As I hope our website makes clear, the Center for Court Innovation is a unique institution. We are a team of researchers, planners, technologists, attorneys, social workers and others who have come together to advance a simple idea: that the justice system has an important role to play in aiding victims, changing the behavior of offenders and improving public safety in our neighborhoods.
We are committed to helping judges and other key players—defense attorneys, probation officials, prosecutors, clerks, police officers, and community groups—test new approaches to the delivery of justice. And we are committed to the value of rigorous research. We use data to measure the effectiveness of new programs, documenting what works, what doesn’t and why.
In short, the Center stands at the crossroads of action and reflection, doing and thinking. Our job is to dream up new ideas and then go out and test them in the real world.
We currently operate more than a dozen demonstration projects here in New York, each of which is experimenting with new solutions to difficult problems like drug addiction, mental illness and neighborhood disorder. These range from large-scale reform efforts like the Red Hook Community Justice Center that handle thousands of cases each year to smaller experiments like the Brooklyn Mental Health Court that work intensively with a few dozen offenders at a time. Our projects also cover a wide range of topic areas, from juvenile delinquency to felony-level domestic violence crime.
What unites all of our projects is an underlying philosophy that we call problem-solving justice. This is the idea that the justice system should do more than simply process cases, it should actively seek to address the problems that bring people to court.
All around us is evidence that the reforms that the Center for Court Innovation promotes are gaining traction. Here are just a few recent snapshots:
- Last year, we celebrated our 10th Anniversary with a celebration at the New York City Bar Association attended by more than 300 people, including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
- The Center’s projects have been featured on the front pages of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and other periodicals.
- By airing "Red Hook Justice," a documentary film about the Red Hook Community Justice Center, PBS brought problem-solving justice into living rooms across the country.
- With the help of the U.S. Department of Justice, we've embarked upon a major study of failure—criminal justice reforms that did not achieve their goals. The idea here is to promote experimentation by creating a climate that acknowledges the realities of trial and error.
- The New Press published Good Courts, the first-ever trade book about problem-solving courts. The book is being used in graduate schools and has been reviewed in Judicature, New York Law Journal, Criminal Justice, British Journal of Criminology, and other publications.
- The U.S. Department of Justice has affirmed its commitment to problem-solving justice by supporting 10 experimental projects around the country. The Center was named the official technical assistance provider for this initiative.
- New York State Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye highlighted the contributions of the Center for Court Innovation in her most recent State of the Judiciary address.
As proud as we are of these accomplishments, we are not resting on our laurels. In recent months, we have piloted a class on problem-solving justice at Fordham Law School. We have worked with criminal justice officials in South Africa, China, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, Japan, Canada, England, and other countries, helping them plan their own problem-solving innovations. And we have opened perhaps our most ambitious experiment to date—Bronx Community Solutions, an effort to bring the community court model of combining punishment and help to non-violent offenders in the Bronx.
As these projects suggest, we are interested in exploring the boundaries of problem-solving justice, testing the extent to which the ideas that we have pursued here in New York—stronger connections between courts and social service providers, aggressive community engagement strategies, a reliance on data to improve accountability—can be transported to other settings and used outside of the specialized court context.
These are complicated challenges, to be sure, but we look forward to working on them in the days ahead alongside our government and non-profit partners. I will keep you posted as we proceed.
Greg Berman
last updated 2-14-2008 |
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LATEST PUBLICATION
Good Courts: The Case for Problem-Solving Justice
By Greg Berman and John Feinblatt
Good Courts is the first book to describe the problem-solving court movement and features in-depth looks at Center for Court Innovation projects.
Learn more
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