Herb Sturz–the subject of a new book, A Kind of Genius, by New York Times reporter Sam Roberts–talks about
innovation, the power of private-public collaborations, the founding of the Midtown Community Court, and his current
work at the Open Society Institute.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi.
This is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Today I’m at the Open Society Institute with Herb Sturz. It’s difficult for me to even begin
to describe who he is because he’s done so much. What draws me to him today in particular is a new book out by Sam
Roberts called A
Kind of Genius: Herb Sturz and Society’s Toughest Problems, published by PublicAffairs.

Your
career has spanned so much over the last four decades or five decades. The Vera Institute of Justice, for instance: you spearheaded its creation and
led it. And Project Renewal,
the Center for Court Innovation… Maybe I should start out just by thanking you for having launched the Midtown Community
Court which led to the creation of the Center for Court Innovation, which has been my home for the last 10 years.

HERB STURZ: I’m delighted.

WOLF:
I thought I might begin with a big picture question, which is, in your incredible experience with public policy and
government, what are the biggest changes that you’ve seen in terms of people’s attitudes about what government can
do and just the most important changes in public policy that you have seen?

STURZ:
It’s a large question, Rob. I don’t think I’ve seen a great change over the 50 years as it relates to what government
can do. I think we—back then people thought that government could do almost anything. One felt really that it took
the government to do things, and the role of the private sector was less out front than it is today. And I think
there’s been a much greater awareness both on the private, non-profit side or business-side and government that you
could do a lot more when you marry private non-profit and government together. They’re not necessarily on the opposite
sides of the line. In fact, they add to each other.

The Center for Court Innovation is a kind
of perfect example where you started with one experiment working closely with the court, police, D.A. It wasn’t always
easy, but it took both sides and a lot of finesse and thought and understanding on both sides. To that extent, I
think it just opened people’s eyes more rather than saying ‘it’s a new role for government,’ if you want to call
it a new role, as government has helped welcome the private sector. And that’s something that Vera helped certainly
start early in the sixties. I doubt it that it was original, that it never happened before. But we made that very
central to the way of modus operandi in those years and I think to this day.

WOLF:
You have had an extraordinary talent, it seems to me, to connect with the right people, to bridge differences between
people. I wonder what your secret is.

STURZ: It is not a secret.
What I have done and do to this day is I’m persistent. If I care about a problem, I stay with it and I try to understand
it. I try to understand it from everyone’s point of view. And you’re arresting somebody or stopping and frisking
someone down on the street, what is the impact on the person who’s stopped? What’s the impact on the person’s family.
From the police point of view does this really cut down serious crime, as they would suggest, by making it more certain
that people would leave loaded weapons or hard drugs home or not? But those are the – so you’re trying to understand
what is at play and what are the collateral effects and what’s more central. And so, it’s really a way of looking
at a problem and not assuming you have a lock on knowledge, and also trying to understand, I guess, the motivation
of individuals. And certainly in government, what do they need versus the private sector, non-profit sector, and
trying to uncover what’s involved in a problem.

WOLF: So much of
public policy, criminal justice especially, is fraught with ideologies and things are interpreted through, you know,
left and right, and conservative. How do you get people to see beyond that into just the practical aspects?

STURZ:
Not difficult. On paper they see it in the ideological side. But my experience with police has been – say, with skid
row derelicts, they didn’t like being thought of as street cleaners picking up the same drunk down on the Bowery
every day; nothing of value happening. Administrators there are aware that it doesn’t do the court system any favor
or anyone else including the skid row derelict to have them hauled into the lower courts everyday. It could be done
two, three times a day and nothing of value coming. I think defense lawyers or prosecutors realize they’ve lost dignity
dealing with an issue as important as this if, back then, you know, I think a third of all arrests were this skid
row-type in the City of New York.

WOLF: You’re talking about the
1960s when you developed Project Renewal.

STURZ: That was then called
Manhattan Bowery Project. It evolved to Project Renewal. And the police became our allies. The Correction Department
understood it and soon became our allies. It’s not like on all these things that everybody’s going to become your
ally. You have to go at a problem also, at times, when you’re going to have groups that are not sympathetic–in their
perspective for good reasons. You have to be very careful how you articulate something for sure. But you can articulate
it in terms of—and we did, certainly—both fairness and efficiency, and they’re not contradictory.

I
think if Vera and its off springs from the beginning just put it as ‘All we care about is the maltreatment of defendants,’
we would have done some good things, but we never would have taken it the next step to understand and open up doors
that weren’t all that hard to break down. A good idea, it takes you away. Then you have to be I will say a little
smart and persistent, again surrounding the problem, and how to articulate it.

WOLF:
So it sounds like seeing from the perspective of all the players allows you to find common ground. I mean you know
what the police, how they’re seeing this problem, you can find a way to come up with a solution that …

STURZ:
Often. Not always.

WOLF: Okay.

STURZ:
Not always. And there will be problems in anything. You may have to put it off a month or two months or three. Or
you have to figure out what the entry point is to get support. And it differs. There’s no rule. You have to get the
feel of the situation, the feel of what the public policy person has to—what his or her needs are at a certain time—what
politics of the government is.

WOLF: Well, so let me ask you: Have
you ever been arrested? Have you ever been through the justice system?

STURZ:
Well, let’s see. When I was about nine, I was sort of arrested. Someone stole a bicycle that was in our garage, my
first bike. And they left an old used bike in there. And so, that was all there was. And so, one day a few days later
I was driving the bicycle on the street, and I felt somebody grab my arm and said that’s my son’s bicycle. And they
took me, believe it or not, to the police station, and they put me behind the bar. I was about nine. I couldn’t remember.
They called my family and I was – you know, it wasn’t real traumatic, but I was so scared. I always remember most
the police bringing me in there and that arm and hand grabbing me and his saying, ‘You stole my son’s bike.’

WOLF:
It’s an interesting story because it is – it’s a complicated story, you know. It’s not like you were entirely – you
were innocent in a sense, but on the other hand, you understand that it was probably a stolen bike.

STURZ:
I did understand it, but also you get back to – I was nine.

WOLF:
Right. Yes.

STURZ: How much did I understand?

WOLF:
Well, right, right.

STURZ: And I had support from my family that
didn’t know the nuance of that. And then I was arrested, as it were, at the University of Wisconsin, when a friend
of mine, who later became deputy police commissioner of New York, and I were trying to earn some money with our variation
of “simonizing” carwash business. And we put on up and down the street, putting on a little tag on people’s windshields
saying ‘here’s your ticket’ to getting a good “simonizing”.

WOLF:
Right.

STURZ: The police took us and brought us into the police
station in Madison, Wisconsin. And then a third sort of thing was in Chicago where I went for a weekend just to feel
what it was like to be, knowing it was a phony in a way, what it’s like to be kind of poor. I went with old clothes
and no money. And I spent a weekend sleeping one night in a flophouse and another in a police station and spending
it during the day in a sawdust covered saloon, getting a feel of what it was like to just drink beer and all that
sort of thing.

WOLF: Well, let me ask you, I know I’m sure you’ve
told the story many times, but since I am from the Center for Court Innovation, maybe you could take a few minutes
and just talk about what led to the creation of the Midtown Community Court, you know, what you were thinking at the time.

STURZ:
Well, I really was sensitive to the idea of community and justice and working in the community. That was consistent
with certainly early work with the Bowery, with Wildcat. I also played a role in the redevelopment of Times Square
when I was chairman of the Planning Commission. And then I got to know Gerry Schoenfeld. I met him first in City Hall when we came to see Mayor Koch
and I was deputy mayor.

WOLF: And Schoenfeld is the theater owner,
Broadway producer.

STURZ: He was the head of the whole Shubert Organization.

WOLF: Right.

STURZ:
And it was really over I think breakfast, I was always complaining about panhandlers and such, and the mess-up in
Times Square, and what can be done about it, and no one cared but the theater. Whether he first said it or I first
said it, I’m not sure, but let’s say he did about doing something with the courts. It just was not necessarily original,
the concept, in Times Square. And I do remember very well saying to Gerry, “Gerry, you know what? If you give me
a theater, I’ll give you a court” because I knew he’s so dramatic and that we could do it and that will take care
of a place in Times Square. He offered it rent-free for three years.

WOLF:
This is when you were a planning commissioner.

STURZ: No. This is
while I was doing housing, working for Mullen Corporation.

WOLF:
So you weren’t in government. You weren’t in the judiciary, but you were promising you’d give him a court.

STURZ:
Yes. And one of the first persons I went to was Bob Keating. And Bob, whom I knew, I mean who in fact had followed
me as coordinator of criminal justice –

WOLF: I’m sorry, and Judge
Keating was the –

STURZ: City Administrator Judge of Criminal Court.

WOLF: Right.

STURZ:
And Bob was welcoming, but we got overwhelmed by opposition from neighboring real estate owners, from theater preservationists.
We had opposition from the New York County district attorney. We had a mixed response from the police at different
levels. The defense bar was concerned about ‘will this be a plea factory?’ and so on.

And ultimately,
we had to change the venue from the Long Acre Theater to the current home on 54th Street. There I started with no
money. I think I raised $5,000 or $10,000, not more than that I know, from the Shubert Theaters. And then I knew
I needed more money so I went to see Peter Goldmark who was then president of Rockefeller, very shortly or around
that same time, I hired John Feinblatt because then I had the nucleus of some money.

WOLF:
Right.

STURZ: Not a lot.

WOLF:
Right.

STURZ: But it started with like nothing.

WOLF:
And you had to get the courts backing, too.

STURZ: Well, not just
one. We had to get the state administrative judge. We had to get ultimately Chief Judge Judith Kaye and, you know,
of the story of her coming the night before.

WOLF: Right.

STURZ:
In her jeans to help whitewash the walls of that court. Midtown Community Court and Red Hook and then Center were
blessed with two really extraordinary persons to really make it work, which was John Feinblatt and Greg Berman, two
great people.

WOLF: And so, maybe you can tell me a little bit about
the kinds of work you’re doing, how you’re occupying yourself here at the Open Society Institute?

STURZ:
I guess I’m spending most of my time working on the mortgage foreclosure problems. George Soros asked me to try to look at this and what collateral impact on
young people is when they get thrown out of school, have to move or lose their homes.

I helped
set up something called the Center for New York City Neighborhoods ,which became a not-for-profit that was set up
by Shaun Donovan, now secretary of HUD and the mayor and Christine Quinn, head of the City Council. But I also went
back to my past and helped them to start something called the Neighborhood Improvement Project. Taking the elements
of supported work, we put people, in this case welfare recipients and homeless people, and capture their welfare
entitlements through the city’s Human Resources Administration and put them out in work crews. And ironically the
first group that received an award to do that from HRA was Wildcat
Corporation.

WOLF: Which you had started.

STURZ:
And so, what I did was change the concept and bring it up 30 years later to a whole other big problem, which was
mortgage foreclosure. And the idea is can you use people like this as a sort of mini-WPA, you might say, in the neighborhood,
not to go necessarily to the houses that are foreclosed but at the surrounding houses.

WOLF:
And do what?

STURZ: Remove the graffiti, remove debris ranging from
old refrigerators to cars, re-sod the lawns, fix broken fences.

WOLF:
You know, with Obama in the White House, I just wonder what your hopes are for this administration, what you see
that might be different.

STURZ: My thoughts are just filled with
hope. I love to turn on the television and read the paper and see Obama in action talking. I love to see Michele
Obama and the two kids. It gives me a great expanse of feeling when you have high, real quality people in the White
House trying to do hard stuff. I have no wild expectations. There’s a lot of stuff that would be out of his control.
But I feel there’s a real intelligence and a big heart going for him.

WOLF:
Well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking to you. I learned a lot. I’ve been talking to Herb Sturz who is
the subject of a new book, A Kind of Genius: Herb Sturz and Society’s Toughest Problems, by
Sam Roberts ,who details all of Herb Sturz’ amazing achievements whether he’ll call them that or not from the founding
of the Vera Institute of Justice to the Wildcat Corporation to Project Renewal to the Center for Court Innovation
and Midtown Community Court. The list is quite long and it’s still being added to. So thank you for taking the time.
This is Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Thanks for listening.

May 2009

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After visiting the Harlem Community Justice Center, Katherine McQuay and Zoe Mentel of the U.S. Department of
Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) talk about reentry, community policing, and
the stimulus package.

ROBERT V. WOLF: This is Rob Wolf,
director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome to another New Thinking podcast. I’m here
today at the Harlem Community Justice Center with Katherine McQuay who is a supervisory policy analyst with the Office
of Community Oriented Policing Services, and with Zoe Mentel, a policy analyst also with the Office of Community
Oriented Policing Services, otherwise known as the COPS Office. You came to learn a little bit about the Harlem Reentry
Court. Maybe you could tell me what interested you in it and what you thought about what you saw.

KATHERINE
McQUAY: Sure. The COPS Office is all about community policing, so we’re all about partnering, problem
solving, organizational change, and reentry is tailor-made for community policing because it’s all about partnering,
it’s law enforcement, with the community and the social service agencies, with other criminal justice agencies. And
we’ve been involved with reentry to a small extent in the past. We had a pilot program where we funded five pilot
reentry sites, and we’ve required community-based or faith-based organizations to partner with law enforcement agencies,
and faith-based mentoring is the centerpiece of those programs.

WOLF:
I know maybe it’s too soon. You’re still processing what you’ve seen, but are there some takeaways here, things that
you learned or think you might be able to apply?

MCQUAY: Well, I
think it really fits with everything we’ve learned over the years. Someone today said, you know, it’s all about partnering,
which, you know, that speaks to us, and it’s knowing what everybody else is doing and seeing how we can collaborate
because it’s not – no one person can do it alone.

ZOE MENTEL: And
what about other lessons that we’ve learned from hearing the parole officers is that offering services isn’t just
one more thing that you have to do in the course of your job. It’s something that’s going to make your job easier
or make it easier for you to have a positive impact.

McQUAY: And
I think that the discussion afterwards emphasized the need for law enforcement involvement because law enforcement
can be a detriment to these efforts or a great plus to these efforts.

WOLF:
I see.

McQUAY: And I think it really points to the need to partner
with law enforcement, to let law enforcement know what you’re doing with these efforts and to try to get them on
board so you can work in a coordinated fashion. We’ve talked to jurisdictions; there aren’t many but there are few
who do have law enforcement officers and probation-parole officers going out together, so really presenting a united
front and working together. And that seems to be a really good idea that’s starting to catch on.

WOLF:
As opposed to cross-purposes, it sounds like you can have different goals where the parole-reentry attitude sort
of encourages a certain amount of perhaps forgiveness with technical, very technical violations, and the police might
be presuming something else along the lines of zero tolerance.

McQUAY:
And the reentry parole officer talked about, you know, even if there is a technical violation of parole-probation,
that doesn’t mean they’re automatically going back to prison, so there seems to be a new attitude here where you’re
really trying to work with that individual and giving them every break possible to help get them on the right road.

WOLF: So why don’t you tell me a little bit about the COPS Office?
Tell me about its history.

McQUAY: We were created in 1994 as part
of the Violent Crime Control Act under President Clinton. And we were initially known for putting a hundred thousand
community policing officers on the street. And since then, we’ve done that and much more. We’ve created a network.
We call them the RCPIs: the Regional Community Policing Institutes that provide training and technical assistance
to law enforcement and the community on a variety of topics. We have a research and evaluation division that does
a lot of publications for us on a variety of subjects. We just distributed our 2 millionth publication. And we cover
everything from reentry to law enforcement agencies, internal affairs department, to hiring and recruitment to domestic
violence, to innovative ways for law enforcement to partner with the community. So we offer a lot to law enforcement
and the community on ways to work together.

WOLF: And is that the
theme that runs through all your work, the community-oriented element where you’re trying to build bridges between
law enforcement and the community?

McQUAY: Exactly. And the three
elements of community policing which are partnering, problem solving, and organizational change, getting across the
idea that, you know, it’s not enough for law enforcement agencies to say this is our community policing officer.
It really has to be a philosophy that goes through the department.

MENTEL:
And it’s a philosophical change from moving away from a reactive stance to a proactive stance. And that’s one of
the commonalities between community policing and the community justice movement. There are a lot of similarities,
especially when you hear community justice people say that most of the courts out there are doing some form of community
justice but not calling it by that name. We have the same sort of phenomenon happening with law enforcement agencies
where they’ll be doing community policing and maybe they won’t even know that’s what it’s called but just through
innovations that they kind of fall into it.

WOLF: So in what direction,
what’s new in the agenda going forward here in 2009?

McQUAY: Oh,
we were pleased to be a part of President Obama’s stimulus package. So the COPS Office has a billion dollars that
will go for funding officers. It’s all hiring money. But we have to hire quite a few officers across the country
with that money and we think that’s a great way to help revive the economy and create jobs, and at the same time
increase public safety and reduce crime. So we were very excited about that.

WOLF:
About how many people does a billion dollars pay for?

McQUAY: You
know, we’re not sure. But when you take it over three years because it’s a three-year program and then you add on
benefits, maybe around 5,000 and that’s a very rough estimate at this point.

The COPS office
always has tribal money, methamphetamine money, technology money. So we’re involved in a lot of areas. And then our
area of the office is currently looking over the things we would like to focus on this year. And we haven’t nailed
those down yet, but certainly, violent crime would probably be among those. Youth violence may be among those. The
effect of the worsening economy on crime may be among those,

MENTEL:
Urban violence.

McQUAY: Urban violence. So a lot of key things we
have to look at in 2009, 2010.

WOLF: Interesting.

MENTEL:
Busy.

WOLF: Busy, absolutely. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for
taking the time.

McQUAY: Thank you. It’s great to see this today
and see how it works.

WOLF: It’s very nice to meet you. I’ve been
speaking with Katherine McQuay, supervisory policy analyst with the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services
and her colleague, Zoe Mentel, a policy analyst also with the COPS Office. This is Rob Wolf, director of communications
at the Center for Court Innovation. To learn more about the Center for Court Innovation, you can visit www.courtinnovation.org.
Thanks.

April 2009

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Roxann Pais, an executive assistant city attorney in the Dallas City Attorney’s Office, describes how prosecutors
across the U.S. are responding to the crisis in foreclosed and vacant properties.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi. This is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome
to another New Thinking podcast. I’m here with Roxann Pais, who is the executive assistant city attorney with the
Dallas City Attorney’s Office and the special assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas. And she
and I have both been in Washington a few days before President-elect Obama’s inauguration—but that’s not why we’re
here—to discuss mortgage fraud and the foreclosure crisis and how they are affecting communities and what law enforcement,
prosecutors and police can possibly do about it. Roxann, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me.

ROXANN
PAIS: Absolutely, Rob. How are you doing today?

WOLF:
I’m doing great.

PAIS: We have some friends here in Washington.

WOLF: Yeah, we have. It’s been very interesting. I’ve learned a
lot.

PAIS: It’s been so exciting to be able to see people so passionate
about their work and the hope of a new era.

WOLF: You know, when
I think of foreclosures, I associate that within a problem for individuals who are perhaps having problems paying
their mortgage and with the banks. Tell my why prosecutors should be interested in foreclosures and why you and the
Dallas City Attorney’s Office have become interested in it.

PAIS:
The prosecutors are in the business of ensuring that quality of life is improved in their neighborhoods. They are
in the business of reducing crime and prosecuting crime. They are in the business of making sure that justice is
served to the fullest extent possible under our laws.

If you take a look at the mortgage crisis,
the foreclosure crisis, what you’ll find is that this results in vacancy of structures on blocks. And typically,
these vacancies are occurring in some of the most crime-ridden, poorest neighborhoods in our country. And as a result,
crime begins to flourish with vacancy. Austin, Texas did a study where they found a block that had a vacant structure
on it had crime two times more than a block next door that didn’t have a vacant structure on it. So you could imagine
the cost that police incur in addressing crime with vacant structures on the block.

WOLF:
What kinds of crimes are we talking about?

PAIS: The drug dealing,
the gangs. The National Fire Protection Association estimates that about 6,000 firefighters are injured every year
just to put out fires in these abandoned vacant structures. There’s been a lot of talk about domestic violence increases
as a result of the foreclosure crisis and the stress that it has placed on families. There’s been talk about juvenile
delinquency and the amount of pressure that it’s putting on children who are being torn from their neighborhoods
and put somewhere else where they don’t know anyone.

WOLF: And is
it true that if you have a vacant property that that can lead, that can generate more vacant properties?

PAIS:
It’s an extreme domino effect and it can lead to potentially serious, serious problems not only resulting in crime
but even in city budgets, for example. We have a vacant structure. The value of the property is less than if it was
occupied. So when cities have lower property values, their tax base is lost. And when they have a lost tax base,
the municipal budgets are lower than they were in the preceding year. When you have a lower budget, municipal budget,
you have less services, such as police and fire services.

WOLF:
Well, so tell me, what can prosecutors do in response to this crisis and to prevent this crisis?

PAIS:
I’ve had the great opportunity to actually look across America and study various jurisdictions to see what they’re
doing. It’s important as we discuss a holistic approach to solving problems that we look at making sure that a jurisdiction
has prevention methods to prevent foreclosed or vacant structures, that they have enforcement methods, and that they
have a plan to reuse the property. And I’ve studied probably 80 different jurisdictions and have come up with about
80 different ideas on how to attack the problem through prevention, enforcement and reuse methods.

WOLF:
Wow. And so, there is a lot going on.

PAIS: Prevention methods,
for example: we have jurisdictions that are having to hire vacant property coordinators because there’s really not
a sophisticated method in place for municipalities or districts or counties to identify where vacant structures are
located. So they’re actually having to be pretty sophisticated in terms of gathering information from their fire
inspectors, their code inspectors, the U.S. Post Office.

WOLF: So
you’re saying they hire a coordinator who then specializes in this because …

PAIS:
Correct.

WOLF: Prior to this crisis, they didn’t know even where
to begin to …

PAIS: Correct.

WOLF:
To identify where these properties were let alone what to do with them.

PAIS:
Some creatively are even looking at the foreclosure dockets [to] identify where the vacant structures are located
and being foreclosed on. Some are actually looking in the newspaper to get identification of the structures that
are being foreclosed upon and their public notice.

WOLF: In the
legal notices. And what do they do when they identify, you know, so they know where the properties are?

PAIS:
Well, a lot of these vacant structures that have been foreclosed are actually owned by the banks. And many banks
are not taking care of their properties. So prosecutors are beginning to hold the property owners, which are the
banks, responsible for making sure that those properties meet minimum housing standards and are boarded up and secured
so that we can avoid any kind of violent crime occurring on the property.

In terms of enforcement,
many jurisdictions around the country—and I would say Chicago, Illinois is leading this effort; Dallas, Texas also
just recently passed one—there’s an ordinance called the Vacant Registration Ordinance, and this is where the municipality
places the burden on the property owner of the vacant structure to register the vacant structure with the city. They
usually have to pay some sort of registration fee and they have to file an application that identifies all the information
that a city would need to know to contact the vacant structure owner if there are any problems on the property.

WOLF:
Because this is not information that is readily available?

PAIS:
Correct. Usually, there are also very specific ordinance requirements for these vacant structure registration ordinances.
Many cities are requiring these property owners to have security lighting or alarm systems or fire sprinkler systems
as a way to encourage public safety and discourage vacancy. Some jurisdictions are actually even requiring vacant
liability insurance so that if you have a vacant structure, they’re going to mandate that it be insured. And many
jurisdictions have gotten really creative on their reuse methods. And some cities are actually taking vacant lots
and selling them at a very nominal price. For example, Columbus, Ohio can sell their vacant lot for $500, but they
enter into an agreement with the purchaser that they’re going to do certain things to that property to improve the
development in that neighborhood. And if the property owner doesn’t comply with that agreement, the property reverts
back to the city.

Other jurisdictions, for example, have a side yard program. These may actually
be properties where the vacant land is too small to redevelop. And so, they offer the lot to the neighboring property
at a very nominal price so long as they keep it up..

WOLF: So someone
who – a non-vacant owner who is responsibly taking care of their property can then annex this side yard as long as
they are committed to maintaining it.

PAIS: Sure. And other jurisdictions
are even becoming more green and allowing non-profits and neighborhood association groups to purchase land for a
dollar as long as they turn it into some sort of garden.

WOLF: Wow.

PAIS: For beautification purposes. There have been other very creative
methods. Some non-profit organizations are actually purchasing the land and house, and they keep the land and sell
the house so it makes the house sale more affordable for people to buy. The creativity involved among prosecutors
and those at the table working with them is pretty phenomenal.

WOLF:
It sounds like – it sounds very encouraging. It sounds like there’s a lot of good ideas out there to respond to this
what is now a growing crisis. I want to thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me.

PAIS:
In Washington D.C.

WOLF: In Washington D.C. I have been talking
to Roxann Pais, an executive assistant city attorney and special assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District
of Texas. Thank you so much. This is Rob Wolf. Thank you all for listening.

March 2009

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Ann Fulmer, a lawyer and community activist, explains how mortgage fraud harms neighborhoods—including her own
community outside Atlanta, Georgia—and what residents can do to stop it.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi. This is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome
to another New Thinking podcast. Today I’m with Ann Fulmer who is a vice president at Interthinx, and she’s also
the co-founder of the Georgia Real Estate Fraud Prevention and Awareness Coalition. And we just spent a couple of
days in Washington D.C. at the Bureau of Justice Assistance at a focus group discussing the impact that foreclosures
are having and mortgage fraud is having on communities around the country and various law enforcement and justice
system responses. First of all, welcome.

ANN FULMER: Thank you.
Glad to be here.

WOLF: Happy to have you here. You are a dynamic
speaker and that’s one reason I invited you. And you’ve been doing some interesting work. I wanted to ask how mortgage
fraud, which maybe people associate or think of as a white collar crime, think of it as something involving the financial
world, how that actually impacts crime and impacts communities?

FULMER:
Well, mortgage fraud is literally bank robbery without a gun. But it brings other crimes and other really negative
effects into a community. When you have people who are acquiring properties and mortgages with the intent of taking
money and not occupying the home or rent it out to people who are criminals—because a lot of times we see that, you
know, it’s a way to launder cash—there’s a whole cascade of events that happen.

When you have
inflated values, the tax assessments go up. People who move into the neighborhood later are going to pay more than
the houses are really worth because on paper, in the real estate listings and in the tax digest, the properties look
like they’re worth more. But because it’s bank robbery without a gun, these properties inevitably go into foreclosure.
And foreclosures, as you know, have a negative impact on all the surrounding properties in the immediate vicinity.
And then you have underwater borrowers. You have vacant houses; you have blighted houses. And as you know, vacant
houses invite crimes like prostitution, vagrancy, arson, drug dealing, those kinds of things.

WOLF:
Well, so tell me about your personal experience because I’m interested in how you as a community member became aware
of this and actually became very involved in fighting it.

FULMER:
Well, I’m a recovering lawyer. And I was at home on the mommy track after my children were born in a very high end
– well, maybe not very high end, but a very nice neighborhood in the eastern suburbs at Atlanta. Yes, it was a suburban
neighborhood. And back in 1996 we started noticing, and I started being told because I was involved with the community
association, that people were buying houses in our community and walking away with a lot of money. And I thought
how did they do that because I haven’t bought that many houses but I’ve always written a big check; what am I doing
wrong? Over time I started to notice that houses in our neighborhood were selling twice on the same day and for hundreds
of thousands of dollars on the second transaction.

WOLF: Wow.

FULMER:
There were a couple of houses on my street that sold for about $300,000 more than they were worth at the time. And
one of the things that—one of the houses was never occupied. So that’s what the FBI would call a clue. When you have
somebody who’s paying too much money for a house and they don’t bother to move in, you might have a problem with
mortgage fraud. The other house, which was directly across the street from that one, and that’s one of the reasons
fraud is such a problem because they tend to cluster. And the other clue that I had was this house right across the
street from the one that was never occupied, even though UPS was delivering packages, which turns out that they were
delivering drugs to these houses and picking them up at night. The other house across the street was occupied, but
the people moved in, in the middle of the night with the teeniest little—and this is like a 6,000 square foot house—so
the teeniest little U-Haul you’ve ever seen and everything they owned they carried into this house was in 30-gallon
trash bags.

Well, the next thing you know there’s kids from the school who are living in this
now 600,000, 500, $600,000 house 12, 15 years ago who are going to our elementary school. And all of a sudden, the
school’s asking me what do you know about your neighbors because here’s these kids, they live in a $600,000 house.
Grandma, who is now a convicted felon, by the way, is driving a Jaguar or a brand new Jaguar, and these kids are
on free lunch. What’s up with that? And because these things were happening and because of my work in the community
people were telling me about other houses, I started to look into these transactions.

And I discovered
this really very typical web of transactions where you have a few people who are buying a lot of houses all over.
And I realized it wasn’t just, you know, the 20 or so houses that I ultimately identified in my neighborhood, but
it was happening all over Atlanta. And as I kept trying to get someone to address the problem, which at first they
wouldn’t do because I was dismissed as a bored housewife who needed a better hobby, I started finding out that it
was happening – it wasn’t just Atlanta; it was all over the country.

WOLF:
Now without going to too much detail, what’s the basic principle here? I mean this person moved in with trash bags
and yet could afford this house. How did this person profit from this transaction?

FULMER:
The people that moved in with the garbage bags were actually ex-cons who were friends of what we call the orchestrators.
The orchestrators are the people who are the brains behind and who profit most from these transactions.

WOLF:
I see.

FULMER: And they were recruiting people who were coming out
of the Georgia prisons to act as what we call straw buyers to stand, to actually fill out the paperwork. So they
were profiting because they were getting paid five to $10,000 per transaction that they lent their name to and showed
up at the closing to sign the paper. And this particular group used a lot of identity theft too. So these guys were
standing in for people in Michigan and in Florida who had no idea that they were buying overpriced property in Georgia.

The orchestrators are profiting because let’s say you have all – I’m not good with numbers so
I’ll just use low simple numbers. But say you have a house worth $100,000. If you can flip it for $200,000 by getting
a bad appraisal or a bad appraiser to say that it’s worth $200,000, then there’s a $100,000 profit there.

WOLF:
Right.

FULMER: One of our cases the closing attorney was getting
$4,000 per transaction under the table when the normal fee’s about $500. And these people were walking away with
anywhere between $30,000 and $60,000 per transaction.

WOLF: So they
don’t pay off the mortgage. These people do temporarily until the bank foreclosed or something.

FULMER:
Like I said in the beginning, it’s bank robbery without a gun. There’s no intention to pay for the property.

WOLF:
What’s interesting to me is how can community play a role in assisting law enforcement prosecutors, people who are
attempting to address this problem. You as a citizen, you went ahead and you started …

FULMER:
GREFPAC?

WOLF: Right. The Georgia Real Estate Fraud Prevention and
Awareness Coalition. Maybe not everyone can do that, but maybe you can tell me what GREFPAC encourages people to
do.

FULMER: Right. And with the banking crisis, one of the things
that’s happened now is people who are in danger of being foreclosed or fallen victim to a whole new world of scams
that are designed to take advantage of desperate borrowers like that.

I think that there’s a
couple of things. One, when we’re talking about spotting fraud, people who are in neighborhoods are the canaries
in the mine because you know when somebody gets a hundred thousand dollars more than their asking price. You know
because you hear through the grapevine that somebody came in and, you know, the house is on the market and somebody
made an offer, sight unseen. You hear these kinds of things, or that the seller got $75,000 back or that the borrower
got a bunch of money back. So in that sense, you know, you can be the first eyes and ears for your law enforcement
community.

One of the things community associations need to—can do—is cultivate relationships
with law enforcement agencies because these crimes do bring in street level crimes. A lot of these houses get turned
into meth labs. They get turned into “grow” houses so they’ve got a pot farm in the basement. If they’re not occupied,
you have arsonists; you got prostitution; you got drug dealing; you got vandalism; you got fires – all this kinds
of stuff.

WOLF: So it really behooves community members to inform
themselves about this and for community groups to do it because it really can have a tangible impact on their very
quality of life and their safety, public safety.

FULMER: Absolutely.
And you need law enforcement to help you with that. But the other thing, the other side of the equation I think is
education because one of the ways that my community ultimately shut down the flipping was by engaging the community
in dialogue about what mortgage fraud is. We didn’t know the whole scope; we didn’t know the whole panoply of damages
that were going to happen. But we started talking about what we were seeing. And one of the things we were able to
do was to educate sellers so that they would be wary when somebody came in and made a weird offer. Instead of just
saying “Wow, somebody wants to me a hundred thousand more than I’m asking, cool; where do I sign,” they would stop
and they would ask. And we could say yeah, that’s a huge red flag for mortgage fraud.

We educated
the realtors who farm our neighborhood because realtors like to have a specialty in an area. We worked with closing
attorneys. We worked – I mean, basically, we made a whole lot of noise and said, “you know, not in our backyard.”
But it really is a lot about education.

WOLF: Wow. Well, you know,
I want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. And it was a pleasure to meet you. Once again, I’ve
been speaking with Ann Fulmer who’s a vice president at Interthinx and a co-founder of the Georgia Real Estate Fraud
Prevention and Awareness Coalition. And I don’t know if you have a website or something that you might want to refer
people to.

FULMER: Well, Interthinx is at interthinx.com and GREFPAC
is at grefpac.org.

WOLF: Wonderful. This is Rob Wolf and thanks
so much for listening.

February 2009

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Linda Baird discusses the Youth Justice Board, which brings together high schoolers across New York City to
study and make recommendations about justice policies that affect their peers.

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Mary Claire Landry, director of Domestic Violence Services for the Catholic Charities in New Orleans, discusses
the challenge of rebuilding effective responses to domestic violence in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: This is Rob Wolf with another New Thinking podcast from the Center for Court Innovation.
Today I’m with Mary Claire Landry, who is the director of Domestic Violence Services for the New Orleans arm
of Catholic Charities and also serves as the Secretary of the Louisiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Thanks
so much for joining me today.

MARY CLAIRE LANDRY: Thank you for
having me.

WOLF: I wanted to talk about what’s happened with
domestic violence services in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina. Maybe you could take me back three years. Obviously
Katrina was devastating to the entire city, devastating to the infrastructure.

LANDRY:
Well I think after Katrina, what we experienced is just, as you know, just a community just broken in so many ways.
We knew immediately when we got back into the city a couple of months after Katrina and we were able to re-inhabit
the city, that we had to find new and different ways to identify victims of domestic violence and find those places
that we knew they would start showing up.

We knew people were not going to know where to go for
services, and we knew that people were going to be experiencing domestic violence in ways that they had not, maybe
not been exposed to before. We knew that we were gonna have a lot of situational domestic violence, which is not
your typical control-type of long-term, escalating violence, but just really related to coping, the lack of coping
mechanisms, of coping support systems, of couples that had been married, 20, 30, 40 years and never experienced domestic
violence coming in with very severe cases, very kind of primal responses.

Not only did we see
an increase, but I think it exposed the domestic violence that was already there. They won’t call the police, they
won’t go to the court systems. It got really exposed after Katrina when those systems went away.

WOLF:
What happened to the resources you had? You had had shelters, you had had some, obviously programs running prior
to the hurricane.

LANDRY: Absolutely. We ran the traditional emergency
shelter in New Orleans. We lost one of our buildings to fire, and one that flooded substantially and we couldn’t
use it. So we were down to one building. The other partner that did a lot of the work traditionally in domestic violence
for 30 something years, the YWCA, flooded substantially and that organization didn’t recover. They did not re-open.
So we took over a lot of the services—a lot of the non-residential services—that the Y operated prior to Katrina.

We lost all of our funding contracts after Katrina, and we had to go back and fight because what
I heard immediately after Katrina is ‘There’s nobody living in New Orleans, there’s no domestic violence,
you know, you lost your shelter, so you know, we don’t feel we need to fund you.’

WOLF:
And those were local funding sources?

LANDRY: It was federal, state,
and local. And I basically had to say, ‘You know, even though I lost all my staff, we are recovering. We’re
rebuilding our infrastructure and domestic violence is not going to go away. It’s going to be, it’s ever more
critical that we get our services back up and we need your support.’ And fortunately, it took me about six months
to recover all of our funding grants.

WOLF: So it sounds like you
almost had a clean slate after, I mean no funding, resources gone, and you mentioned your staff…

LANDRY:
… Was all over the country. I came back to New Orleans with three employees. I mean, when I came back and I saw my
building burned, and saw the ashes and saw my car in ashes, and saw my home, you know, while it really just was very
disheartening and difficult and the loss was tremendous, I also saw tremendous opportunity. I saw us really having
an opportunity to redesign services the way we always wanted to.

We were starting from scratch,
and how many people in a lifetime have an opportunity to, to just rethink, start from scratch and say, this is what
we know, we have the expertise, we know what’s going to work and what doesn’t work? And if we’re going
to spend all this time and money in putting back an infrastructure, let’s do it the right way. Let’s do
it, let’s look at all the best practices and design a system that’s really going to be responsive. And
that’s what we’ve done.

WOLF: So tell me about that. What
does it look like now? What have you created?

LANDRY: Well, it’s
been incredible. I mean what we created, we redesigned how we provide housing. We no longer do the shelter model.
We provide hotel vouchering, we provide safe houses that we lease in Catholic Charities names that are located throughout
the city so that if people want to stay in their community they can stay where they feel comfortable and where they
feel safe.

WOLF: Mmm-hmm

LANDRY:
They like the independence. You know, we really wanted to get away from congregate living because that’s very
difficult for women who are in trauma and who are moving away from a control issue, to move into a congregated living
situation where they have to follow rules. And other people are making decisions.

So we really
want to be able to respect their need for independence and control over their own lives. We identified every entry
point that we knew that survivors would show up for services: healthcare, emergency rooms, police, court systems,
and we put trained advocates in all those systems to make those linkages. Very, very effective.

But
the most exciting initiative is the Family Justice Center because it just makes so much sense to locate everything—especially
people who are in trauma, especially in a disaster area where everything that’s familiar is gone, to really
have one place that we could direct women and families or anybody who’s a victim, to get all those services
and to really get the partners on board to work with us, to redesign this vision. And that’s what the Family
Justice Center has enabled us to do.

WOLF: Describe the facility
for me. You picked a location and started from scratch?

LANDRY:
We were very fortunate. At one point we were really actually thinking of putting the Family Justice Center in FEMA
trailers. That’s how desperate we were. At the end of June the city came forward with a city-owned building
that was vacant, that had not been flooded. It was an old firehouse from the 1850s, one of the first original firehouses
in New Orleans, and we had our grand opening two years to the date of Katrina. And we just celebrated our one-year
anniversary.

WOLF: And so describe it to me. What is there? What
happens?

LANDRY: What we have on site is the New Orleans Police
domestic violence unit, we have the district attorney on site, we also have city attorneys, and then of course we
have Crescent House. We have a whole range. We have an NOPD advocate, we have a legal advocate, we have a number
of case managers that are on site.

WOLF: So Crescent House is the
Catholic Charities’ domestic violence package of services.

LANDRY:
Correct.

WOLF: That used to be a shelter.

LANDRY:
Right.

WOLF: …per se and now it’s –

LANDRY:
We will get them to safety. We do the safety plan, you know, it really wraps services around the survivor when she
comes into the Family Justice Center, we provide all of those social services.

WOLF:
And what are the advantages of bringing everyone together in one location?

LANDRY:
Well I think it just has given us the leverage to be able to look at domestic violence as a community issue and to
look at community solutions so that it’s not just Crescent House going, saying ‘What should be the criminal
justice response to this? What should be the law enforcement?’ Because as you create that holding place, which is
the Family Justice Center, it really brings those partners in, and it brings buy-in. And so that, you know, it’s
not just one system that is working or not working. We’re all working toward really looking at how this is impacting
the survivors.

WOLF: Are there things you can tell me about, things
that have changed as a result of the insights that you have come to or the collaboration that has come about as a
result of being co-located in the center?

LANDRY: Absolutely. You
know, the domestic violence detectives now have protocols that we use so that we can work with them so if a woman
or a victim does not know how to navigate the police system and she’s distrusting of the police system, that
we can establish, re-establish that relationship. The relationship between the police and the district attorney,
the relationship between the city attorney and the district attorney, to make sure that those communications—so that
if we need to get a case moved from a misdemeanor charge to a felony charge, the Family Justice Center provides that
avenue for that to happen very quickly, and funding the Family Justice Center has really enabled us to bring more
prosecution resources to the table.

So one of the things that we’ve done is we’ve funded
some investigative positions to assist the police. We’ve actually funded some city attorney positions. We’ve
actually funded the district attorney position. And that was one of the things that we negotiated with the Office
of Violence Against Women when we were in the initial discussions because our criminal justice system was just devastated
after Katrina. They were down to one city attorney.

WOLF: So it
sounds like there was, in a way, a silver lining. It sounds outrageous to say about something as devastating as Hurricane
Katrina, but you’ve been able to take advantage of the circumstances, the starting from scratch, and create
something that sounds like it’s better than what it replaces.

LANDRY:
Absolutely, and I just, for myself personally, to stay in New Orleans and help the recovery, my commitment was if
I was gonna stay and do this, and rebuild this, why would I go back and rebuild a broken system? It just doesn’t
make any sense. We have this incredible opportunity. We had the support of the federal government, the Office of
Violence Against Women could not have been more helpful in bringing resources to us, to help our city to do that.

WOLF: And so you’re up here with a team of people visiting
Brooklyn, and you’re here with the Brooklyn D.A.’s Office and their Family Justice Center, and you’ve
seen the domestic violence courts operating here, and you’ve seen the traditional criminal court. And I wonder,
I don’t know if it’s too soon, if you’ve been able to process it, have you seen things that you want
to take back with you or lessons you learned?

LANDRY: Absolutely.
I mean we look at some software and tracking systems that we definitely can implement, that they have shared with
us. The Center for Court Innovation is going to provide us with a tool kit to help really create this domestic violence
court. The judge that is with us is really interested in doing this.

WOLF:
Really great. Well you know, I’ve really enjoyed talking with you and learning what’s going on in New Orleans.
We read about it all the time in the paper, and I can’t imagine going through that, and it sounds like you’ve
really been able to do something positive.

LANDRY: Well, it’s
been an incredible journey and it’s been exciting and, you know, I tell people it’s like being part of
the wild, wild west. We had this incredible opportunity. It’s quite challenging, but it’s also very rewarding,
so I’m very grateful for what we’ve been able to create.

WOLF:
Well thank you for taking the time and sharing your ideas and what you’ve been doing.

LANDRY:
Thank you.

WOLF: I’ve been speaking with Mary Claire Landry,
who’s the Director of Domestic Violence Services for the New Orleans Arm of Catholic Charity. And she also serves
as Secretary of the Louisiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence. I’m Rob Wolf and this has been another New
Thinking podcast, produced by the Center for Court Innovation. And to find out more about the Center for Court Innovation,
you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.

December 2008

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Judge Wendy Lindley offers a preview of the Orange County Community Court, which is scheduled to open in coming
months.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi, this is Rob Wolf, director of
communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and I’d like to welcome you to New Thinking, a podcast produced
by the Center for Court Innovation. With us today is Orange County Superior Court Judge, Wendy Lindley. I’m
sorry for the background noise, but we’re in a hotel lobby. Welcome to New York.

JUDGE
WENDY LINDLEY: Thank you very much; it’s great to be here.

WOLF:
So let me ask you, I know you’re doing a lot of interesting stuff in Orange County. Can you fill me in on your
background? You preside over a lot of different kinds of problem-solving courts. So maybe you could tell me what
those courts are.

LINDLEY: Certainly. I’ve been very, very fortunate
to have been involved in what we call collaborative efforts for many, many years. I’ve been a collaborative
court judge for drug court for 14 years, for a criminal mental health court for almost seven years, for a DUI court
for about two years, and a homeless court for about six years. I’ll be opening up a veterans court in November
of 2008.

WOLF: How did it come to pass that you’re at the crossroads
of so many of these collaborative courts?

LINDLEY: I think that I
came out of the district attorney’s office and my first week on the bench I looked at things in a completely
different way and it dawned on me that jail wasn’t solving problems and that I, I felt compelled to try to look
at a different way of conducting business. And in the beginning, I just had people come back and see me, bring their
AA cards, bring family members, and had a kumbayah court. The problem was it didn’t work. They were picking
up new cases and I couldn’t understand why. And that was when I learned about the drug court effort started
by Janet Reno in Florida. And when I learned about the techniques that were successful, such as drug testing and
the more counseling, and oversight, I made overtures to work with other community members to set up a true collaborative
effort, about an 80 percent of those individuals don’t ever pick up anything again, including a driving on a
suspended license, which is about the lowest case you can get. So it’s been very exciting.

WOLF:
And so over the years you’ve expanded your involvement by creating these other kinds of courts, and now you’re
about to start a veterans court, and I understand you’re also about to start something that, as far as I know,
doesn’t exist anywhere in the country.  It’s a community court, which of course exists in other
places, but it’s a different kind of community court. And so I wonder if maybe you can tell me a little bit
about the veterans court and then about this new kind of community court.

LINDLEY:
We decided we wanted to have a more coordinated effort to work with people who’ve served this nation and as
a result we will be opening up our veterans court specializing in PTSD, traumatic brain injury, substance abuse,
and mental illness, specifically for individuals who have served in a combat arena on behalf of this nation. 
So we’ll be using the same collaborative efforts that we’ve used, the same model that we’ve used since
the inception of our collaborative courts, the research-based drug court model with this new court as well, that
of course as always, when we open up different kinds of courts, we’ll be bringing in different community partners. 

WOLF: So like all problem-solving courts, people who are coming into the court
are involved in the criminal justice system in some way, so they’re facing some kind of charge but you are offering
them an alternative to incarceration through treatment and collaborating with community services to try to get them
back on track, but presumably if they don’t do well, because you’re following the drug court model, there
are sanctions and there are other penalties. Is that right?

LINDLEY:
Exactly. You’ve described it beautifully. We follow the graduated sanctions and rewards and we are a court that’s
really based on positive reinforcement and it’s a very fun, wonderful place to be. We clap, we are enthusiastic,
and we reward good performance. We have mentoring programs that also assist our clients staying on track, and if
they don’t do well, we have flash incarceration, which is, you know, a pretty severe sanction, and we do occasionally
have people who terminate.

WOLF: And when you say terminate, then
they face some other penalty?

LINDLEY: They go back to basically
the regular criminal justice system. 

WOLF: So tell me about
the community court. How did the idea come about? And what is it and what stage is it at?

LINDLEY:
Well interestingly enough, the idea started with the prior presiding judge, Judge Fred Horne had come out through
an invitation through the Center for Court Innovation to see Red Hook. And he was so enthusiastic about that, that
he came back to California and was able to get a grant from the AOC to work with the Center for Court Innovation
on creating a community court for our community. So it’s a stand alone court that will have one courtroom in
it, one judge, and 30 ancillary services all on site. We have a full time social worker that will be there every
day. We have full time paralegals from the public defender’s office that do outreach with our clients and link
them, not only with cases that they have in the system, but also with services. We have a medical doctor that will
be there certain hours, we have a psychologist that will be there. We have a psychiatrist that will be there. We
have outreach and engagement for mentally ill, which is a team that is comprised of law enforcement and psychiatric
nurses that go out into the community but they’ll also have an office on site on our, in our facility.

WOLF: And they go out into the community, presumably not to arrest people,
but to offer services?

LINDLEY: No, to do outreach. And also if there
is an altercation with a regular police officer, they will call this team in—and they believe the client is mentally
ill—they’ll call this team in and this team will work with the mentally ill person. They are specially trained
to do outreach for the mentally ill. It’s a fantastic program. We also have a children’s chambers. And
the children’s chambers is a beautiful room which will be served by agency, another partner called Victim Witness,
where they’ll have full time staff on site to take care of the children while the parents are in counseling,
and our theme there is reading. And every child that goes in will be read to while they’re there. We don’t
have a television. And they will leave with a book of their choice. They can choose any book in the room. We’re
hoping that while we have the children there, the doctor and psychologist have a room right there in the next office,
that we’re gonna be able to meet the needs of these kids that come in and suffer so much by the bad decisions
of their parents.

WOLF: And you are going to be the judge.

LINDLEY: Very fortunate, yes, that I get to be the judge there. It’s a
labor of love.

WOLF: And just give me a sense of how it works. So
you go in in the morning there and then you have say a drug court calendar in the morning, and then a veterans court
in the afternoon, and then the next day a homeless court?

LINDLEY:
Exactly. There’ll be a specified court every morning and every afternoon, every day.

WOLF:
In the same court room but you sort of put on a different hat and have different people coming in.

LINDLEY:
Different hat, different team. For every single court we always have a public defender, a lawyer, the district attorney,
healthcare agency, which is our healthcare, county healthcare provider, the probation department, who is a wonderful
partner in all of our efforts except homeless court, and then all of our ancillary agencies.

WOLF:
When I think of Orange County, I’ve always been told it’s a very conservative place. Were there some people
who were, perhaps, critical of this approach?  And if you did face those kinds of challenges, I wonder how
you addressed it?

LINDLEY: Well, I think it’s important for
individuals in the community to understand this isn’t about some, you know, drug user or mentally ill person.
This affects the kids. The majority of my clients are parents because I do adult programs. So this, this is a huge
factor in our community and the way that it affects young people. Plus with all the wonderful studies we have, showing
that we save, you know, 10 dollars for every one we spend in a program like this, it’s a pretty easy sell, really,
both economically and socially, to most people if you have a chance to sit down and really talk with them about the—and
the great end results we have in the researched-based programming that we do.

WOLF:
So when is your opening day?

LINDLEY: Justice George, who’s
Chief Justice in our state, he is going to come down and do a grand opening on December the 5th.

WOLF:
Sounds great, and I look forward to hearing more about it as it progresses. And thank you so much for taking your
time.

LINDLEY: Certainly. It’s nice to meet you.

WOLF:
This is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. You’ve been listening to my
interview with Orange County Superior Court Judge Wendy Lindley. To find out more about the Center for Court Innovation
visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.

November 2008

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University of Maryland Law Professor Terry Hickey discusses Baltimore’s new Prostitution Court and other
community justice initiatives.

ROBERT V. WOLF: This is Rob
Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. I’m here today with Terry Hickey, who is
adjunct professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and is deeply involved in an interesting project that
they have been collaborating on, called the Community Justice Initiative. Terry, welcome to Brooklyn and the Red
Hook Community Justice Center.

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Member of Parliament Nick Herbert talks about his work as Britain’s shadow justice minister, the Conservative
Party’s prospects in the next election, and the importance of problem solving.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: This is Rob Wolf and I’m welcoming listeners to another podcast produced by the Center
for Court Innovation. With me today is Nick Herbert, who is a member of Parliament, conservative member of Parliament,
and currently the shadow justice secretary. Let me first welcome you to New York and to Brooklyn.

NICK
HERBERT: Thank you very much for having me.

WOLF:
I wanted to just wonder if you could indulge me just for a little bit and give me a little civics lesson and explain,
what is a shadow minister?

HERBERT: Sure. Well, we have the British
Parliament, which comprises the elected House of Commons and the unelected House of Lords and the general election
to the House of Commons determines who will form the government. Whichever party has the biggest majority forms the
government. And for the last 10 years, the labor party has held the majority and has formed the government, first
with Tony Blair as prime minister, and now with Gordon Brown.

There will have to be an election
within a couple of years and my party, the Conservative Party, which was led by Margaret Thatcher and is now currently
in opposition is hoping to win the election next time. And our government also has ministers. One of those ministers
is the justice secretary, what’s called the secretary of state for justice, who is responsible for prisons,
courts, probation, oversight of the judiciary, and we have shadow ministers from the opposition party who shadow
the government and hold them to account.

And actually, we are formally called the opposition,
Her Majesty’s Official Opposition. And our job is to oppose the government and hold the government to account
with regard to the public.

WOLF: And how does that work? Do you
have a critique on every action and decision that the government makes?

HERBERT:
Well, I expect visitors will have seen the House of Commons and, you know, you have the governing party sit on one
side and we sit on the other, and we discuss things, debate things across the floor.

WOLF:
I’ve seen lots of shouting when I’ve seen it.

HERBERT:
It’s quite lively. But, you know, it’s deliberately a confrontational chamber where we get to the bottom
of issues by discussing them in a fairly robust manner. So we debate issues in the House of Commons, we vote on legislation,
and naturally also we debate issues through the media. And we have to test the government’s legislative program,
make sure they can justify it, and hold the government to account for the way in which it’s running the prison
service, running the probation services.

And at the same time as holding them to account, we
have to come up with ideas of our own, positive ideas for how we would like to change things that we would put to
the British public at the next general election.

WOLF: And are there
opportunities for your ideas to be incorporated into the government or are they sort of, you’re sort of in a
gestational period while you wait and you sort of develop your ideas? You critique what they’re doing but you
wait until you are returned to power?

HERBERT: There is a partisan
debate as there is in the United States, which isn’t always constructive. But actually what tends to happen
is that the government will then pick up the ideas that it wants to and take them on. I think there is probably more
that we agree about as political parties in the United Kingdom than disagree.

WOLF:
And so I understand you’re interested in the concept of community justice, such as it’s practiced in Liverpool,
as I understand it, and some of that taken from ideas that have been generated here in the United States. And I wonder
what interests you about it and how does it fit in with what your priorities are as far as reforming and improving
the delivery of justice?

HERBERT: Well I’m hugely interested
in the community court, as have other people been in the United Kingdom, and many of my colleagues from all parties
have come over and seen the community court here. And as you say, it led to the formation of the experimental community
court in Liverpool back in the U.K., and I’ve been up there and met the judge, and seen all of that too.

And
I think what drives our interest is that we have a rising prison population back at home, not absolutely at the same
levels as the United States but nevertheless, it has risen very sharply. We also have rising rates of re-offending.
And I think that there is, I think that there is now a general acceptance that you cannot allow the prison population
simply to rise indefinitely and that what you should worry about, in particular, is rates of re-offending, where
we have offenders who are cycling back into the system very quickly.

The recidivism rates for
adult offenders are 60 percent within two years and going back into prison amongst youth offenders it’s much
higher. And what we are interested in is the extent to which we can try to intervene at an earlier stage to secure
more effective justice, you could say smarter justice, that is actually going to prevent re-offending, stop people
entering the custodial system in the first place or, once they have been in the custodial sentence, try and rehabilitate
those offenders and prevent them from re-offending.

And what is intriguing about the community
court here and in Liverpool is a different approach to courts, where courts become problem-solving, pulling together
a lot of the resources that are necessary to try and help offenders go straight.

WOLF:
Are there ideas that you’ve seen or that you’ve tossed around that you’d like to see, that you feel
confident should be implemented, or you’d like to see implemented, given the opportunity to implement them?

HERBERT: I don’t think that we can divorce any ideas from the
question of cost and that seems to me to be one of the real obstacles to the further development of community courts
in the United Kingdom and that’s, you know, an issue that we’re going to have to look at very closely.
But certainly, I am very attracted to the notion of accountability, of making sure that when a disposal is handed
down by a court, that it actually is meaningful in terms of securing an outcome. The courts aren’t just handing
down short-term custodial sentence or a fine or a community order which in some way is not effective. A fine, because
it is not paid, as happens in our country. A community order which is ineffective because it is not properly completed
as happens. A drugs rehabilitation requirement which is ineffective because it isn’t completed and the offender
remains on drugs.

What I like about the approach we have here is that there is a different perspective,
which is cases coming back to the court, where the judge is actually, effectively accountable for whether an offender
has gone off drugs, whether a community service was completed satisfactorily. Not just drawing together resources,
but also introducing that accountability to make sure that an offender is dealt with properly.

WOLF:
And I noticed that you had started, before you became a member of Parliament, a think tank called Reform. Can you
tell me a little bit about that and the work it does?

HERBERT: Yeah,
well it hasn’t escaped my attention that Reform is currently sort of one of the buzz points in the United States.
We started Reform a few years ago because there seemed to be only one kind of analysis around in the U.K. and that
was an analysis that said that our public services were starved of investment and what they really needed was more
resources and that would make them more effective.

And there certainly was a case that some of
our public services, including our health system, did need more funding. But we were very concerned that the analysis
was a very shallow one and that actually what mattered also was how our public services were organized, to what extent
they were accountable, and whether the big funding increases would deliver higher productivity and value for the
money, for the taxpayer.

And in the main, I think there’s a wide acceptance now in the U.K.
that the very big increases in public spending that we’ve seen over the last decade have not yielded the improved
performance from our schools, from our hospitals that is proportionate to those spending rises. And the taxpayer
has paid a very hefty bill for the increase.

And so we wanted to come up with ideas to drive
value from money in our public services. And that may mean introducing principles of choice and competition into
public services. It may mean that in terms of monopolistic public services holding them, finding mechanisms to hold
them properly to account.

Reform is a non-partisan organization which promotes its ideas to political
parties of all persuasions. And what we’ve found is that these ideas have increasing traction in the U.K. as
politicians are confronted with very difficult decisions. They cannot just go on spending more money on services.
They have to focus on the outcomes whether the services are performing well.

WOLF:
Just one last question. So what are the prospects for the Conservative Party? HERBERT: Well, at the moment, having
been out of office for a considerable period of time, over 10 years, the Conservative Party are favorites to win
the next general election, which has to be held at the latest by June 2010. So in a couple of years time, or it could
be before that.

Having said that, we are not complacent. We have a highly effective young leader
of the opposition now, David Cameron, who was just featured on the cover of Time magazine, which is a kind of tribute
to the fact that he is very much seen as the coming political figure. He’s a hugely impressive leader of the
opposition, and clearly has the makings and the look of a prime minister.

But we have an electoral
mountain to climb. We have a lot of ground to make up, and in spite of the unpopularity of the current government,
which is perhaps not surprising after it’s been in power for 10 years and we’re now moving into an economic
recession, which never makes governments popular, it’s very important that we, as the Conservative Party, earn
the trust of the British public, that we demonstrate that we have the ideas and the vision to govern the country
effectively.

It’s in the search for these ideas that I find myself here in the community
court, Red Hook, and looking at how things can be done better, be willing to learn from countries where things have
been done differently, in an entirely non-dogmatic basis, on the principal that if it works better, we should be
willing to consider it.

WOLF: Very good. Well it’s been very
nice talking to you and I hope you enjoy the rest of your visit to New York and the United States.

HERBERT:
Thank you very much indeed for having me here.

WOLF: Thanks. This
is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. I’ve been speaking with conservative
Member of Parliament Nick Herbert. To find out more about the Center for Court Innovation you can visit us at our
website, www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

September 2008

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Staff of the Harlem Parole Reentry Court discuss how they help ex-offenders make the transition from incarceration
to the community.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi. This is Rob Wolf,
director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and welcome to another episode of New Thinking, a
podcast produced by the Center for Court Innovation to highlight practitioners, researchers, and others who are experimenting
with new approaches to justice.

Today I’m in the Harlem Community Justice Center with some
people who make the Harlem Reentry Court a reality. The reentry court, which was launched in 2001, is one of many
experiments around the United States seeking to address the fact that within three years of their release from state
or federal prison, about half of ex-offenders return for either a new crime or parole violation.

With
me today are Administrative Law Judge Grace Bernstein of the Division of Parole, Senior Parole Officer Alfonso Camacho,
Reentry Coordinator Nigel Jackson, and Deputy Project Director of the Harlem Community Justice Center John MeGaw.
Welcome everybody.

ALL: Hello.

WOLF:
So let me start off with a straightforward question. What is the Harlem Parole Reentry Court?

JOHN
MEGAW: Rob, we opened up in 2001 and it was an effort by the Division of Parole, which sort of acknowledged
the difficulty of men and women who had gotten out of prison staying out of prison. Nigel and Al Camacho’s staff
go into prison prior to the release of the inmate to get a lot of information. Then when they come out on the day
that they’re released, they appear here and they appear before Judge Bernstein.

And the idea
is that they will—they need to be more accountable, and we help them get to jobs, we help them get into treatment
programs, and every other week review how things are going.

We work with them for six months,
but if they successfully make it through their first six months after release, then we have a big graduation ceremony
and celebrate their success.

WOLF: Generally, how long have they
been in prison? Is there a wide range?

ALFONSO CAMACHO: Our parolees
consist of violent and non-violent offenders that can vary in time of incarceration from a year to five to 10. One
individual in particular just spent a significant amount of time in jail for 20 years; and he’s doing well by
the way.

WOLF: So I would think that someone who’s been in
jail that long has a tremendous number of needs, you know, housing, job, I mean just getting reoriented into the
community. And John referred to the kinds of services, but, I mean, how do you really get in there and support someone
like that?

CAMACHO: Well, unlike the traditional services where
mostly everything is done by referral, here at the Harlem Reentry all the agencies involved are anticipating this
person’s arrival with more or less a coherent plan in store for them with the goal hopefully that this individual,
the needs are already known by each inter-dependent agency and therefore to lead to the same basically common result
of hopefully providing services this individual may need.

GRACE BERNSTEIN:
Last year we’ve had a number of individuals who had served a significant amount of time, 20 years I think, some
even more.

When they come out of prison, they’re very motivated, but they come out of prison
sometimes with no place to go. We provide them immediate housing.

One guy said he didn’t know
anything about a Metrocard when he got out. And he actually went back to school. And these are men in their fifties,
these are not young people, some are in their forties.

And you know, we give them what they need,
and there’s a very supportive environment here. But that, you know, a supportive environment and everything
isn’t what does it. What does it is the immediacy of the services; that’s what does it, and parole officers
and senior parole officers who really want this to succeed and work very, very hard with the individuals because
it’s not always “Oh, he comes in after six months. It’s perfect.”

WOLF:
And I imagine that there are some people who have been in prison a long time. They’ve been involved with the
justice system, and then they’re brought to a courthouse after their release. Do some people, I don’t know,
react negatively or have some issues around that, being brought before a judge again when they thought they were
done with judges.

NIGEL JACKSON: I would say yes. They definitely
have a problem with seeing a judge. Ninety nine percent of the people, you know, they have a big problem coming to
see a judge as well as a parole officer. Maybe I’d give them a 20-minute talk to everyone that we’re interviewing
before individual interviews. There’s a lot of apprehension. So at one point I asked, “Yo, what’s
the problem?” And he said, “Every time I see a judge, I go to prison.” So at that point, I changed
my whole spiel and I let them know how Judge Bernstein is. She’s their biggest ally and they have to meet here
before they judge what type of person she is and what her role is. And I let them know the only person they can violate
you first is yourself and your parole officer. And Judge Bernstein is there to help you. And if you need a kick in
the butt, she’s going to kick you in the butt.

WOLF: So Judge
Bernstein, I understand that you spend a good part of your week actually at Rikers—that’s not part of the reentry
court—where you are looking at parole violators perhaps.

BERNSTEIN:
I do parole violators. And if somebody violates from here, then they know if that has to happen, then we tell them
this is the whole purpose, for to not send you back to jail. That’s my opening statement: “We’re here
not to send you back to jail,” that they know they’re going to come before me. And they know when I tell
them it’s not a Chinese menu where you can choose some of your conditions like part of A and not B, that you
have to do everything; if there’s a problem, come in and talk to us. We try very hard to work with them as long
as they’re working with us.

There was one incident yesterday, if I can have a minute, which
I think really says a lot about the program. I was in the waiting room where people stand and I’ll talk to them
and they’ll tell me their problems; they’re doing well enough; whatever. But this particular individual
said his son graduated high school and is in and will be going back to where he lives and to college. And he wanted
to bring his son here to meet everybody. And he wasn’t sure—could he come in next week even though it’s
not his regular day to meet his parole officer and bring his son? You know, every once in a while there’s something
that says everything. I think that says everything.

WOLF: Well,
let me ask you. Your role is very different when you’re here. Do you feel different as a judge? You’re
doing something different; your function is different.

BERNSTEIN:
Yes. I feel sometimes that it’s at the finish line and I’m coaching, “You can do this just a little bit
more; you can do this,” and sometimes to say to them you care, sometimes you make them feel that they can do
something, that they can have confidence in themselves when they fall to move forward again. I feel that my purpose
here really is to make sure that they do not violate and go back to jail. This is why I’m here; this is why
I want to be here.

MEGAW: The irony to your earlier point about
their reluctance, resistance to see a judge when they first hear about it from Nigel and the parole staff in Queensboro
before they’re released, the irony is that when they complete their six months, very few want to return to regular
parole supervision. They all want to stay in this program.

Unfortunately, we can’t continue
because there are new parolees that need to come in. But it’s a complete turnaround in that time because of
the attention that they get here.

WOLF: Do you find it a challenge
sometimes to find them housing or jobs because people are reluctant to house ex-offenders or employ ex-offenders?

CAMACHO: We do have agencies that can accommodate at least this
particular group of individuals because, again, we have established relationships with other agencies like Palladia
that can take our undomiciled offenders. So we do have things in place for that.

MEGAW:
It’s temporary housing. There’s no question that housing is tight especially for someone who is working a low-level
job and doesn’t have the money to be able to afford an apartment in Manhattan.

Jobs, actually,
the other part, you know, jobs is one of the other stumbling blocks. We have a – the Division of Parole works with
and we work with an agency called the Center for Employment Opportunities. So we set up—and again, it’s the
immediacy of the services—the parolees begin transitional work right away. And so, they are going each day, getting
into a routine of getting up in the morning, getting to a job, working, and they get a paycheck at the end of every
day. So they have a little money in their pocket to begin to support themselves and to provide for their families,
something they may not have done before for many years. We also work with agencies in this area by encouraging them
to hire ex-offenders.

WOLF: And so, have you observed certain characteristics
that the most successful participants have? I mean what makes for a successful participant in the reentry court?

BERNSTEIN: I think what it is, is real determination not to go back
to jail. “I’m not going back to jail and I’m going to do whatever is necessary.” And persistence: “I’m
not getting discouraged.” And the problem is the drugs though; that’s a whole separate issue. I’ll let you address
that.

CAMACHO: There’s a renewed sense of responsibility for their
actions. I mean this is a short-term program for six months. But to just instill certain behaviors that can carry
on to their next PO because when they leave here, they do get transferred to a regular field PO. But unlike that
field PO getting a fresh individual out of jail with all these needs, these individuals have probably achieved or
reached most of their needs. So it becomes actually a pretty decent transition for them to continue their life with
parole as part of it, remain working, stable residency and, of course, absence new drugs. Those three things, are
basically the most common factors to recidivism that I’ve seen in my years as a P.O.

BERNSTEIN:
Some parolees react very positively when they have extra responsibilities thrown on them. They’re all of a sudden
responsible for a child that they didn’t think they’d be responsible for and they know they have to get
themselves together; when somebody in their family is ill and they know they have to be there for that person.

CAMACHO:
Just finding that a motivating factor.

BERNSTEIN: Yeah. Something
that says “I’m going to do it.”

CAMACHO: It’s no longer
“do it for parole or you get locked up.” That premise is out the window.

WOLF:
Nationally, I understand there’s a trend towards more attention on reentry. That’s a focus. What’s
your sense of that?

MEGAW: Fifteen year ago the term “reentry”
was not really in the vocabulary of criminal justice experts and policy folks. The fact is that about 600,000 men
and women are released from state and federal prisons each year. And there’s a recognition that about half of
them—there’s the problem—about half of them end up in jail or prison within three years.

And
so, in 2001, I think 2001 was really the year in which, not just in New York State, but other states as well, where
they started to look at the rate of recidivism and the approach to dealing with that problem.

And
so, New York State and this court in particular was – I actually thought we were the first in the United States.
It turns out I think we’re the second or the third reentry court that started. But 2001 is when the other courts
started as well. Now I just learned, actually a couple of weeks ago at a conference in St. Louis, there’s about
50 reentry courts around the country.

WOLF: What kind of results
have you seen? Have you been able to track participants and see if the lessons that they’ve learned here have
stuck?

MEGAW: Here, since actually 2006, we’re proud to report
that over 85 percent of the men and women we worked with have been successful. So that means that they haven’t
violated or had new arrests.

CAMACHO: And I can even add more recently
to that. Our graduating class here—we’re going to have a graduation soon—from the beginning of the year, January,
quite frankly I totaled I think about three year arrests from the whole population of over 70 parolees, give or take.
That’s amazing.

WOLF: That’s great.

CAMACHO:
What I’d like to see is really agency, cooperation, and coordination combined with individual determination
resulting in positive numbers that you see here.

WOLF: Well, I wonder
if any of you have any final comments you’d like to share with others who might be thinking about ways to ease
the transition from prison to the community.

JACKSON: Like everyone
says, the coordination with different agencies that provide the services, the service providers. You have to have
some sort of collaboration. And when we come together at our monthly meetings, this also makes the person be responsible
because they know that we’re talking, they know they can’t go and jive us: “Oh I went to the program.”
No, we get a report every week.

So these are the things that I –the programs are very important
as well as our collaborations and the responsibility that the parolee has, that he knows that we are speaking to
each other every week or everyday.

CAMACHO: Communities, localities,
more or less, do have to take a responsibility of the population that’s coming in from jail to their immediate
districts or residences, whatever. And with that in mind, their parole officers can more or less help these people
reach a successful completion of their sentence by having immediacy, what we have here, but is so lacking in the
general parole population as a whole.

WOLF: Right. Right.

JACKSON:
The word I was looking for is “accountability” that the parolee has when he knows that we’re all in communication
with each other. They can’t lie. If we have a problem with someone, and the world is so small …

CAMACHO:
For this one little community, this one little area and this one project going on here, I really think it does more
or less give a model to what should be the new 21st century view of criminal intervention and changes in social behavior.

BERNSTEIN: About the program, one of the big things is the continued
innovation in the program. The program started originally with a very small amount of people in it, very small case
loads, all non-violent. We now have people who are violent. And for the first time, we’re now taking women.

So there is constant innovations within the program itself, and the one thing that I think needs
to be worked on is jobs, jobs, jobs, and the community being open to hiring people.

WOLF:
Thank you, all, so much for taking the time to tell me about your work here at the Harlem Parole Reentry Court.

I’ve
been talking with the Administrative Law Judge Grace Bernstein from the Division of Parole, and Senior Parole Officer
Alfonso Camacho, and the reentry coordinator, Nigel Jackson; and the deputy project director of the Harlem Community
Justice Center, John MeGaw. Thanks so much to all of you.

And to learn more about the Harlem
Parole Reentry Court, you can visit the Center for Court Innovation’s website at www.courtinnovation.org. At
the bottom of the home page you’ll see a tab labeled “reentry” and you can subscribe to the New Thinking
podcast through iTunes or you can visit us on the podcast page at www.courtinnovation.org. I’m Rob Wolf, director
for communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Thanks for listening.

July 2008

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