of those families, and so the stake that we have as tribal officials working
in those tribal communities is as much like a family.

WOLF: This
Is Rob Wolf. I’m talking with Judge William A. Thorne Jr., Judge Theresa Pouley, and Judge Michael Petoskey
here at the Annual Conference of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

We’re
were talking about tribal courts, and we’re talking about child welfare in particular, and maybe I thought we
could take a step back. Judge Thorne, if you could explain, where does the legal authority come from for tribal court?

JUDGE THORNE: Most kids are taught in school about the two different
governments that impact their lives: the federal government and the state government. But what the instruction often
leaves out is that there is a third leg of the stool in that family of governments, and that’s the tribal governments.

And the authority for the tribal government, the sovereignty, actually predates the U.S. Constitution.
And while the Supreme Court has said that Congress has plenary authority, Congress has the ultimate say on whether
tribal governmental existence continues or not, the policy of the Congress, the policy of the Supreme Court has been
that tribes have a legitimate government, and particularly have an important tool, an important voice in taking care
of their children.

And that’s what founded, or was the underlying cause of the Indian Child
Welfare Act. It was a recognition by Congress that tribes had a vested interest in the outcome of their children’s
cases.

And so now the federal law recognizes that parents have a role and have rights in any
state court proceeding involving tribal children, and tribes do as well. They have a separate voice that’s recognized
as being valuable and legitimate about the health and welfare of their children.

WOLF:
Give me a sense of how many tribes, in fact, have their own court systems.

JUDGE
THORNE: There are roughly 565 Indian tribes in the country. There are a little over 300 tribal courts.

WOLF: Tell me, with the existence of these 300 or so tribal courts,
what can be done to improve the understanding between these various legs of the stool, as you’ve described?

JUDGE POULEY: Education, education, education.

It
doesn’t make any difference if you do it with a grade school child, a child in kindergarten, a high school student,
or a judge who’s been sitting on the bench for 20 years. They have to understand that tribal courts have been
in existence. They are absolutely competent to adjudicate the matters in front of them. They just need to be considered
as sort of the equal of state and federal court systems, which they absolutely, positively are.

In
terms of providing long-term solutions for persons in their community, they really are the experts. So just an ongoing
recognition that they are a co-equal branch of the government, that they are someone who should be respected and
maybe more important than that, solicited for input.

Because the statistics for tribal court
and the outcomes in tribal court are the exact same outcomes that federal and state court judges aspire to. We want
healthy children. We want to reunify kids with their families. We want to stop substance abuse in families, and we
have the tools and the resources in our communities, which can help not only our clients, our clients of the tribal
court system, but clients of the state court system as well.

So equality and communication is
sort of the key.

WOLF: Thank you, Judge Pouley.

Judge
Petoskey, there’s been money from the federal government over the years at various times. Is it going to the
right places in terms of helping the courts strengthen their capacity to handle child and family cases?

JUDGE
PETOSKEY: It seems to me that, you know, under the trust responsibility, tribes have always, sadly,
just received a pittance of what they need to function and operate.

Being a tribal member and
having been a chief judge of my own tribal community for 16 years, I realized that I wasn’t going to allow money
to be a barrier, that we would put our heads together and collaborate and come around the table and do what we can
for our own children, because if we didn’t, nobody else was.

I would like to go back to
something Judge Pouley mentioned and it is in Michigan when the former chief justice and current Justice Michael
Kavanaugh first brought tribal court and state court judges together over 20 years ago, so that they could first
meet each other and develop strategies for avoiding jurisdictional conflict and strategies also for cooperation,
one of the very first things he said to us, to us tribal judges was, “We will learn more from you, probably, than
you will learn from us.”

JUDGE THORNE: Historically, tribal welfare
systems have not had access to the federal support systems available to the states. The biggest has been 4-E which
is a $5 billion pot of money. Congress just recently authorized tribes to have access to that. There is also a separate
fund that the federal government makes available to every state to improve their juvenile court systems. They’re
called Court Improvement Funds and tribes don’t have access to those.

And so tribal courts
have historically been underfunded. In the last 20 years the training money for tribal courts has basically dried
up. As Judge Petoskey said, they’re doing a good job of doing a lot with very little. But just a little bit
more resources would help them start innovative practices, find new approaches, find new ways of helping, because
they’re already masters of stretching the dollar.

WOLF: I hope
people who see this podcast can exert some Influence and help expand the resources for the incredible work that you
guys are doing.

Thanks so much for talking with me today. I’ve been talking about tribal
justice and the Indian Child Welfare Act with Judges William A. Thorne Jr., Theresa Pouley, and Michael Petoskey.

This podcast was jointly sponsored by the National Council of Juvenile Family Court Judges and
the Center for Court Innovation. To find out more about the National Council, you can visit their website at www.ncjfcj.org
or you can learn about the Center for Court Innovation at the Center’s website at www.courtinnovation.org.

I’m
Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Thank you for listening.

July
2011

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Jim Henderson, a trainer and lecturer on domestic violence, discusses probation group conferencing, motivational
interview techniques, and the importance of community collaboration.

SARAH
SCHWEIG: Hi. I’m Sarah Schweig at the Center for Court Innovation and today I’m speaking with Jim
Henderson. Jim provides technical assistance as a trainer and lecturer to courts, probation offices, and other criminal
justice agencies to help them improve their responses to domestic violence as part of the Federal Office on Violence
Against Women Battered Women’s Justice Project. Jim also acts as a consultancy team member for the Family Justice
Center Alliance, the Battered Women’s Justice Program, and the Center for Court Innovation. Thanks for speaking with
me today and welcome.

JIM HENDERSON: Thank you.

SCHWEIG:
So what are the biggest challenges probation offices face when working with domestic violence offenders and how does
the court monitor compliance?

HENDERSON: I think probably the biggest
challenge is figuring out how to do an adequate assessment: you know—are we getting police reports that are well-written
and well thought-out? Did the detectives do an appropriate investigation and questioning? Do we have access to 911
tapes? Do we have access to prior personal protection orders, prior police reports, calls to the home? So are we
really looking at domestic violence in the whole context of what’s really going on. Then if we’re doing that, are
we then able to collect that information in a way, disseminate it to the judge where it makes a meaningful impact
for sentencing. Hopefully, if everything goes well, we’re able to assess who truly is the batterer, who is the true
victim in context, look at what type of intervention we feel will be most helpful as far as enhancing victim safety
and holding the offender accountable.

From there, it’s trying to make sure that the judge is adequately
informed about what are we doing? How’s the program operating? Do probation officers have the training they need
to be able to talk to those who are victimized by the violence? That’s another challenge because we’re trained so
much to really investigate a case and kind of be a little hard-nosed at times. And when we talk to a victim, if we
investigate it appropriately and she’s 100 percent honest, sometimes that can result in collateral consequences to
her or retaliation that we get frustrated with when we are trying to talk to her and we feel she’s not being forthcoming.
And trying to get probation officers to understand that it might not be in her best interest to be forthcoming and
why she may recant or change her story, or why she might take him back. In looking at that entirety and helping probation
officers really kind of come to that realization has been difficult.

SCHWEIG:
You’ve utilized probation group reporting to gain better compliance. Can you talk a bit about what it is exactly
and how that works?

HENDERSON: What happens, when we came into the
domestic violence field it actually fit very well with my training as a social worker in the sense that we really
look at systems. So saying okay, if we’re really going to address domestic violence it has to be a community process.
So, you know, are police on board? Are the prosecutors on board? What are the messages they’re sending to those victimized,
to the community, and to the assailants? You know, how—what’s the judge doing? What are the victims’ services that
are in place? What are children’s services that are in place? So as a probation agent, I was trying to figure out
how do I better collaborate and learn from my partners? What training can I get from the shelter? How can I incorporate
their voices or their experiences into our policy so that we’re not creating policy or engaging in practices that
actually hurt or hinder the people we say we’re there to protect, right? And that takes a lot of time, going to the
CCR meetings, watching the batterers in a bunch of programs to make sure they’re actually doing what they say they
do, doing home visits, contacting victims.

When I’ve seen defendants in a traditional manner,
in individual sessions, it seems like every single client had the exact same road blocks to success. They do the
same kind of threats or you know, accountability plans, they did the same pep talks, and it was a waste of time.
There was one day I had seen every client back to back to back. I had like 14 clients. At the end of the day, at
5:00, I finally get to listen to my messages. Three victims called, the judge called twice, and I wasn’t able to
get a hold of any of those people because it was after 5:00. And so I’m like, this isn’t working because every defendant—I
could have put them all in one room, played a tape, and said listen to the first guy I talked to, and it would have
got accomplished the same thing. And so I said well then why don’t I do that?

We created a probation
group reporting really as a time-saving mechanism so I would have more time to reach out to victims and work with
community partners. What happened was, almost overnight, our compliance rate rose through the ceiling because we
started being able to break down barriers to successful completion of probation by using other offenders experience
who had successfully achieved that. So an example would be if you’re not able to make it to AA so that’s your excuse
because you don’t have a driver’s license. So then we talk in the group, well how are other people getting to AA?
And people are brainstorming all these different options. People are telling the guy about meetings he might not
have known about; people are offering to pick him up; people are talking about their sponsor who lives two houses
down from the offender and are willing to give him his number. So all of a sudden he had all these new resources
opened up to him that I couldn’t do individually. And he’s also seen that some of his excuses were lame. That other
people had accomplished, with larger road blocks, were being compliant.

And so it just ended up
not being just a time-saving mechanism. It ended up being our batterers intervention compliance went right through
the ceiling. People who were violating probation dramatically decreased because now—let’s say you’re skipping meetings:
we’re going to violate you and take you back to court and a judge is gonna give you one day of jail for every day
you missed of the batterers intervention program. Well now instead of me even doing that, I can go around the room
and say, ‘Okay, George, I understand you haven’t gone for the program, you don’t have time. Has anybody else not
gone to the program?’ Five guys raise up their hand. We say, ‘Okay, so Tom, what happened to you?’ ‘The judge gave
me one day jail for every day I missed.’ ‘Michael, what did the judge do to you?’ ‘She gave me one day jail for every
day I missed.’ ‘Thomas, what did the judge do to you?’ he gave me one day jail for every day I missed.’ Now I can
go back to defendant A and say, ‘Okay, when I violate you, what do you think the judge is gonna do?’ He already knows.
‘Well, it sounds like she’s gonna give me one day of jail for every day I missed.’ ‘Is that what you want?’ ‘No,
that’s not going to be helpful to me.’ So I say, ‘Okay group, what do you think we can do to help Thomas so he doesn’t
go to jail?’ And they will tell him a variety of ways that he can get compliant before we go back to court. So then
the other guy who’s sitting in a room who hasn’t screwed up yet is thinking about it, already has been taught ‘Oh,
this is what’s gonna happen.’ So really, all of a sudden, less people were skipping, more people were going, more
people were dealing with their resistance, and it ended up being a helpful tool.

SCHWEIG:
It sort of offers all different kinds of perspectives in that system. That’s really interesting. Um, so you’ve also
worked with changing the dynamics of you know, interviewing the domestic violence offenders as well as victims. Can
you talk a bit about the motivational techniques used with domestic violence offenders? It sounds like you sort of
addressed that a little.

HENDERSON: In motivational interviewing,
the whole thing is rowing with the resistance. We’re helping a client identify what their needs are and pointing
out discrepancies. So let’s say Client A who hasn’t gone to the batterer’s intervention program who says that he
doesn’t have time. He has a wife and three kids to take care of. So then we’ll talk, you know, how many people have
a wife and multiple kids. ‘How are you guys able to juggle that?’ So we have some clients who have five kids, some
who have six, some whose wife just had twins. So they can talk about how they’re juggling that. We can also talk
about pointing out the discrepancy: ‘Okay, you heard from all these guys that it sounds like the judge is gonna give
you one day jail for every day you missed. Is that gonna be consistent with your desire to spend more time with your
family? Do you think your wife and kids are gonna go to jail with you for those eight days that you’re gonna be in
there, or do you think those are gonna be eight days you’re not gonna have any access to them and not be earning
any income to help support your family that you say you care so much about.’ ‘So maybe I understand you don’t want
to give up that two hours a week to go to class, but you tell me which is going to be more advantageous to your goal?’
He gets to—I don’t tell him—what to do. I don’t tell him what to think. I help him assess where he’s at in his life
space, and what’s going to be the best role for him. And we don’t really argue with him. We just kind of point out
what’s gonna happen.

And you can also tap into the strengths of the other clients who have done
well. Clients who you never thought would make it and never graduated high school, now all of a sudden they’ve got
their GED, they’re finishing this program, and you can compliment them and their successes. We’re not gonna compliment
them and say they’re not a batterer, because I don’t know. But I do know he made it through his batterers intervention
program, he got his GED, he completed his drug testing class—he hasn’t ever tested positive in two years, you know?
There’s a lot to be proud of and just identifying that and letting him be able to brag and tell other clients how
they can, too, be successful.

SCHWEIG: So you’ve also worked on changing
the focus of the victim interview as well. Can you talk about the importance of playing the role of an information
provider to the victim rather than an information gatherer, and why the shift is so significant?

HENDERSON:
Probation officers are trained really well on how to gather information, right? And so we set somebody down and we
almost interrogate them, right? We ask them all these questions about very intimate, personal, shameful experiences
that they’ve had. And then sometimes we get frustrated when people aren’t forthcoming with that information. We talked
a little bit about sometimes if people are forthcoming with it—so let’s say I make you feel very comfortable and
very safe; you give out more information than you really would have been in your best interest.

And
now as agent of the court, I have to provide it to the court, the assailant gets to read it and hear what you told
me, and now there’s retaliation against you. I’ve accomplished nothing. So really, what I want to do in my interviews
is ask you questions in a way that even if you aren’t honest, even if you can’t be honest, when you leave my room,
if you’re a victim of domestic violence you understand what that means. If you’re a higher risk than the general
population, you understand what risk factors are. That you understand what community resources are in place that
would be more advantageous to you than the court. So maybe I’m not the best person to tell, but maybe knowing that
Theresa Johnson at the shelter specializes in sexual abuse and trauma, then you can go talk to her 100 percent confidential,
would be life-changing for you. That’s what we mean.

So it’s really a way for probation officers
to ask questions. If a victim feels empowered enough or safe enough to disclose, she can, but if she doesn’t it doesn’t
mean I’m not successful. I think sometimes probation officers felt like they were non-successful: ‘I just spent a
half hour or an hour with this person and I got no goods.’ Well you know what, if you got no goods and her life is
safer, she knows what resources are available, she knows what the system can and can’t do for her, you were 100 percent
successful and you should be extremely proud of the time you spent.

And so that’s kind of what
we mean by it’s less about gathering and more about providing. I even start out the interviews now—I tell, when I
meet with an individual who’s been victimized, I say, ‘You know, I’m gonna ask you very personal questions that are
probably none of my business, other than the fact that I want to make a recommendation to the court that’s gonna
make your life safer, um, and better help the offender change his behavior. However, if you think answering any questions
are gonna endanger you, you are not on probation, you are not required to answer anything. What you can do is just
say, ‘Jim, I prefer not to answer that question and I will never document that.’

So I’m trying
to work to bridge that gap, instead of giving that victim our card and saying, I think you should call this person—which
she won’t because it’s too shameful, it’s too difficult—I’m gonna say, ‘We care enough about you to reach out to
you at a time that’s convenient and safe for you.’ And I have a good enough relationship with my partners that I
believe they’ll do that. They’ll never come back and tell me they did because they have confidentiality, but I trust
them as individuals that if I say, ‘Theresa will you please call Mrs. Johnson? Here’s what I’m concerned about; here’s
what happened in our meeting today,’ I have faith that somebody will call her that could assist her.

SCHWEIG:
Excellent. Well thank you for letting me ask you the questions today. I’m Sarah Schweig and I’ve been talking to
Jim Henderson about probation group conferencing, motivational interviewing techniques with domestic violence offenders,
and the importance of collaboration within the community to address domestic violence. To find out more about the
Center for Court Innovation, you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thank you for listening.

July 2011

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