The Allegheny County (Pennsylvania) Mental Health Court has served as a dedicated criminal court docket for defendants with underlying mental health diagnoses since 2001. During the period from 2010 through 2016, this evaluation found mental health court participants had significantly fewer new arrests in the three years following the conclusion of their cases than similar defendants who went through traditional court.
Peacemaking is a traditional Native American approach to justice focused on healing and community restoration, rather than punishment. The Near Westside Peacemaking Project brings this practice to one of Syracuse, New York’s most distressed neighborhoods, offering community members a unique approach to addressing an array of community problems. This report describes the 24-month planning period and the first two years of program implementation, including program structure, goals, caseload, and feedback from participants.
How effective is therapy or treatment when it's used instead of incarceration, and what are the challenges to conducting it inside the coercive context of the criminal justice system? In this episode of New Thinking, host Matt Watkins is joined by clinical psychologist Jacob Ham who works with justice-involved young people affected by trauma, and John Jay College's Deborah Koetzle who evaluates programs across the country intended to help participants rebuild lives outside of the justice system.
Highlights from a public screening and panel discussion of Bill Moyers's 'Rikers: An American Jail,' moderated by New Thinking host, Matt Watkins. Commenting on the film and the future of criminal justice reform are Tina Luongo of the Legal Aid Society, Jill Harris of the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office, and two of the people formerly held on Rikers featured in the film: Barry Campbell of the Fortune Society, and Johnny Perez of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. This episode was originally released in July 2018.
Through conversations with prosecutors, reformers, and public defenders, our New Thinking podcast has been examining the ideas, victories, and challenges of the movement to educate the public about the power of prosecutors and to elect "progressive" district attorneys promising to overhaul the justice systems they're inheriting.
As a defense attorney, Larry Krasner sued the Philadelphia police upwards of 75 times. Then, in late 2017, he was elected D.A. in a landslide. As part of our series on the power of prosecutors, Krasner explains why he has little patience for compromise in a city whose justice system is "an outlier in a country that is an outlier."
Explore the 25-year history of Midtown Community Court as the nation’s first community court, its impact on the justice landscape, and its unique community partnerships, including an emphasis on using arts programming as an alternative to incarceration.
This report provides the results of a regular community survey intended to give voice to the concerns of the people who live and work in the Red Hook neighborhood in southwest Brooklyn, the home of our Red Hook Community Justice Center. This 2016 survey measured citizen perceptions of neighborhood quality of life, public safety, and satisfaction with local criminal justice agencies.
This collection of photographs tells the story of the Midtown Community Court, looking at its first 25 years of operation and tracing its development from groundbreaking experiment to a core component of the New York City criminal justice landscape.
In 2016, Adam Foss, a young prosecutor in Boston, gave a TED Talk on reforming his profession that became a sensation. Today he trains incoming prosecutors in D.A. offices across the country. In the latest episode of our series on prosecutors, Foss says the problem isn't that prosecutors have too much power; it's that no one is teaching them to use it for good.
