Small Sanities

A Simple Hug

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Thu, 19 May 2022 13:27:00 +0000

I have written about Jonathan Lippman before (see here for example), but it is always good to have another opportunity to give credit where credit is due. At the Center for Court Innovation's 25th anniversary celebration earlier this week, Judge Lippman was honored with a well-deserved lifetime achievement award. Asked to give a short introduction, this is what I said:

What is there to say about Jonathan Lippman that hasn’t already been said?

You don’t need me to tell you about the decades of public service. And you don’t need me to tell you about all of the important causes he has championed, often before they were fashionable: problem-solving justice, bail reform, tax fairness, and so many more.

Instead of talking about Judge Lippman’s grand, public achievements tonight, I want to talk about something small and personal.

You almost certainly won’t remember this judge, but at the end of the long and arduous selection process when I was applying to be the executive director of the Center for Court Innovation back in 2001, after my final interview, you gave me a hug. I was 34 years old at the time. I don’t think a judge had ever hugged me before. But I really needed that hug. I was facing the daunting prospect of following in the footsteps of the great John Feinblatt. I felt like I was in way over my head.

That simple gesture, that single hug, meant the world to me. It told me that you knew of my trepidation, that you had confidence in me, and that you would have my back going forward.

Whenever people ask me about the secret of Judge Lippman’s success, I remember that hug. I think it speaks to two of his greatest qualities: the personal touch he brings to everything he does and his willingness to take a calculated risk every now and then.

Judge Lippman, speaking on behalf of all the people who, over the years, have been on the receiving end of a hug from you, whether real or metaphorical, I thank you for all that you have given to us, to the city and state of New York, and to the pursuit of justice in this country.

Deep Cut: Jeremy Travis

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 12:55:00 +0000

In recent months, I have been spending a good chunk of my time on a project for the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, "At the Crossroads," that has involved interviewing a series of experts on community violence in New York City. The latest interview in the series was particularly rich -- I sat down with Jeremy Travis of Arnold Ventures to talk about his career, which has included stops at the Vera Institute of Justice, the NYPD, the US Department of Justice, the Urban Institute, John Jay College, and more. Over the course of a half century (!) Jeremy has played a role in some of the most significant criminal justice reform efforts of our times -- and interacted with a host of important figures. I talked with him about some of these luminaries, but a lot of this conversation ended up getting cut from the final piece just for reasons of length. I present it here as a deep cut for hard-core criminal justice nerds.

Berman: One part of your career that I know less well is the time you spent working for Mayor Ed Koch. What did you do for Koch?

Travis: I was a special advisor to the mayor, brought onto his staff in his third term.

Berman: Not always the best term…

Travis: Yes, the third term is typically thought of as the least productive of a three-term mayor. At the time, Koch said he wanted to bring in fresh blood and new ideas. I was part of that. I did not have a portfolio. The understanding was that I would work on issues that were complicated. So those included a great list of topics: charter revision, immigration reform, education reform, race relations. We did a total revamp of the Human Rights Commission, which I'm very proud of. So it was an eclectic mix of topics. But the joy of working for Ed Koch was working for Ed Koch -- watching him do his work, being part of his inner circle.

Berman: How did his personality behind closed doors differ, if at all, from his public persona?

Travis: It didn't. I think that's why New Yorkers loved him so much. He was who he was. He always asked, “How am I doing?” I think he was just a great mayor. I'm a big admirer of his. I learned a lot from him, particularly in terms of fortitude. He had great strength in his convictions. He assembled great talent. A lot of people who worked for Koch are still close colleagues of mine. It was a great team. Those three years working for him were just electric.

Berman: So then you go to work for the NYPD?

Travis: No, there was an interstitial period when I worked for now-Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Berman: What were you doing for him?

Travis: Then-Congressman Schumer was rising through the ranks. He asked to be the chair of the criminal justice subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee. This was in 1990 when crime was rising. Chuck very wisely said, “How can I have a voice on crime policy?” He looked around for somebody to be his chief counsel. I was available because Koch had lost his bid for a fourth term. I signed on to the Schumer team and was immediately very unhappy.

Berman: Why?

Travis: The pace of Congress did not meet my preferred tempo. I couldn't move things quickly. I was commuting back and forth, between New York and Washington. It was tough on my wife and kids. So I did a U-turn and came back to join the new administration at the police department under Lee Brown. It was a chance to get back into policing. (I had been special counsel to Police Commissioner Ben Ward before going to City Hall.) I became the deputy commissioner for legal matters at the NYPD.

...

Berman: You talked about the generation coming up. I want to talk about the generation that just passed. At the risk of being maudlin, in the last couple of years, we've seen Joe Hynes, Judith Kaye, Herb Sturz, Bob Keating, Herman Goldstein, George Kelling, Michael Smith and a number of other important criminal justice figures pass away. These were all important people to me in way or another. I also know that two other important people for you recently passed: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Janet Reno. I'm wondering whether there are one or two of these figures that you find yourself wishing we could hear from right now as we try to make sense of the world?

Travis: Of the people that you listed, I had the incredible privilege of working directly for Reno, Ginsburg, and Sturz. I consider the three of them to be very important figures in my life. They literally helped me to become who I am today. I would also add Ben Ward to that list, although he passed away a few years ago. I think about all of them from time to time.

With Janet Reno, her watchword was to do the right thing. So many times, in so many meetings she said, “Do the right thing.” That sense of integrity, and having a backbone, I hear that voice in my head every once in a while.

Justice Ginsburg, in her opinions, in her work as a litigator, and in her public discussions, always foregrounded the people at the center of any given controversy. She would always talk about the person who came to the court asking for justice. For me, that's a reminder, as we get lost in some of the theoretical or empirical or historical questions, to just remember that it's always about the people.

Ben Ward, I put on my list as being one of the great public servants. He was larger than life, willing to take risks, and willing to be outspoken. He was willing to buck conventional wisdom. But he really cared about the role of the police in our city. In particular, the relationship between the police and the black community was his life's work.

Then finally, Herb. Herb was, in many ways, closest to me for the longest period of time, as friend and mentor and inspiration. Going back to my time at Vera, and up until a couple of weeks before his death, we were in close contact. I always valued his wisdom and his brilliance as a social entrepreneur. He was always able to think about the next big idea, of what might be possible and how to respond to some way that the world was doing harm to people. He always wanted to test new ideas.

All of these people are very much part of my history and very much part of the way that I think about things.

Liberty

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Fri, 11 Jun 2021 14:02:00 +0000

I have been lucky to have had a number of important work partnerships over the years – colleagues and bosses and co-authors that I have worked with closely on big projects and challenging assignments.

No work partnership I have ever had has been more long-lasting or more productive than my relationship with Liberty Aldrich. I worked with Liberty for 18 years at the Center for Court Innovation. These were years of enormous change and growth which saw the agency expand its reach to every borough in New York City as well as locations across the country and around the world.

My time at the Center ended last year. Liberty’s will end shortly as she transitions to a new role as a New York City Family Court judge.

I have so many memories of our work together – award ceremonies and tricky HR decisions and trips to Congress and brainstorming sessions and so many more besides – but when I think of Liberty the first thing that pops into my head is a moment that occurred 5 or 6 years ago. I can’t remember precisely what we were working on, but I remember clearly Liberty’s exasperation with me on the day she came into my office and offered this withering assessment: “You aren’t tough enough to be a nonprofit executive.”

Breaking down this conversation later that night with my wife, I realized that, as is so often the case with her, Liberty’s message to me had multiple layers.

On the surface, Liberty was, of course, criticizing me. This was not atypical. Liberty likes a good argument and believes in speaking truth to power. (To her credit, she gets as well as she gives.)

But one level down, I could discern something else: concern for me. Liberty was communicating that I was worthy of her time and interest, that she cared enough about me to notice how I was doing. I never doubted that I mattered to her. This was hardly unique to me. Liberty is a keen observer who thinks deeply about all of the people in her orbit and tries to arrange the world so that everyone can thrive.

But as I excavated further, I think I ultimately found the true purpose of Liberty’s remark to me. At the most basic level, Liberty was exhorting me to do better on behalf of the people and the cause that we were trying to advance. This is Liberty’s not-so secret superpower and the engine for her remarkable record of creativity and accomplishment: she is driven by a deep and abiding commitment to achieving justice on behalf of the voiceless, the marginalized, and the unrepresented. The name of one of the projects that Liberty helped give birth to at the Center speaks volumes: Poverty Justice Solutions. That's what Liberty was and is about.

Liberty’s moral compass and sense of purpose are what has made her such an effective and inspiring leader -- not just at the Center for Court Innovation, but in her work creating LIFT and in other settings. I have no doubt these same qualities will make her an excellent judge.

I miss having Liberty as a colleague but am blessed to have her as a friend.

"It was hard to say goodbye"

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 17:11:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to speak with Sister Paulette LoMonaco, the former head of Good Shepherd Services, for the column on leadership that I am writing for New York Nonprofit Media.

Sister Paulette is a giant in the field of New York City social services. She casts a large shadow. A lot of people are intimidated by her. I can say this with some authority, because I used to find her intimidating. (Being a nun has something to do with this, of course.)

As I have gotten to know her a little better over the years, though, I have seen that Sister Paulette is someone with a strong BS detector and a healthy sense of humor. I'm hoping that some of this came across in my interview with her.

Here are some outtakes from the session that didn't make the final piece:

Berman: You won’t remember because I was just a pipsqueak, but you and I first met more than 25 years ago in Red Hook when I was working on creating the Red Hook Community Justice Center. After some initial skepticism, Good Shepherd Services welcomed us to the neighborhood and was enormously helpful in establishing the Justice Center. So I guess I wanted to start just by thanking you for that.

LoMonaco: I do remember. You know what, when we moved into Red Hook in 1980, there weren’t a lot of nonprofits there. So when you came to the neighborhood, it was great to have a partner. And I do remember the students from the high school that helped you create the youth court in Red Hook, which was a wonderful experience for them. In the years since then, we have also worked hand in glove with RHI (the Red Hook Initiative). I think we've all benefited from the partnership.

Berman: When you stepped up to be the executive director of Good Shepherd Services, did you think you would be in the position for decades? What was your mindset at that point?

LoMonaco: I don't know if I really had anything in mind other than just hoping that I could pull this off. I loved the agency. I loved our mission. I wanted to expand on Sister Mary Paul Janchill's vision, which was in the direction of more community-based programming. I just took a deep breath and moved into it.

Berman: Do you buy into the importance of birth order? You are the oldest of seven girls. Do you think that being an older sister played any role in your becoming an executive director?

LoMonaco: Yes, it probably did. In a way, I was used to taking care of people. That's why operating a residential program felt like coming home to me.

Berman: Were you happy with how your leave taking went? Was there anything you would've done differently with the benefit of hindsight?

LoMonaco: I received tremendous recognition and it was hard to say goodbye. Then immediately, I found other things to do, because I recognized that you can't leave such a high-power job and do nothing. I had a life planned out for me after I left, but then COVID interrupted.

Berman: How do you like working on Zoom?

LoMonaco: Oh, I like Zoom. I think it has brought us a new level of connectedness and transparency. For example, there would be times when a limited number of people would be able to fly to a place to participate in a meeting. Now, with Zoom, it's open to everyone. I think Zoom has really increased our equity ability.

Berman: As you look back on your career, what are you most proud of?

LoMonaco: I guess I'm proud of the impact that Good Shepherd has made in moving public policy and creating programs that are really responsive to the needs of children and families. Going back to before my time, we were among the very first to open a preventive services program, before the Child Welfare Reform Act was passed. I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to be a part of moving the system that cares for children and families.

Kindness and Accountability

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:13:00 +0000

I have contributed a short essay to a new book called Humane Justice that looks at the role that compassion plays in the criminal justice system. I chose to write about one of my favorite books from last year -- The City Game by Matthew Goodman. I have pasted my contribution, which is entitled "Kindness and Accountability: Lessons from the City College Basketball Scandal in New York," below, but I encourage you to check out the complete book, which contains a broad range of essays by justice system practitioners, advocates, and those who have spent time behind bars. Special thanks to Khulisa UK, the nonprofit organization that helped to put together the collection.

* * *

The City Game by Matthew Goodman is a book about basketball in New York City that should be required reading for anyone interested in thinking about the meaning of justice. The setting may be grounded in a specific historical time and place, but the questions the book raises are universal: How should government respond when important social values are transgressed? To what extent does context explain, and even dictate, behavior? Or are we ultimately responsible for our own misdeeds as individuals?

In 1950, City College of New York (CCNY) were the national champions of college basketball in the United States. This was an exceptional achievement: City College was regarded as a prestigious academic institution, not an athletic powerhouse. Charging no tuition to those who met its rigorous entrance requirements, the school attracted many of the best low-income students in New York City. The CCNY basketball team was entirely comprised of Black and Jewish students – a rarity in an era of discriminatory Jim Crow laws and de facto quota systems that limited the enrollment of Jews at many universities.

Unfortunately, the CCNY basketball team is remembered today less for their prowess on the court and more for their involvement in scandal: the entire starting five were convicted of taking bribes from gamblers to influence the outcomes of their games.

The City Game tells this story in absorbing detail. It catalogs the shame and guilt experienced by the participating players, all of whom were young men from modest backgrounds. They clearly knew that what they were doing was wrong.

They were judged harshly in the court of public opinion. For example, their coach, Nat Holman, blamed the scandal on the players’ moral deficiency: “the youngsters lacked the moral fiber to make a decision when they were faced with temptation, when those unscrupulous gamblers approached them.”

On the other hand, the players’ crimes were not isolated incidents: they were part of an endemic citywide problem. According to Goldman:

Cops were on the take everywhere in the neighborhoods in which the players had grown up, the crooked cop as much of a local fixture as the bookie taking bets in the pool hall…When the players got into trouble with the law, everyone understood that their strongest hopes lay not in an attorney who was legally astute but one was politically well connected…The corruption was not abstract: it was both intimate and pervasive, a rotten smell that seemed to hang in the air, seeping into all aspects of [the players’] lives, reminding them always that this was the way things were done in the city.

As Goodman describes, the players paid a high price for their crimes. After pleading guilty, all of them were effectively blackballed from playing in the National Basketball Association. All of them suffered public humiliation. Their lives were forever altered for the worse.

This was particularly true of Ed Warner, the only member of the CCNY team who ended up serving time behind bars. It is perhaps no coincidence that Warner was also African-American. Warner, who had engaged in minor misbehavior as a juvenile, served six months for his role in the CCNY scandal. Years later, he would serve still more time after pleading guilty to selling heroin.

Was justice served in the case of Ed Warner and the other CCNY players? Were their life trajectories improved by their engagement with the American justice system? The City Game suggests otherwise. The portrait the book paints is of a justice system focused on retribution at the expense of goals like rehabilitation and restoration.

In the years since the CCNY scandal, the politics of criminal justice in the US have taken several twists and turns. As crime rose in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, conservative voices were largely ascendant, arguing for stiffer penalties for criminal behavior. A massive increase in the use of incarceration followed.

More recently, as crime rates have decreased, liberal advocates have begun to dominate the public debate, focusing attention on the underlying causes of crime, including inequality and racism, and arguing for more lenient responses. Their arguments have been bolstered by a number of high-profile injustices perpetrated against African-Americans, including cases where individuals were killed by police officers in dubious circumstances.

The creative tension between the liberal and the conservative tradition is likely a permanent feature of the American criminal justice landscape – advocates of law and order will always compete with bleeding-heart liberals in the marketplace of ideas. But in recent years, there has been some movement in the US toward synthesizing the two traditions -- to acknowledge that justice demands a combination of kindness and accountability.

Signs of this synthesis can be found in a number of different places. For example, a group of prominent Republicans has launched Right on Crime, a campaign to reduce American reliance on prisons that they view as expensive and ineffective. Another example is the US Department of Justice’s effort to promote “evidence-based programs,” which seeks to bring a level of rigor to the business of investing in rehabilitative programming.

Perhaps the most dynamic effort to synthesize the liberal and conservative traditions in American criminal justice has been the emergence of problem-solving courts across the country. These programs – which include drug courts, mental health courts, community courts, and others – seek to reduce the use of incarceration by expanding the use of alternatives like drug treatment, mental health counseling, and community restitution. New York City has been at the forefront of problem-solving justice in the US, pioneering the community court model and, more recently, investing in the spread of opioid intervention courts.

New York has changed in many ways since the days of the CCNY basketball scandal. College basketball no longer dominates the sporting scene. The influence of organized crime is dramatically diminished. Perhaps most important, the justice system has undergone a cultural shift, moving away from the assembly-line and toward a more problem-solving brand of justice. It is too late for Ed Warner and his CCNY teammates, but thousands of New Yorkers are benefitting from this new approach to justice, which acknowledges the harms caused by criminal behavior without resorting to overly punitive responses, like incarceration, that can do long-term damage to individual defendants, their families and their communities.

Readings

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Mon, 14 Dec 2020 17:06:00 +0000

One of the silver linings of the Covid pandemic for me has been a significant increase in the time I have been able to devote to reading. In 2020, I basically doubled the number of books that I typically read in a year. (The photo above offers a preview of what I plan to read in 2021.)

As you will see below, my taste runs toward non-fiction. This list offers a pretty accurate gauge of my interests at the moment – soccer, pop music, and race figure prominently. I also have devoted a fair amount of my reading hours to trying to make sense of recent political and intellectual trends.

1. Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21^st Century — Jessica Bruder

2. The Fifth Risk — Michael Lewis

This book looks at the damage done to federal agencies by inattention, bordering on contempt, during the early years of the Trump administration. I found Lewis’ depiction of decent, hard-working, and basically non-partisan government officials surprisingly moving.

3. The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars — Meghan Daum

I must confess to sharing a fair amount of Daum’s Gen-X angst as she surveys the current intellectual landscape.

4. Leap: Leaving a Job With No Plan B — Tess Vigeland

5. The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team — Matthew Goodman

A fascinating exploration of corruption in New York City that reads like the best fiction. If I could write only one book on this list, I would probably choose this one. I was inspired to write about The City Game for a forthcoming collection of essays about the role of kindness in the criminal justice system.

6. State of the Union — Nick Hornby

7. Professor Berman: The Last Lecture of Minnesota's Greatest Public Historian — Hy Berman and Jay Weiner

I’m not related to Hy Berman, but I married into a Minnesota family, so I enjoyed this memoir by one of state’s leading public intellectuals.

8. The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics — Mark Lilla

9. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis — J.D. Vance

10. Thierry Henry: Lonely at the Top — Phillipe Auclair

11. Famous Men Who Never Lived — K Chess

Thanks to my friend Rob for this recommendation from his great science fiction podcast.

12. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World — David Epstein

13. Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt — Kirstin Hersh

14. Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics — Jonathan Wilson

15. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind — Yuval Noah Harari

16. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now — Jaron Lanier

My wife insisted that everyone in our family read this book.

17. The Mixer: The Story of Premier League Tactics, From Route One to False Nines — Michael Cox

A history of the British Premier League through the prism of tactics. I particularly enjoyed the passages describing a time (so unlike the present) when Arsenal were good at football.

18. The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy — Albert Murray

19. Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution — Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

Provides valuable context for the current fashion of anti-racism and implicit bias training.

20. The Riddle of the Sands — Erskine Childers

One of the first ever spy novels. I didn’t understand most of this book’s references to European geography and nautical terminology, but I still found it pretty compelling.

21. Long Walk Home: Reflections on Bruce Springsteen — Eds. Jonathan Cohen and June Skinner Sawyers

22. All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can’t Save Black America — John McWhorter

23. Intimations — Zadie Smith

24. Walls Come Tumbling Down: Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone, Red Wedge — Daniel Rachel

An oral history of British musical protest movements from the 1970s and 80s. This book sparked a summer of listening to The Specials non-stop, much to the chagrin of the rest of my family.

25. Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought — Jonathan Rauch

26. 75 Years of Marvel: From the Golden Age to the Silver Screen — Roy Thomas

A gift from my parents. An absolutely beautiful book made by Taschen.

27. Heads You Lose — Lisa Lutz and David Hayward

28. East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity"— Phillipe Sands

Part of my family traces its origins to the city of Lviv, where much of this book takes place. Somehow Sands manages to make a book about legal scholarship into a gripping page-turner -- no small feat.

29. We Need to Talk: A Memoir About Wealth — Jennifer Risher

30. The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed and Happiness — Morgan Housel

I haven’t read a ton of books about personal finance, but this is the best of the bunch. Recommended for those without a particular aptitude for numbers or money.

31. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations — Christopher Lasch

This book was written in the 1970s, well before the emergence of social media and the collapse of many American civic institutions, but much of it feels like it could have been written yesterday.

32. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents — Isabel Wilkerson

33. What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era — Carlos Lozada

34. The Beatles Anthology – The Beatles

Another rock music oral history, this time the four members of the Beatles talking about what it was like to experience Beatlemania first-hand.

35. Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country – Shelby Steele

Guarding Against Cynicism

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Mon, 05 Oct 2020 18:02:00 +0000

One of the reasons that I stepped down from running the Center for Court Innovation earlier this year is that I found myself edging closer and closer to becoming a cynic. I don't think this is all that unusual -- over time, many people in the nonprofit sector find themselves moving from idealism to pragmatism and then to cynicism.

I first started thinking about the dangers of cynicism a few years ago when I was asked to contribute a chapter to a book about Herb Sturz. (For those who don't know him, Herb founded the Vera Institute of Justice in the 1960s and went on to an illustrious career that included stints working for the Koch administration, the New York Times, and Open Society Foundations.)

This is an excerpt of what I wrote about Herb, who is more than 30 years older than me:

A few years ago, I participated in meetings convened by Mayor Bill de Blasio's transition team to review potential job candidates for public safety positions in the administration. Herb also attended, along with a few dozen other people.

The meetings were long and it was unclear how much the group's feedback would inform the decision-making process. I found it a challenge to stay engaged.

When my mind began to wander, I looked toward Herb. I wondered how many similar meetings he had attended across his career. How many different probation commissioners (and mayors) had he seen come and go? Surely he was experiencing the same sense of ennui that I was.

But no. When I made eye contact with Herb from across the table, what I saw was not boredom or cynicism or despair. What I saw instead was someone who was fully engaged with the task at hand. It was pretty clear in that moment that he did indeed care more than everyone else at the table.

This is as close as I have come to putting my finger on the secret of Herb's success.

Over the last several months, I have interviewed a variety of non-profit leaders for New York Nonprofit Media. The executives I have talked to represent the diversity of the sector: big organizations and small organizations, advocacy groups and service delivery groups, old agencies and emerging agencies.

I can’t speak to what these folks are like behind closed doors, but I can say that they all seem to have managed to avoid becoming cynics. To a person, each of the non-profit leaders I have spoken with has communicated a commitment to using their powers to improve the world, even in the face of daunting obstacles. I have found these conversations a helpful antidote to the pervasive pessimism that seems afloat in the world at the moment.

But don't take my word for it -- check out the interviews I have done so far:

Jennifer Jones Austin, FPWA

Meg Barnette, Nonprofit New York

Herb Sturz, Vera Institute of Justice

Roundtable: The Post-COVID Nonprofit

Roundtable: Responding to Race and COVID-19

Emma Jordan-Simpson, Fellowship of Reconciliation

Fatima Shama, Fresh Air Fund

John Raskin, Riders Alliance

Colvin Granum, Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation

Phoebe Boyer, Children's Aid

Wayne Ho, Chinese-American Planning Council

Shaw Brothers

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 22:02:00 +0000

One of the ways I have been keeping busy and maintaining my sanity during the current pandemic has been watching kung-fu films, with a special focus on the movies produced by the Shaw Brothers Studio in Hong Kong during the 1970s and early 1980s.

What is compelling about these films?

The first thing that must be acknowledged upfront is that these are not great films in the conventional sense. They were made quickly and relatively cheaply – at their height, Shaw Brothers cranked out more than 20 films per year. The acting isn’t exactly subtle. The comedy tends toward the broad (and occasionally the offensive). Perhaps because of the language barrier, the scripts somehow manage to be both simple and difficult to follow at the same time. I watch most of the films with the sound off in order to eliminate the bad dubbing into English and the often-oppressive sound effects.

Despite all of these negatives, the Shaw Brothers kung-fu films make for incredibly enjoyable viewing. For me, their greatness resides in the following:

The Ensemble – Like the classic Hollywood studios, Shaw Brothers kept a cohort of actors under contract and used them frequently to get their money’s worth. The Shaw Brothers kung-fu films feature what amounts to an ensemble cast, with the same dozen or so supporting actors rotating through playing different roles in each film. Every time Kara Wai pops up in a film, for example, she brings a little bit of joy with her, kind of like seeing an old friend at a reunion. Other actors that always bring a smile to my face when they appear include Lo Lieh and Wang Lung Wei, who often play baddies; it is a particular pleasure on those few occasions when they are drafted to play good guys.

The Sets -- Perhaps driven by cost concerns, the majority of the Shaw Brothers films seem to have been shot on sets rather than on location. Somehow, this works to the benefit of the films, giving them a certain surreal, timeless quality that suits the stories they tell, which tend toward the mythic and the historical. (The Shaw Brothers films are a bit like the original Star Trek series in this way.) The films may not be expensive, but they are consistently interesting to look at, full of bright colors, elaborate architecture, and funky costumes.

The Cultural Similarities and Differences – Critics of toxic masculinity be forewarned: kung-fu films have a lot in common with American Westerns. Almost every movie revolves around themes of honor and revenge. Conflicts are almost exclusively resolved through violence. The old line often (mis) attributed to John Wayne would apply to most of the kung-fu heroes: “A man’s got to do what he’s got to do.” Typically this means paying back dozens of adversaries in the third act for crimes committed against the hero’s family or village or martial arts club in the first act.

While they echo Hollywood movie conventions, the Shaw Brothers movies are different in many ways. Here the history that matters is Chinese history. Shaolin monks feature prominently, so many of the films contain a light dusting of Buddhist philosophy. The heroes often extol an ethic of modesty and a belief in the virtues of discipline and difficult practice. The films are exceedingly chaste – I can’t remember a single public display of affection off the top of my head. And they are almost always efficient: after 90 minutes, the films typically end immediately after the climactic battle with a freeze-frame shot – no valedictory speech, no epilogue, no nothing.

The Choreography – Kung-fu films are action films and this is where the Shaw Brothers movies really shine. In an era before computer effects, fight scenes had to be carefully scripted and rehearsed in advance. The Shaw Brothers’ films were nothing if not exceptionally well-choreographed. It is a cliché to say that martial arts action is basically a form of dance, but I can’t think of a better way to describe what happens in these films.

No action hero from the Shaw Brothers canon is more graceful, more charming, or more athletic than Gordon Liu, who is a beloved figure among kung-fu fans but never crossed over into the Bruce Lee-Jet Li-Jackie Chan pantheon in terms of mainstream name recognition. All of his films are worth checking out, but these are my favorites:

Dirty Ho – Liu plays a prince who, for reasons that are still obscure to me after having seen the film twice, decides to pretend that he has no martial arts skills. This leads to a number of remarkable set pieces where Liu must evade attackers without revealing his prowess.

Return to the 36^th Chamber – The 36^th Chamber of Shaolin is probably Liu’s most famous film, but I actually prefer the sequel, which allows Liu to show some of his comedic skills.

Martial Club – The story of two rival martial arts clubs ends with a claustrophobic battle in an increasingly narrow alleyway between Liu and Wang Lung Wei. A rare film that doesn’t culminate in massive bloodshed.

Challenge of the Masters – Another film that focuses on a rivalry among martial arts clubs. It ends on a lovely grace note with Liu showing compassion and forgiveness to his main rival.

Clan of the White Lotus – This is almost a feminist film. Liu faces perhaps his most formidable rival – Lo Lieh’s Pai Mei – who defeats Liu on three separate occasions. Liu only succeeds in the end when he is taught a novel brand of kung-fu – the embroidery technique -- by Kara Wei.

Humility, Hope & Nuance

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 18:19:00 +0000

Last week, my younger daughter graduated from high school. It was, to say the least, an unusual graduation, taking place entirely online. In an effort to replicate at least a smidgen of the typical pomp and circumstance, my daughter asked me to write her a graduation speech. This is what I delivered:

Commencement speeches are a tough genre. It is extremely difficult to offer up anything even remotely original. Everything has been said before, usually many times over.

The world is your oyster…Follow your passion…The generations before you have screwed things up so we need you to help fix the world…Blah blah blah.

Instead of repeating these clichés, I want to encourage you to embrace three simple values: humility, hope, and nuance.

Humility

First, humility. You have probably noticed that the world is pretty messed up right now. Many of you will be understandably outraged by the continued existence of poverty, oppression, and violence, among other urgent problems.

Here’s the bad news: the odds are very slim that you are going to solve these problems.

It is estimated that over 100 billion people have come before you. I’m here to tell you that a great many of them were not morons or racists or indifferent to the suffering of others. Indeed, quite a few were geniuses who sought to solve the problems they saw all around them. They did not succeed for a simple reason: the world does not easily conform to our dreams and desires, however noble they may be. Too many things can get in the way, including bad luck and our own propensity for self-sabotage through error or avarice or other means.

So I encourage you to proceed with humility. I encourage you to learn from the partial successes of those who have preceded you. And I encourage you to set realistic expectations for yourself, your peers, and the institutions that you are a part of.

Hope

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that while you might not eradicate problems that have been with us for millennia, you almost certainly will change the world.

I know there is nothing that young people love more than an older person telling them how different the world was back in the day. But please indulge me just for a minute, because the political, technological, and cultural changes that have occurred since I was born in 1967 have been nothing less than staggering.

This is important to underline because there are those who will tell you that nothing has changed, that we have made no progress. So, to pick just a few things off the top of my head: when I was born, the following would have been difficult, if not impossible, to conceive: the Internet, marriage equality, a black President, female Supreme Court justices, the winding-down of the Soviet Union, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the reduction of murders in New York City, and the birth of hip-hop.

I could go on, but you get the picture. I would argue that these developments amount to far more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Lord knows, there are plenty of dragons left to slay. But let’s acknowledge and celebrate the battles that we have won. These victories should give us hope that we can in fact make the world a better, less cruel place in the days to come.

Nuance

Speaking of dragons, let’s talk about our current propensity to find them lurking in every corner.

Now, sometimes the world does cough up genuine villains. But the truth is that there are very few Hitlers out there. Mostly what the world offers us are complicated characters.

Take for example a guy that I once met on a train going down to Washington DC – Craig Newmark. Seemed like a nice enough guy. It was only afterwards, when I went home and Googled his name, that I figured out that I had spent the past four hours talking to a billionaire.

Anyway, for those who don’t know him, Newmark is the visionary who created Craigslist. His website was one of the original transformative successes of the Internet. For millions of people, Craigslist has been an unalloyed positive, enabling them to make friends, organize events, and save millions of dollars.

But if you talk to the average journalist about Craig Newmark, you are likely to get a very different response. “Craig Newmark has probably done more than anything to destroy newspapers,” wrote The Economist.

You see, even as Craigslist was going about its mission to “restore the human voice to the Internet, in a humane, non-commercial environment,” it was also decimating the business model that supported journalism across the United States. Local newspapers relied on classified advertisements to survive. They simply couldn’t compete with Craigslist. And so we have seen hundreds of local papers go out of business, depriving cities across the country of an important source of information, employment, and connection.

So are Newmark’s critics right? Is he a monster responsible for hastening the decline of professional journalism? Or is he to be celebrated for improving the lives of millions of Craigslist users?

The correct answer is: its complicated.

Seeing the world in black and white is child’s play. Understanding complexity and nuance and figuring out how to navigate the grey areas – that is a sign of true maturity.

Meaning

Aside from the aforementioned villains, I think it is safe to say that most of us want to be good people. But what does it mean to be a good person?

I believe we all have a moral obligation to try to leave the world a better place than we found it. There are a million different ways to accomplish this goal. Those who would tell you differently, those who would tell you that there is only one path to righteousness, should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

So go forth and try to make a contribution, whether through art, or government, or business, or some other avenue. But even as you do, remember to nurture your relationships.

I started out by bemoaning cliché but I want to finish by embracing it. One of my favorite movies is It’s a Wonderful Life – I watch it every New Year’s Eve with my family. The plot is complicated but the moral is simple: the film argues that the key to a good life is the relationships that you create.

In my experience, this simple truth is, well, true: meaning in life comes not from individual accomplishment but from the strength of the connections you make with your relatives, with your friends, and with your larger community, however you choose to define it.

So, congratulations on your graduation. I wish you joy.

Reading List

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Sat, 23 May 2020 17:02:00 +0000

From time to time, people ask me for reading recommendations. One such request came recently with a new wrinkle. My friend said she was looking for stuff to read, but between work and child care she didn't have the time or energy for books -- could I please suggest some essays instead? I sent her the list below, comprised of recent work from some of my favorite writers, plus one golden oldie on football and the law that has stuck with me for years. Most of these essays venture beyond the borders of justice reform, although they all touch on issues -- race, class, technology, political polarization, etc. -- that influence the public debate about justice.

Malcolm Feeley, "How To Think About Criminal Court Reform," Boston University Law Review
"Failure is the norm, not the exception, for both bail reform and diversion, as well as a great many other innovations and practices."

Zadie Smith, "Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction," New York Review of Books
"What would our debates about fiction look like, I sometimes wonder, if our preferred verbal container for the phenomenon of writing about others was not “cultural appropriation” but rather “interpersonal voyeurism” or “profound-other-fascination” or even “cross-epidermal reanimation”?"

Wesley Yang, "Is It OK To Be White"? Tablet
"Liberals think that there’s a way to design a fair system of rules applicable to all people that would induce us to cease judging each other through the lens of the superficial physical traits that mark us off as racially distinct. Postructuralists think that the very idea of a fair system of rules applicable to all is a pernicious mystification disguising the partial interests of the dominant class as universality itself. No such universal position is possible; what remains to be done is the re-engineering of norms, customs, and precedents to favor the marginalized."

Caitlin Flanagan, "They Had It Coming," The Atlantic
"The word entitlement—even in its full, splendid range of meanings—doesn’t begin to cover the attitudes on display...When I was a prep-school college counselor 25 years ago, I thought that whatever madness was whirring through the minds of the parents was a blip of group insanity that would soon abate. It has only gotten more and more extreme."

Thomas Chatterton Wiliams, "An Incoherent Truth," Harper's
"One of the outgrowths of the frenzied, justifiably Trump-panicked moment in which we find ourselves is a profound unease with ambiguity or multidimensionality of any sort—moral, intellectual, ideological, political, artistic. Clarity is what’s most yearned for in times of emergency...That there is weakness instead of strength in viewpoint diversity is presented matter-of-factly, as self-evident truth."

William Pizzi, "Soccer, Football, and Trial Systems," Columbia Journal of European Law

"Our American trial system reflects many of the cultural values encoded in the rules and traditions of professional football: the worship of procedurals, the attempt to rationalize every aspect of the decision-making process, the distrust of spontaneous action, the heavy preference for managerial control over participants, and, above, all the daunting complexity of rules that such a system requires."

Martin Gurri, "2019: The Year Revolt Went Global," The Fifth Wave
"Beyond the oppositional stance, the public in revolt has displayed a singular lack of clarity about its objectives...Pure negation – a loathing of the system and the elites who fatten on it – has taken the place of political doctrine."

Relief Among the Relics

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Wed, 13 May 2020 17:53:00 +0000

I wrote this piece on my current coronavirus coping strategy and posted it on Medium:

How much would you pay for a 2.5 x 3.5 piece of cardboard?

Before you answer, what if affixed to the cardboard was a swatch of clothing from a famous celebrity? Or the celebrity’s signature?

I have been grappling with these questions with increasing urgency over the past two months as I have gone down a seemingly endless rabbit hole: collecting trading cards that contain pieces of memorabilia taken from the garments of professional athletes.

There are plenty of coronavirus narratives out there -- tales of hardship and heroism and people overcoming enormous obstacles to assert our common humanity. This isn’t one of those. This is, instead, a story of intellectual and emotional regression, of seeking (and finding!) comfort in mindless consumerism and nostalgia.

It all started, innocently enough, with a text. Two of my closest friends from high school began regularly checking in with me shortly after the quarantine began. Our correspondence gravitated toward memories of growing up in Washington DC in the 1980s, including the successes and failures of local sports teams like the Bullets and the Redskins. This soon evolved into a daily exchange of photographs of old trading cards featuring athletic heroes like John Riggins and Wes Unseld.

The collection of cards that I retained from my youth was anemic compared to my friends, so I ventured onto eBay in an effort to keep up. There I discovered a vibrant marketplace of trading cards along with a new wrinkle – many of the most attractive cards contained swatches taken from the jerseys of my favorite players.

These so-called “relic cards” are a relatively recent phenomenon. According to the website The Cardboard Connection, the current mania for relic cards has its origins 20 years ago, when one of the leading card manufacturers, the Upper Deck Company, cut up a bat owned by Babe Ruth and placed some of the shards on top of a limited run of cards featuring Ruth’s likeness. The popularity of the Ruth card among collectors meant that all of the other leading card companies soon followed suit.

Today, anyone with some time on their hands can find thousands of relic cards online. Cards with a piece taken from Joe Montana’s facemask. Cards with a swatch from one of Larry Bird’s shoes. Cards with a bit of Nolan Ryan’s glove. Anything that can be affixed to cardboard is fair game, including pieces of towels, Santa hats, and dirt.

You don’t need much time to find relic cards, but you will require some money: typing “LeBron James jersey card” into eBay yields more than a thousand entries, with a top price of a cool $85,000.

I started small, spending five bucks on a card featuring a piece of hardwood floor that Allan Houston, who used to play for the New York Knicks, allegedly trod upon twenty years ago. When it arrived in the mail, I couldn’t believe my good fortune. A little piece of history in my own hands! I placed the card in a protective case and displayed it prominently on the shelf above my desk.

Pleased with myself, I decided to continue shopping, but vowed that I would spend no more than $20 on any single card. Less than a week later, I had blown through this barrier not just once, but repeatedly and consistently. (To date, I have yet to spend more than $40 on a card on eBay, although I maintain that the Lionel Messi jersey card I purchased for this amount would have been a bargain at twice the price.)

Every day, new packages would arrive at my doorstep containing the fruits of my online spending. As the prices got higher and the cards stacked up on my desk, I began to feel like I might have a problem. Why was I spending so much time and money on such meaningless ephemera?

“Maybe you are just missing watching games,” my wife ventured. This was no doubt true. In normal times, I would spend hours in front of the television each week watching my favorite teams play. My relic card collecting was helping to fill the void.

I am not generally prone to self-reflection, but even I could sense that there was something deeper at work.

In a scary time, the relic cards offer me not just distraction but support. First and foremost, they are a tangible reminder of a different, more innocent time. They bring me back to my youth, when my days were spent memorizing basketball statistics rather than contemplating pandemic prevention.

Even as the cards summon me backwards, they also present me with something important in the here and now: a sense of control. In the world of trading cards, I am the master of my own fate, deciding what to purchase and when and how my acquisitions should be displayed on my shelves. The authority that I wield in this domain is a stark contrast to the power that I exercise in the real world, where I do not have permission to venture out of my house except in rare circumstances.

The sense of mastery that I feel when I survey my tiny kingdom of cards is, of course, an illusion. Beyond my walls, things continue to spiral out of control. Still, I am managing to maintain my sanity. What price would you put on your mental health? I can tell you that mine is worth a $20 Jerry Rice jersey card.

Much as I love the card right now, I am also looking forward to a time when I will put it in a box in my closet and forget about it. Some day soon, I hope my Jerry Rice relic card will serve not only as an remnant of his career, but as an artifact from a moment in history that we have all put behind us.

One Fine Day

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 16:00:00 +0000

I became the director of the Center for Court Innovation in the aftermath of 9/11, so it seems somehow fitting that my final days in the position have also involved a major crisis.* While it is sad to end my run on a less-than-festive note, a global health emergency does have a way of putting things in perspective.

Some weeks ago, I went to see American Utopia, a show put together by David Byrne, the former lead singer of Talking Heads. Much to my surprise and chagrin, I found myself moved to tears by the performance. Byrne had assembled a band of a dozen or so musicians of diverse origins (in terms of race, gender, nationality, etc). There was something incredibly powerful about seeing this group function as a team, performing precise choreography and complicated rhythms with style and enthusiasm.

It reminded me of the Center for Court Innovation.

I don’t claim that we are a perfect organization. I don’t claim that we are immune to disorganization or disagreement or any of the other ills that afflict even the best institutions. But, on our best days, the Center is a staggeringly diverse collection of people who have come together to do something difficult and important. And, like the American Utopia band, we do it with our own unique, life-affirming swagger.

The song that made the deepest impression on me during American Utopia was called “One FineDay.” The lyrics suggest that the singer is living through troubled times but that he can see in the distance a city on a hill. He concludes on a hopeful note: “It is not that far, the one fine day.” Check out this version of Byrne singing the song with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus:

Byrne expresses a feeling that is deep in my bones: the goals that we seek – a world where truth, decency, and kindness are ascendant – are not that far away, if we just keep at it.

It has been an incredible honor to serve as director of the Center for Court Innovation for nearly two decades. I step down full of pride at what we have accomplished together -- and full of excitement to see what comes next.

* This is an excerpt of an email that I sent to staff at the Center for Court Innovation earlier this week.

Hail Fellow Well Met

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 16:46:00 +0000

Earlier this week, I started a new column at New York Nonprofit Media devoted to issues of non-profit leadership. The basic idea is to interview a different non-profit CEO each month to talk about the substance of their work, the path they took to their current job, and the management challenges that they are currently tackling.

My first interview was with Wayne Ho, the CEO of the Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC), one of the largest Asian American social service agencies in New York. I’m not close with Wayne but I think of him as a “hail fellow well met” – he is quick with a story and a laugh whenever our paths cross.

When I interviewed Wayne two weeks ago, however, he was all business. My timing was awful – our meeting occurred a few days after a fire had hit one of his programs and in the midst of the coronavirus crisis. Despite all of the distractions, Wayne was exceedingly generous with his time. So much so, that I had plenty of good material that didn’t make it into the final article. Here are a couple of additional excerpts from our conversation, which have been edited for clarity and length. Think of this as a B-side or an outtake from the finished product.

Ho: We're getting more recognition in the mainstream press. We're always in the Chinese press. We're always recognized by immigrant and Asian communities, but we're getting more recognized in mainstream press.

Berman: Just to play devil's advocate for a moment, but why does it matter? Who cares if you are in the mainstream press?

Ho: We need to make sure that the external environment supports us. And one way to do that is getting public recognition from folks outside of our networks or outside of our communities. So whether that's being covered by City & State or New York Nonprofit Media or the New York Times or neighborhood blogs, I think it just helps the organization get recognition, which hopefully then means more resources and support for what we're doing.

Berman: Not all press is good press of course. How do you deal with being criticized?

Ho: I'm okay. I think that I learned early on that if you're making hard decisions, not everybody is going to support you.  I think that there are some longtime allies and supporters of the organization who always want to see positive press about CPC and that’s not always possible.

Berman: Did you fundamentally change the structure of the organization when you took over?

Ho: So much was decentralized because we always wanted as many resources as possible to go to the program level.  As we've been fundraising, I think I've been pretty transparent that we are trying to raise general operating dollars and capacity building funding. I'm trying to build up our central administration. When I joined, we didn't have a formal development team.  We didn't have a communication system. Our fiscal team ran very lean. Our HR team ran lean. Our general counsel was a one-person shop. I wanted to formalize our structure, so I created a C suite structure. And then I made it clear that everyone on the C suite level and the director level has to join in in carrying out our strategic direction while also trying to raise revenue and support.

Part of what I am trying to do is to build more unity in the organization. Not everyone had emails when I started, so communicating was hard.  So we made sure everyone had emails. There wasn't a common orientation.  We didn't have staff meetings. We have 700 staff, and 4,500 home health aides. How do we communicate with everyone, when we have 5,200 people total?  So now we are having more emails, having staff meetings every quarter, having a common orientation so I can communicate to the team.  I have been trying to bring in more systems while supporting those folks who've been here for a long time as well as the new people coming in.

Berman: Have your politics changed over the years?

Ho: I think some report came out a couple of years ago that said the longer you're out of college, the less radical you are.

Berman: Well that stands to reason.

Ho: It stands to reason because you start realizing fiscal realities and political constraints and how negotiations work.  I don't think ideologically or philosophically I've changed my mind, but I think the reality is when I'm the leader of an organization, I have this dual role of looking out for what's best for the organization and its staff. At the same time I have to look at what's best for the communities we serve or represent. While the Venn diagram has a high crossover, it's not always the same.

Problems With "The Problem of Problem-Solving Courts"

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 15:21:00 +0000

Last week, a new article on problem-solving courts came across my radar. Written by Erin R. Collins, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, “The Problem of Problem-Solving Courts,” attempts a revisionist history of problem-solving justice. As I read it, Collins makes three principal arguments against problem-solving courts:

1. “Problem-solving courts also emerged to solve a problem internal to the judicial process itself: a growing sense of judicial dissatisfaction and disempowerment caused by the rise of structured and mandatory sentencing schemes.”

Collins claims (with no empirical evidence) that, essentially, judges across the United States came to feel powerless as a result of sentencing schemes that limited their discretion and have sought to use problem-solving courts to increase their authority.

Despite the lack of supporting data, it is of course possible that mandatory sentencing laws may have been a factor in the rise of problem-solving courts. But, to paraphrase Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride, this doesn’t mean what Collins thinks it means. Collins seems to think that this is a damning indictment of problem-solving courts. It is not. Rather, it is an indication of why they are an important reform movement.

Problem-solving courts first emerged more than 25 years ago in a political moment very different from the one that we currently occupy. This was an era where “tough on crime” rhetoric and policymaking were ascendant. Criminal justice legislation at the state and federal level tended toward strengthening penalties for wrong-doing – mandatory minimums, three-strikes-and-you’re-out, and other such laws.

Problem-solving courts were a response to this reality. In a hostile political environment, they sought to push the justice system away from strictly punitive responses to criminal behavior and toward more rehabilitative sentencing outcomes. They also encouraged justice system actors (not just judges but attorneys and clerks and court officers) to see defendants as individuals worthy of being treated with dignity and respect.

In the process, problem-solving courts recalibrated the balance of power in the courtroom. The sentencing reforms of the preceding years had tilted the playing field in the direction of prosecutors – their charging decisions and sentencing recommendations largely dictated how a case would proceed for defendants who were facing the threat of long spells behind bars. By restoring a measure of judicial discretion, problem-solving courts have helped to improve fairness in the justice system, allowing thousands of defendants to avoid harsh sentences. They also provided a framework that encouraged prosecutors to step back from maximalist and retributive approaches to justice. This helped set the stage for the progressive prosecution movement that has emerged over the past several years.

In her effort to make the case for the importance of judicial discretion as an underlying driver of the problem-solving court movement, Collins gives short shrift to a much more obvious force fueling the expansion of these programs. Judges and court administrators faced massive spikes in criminal court caseloads in the 1980s. Many understandably sought new ways to solve the problems that were fueling the influx of cases. They gravitated toward programs like drug court and mental health court not because they were petty bureaucrats seeking to expand their power but because they were reformers seeking to solve the real-life problems of court users. And they did this in the face of powerful countervailing winds, including the widespread idea that “nothing works” to change the behavior of offenders. Indeed, the success of problem-solving courts has arguably helped to change this dynamic, making it clear that criminal justice interventions can succeed in reducing crime.

2.“the actual data on [problem-solving courts] efficacy is underwhelming, inconclusive, or altogether lacking”

Collins seems to long for a world in which new reforms are rigorously tested in experimental settings before being replicated in other places and where researchers render clear judgments as to whether the programs work or not. I sometimes pine for this ideal world myself, but it is not alas the world in which we live.

In my experience, research findings are always mixed. Researchers almost never deliver categorical judgments, either positive or negative, about social interventions. It is fair to say that the research literature does not speak unequivocally about problem-solving courts. There are studies that have documented negative impacts. There is still much we don’t know. There is always a need for more research. (There is also a need for discipline and modesty among advocates of problem-solving justice, who have sometimes over-stated the impact of their programs.)

Reasonable people can disagree about how to interpret research findings. Collins finds the literature on problem-solving courts underwhelming. I find it pretty convincing. I base my conclusion on sources like the following:

A review of 150 (!) drug court evaluations finds that “research has amply demonstrated the positive impact of adult drug courts on re-offending… an array of cost-benefit studies almost universally confirm that drug courts save money.” (Rempel, M. (2014). “Drug Courts.” pp. 1159-1170 in Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice, eds. G. Bruinsma & D. Weisburd. New York, NY: Springer.

A review of 17 studies of mental health courts (involving more than 16,000 participants) concluded that “our finding supports the effectiveness of mental health courts in reducing recidivism.”

Of course, recidivism is not the only measure that matters. Beyond recidivism, problem-solving courts have been documented to achieve a range of other positive outcomes. This includes improving perceptions of justice, both among defendants and among community residents. In a moment when the justice system is suffering from a crisis of legitimacy in many quarters, problem-solving courts offer potentially valuable lessons about how to promote public trust in justice. And many (but not all) problem-solving courts have reduced the use of incarceration as well.

In the end, the most honest, bottom-line assessment of problem-solving courts is probably this one: “Problem-solving courts are not silver bullets. The impact they have on reoffending is positive but also modest, like any other evidence-based intervention."

The research about problem-solving courts may not blow Collins away, but it is robust when measured against other criminal justice programs. Here we would be wise to remember the late Joan Petersilia’s cautionary note:

There’s nothing in our history of over 100 years of reform that says that we know how to reduce recidivism by more than 15 or 20 percent. And to achieve those rather modest outcomes, you have to get everything right – the right staff, delivering the right program, at the right time in the offender’s life, and in a supportive community environment. We just have to be more honest about that.

(Indeed, there is more research to document the effectiveness of problem-solving courts than there is for diversion programs, pretrial supervised release programs, and credible messenger programs, to mention just three reforms that are being broadly replicated at the moment.)

3. “[The] belief that problem-solving courts are the most effective reform strategy is problematic not only because it is inaccurate, but also because it can create resistance to alternative reforms.”

Collins argues that problem-solving courts are standing in the way of other, more fundamental reforms. In New York, something like the opposite has been the case – problem-solving courts have been the foundation upon which other reforms have been built. Two examples are worth highlighting in this regard.

For decades, criminal justice advocates sought to reform New York’s Rockefeller Drug Laws, which mandated long prison terms for those convicted of drug offenses, without success. When change finally happened, in 2009, government decisionmakers cited the impact of New York’s drug courts as one of the justifications for passing new legislation. Indeed, the legislation that passed explicitly sought to expand judicial discretion to offer drug court alternatives to a broader range of defendants.

More recently, the New York City Council approved a plan to close the notorious jail complex on Rikers Island. This systemic reform was only conceivable because problem-solving courts had helped to change the culture within the local justice system. According to the New York Times:

Fewer inmates are behind bars in New York on any given day than at any time in the past 24 years…While the plunge in the city’s crime rate has undoubtedly been a critical factor, a number of other large cities where crime has also fallen have not seen a parallel drop in their jail population. Instead, steps taken by the city, including special courts to deal with nonviolent offenders and programs to deter former convicts from returning to jail, appear to be bearing fruit…New special community courts in Midtown Manhattan, Brooklyn, Harlem and the Bronx as well as drug courts and mental health courts, are meting out alternative sentences like street cleaning or drug treatment instead of jail time.

Within the justice system, problem-solving courts helped shift the attitudes of judges and prosecutors iabout sentencing and interactions with defendants. Outside of the system, problem-solving courts have demonstrated to the public that alternatives to incarceration can achieve positive public safety outcomes, in turn making it politically acceptable to support policies that promote rehabilitation and decarceration.

Problem-solving courts have made an important contribution to criminal justice reform in the United States. During decades in which it was politically impossible to advance any kind of legislative change that was not focused on strengthening penalties, problem-solving courts managed to introduce significant change within one of our most conservative (with a small “c”) institutions: the courts. They demonstrated that the walls would not cave in if we treated defendants and victims alike with humanity and decency. They also helped make the case that it is possible to change the behavior of offending populations during an era when the very idea of rehabilitation was widely discredited. In sum, we can only imagine the systemic reforms that are currently being advanced because of the success of problem-solving courts.

The challenge now confronting problem-solving courts is how to adapt to a world that they helped to create. If “regular” courts begin to look more and more like problem-solving courts, how will problem-solving courts evolve? This is where Collins’ article is helpful. To continue to make a positive contribution to criminal justice reform, problem-solving courts must be committed to rigorous self-reflection and continuous self-improvement. Reading and engaging with thoughtful critics like Collins is essential to the long-term health of problem-solving justice.

Transition

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Sat, 26 Oct 2019 17:34:00 +0000

Last week, I wrote to staff at the Center for Court Innovation to let them know that I have decided to step down as director of the agency. This is an excerpt:

I have worked at the Center for Court Innovation since it was founded in 1996. The Center has served as my base as I have gotten married, raised two daughters, and established a home in New York. Thanks to the Center, I have traveled to dozens of places across the country and around the world that I might not have experienced otherwise. (This includes Syracuse and London, two places that I have gotten to know after the Center established outposts there.) Thanks to the Center, I have established enduring friendships that have sustained me through good times and bad.

Perhaps most important, the Center has given me a way of being in the world -- namely a commitment to bridging the worlds of pragmatism and idealism, doing and thinking, and community and government (among other boundaries). To say that I owe this agency a debt of gratitude is a serious understatement. I would literally not be who I am were it not for the Center for Court Innovation.

The Center for Court Innovation has come a long way since we first opened our doors in the 1990s. Back then, no one had heard of the organization. Indeed, our name struck many people as non-sensical or oxymoronic. The most powerful criminal justice official in New York City at the time, the Manhattan District Attorney, was not a fan. There were other, more well-established agencies occupying similar corners. Fear levels were high, jail cells were full, and the politics of criminal justice were dominated by calls to be “tough on crime.”

Our first director, John Feinblatt, guided the organization into and through these strong headwinds. By the time I took over, in late 2001, the Center had considerable momentum and a solid reputation. When I interviewed with Jonathan Lippman and Mary McCormick for the job, part of my pitch was that it was time for the Center to move from the margins of the justice system and into the mainstream. Intellectually, this meant legitimizing and spreading our ideas through any means we could find -- books, training curricula, rigorous research, etc. Programmatically, this meant attempting to bring the strategies that we had implemented at the Midtown Community Court and Red Hook Community Justice Center – treating people humanely, offering alternatives to incarceration and fines, and engaging the community in doing justice – to the rest of the justice system in New York.

I am proud to say that we have made enormous progress on all of these fronts. Many of the ideas that the Center has espoused – problem-solving justice, procedural fairness, community engagement, and more – have come to be embraced by frontline practitioners. We now employ dozens of staffers in New York City’s centralized courts – resource coordinators, social workers, case managers, and others – who provide judges with meaningful alternative strategies, both pre-trial and post-adjudication. New York stands on the brink of closing the jail complex on Rikers Island – a development that would not have been possible but for the Center’s research, strategic assistance, and operating programs, which have shown that it is in fact possible to offer alternatives to incarceration that improve, rather than undermine, public safety. Every state in the US has established problem-solving courts and created an infrastructure to support them.

To achieve these kinds of wins, we have had to grow significantly as an agency. We now have a budget approaching $80 million. We will soon have more than 600 staffers. Over the years, we have won numerous awards for our efforts to improve justice, including the Peter F. Drucker Prize for Nonprofit Innovation. When he was Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg said, "No one has been more effective at finding ways to reduce recidivism than the Center for Court Innovation." And according to Cory Booker, “The Center for Court Innovation is right in the sweet spot of making America true to herself.”

For all of the success of the past twenty plus years, the story of the Center for Court Innovation is far from over. The transformation of the justice system in New York City is well underway, but it is not complete. There is much more work to be done not just locally, but nationally and internationally, if we are going to honor the fundamental humanity of those whose lives touch the justice system, whether as defendants, victims, or litigants.

The race is not yet finished, but I have come to the conclusion that I have taken the Center as far as I can. It is time to pass the baton to someone with the vision and the drive to take our internal infrastructure to the next level, to diversify and expand our funding base, and to advocate for our new initiatives in the marketplace of ideas. In making this call, I am driven by my love for the Center, which I believe is a unique force for good in the world. I believe that a new director will benefit the long-term health of the organization.

I have managed the Center through a number of important transitions, including introducing the agency to new mayoral and presidential administrations and holding the organization steady as we have lost key staffers, including the late, great Alfred Siegel. While change can be unsettling, I am committed to making the transition to new leadership as smooth as possible. I will remain as director until a new leader is hired. To ensure continuity and the transfer of important information and relationships, I also intend to stay at the Center until my successor has had some time to get acclimated. I will become a senior fellow working part-time on a handful of writing projects.

I cannot close without thanking you for your patience and indulgence and support. I am so grateful to work with hundreds of talented people who are willing not just to decry injustice but to roll up their sleeves and try to make change happen right now in the real world. I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but there is something heroic about this work, which every day must confront the imperfectability of human beings, the status quo bias of bureaucracies, and the very real possibility of failure. It has been the great privilege of my life to see this work in action and to attempt to advance it, however modestly.

Joan Petersilia

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 16:42:00 +0000

I never met Joan Petersilia, the award-winning Stanford Law professor who passed away earlier this week, but she was an influential person in my life. She was part of a small pantheon of creative thinkers who were writing about criminal justice in a grounded, pragmatic way as the Center for Court Innovation was emerging as an institution. Along with people like Herman Goldstein and Malcolm Feeley and George Kelling, Petersilia demonstrated that it was possible to a) write in plain, understandable language, b) bridge the worlds of theory and practice, and c) occupy a space that is open to good ideas and input across a broad ideological spectrum. I have attempted to carry forward these values in my own work.

While I never was in the same room with Petersilia, I did have a relationship with her. She was a good email correspondent. A lot of the tributes I have read since Petersilia's passing have highlighted her warmth and generosity. I can personally attest to these qualities. She was nice enough to offer a blurb for Trial & Error in Criminal Justice Reform, the book that I wrote with Aubrey Fox. Even more important, she agreed to participate in the interviews we were conducting around the topic of failure in the criminal justice system. I think this conversation offers a window into how her mind worked. This passage in particular has stuck with me:

There’s a long history of over-promising and under-delivering that has contributed to the constant pendulum swings in punishment practices. There’s nothing in our history of over 100 years of reform that says that we know how to reduce recidivism by more than 15 or 20 percent. And to achieve those rather modest outcomes, you have to get everything right – the right staff, delivering the right program, at the right time in the offender’s life, and in a supportive community environment. We just have to be more honest about that, and my sense is that we have not been publically forthcoming because we’ve assumed that we would not win public support with modest results. I was naive about the impact that intermediate sanctions would have on prison commitments, and have become much more realistic about what success we can have, and what the financial costs will be. It isn’t that we can’t deliver effective programs, but we usually don’t do the implementation groundwork nor fund them sufficiently. The field is littered with broken promises in this regard, and I am trying not to make that mistake around reentry programs. In California, I make it a habit to tell elected officials and correctional practitioners that in the short term, it’s not possible to deliver good programs and save money at the same time. I feel that I’ve been able to sell more modest expectations in California, but I’m not sure if that works in other states. It takes a lot of education and working closely with decisionmakers, but it is worth it.

I wish I had a nickel for every time I have quoted this passage. As the rhetoric about criminal justice gets more heated and more aspirational, with many folks clamoring for the complete transformation of the system from soup to nuts, I find myself particularly missing Petersilia's voice. Her credibiltiy, her realism, and her modesty will be difficult to replace.

“If you are not safe, nothing else matters”

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Thu, 04 Jul 2019 14:39:00 +0000

I wrote this review of Thomas Abt's new book "Bleeding Out" for the New York Law Journal:

We are living in what might be called the golden age of criminal justice reform literature. In the wake of The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander’s chart-topping, game-changing 2010 investigation of the intersection of race and criminal justice, have come an avalanche of related books. Ordinary Injustice by Amy Bach, Charged by Emily Bazelon, Punishment Without Crime by Alexandra Natapoff, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime by Elizabeth Hinton…the list continues to grow.

These works have a couple of things in common. By and large, they are books that highlight the real and urgent problem of mass incarceration – the grim reality that more than 2.3 million Americans are currently locked up behind bars. Another thing they have in common is that they spend preciously little time talking about actually fighting crime.

Thomas Abt’s Bleeding Out (Basic Books) fills an important gap in the emerging criminal justice canon. Abt, a former Manhattan prosecutor who worked at the Justice Department during the Obama administration, writes about the seemingly intractable problem of urban violence, which he calls the “pinnacle of social injustice.”

While Alexander and those who have followed in her wake tend to focus on how the system mistreats the accused and the incarcerated, Abt takes as his subject the mistreatment of the people and places that are victimized by high rates of violent crime, and gun crime in particular. As Abt makes clear, even as we look to build a justice system that is truly fair and compassionate, we must not forget the devastating effects of violent behavior on our streets.

This is not just a conservative talking point. Indeed, for Abt, reducing the homicide rate is the first step toward achieving broader social change. According to Abt, “high rates of violent crime are the structural linchpin of urban poverty, trapping poor people in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage.” Quoting the human rights lawyer Gary Haugen, Abt argues “If you are not safe, nothing else matters.”

In making the case for the importance of combating violence in places like Baltimore, St. Louis, and Chicago, Abt has not conducted new and original research. Nor does he advance a novel theory. Instead, his primary contribution is one of synthesis: he provides readers with a brisk summary of some of the greatest crime control thinkers of the past half century.

Drawing on the seminal work of Lawrence Sherman and David Weisburd, Abt makes the point that crime “clusters inside America’s distressed neighborhoods, but it does not do so uniformly. Instead it concentrates among small groups of people, places and things.”

Abt also quotes approvingly from the grandmother of urban theorists, the great Jane Jacobs: “The first thing to understand is that the public peace…of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as the police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.”

Combining these two insights, Abt proposes an approach to urban violence that seeks to target the awful might of the modern criminal justice apparatus as surgically as possible , so that Jacobs’ informal mechanisms of social control can do their work in a peaceful fashion. Violence, he argues, is a big problem that actually demands small solutions: .

Urban violence imposes tremendous costs on poor communities and the public at large, but because it is highly concentrated among a few people, places, and behaviors, it is actually “small” in terms of policy…we can do a lot with a little.

Abt espouses an anti-violence agenda that balances help (investments in community non-profits, street outreach programs, and cognitive behavioral therapy) with the strategic use of punishment (incapacitating chronic offenders).

Here, Abt is particularly indebted to the work of David Kennedy, the architect of the “focused deterrence” model of crime prevention. Kennedy’s model attempts to focus the energies of both justice agencies and community groups on those individuals within a given community who are most at-risk of engaging in violent behavior, particularly those who are already on probation or parole for prior criminal activity. These individuals are offered a choice: they can take advantage of services and be reintegrated into the community or they can experience the full weight of local law enforcement agencies.

Kennedy’s focused deterrence model was first tested in Boston in the 1990s, to remarkable effect – researchers documented that it contributed to a significant reduction in youth homicide. Since then, the model has been adapted in dozens of other American cities. A recent review of the research on focused deterrence conducted by the Campbell Collaboration found that there is strong empirical evidence to support the effectiveness of the model.

In writing about focused deterrence and other anti-violence strategies, Abt is driven by a question that many of the current books about criminal justice do not even bother to ask: how can we change the behavior of those who are involved in the most damaging kinds of criminal conduct?

In attempting to answer this question, there are certain avenues that Abt does not explore fully. One is culture. Why is the rate of homicide five times higher in the US than in Canada or the United Kingdom? Is the easy availability of handguns the primary explanation? Or is there something in the American DNA (eg. the myth of the gunfighter) that encourages the idea that violence is an appropriate way to resolve disputes? Do our violent delights (first-person shooter games, gangster movies, etc.) necessarily entail violent ends?

Like many commentators, Abt spends a good chunk of his book looking at the persistence of racial disparities in the justice system. Another, arguably more pronounced, disparity is mentioned only in passing: gender. Roughly 9 out of 10 homicides in the US are committed by men. Why is this? Does biology explain the gender gap? Is there something amiss in the way we think about and perform masculinity? Are there other possible explanations?

While Abt leaves these questions unanswered, he has, in the end, made a valuable contribution to our current conversation about crime and justice. In particular, Bleeding Out makes a strong case that “sustainable crime control does not happen without social justice, and vice versa.” These goals are often viewed in conflict with each other, but Abt argues that they are inextricably bound together.

Combating persistent violence in urban communities should be a national priority. But politics often gets in the way of clear thinking about how to move forward. Abt has a clear message for demagogues on both sides of the aisle. He argues that conservatives should abandon rhetoric (eg “black-on-black crime”) that implicitly advances ideas of racial inferiority. In a similar vein, he tells progressive activists that “characterizing all of criminal justice as irredeemably racist or illegitimate does not actually advance a broader social justice agenda.”

Here’s hoping that all of our presidential candidates, both Democrats and Republicans, heed Abt’s compelling call for change.

The Future Will Be Different

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Mon, 06 May 2019 19:55:00 +0000

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different. -- Peter Drucker

Today, the NYC Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice and the Center for Court Innovation co-sponsored an event at New York Law School that focused on the future of criminal justice in New York City.

The basic premise of the forum was that the historic reductions in crime and incarceration of the past generation combined with a growing understanding of the harms that criminal justice system involvement can cause have helped to spark a new kind of conversation about crime in New York City. In particular, many reformers are now looking for ways to promote public safety that do not rely on the traditional mechanisms (arrest-adjudication-incarceration-supervision) of the criminal justice system.

Over the course of three hours, leading thinkers from government, academia, and the non-profit sector grappled with the challenge of how to simultaneously shrink the footprint of the justice system while continuing to reduce neighborhood crime. Part of this involved a look backwards, attempting to explain both the successes of the past generation in New York City (the safest big city in the country, with an incarceration rate that is closer to Europe than it is to many American cities) and some of the failures (recurring racial disparities at basically every point in the criminal justice system). For a snapshot of some of the data that was presented by Liz Glazer from the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice today, click here.

The conversation at New York Law School toggled back and forth between visionary thinking (is it possible to imagine a future with no jails or prisons or probation or parole?) and concrete problems that we still need to solve in the here and now (can we reduce technical violations of parole? what should we be doing to address the places that are still hot spots of crime?). I found the combination of lofty ambition and real-life concerns to be invigorating. A few random highlights from the notes that I scribbled during the event:

Eric Cumberbatch of the Mayor's Office to Prevent Gun Violence focused on the history of disinvestment and direct sabotage that has been inflicted on many black and brown communities, arguing that justice should be about healing. He also made the case that "we can't police our way out of historic problems."

Justine Olderman of Bronx Defenders argued that agitation by outside reformers has been crucial to New York's ability to reduce both crime and incarceration rates.

Judge Edwina G. Mendelson broadened the lens of the conversation to include families, discussing recent changes in Family Court and significant reductions in the number of children in foster care in New York.

David Weisburd, a criminologist at George Mason University, argued that police are still necessary to the fight against crime. He also suggested that the police's response to crime might look very different in the years to come than it does today. For Weisburd, the operative question seemed to be not whether there should be police or not, but rather what should police be doing?

Divine Pryor of the Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions echoed Weisburd's point, saying that it is imperative to more clearly define the role of police. He also said that there is a need to repair the relationship between police and communities and that an essential first step is for police to acknowledge, and ideally apologize for, the harms that have historically been inflicted on African-American communities.

Patrick Sharkey of New York University said that the evidence is clear: police help to reduce crime. He also made a powerful argument for looking beyond law enforcement as the primary response to criminal behavior. In particular, he suggested that neighborhood residents be paid to play a pro-social role in public space.

Alex Blau, a behavioral economist at ideas42, suggested that we should be looking to replicate the Becoming a Man program that has successfully been tested in Chicago.

DeAnna Hoskins of JustLeadershipUSA argued that the media has "normalized violence" in certain communities. She also talked about the need not just to change police behavior but to encourage people to call on police less frequently.

Cy Vance Jr, the elected District Attorney in Manhattan, talked about the potential impacts of the bail reform legislation recently passed in Albany and, in particular, about the need for more funding for pretrial services. He also tried to re-frame the conversation about supervision of justice-involved individuals, saying that if done right, supervision "isn't a negative" -- its about providing help to individuals.

Rosalie Genevro of the Architectural League of New York advanced the idea that developing more supportive housing was among the most important investments that New York City could make in the days ahead.

Vivian D. Nixon of the College and Community Fellowship said that she felt there one source of New York City's success in recent years was increased collaboration, particularly between government and communities.

Adapting to Change

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 18:51:00 +0000

The field of criminal justice has shifted in some dramatic ways over the past half decade or so. In the 1990s and 2000s, the field seemed to me dominated by a perception that "tough-on-crime" policymaking was the preferred mode of both political actors and the general public. Against this backdrop, those who were interested in advancing the idea of rehabilitation had to be both modest and cautious. In those years, even when Democrats were ascendant in the White House or local state houses, reformers took great pains to highlight the cost-effectiveness of alternatives to incarceration. Many adopted the language of "evidence-based programs" as a means to depoliticize the conversation about crime, making a technocratic case for less punitive policymaking.

Even though I have been alive and (mostly) awake through these years, I'm not 100 percent certain why the field of criminal justice has changed so much as our current decade has progressed. Certainly, Michele Alexander's book The New Jim Crow has had an enormous impact, as has Ta-Nehisi Coates' writings about mass incarceration. I think that the rise of social media, and the amplification it has given to ideas (for better and for worse) that were previously obscure or extreme, has also played a role. I'd also argue that the improvement in public safety in many American cities has been a significant underlying factor, reducing levels of fear among the chattering class in places like New York and Washington DC.

Whatever the reasons, there has been a rejiggering of the criminal justice narrative, at least in intellectual circles. Many politicians, advocates, and academics now view criminal justice primarily through a civil rights lens. This lens has sharpened our focus on racial disparities within the justice system and on the manifold harms that can accompany conviction and incarceration, not just for the individual defendant but for his family and community as well. It has pricked the moral conscience of many Americans and generated an outpouring of both compassion and outrage. All of a sudden, ideas that would have been non-starters less than a decade ago -- closing Rikers Island! raising the age of criminal responsibility! eliminating cash bail! decriminalizing marijuana! etc etc -- are not only plausible but popular across a fairly broad political spectrum. An array of new funders and new organizations have emerged to advance these and other ambitious goals.

How long this will last is anyone's guess. The tectonic plates of public opinion and government policymaking tend to shift slowly. For example, we continued to pursue high rates of incarceration well after the crime spikes of the 1970s and 1980s faded. So, if history is any guide, we may be in our current mode for quite some time -- I think only a sustained uptick in crime, and the resulting public and political backlash, would be capable of altering the trajectory of the moment.

All of this is mostly good news for those of us in the criminal justice reform business. To be sure, there is the danger of over-correction. We should be mindful of babies and bathwater. Our desire to transform the justice system should not be heedless -- we cannot blithely dispense with practices that have proven to be effective at curbing local crime or core principles (e.g. due process) that continue to make the American justice system a model for many countries around the world.

Our current criminal justice moment does offer some challenges for someone like me who lived through the bad old days when urban life really was defined by high levels of street crime and disorder. Starting my professional career in 1990, I was profoundly shaped by the era when isolated and incremental criminal justice reform was the best that could ever be achieved -- and even this took a huge measure of political skill along with a healthy dose of luck.

These years profoundly shaped my worldview. They taught me to focus on the importance of using empirical evidence, establishing realistic goals, and promoting neighborhood safety. They also impressed upon me the value of using plain language that is not ideologically freighted in order to speak to as wide an audience as possible.

In recent days, I have been attempting in my writing to bring these values forward while adapting to the exigencies (and passions) of our current moment. Here are a few examples:

Why We Need to Rethink Misdemeanor Justice (Governing)

Can We Stop Both Crime and Incarceration? (Public Books)

The Need To Balance Police Effectiveness and Fairness (Governing)

A Blueprint for 21st Century Policing (with David Weisburd) (The Hill)

Reducing the Justice Footprint (The Crime Report)

Electrifying Sounds

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 13:15:00 +0000

In 1994, I was living in Providence, Rhode Island and supporting myself by taking on a bunch of different writing projects, one of which was writing music criticism for the local paper -- The Providence Journal. It was good fun, allowing me to see a bunch of great bands (Beastie Boys, Queen Latifah, Cypress Hill, A Tribe Called Quest, etc. etc.) on someone else's dime. Alas, these were the days before the Internet, so all of the concert and album reviews I wrote are basically lost to the sands of time. (Note to the ProJo: please digitize your archives!) Doing a recent pre-spring cleaning, I found some of the pieces that I wrote, a few of which I have decided to post here, just so they don't disappear completely.

Safety and Well-Being

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Wed, 30 Jan 2019 21:55:00 +0000

Today at the Robin Hood Foundation, the Center for Court Innovation co-hosted a panel on neighborhood safety with Neighbors in Action and the Decarcerated podcast. Panelists included Marlon Peterson, Amy Ellenbogen, Erica Mateo, and Mark Winston Griffith.

Thanks in no small part to the good work of moderator Errol Louis, the conversation was lively and broad-ranging. The idea behind the event was to encourage a paradigm shift away from conventional law enforcement (arrest, prosecution, incarceration) as the primary response to local crime.

In making this case, the panel highlighted work currently underway in various parts of Brooklyn -- places like Brownsville, Crown Heights, and Bedford-Stuyvesant -- that seeks to engage at-risk populations, address chronic victimization, combat bias, re-make the built environment, and provide positive pathways for local young people, among other things.

The panelists were united in arguing that safety means more than simply the absence of crime. Together, they offered a vision of vibrant community life that foregrounded the absence of fear -- including fear of over-aggressive policing -- and the building of trust, which I took to mean not just trust among neighbors but between local residents and government.

Given that the conversation took place at Robin Hood, a foundation that is famous for its insistence on rigorous performance metrics, Errol Louis asked about how community well-being should be measured. This area is ripe for more thought. The panelists emphasized that building community cohesion takes years. They also pointed to the history of racism and community disinvestment in this country as realities that must be dealt with if we hope to build public trust and confidence in government.

While acknowledging the obstacles and challenges to creating healthy communities, the tone of the conversation was hopeful. The panelists encouraged both government and philanthropy to make long-term investments in the kinds of groups that are serving as connective tissue at the neighborhood level. (This echoes a point that Patrick Sharkey made in his recent book, Uneasy Peace -- that the improvements in public safety in American cities over the past generation owe a lot to the unglamorous work done on the ground by local non-profits.)

The final word for me came from Erica Mateo, who talked about the need for tangible goals, reasonable expectations, and small victories. It requires patience of course, but I believe that if you put together enough small victories that, over time, it can add up to significant change.

A New York Story

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Sat, 03 Nov 2018 21:09:00 +0000

I am about halfway through reading the Beastie Boys Book, which I recommend heartily. The early chapters are my favorites – Ad-Rock and Mike D are particularly adept at summoning the ghost of New York City in the 1980s, with all of its dangers and possibilities.

I am not generally given to nostalgia for the New York City of this era -- I thought it was bad when Washington Square Park was an open-air drug market and you couldn’t walk down 42^ndStreet without being approached by prostitutes. But Ad-Rock and MCA highlight some important elements of the ‘80s that are worth celebrating.

Most notably, the 1980s in New York was a time of cultural cross-pollination, as punk met new wave met disco met rap (among other things). For example, in 1982, a DJ from the Bronx, Afrika Bambaataa, transformed “Trans-Europe Express” by the German electronic band Kraftwerk into the groundbreaking hip-hop single “Planet Rock."

These kinds of mash-ups, which were happening seemingly every few weeks, were a big part of what initially attracted me to hip-hop. It was positively dizzying to see a new musical genre emerge from the shards of other, earlier genres. On Licensed to Ill, the Beastie Boys’ debut album, you could hear bits and bobs from Trouble Funk, Led Zeppelin, War, the Clash, and dozens of other groups, all stirred together into something new and different. This kind of borrowing doesn’t feel possible today given the legalities/costs of sampling and the current obsession with cultural appropriation.

Licensed to Ill came out in 1986. I was 19 years old, a Washington DC kid going to school at Wesleyan University.

Around that time, I made one of my first trips to New York by myself, meeting a few college buddies to watch the Knicks play the Bulls. (Unfortunately, Michael Jordan got injured before the game, turning a marquee match-up into something considerably less exciting. If memory serves, Patrick Ewing also didn’t play.)

Anyway, the next day, I went to catch a cab. I was trying to get to Port Authority so I could take a bus back to school in Connecticut. No doubt I looked like what I was: an easy mark.

A man approached me as I tried to pretend I was the kind of person who knew how to hail a cab: “Where you goin’?”

“To Port Authority,” I responded

“I’ll take you. Five dollars.”

Hmmm…..

Any real New Yorker will know what comes next. I took out my wallet to give him five dollars. As soon as the wallet came out of my pocket, he grabbed it and started running.

I took off after him. I know not what I would have done had I caught him. But try to catch him I did, sprinting after him for blocks. I was fueled by pure desperation. These were the days before cell phones. Without my wallet, I had no money, no ID, no credit cards…no way of getting back to college.

I thought I was gaining on the thief when he turned the corner off the avenue and onto a side street. As I followed after him, I came crashing into an elderly woman with a shopping bag, nearly knocking her over. The chase was over.

I apologized profusely to the woman. She asked me what happened. I told her my sob story. After she had composed herself, she instructed me to walk with her.

I thought I was doing her a favor, accompanying her to ensure that no further harm befell her on her shopping trip. But when I looked up, we were at the Port Authority. She took some bills out of her purse and gave me enough money to buy a bus ticket to Middletown, Connecticut. I didn’t ask her name or get her address. I never saw her again. But needless to say, I will never forget her kindness.

The moral of the story: New York taketh away, but it also giveth. The ‘80s had some bad bits, but some good bits too.

20 Years in Crown Heights

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 16:11:00 +0000

Twenty years ago, we created a storefront mediation center in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. In some ways, it was a lunatic undertaking. The Center for Court Innovation was only a couple of years old. We had no name recognition and zero reputation. Nor did we have meaningful roots or connections in Crown Heights. What we had was a small grant from the City of New York, which was interested in improving inter-group relations in the neighborhood and willing to give us some room to decide what that should look like. More than that, we had the two things that have proven crucial to all of our success over the years, both in Crown Heights and the world beyond: we had an idea and we had talented people.

Yesterday, we held a ribbon-cutting to celebrate the re-naming of the Mediation Center, which will now be known as Neighbors In Action. I must confess to a bit of sadness at saying farewell to the Mediation Center. The Mediation Center was launched the week my first daughter was born, so it has always had a special place in my heart. Over the years, we worked hard to establish the Mediation Center and to develop its identity. It has become well-known and well-liked not just in central Brooklyn but across the City. Nonetheless, the name change is probably overdue -- the project long ago moved away from a primary focus on either mediation or Crown Heights.

I went to a seminar on managing organizational growth recently and one of the speakers said that organizations are either busy growing or busy dying. I don't quite believe this is true -- I think sometimes less is more. But I do believe that organizations can't stay the same. They need to evolve and adapt. And that's what makes me most proud of our history in Crown Heights. Thanks to great on-site leadership, we have consistently dreamed up and implemented new programmatic wrinkles. When you take a step back, it is clear that, no matter what the name on the t-shirt says, we have become a valuable neighborhood institution -- nurturing amazing local talent, addressing pressing local problems, and knitting together diverse local groups.

The two photos above and below tell a bit of the story of our work in Crown Heights. Our location has changed. Our branding has gotten better. Our team has gotten exponentially bigger. But it still comes down to our ability to generate good ideas and attract outstanding people.

Congratulations to all who have played a role in making both the Crown Heights Community Mediation Center and Neighbors in Action happen.

"Band-Aids or Brain Surgery"

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Mon, 16 Jul 2018 15:20:00 +0000

This week has begun with sad news: Robert Keating has passed away.

Keating (and he was always "Keating" to me) was, for the better part of four decades, one of the most influential criminal justice policymakers in New York City. He held a number of important positions during those years, including serving as criminal justice coordinator for Mayor Ed Koch and the chief administrative judge for the New York City criminal courts.

It was in this capacity that Keating helped to midwife the Midtown Community Court. The photo above captures him (on the right) with Midtown's founding director John Feinblatt back in the early 1990s.

As this early New York Times piece highlights, Keating was a capable rhetorician. He used the expression "band-aids or brain surgery" to describe the limited options (jail or nothing) available to judges in many criminal cases. His support was absolutely crucial in helping the Midtown Community Court overcome the opposition of the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.

I first met Keating in 1994 as part of the interview process for the job as lead planner of the Red Hook Community Justice Center. Wearing his trademark bow tie, he made a strong first impression. He was an operator. He liked to gossip. But most of all, he liked to get things done.

I got to see this quality up close on many joint projects over the years. Among other things, we worked together to create a judicial summit in the aftermath of 9-11 and the (alas) short-lived Journal of Court Innovation. He participated in numerous roundtables that we organized at the Center for Court Innovation, including a memorable one on failure in the criminal justice system. We served together on the board of the New York City Criminal Justice Agency. And we crossed paths frequently as part of his service on the board of the Fund for the City of New York.

It always made me happy whenever Keating was involved in a project. You always knew what you were getting from him: intelligence, leadership, and a sense of fun. You could throw Keating into complicated situations and he would somehow manage to make sense of them. A good example of this was when we arranged for him to speak in London about community courts. With very little preparation, he was able to make a convincing case to many of the leaders of the justice system in England.

But perhaps my strongest memory of Keating is of a piece of paper. In the early days of the Midtown Community Court, we produced a regular internal report about the work of the Court -- what types of cases were being processed by the court, the disposition rate, compliance with alternative sanctions, etc. For years, it was known as the "Keating Report." This to me symbolizes his commitment to his craft, his interest in the internal workings of the justice system, his personal sense of responsibility, and his relentless dedication to positive change.

I will miss him.

How to Change the Criminal Justice System

noreply@blogger.com (Center for Court Innovation) — Thu, 05 Jul 2018 19:58:00 +0000

For reasons that are somewhat obscure to me, in recent days I have felt the need to defend criminal justice practitioners. This is odd for a couple of reasons.

First, I am nobody's idea of a frontline practitioner -- I have never arrested, prosecuted, adjudicated, or rehabilitated anybody. Second, the agency where I work is in many respects predicated on a critique of standard practice in the justice system -- if system actors were doing their jobs perfectly, there would be no need for an agency like the Center for Court Innovation.

That said, I have felt protective of judges, attorneys, and other frontline players in recent days. One potential reason for this is that so much of the conversation about justice reform pretends like they don't exist or that their insights aren't of any value. I wrote a whole book, with Aubrey Fox, a few years ago that looked at the many ways that practitioners can spell the difference between success and failure when it comes to criminal justice reform. I still believe in this idea. (See Trial & Error in Criminal Justice Reform: Learning from Failure.)

Another reason that I have wanted to defend criminal justice agencies is that very few people seem inclined to do so these days. These agencies are currently under siege from both the left and the right. I don't hold any illusions; I know our justice agencies are deeply flawed. And I also think that they are important institutions that our society cannot function effectively without. Undermining public confidence in them seems like a dangerous game.

At the end of the day, the goal of most criminal justice reform efforts is to change the behavior of system players. There are many ways to attempt to accomplish this goal. Certainly we have seen that legislative efforts or policy changes or impact litigation can successfully constrain the options of system actors, limiting their ability to impose lengthy prison sentences or detain individuals during the pre-trial period, for example. I think all of these are legitimate pathways to change. I also think that true and lasting change requires some measure of buy-in from police officers, probation officers, correctional officers and others who actually administer the criminal justice system each day. And I think that this buy-in is mostly likely to occur when they have been part of the change process.

In recent years, I have written a handful of pieces that attempt to make this case. I think I keep writing about this subject because I'm not sure that I have quite nailed it yet. Here are a few examples:

Our Two Kinds of Justice, and How To Reconcile Them -- This piece, from Governing, attempts to wrestle with the reality that many people in the justice system are trying to do the right thing, but the system is not achieving just results.

The Justice System Case for Radical Incrementalism -- This essay, written with Julian Adler, argues that New York City has been a case study of how small changes in practice can sometimes add up to systemic reform. More on this subject can be found in our book, Start Here: A Road Map to Reducing Mass Incarceration.

The Challenge of Cultural Change on Rikers Island -- I wrote this piece for the Gotham Gazette after stepping down from the NYC Board of Correction. It describes my experience visiting Rikers and meeting correctional officers that defied my preconceived notions.