Our new video captures a week in the life of Judge Carroll Kelly and the Miami-Dade County Domestic Violence Court, highlighting efforts to keep victims safe, hold offenders accountable, and coordinate an effective community response to domestic violence.
Across the country, the movement to reduce jail populations and close ageing facilities has scored some notable victories. But where the tide of confinement has receded, it has exposed a significant tension: what to do about the people still behind bars? Can efforts to improve their conditions of confinement be pursued in tandem with work to stem the flow of people into the facilities detaining them?
In 1996, 16-year-old Reginald Dwayne Betts was sentenced to nine years in prison for a carjacking. He spent much of that time reading, and eventually writing. After prison, he went to Yale Law School and published a memoir and three books of poems. But he’s still wrestling with what “after prison” means. This is a conversation about incarceration and the weight of history, both political and personal. Betts's most recent collection of poems is Felon.
The effectiveness of the drug treatment court model has been well-documented in the United States and Canada, and these reports explore applications of the model in Barbados, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Panama, and Trinidad and Tobago. Each country-specific report explores how key components of the model are adapted and offers recommendations for improvement and/or expansion.
What if you brought together prosecutors and people they may have helped to incarcerate for a college seminar behind bars on the criminal justice system, and asked them to produce a list of policy recommendations? That's the premise of a novel experiment in prison education. On New Thinking, hear from Jarrell Daniels, a program graduate, and Lucy Lang, executive director of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution, who conceived of the idea.
Domestic violence cases present challenges to probation departments. Supervising and monitoring offenders requires an understanding not only of the dynamics of domestic violence but the crime’s impact on the entire community. For this episode of In Practice, Rob Wolf speaks with James Henderson, a former probation officer and a consultant with the Battered Women's Justice Project, and Aeron Muckala, a corrections agent for the Minnesota Department of Corrections in Bemidji, Minnesota. They discuss how probation departments are meeting the challenges of these difficult and often high-risk cases
Recognizing the untapped talent of young people like Jhenai, the Brownsville Community Justice Center created the Hub to offer training, cutting-edge tools, and the opportunity to give back to the community.
Based on a national survey and five in-depth case studies, this study seeks to document how restorative approaches are being applied to intimate partner violence across the country. It concludes with a series of guiding principles and recommendations for the field.
Experts and practitioners who attended a roundtable conversation about community justice at the Center for Court Innovation answer the question "What is a Community Court?"
Community service has been a staple of sentencing in the United States for more than 50 years, yet we know surprisingly little about how it's actually being used. In Act One of this episode of New Thinking, an audio snapshot of community service at the Center for Court Innovation. In Act Two, Joanna Weiss of the Fines and Fees Justice Center offers a national perspective on community service, and the troubling findings of two new reports.
