Explore the 25-year history of Midtown Community Court as the nation’s first community court, its impact on the justice landscape, and its unique community partnerships, including an emphasis on using arts programming as an alternative to incarceration.
This report provides the results of a regular community survey intended to give voice to the concerns of the people who live and work in the Red Hook neighborhood in southwest Brooklyn, the home of our Red Hook Community Justice Center. This 2016 survey measured citizen perceptions of neighborhood quality of life, public safety, and satisfaction with local criminal justice agencies.
This collection of photographs tells the story of the Midtown Community Court, looking at its first 25 years of operation and tracing its development from groundbreaking experiment to a core component of the New York City criminal justice landscape.
Jill Harris says she's "shocked to find myself working for a D.A." A long-time advocate for criminal justice reform, Harris, now the head of the Brooklyn D.A.'s Justice 2020 reform initiative, offers her take on the role of the prosecutor in the third installment of our series on the debate over prosecutor power.
Highlights from a public screening and panel discussion of Bill Moyers's 'Rikers: An American Jail,' moderated by New Thinking host, Matt Watkins. Commenting on the film and the future of criminal justice reform are Tina Luongo of the Legal Aid Society, Jill Harris of the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office, and two of the people formerly held on Rikers featured in the film: Barry Campbell of the Fortune Society, and Johnny Perez of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.
On our New Thinking podcast, Patrick Sharkey, the author of Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence, discusses the wider costs of violence and the threat posed by inequality and disinvestment to the current fragile gains. He points to the signal role of community organizing and community-based nonprofits in combating violence and building safer, more resilient cities.
On our 'New Thinking' podcast, Nashville's top public defender Dawn Deaner explains why she thinks public defending has been "set up to fail" and how working to engage the community—both those who need public defenders and those who never will—is a lifeline for a profession in crisis.
Since 2016, the community court in Eugene, Oregon, has met every week in the downtown library. It's part of an effort getting a lot of attention on the West Coast to bring problem-solving justice to friendlier settings. On our 'New Thinking' podcast, hear about Eugene's success with the new model.