As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, courthouses across the country have adjusted to doing at least some of their business remotely—with litigants in one place, judges and lawyers in another. This episode of In Practice explores the pros and cons of video conferencing at initial appearances in adult criminal court from the perspective of defense practitioners.
Abusive partner intervention programs traditionally work to reduce recidivism and increase accountability. In this podcast, Juan Carlos Areán from our partner Futures Without Violence, speaks with Terri Strodthoff, executive director of the Alma Center, and Steve Halley, director of the Family Peace Initiative, about the growing recognition of the need to address underlying trauma in work with people who cause harm.
Restorative justice is about repairing harm. But for Black Americans, what is there to be restored to? This special episode of New Thinking features a roundtable with eight members of our Restorative Justice in Schools team. They spent three years embedded in five Brooklyn high schools—all five schools are overwhelmingly Black, and all five had some of the highest suspension rates in New York City.
Adam Foss wants to transform the justice system—from within. A former Boston prosecutor who rose to prominence on a TED Talk criticizing his colleagues for using their power more often to jail than to help people, Foss is the executive director of Prosecutor Impact. It trains prosecutors across the country in line with Foss's vision for the profession. But as protests continue against the killing of African Americans by police, other voices are advocating far more radical strategies.
In the U.S., six to seven and a half million people are victims of stalking every year. Nearly one in six women and one in 17 men have experienced stalking victimization at some point in their lifetimes. In this episode of In Practice, Rob Wolf discusses stalking in the context of domestic violence and intimate partner violence with national expert Jennifer Landhuis, director of the Stalking Prevention, Awareness, and Resource Center (SPARC). They talk about what stalking is, why it's so dangerous, and what's being done among advocates and legal practitioners to address it.
Seven students in our Restorative Justice in Schools Program won NPR's 2020 student podcast competition, out of thousands of entries from across the country. On the winning episode, the students—part of the Men in Color after-school program at their Brooklyn high school—discuss climate change and environmental racism. They created the episode after participating in the New York City youth climate march, where they interviewed people about how black communities intersect with climate justice.
“Climate change is racial injustice,” the students conclude.
The death of George Floyd after a white police officer pressed his knee to Floyd's neck for close to nine minutes has triggered a wave of anger and revulsion. Vincent Southerland, the executive director of the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at NYU, compares the brazen nature of Floyd's death to a lynching. The furor comes in the midst of a pandemic itself exacerbated by racism. How will COVID-19, and the reaction to police violence, affect the deep racial patterns of the justice system?
With justice systems across the country scrambling to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a lot of talk about what justice is going to look like when the virus ends. But what has the response actually consisted of, and is there any reason to anticipate a "new normal" will emerge? On New Thinking, New York University law professor Rachel Barkow explains her skepticism.
Jails and prisons have quickly emerged as epicenters of the COVID-19 pandemic. As New York City struggled to get people out from behind bars, it turned to a trio of nonprofits to repurpose a successful program on the fly. The urgency of supporting people released abruptly from jail in the midst of a pandemic is clear, but so are the challenges. The experience also raises the question: what happens to criminal justice when the virus ends?
The effects of the coronavirus are not being experienced equally. Whether it’s infection rates, deaths, or job losses, people of low-income and of color are being hit hardest. In New York City, many of those effects are concentrated in communities where public housing is located. Our Neighborhood Safety Initiatives works with public housing residents. On New Thinking, the program's Alicia Arrington explains the challenge, and the response.
