Phil Bowen
When you emerge from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel heading south, you can pass through north Brooklyn in a matter of minutes. To your left, almost the entire cityscape of Brooklyn with its brownstones and sidewalks stretches out before you. To the right is Red Hook. Sitting alone, cut off from the rest of Brooklyn by the expressway that was barreled through its streets and houses after the Second World War, Red Hook became synomous with the problems besetting New York City in the last part of the 20th century: 'crack capital of America'; 'murder city'; 'ungovernable.'
Much of that has changed for Red Hook. Red Hook, like the rest of the city, has become much safer. In our eyes, a vital ingredient in Red Hook's re-birth has been the Red Hook Community Justice Center. Set up in 2000, housed in a renovated schoolhouse near the Brooklyn waterfront miles away from Brooklyn’s centralised criminal courthouse, the Red Hook Community Justice Center has been handling misdemeanours, summonses for non-traffic violations, and juvenile delinquency cases since 2000. Adopting the principles of problem solving and procedural justice, it was a court that became famous due to its commitment and engagement to its neighbourhood and because it seemed to be what a court ought to be: fair, transparent and ensuring accountability.
But there was a nagging doubt: did the court actually work or did it just feel good? This week, a comprehensive evaluation of the court was published by the National Center for State Courts. The results are pretty startling:
Red Hook residents perceive the Justice Center not as an outpost of city government, but as a homegrown community institution;
Compared to the downtown criminal court, the Justice Center increased the use of alternative community or social service sentences (78% at Red Hook versus 22% downtown); decreased the use of jail as a sentence (1% versus 15%), and decreased the proportion of misdemeanor defendants who “walk” (receive a sentence such as a fine or time served) without any ongoing obligation (20% versus 63%);
Red Hook ultimately sentenced 7% of its defendants to jail compared to 17% in the downtown court.
Case processing at the Justice Center reduced the probability of re-arrest within a two-year period by 10 percent, or 4 percentage points (36% v. 40%).
Impressive stuff, huh? But maybe of even more relevance to the debate in the UK is not just that it works but why it works. The reason Red Hook works is not because of its particular programmes or treatment-based interventions or through improved deterrence but the Center's ability to improve defendants' perceptions of the legitimacy of the court process.
As the study notes, "the Justice Center’s commitment to procedural justice is evident not only in the respectful two-way interaction between the judge and each party appearing before him, but also in its physical design; the conduct of its staff; and the efforts of the judge and other Justice Center staff to become a visible, supportive presence in public housing projects and other parts of the Red Hook community." The role of the judge in this has been key: "Offenders frequently singled out the judge at the Justice Center for praise, describing his compassion, fairness, and willingness in his decisions to mitigate the unfair and disrespectful treatment that offenders routinely believed they had received from local law enforcement at the earlier arrest stage of case processing."
These findings are further evidence to the arguments that we set out in our publication, 'Better Courts'. The Red Hook evaluation puts further flesh on the bones but at the same time asks us in the UK a further set of questions: should 81% of all court dispositions result in a discharge, fine or other form of summary sentence? How can we help courts become more procedurally-just and more community-focused? Where some of these approaches have been tested before, have they ceased because they did not work or because are evaluative tools have not worked? Wherever the questions take us, one thing we can be sure of: if they can do it in Red Hook, surely we can do it here?