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.
The Brooklyn Mental Health Court represents the Center for Court Innovation's commitment to offering treatment rather than incarceration to people with mental illness who have been convicted of a crime. In 2019, the court commemorated the graduation of its thousandth successful participant.
Program descriptions and recommendations stemming from the nine sites involved in the Minority Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. The sites used a variety of means to address youth violence and reduce disparities in access to public health resources. Our process evaluation highlights common implementation challenges, including engaging families, allocating scarce resources, building capacity, and providing culturally-responsive and trauma-informed programming.
Our survey of more than 600 lower-level courts found that while community service is widely used across the country, many courts are adopting an ad hoc approach to issues such as eligibility, mandate lengths, and oversight of outside service programs. Numerous findings also suggest current practices are undercutting community service's potential to act as an alternative to fines and fees. The study ends with a list of recommendations and avenues for further research.
In our study of more than 800 New York City schools, students who were suspended were more likely to incur other negative consequences, including poor academic performance, dropout, and arrest. Suspensions were also disparately applied, influenced by factors such as race, disability, and economic status. Schools with a better overall climate tended to use suspensions more sparingly, and we found positive approaches, such as restorative justice, could greatly improve outcomes for students and school climate alike.
