7.3: Community Courts

In recent years, cities and towns across the country have embarked on an experiment to test the proposition that courts can play a role in solving complex neighborhood problems and building stronger communities. Since the 1993 opening of New York City’s Midtown Community Court, the nation’s first, dozens of cities have begun planning community courts.

Pin It! Community Court Criteria

Eleven community courts are now operating in communities across the nation. At their onset, each court must address the following set of questions:

• Can courts assume a problem-solving role in the life of a community, bringing people together and helping to craft solutions to problems that communities face?
• How can courts address the impact that chronic offending has on a community?
• Can courts improve the quality of life in a community?
• Can local voices—residents, merchants, community groups engage in the administration of justice?

To answer these questions, community courts have developed individual programs that differ in important ways. Although most of these new courts focus on one neighborhood, several jurisdictions are exploring ways to serve an entire city. Many community courts handle matters such as drug abuse, mental health courts and homeless courts. But others are experimenting with a broader range of matters, including juvenile delinquency and housing code violations. Some community courts were initiated by courts, and some have been championed by the district attorney. Most courts often use probation officials to help manage and guide services.

These differences reflect a central aspect of community courts: they focus on neighborhoods and are designed to respond to the particular concerns of individual communities. Moreover, community courts are shaped by the particular political, economic, and social landscapes in each community. One of the earliest examples is the Midtown Community Court which was created New York City to address community problems in time square. In January 1998, the Midtown Community Court was the only community court in the United States. By March 2000, nearly a dozen had opened across the country in Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, Tennessee, and Texas. New York City and Portland, Oregon, each host two community courts, and organizers in both cities intend to open a third court in 2000. Another 13 jurisdictions, in California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Texas, plan to establish community courts in the near future.

Community courts grow out of frustration. Observers have noted that justice has become remote from communities and the people who live in them. Community residents have reported feeling out of touch with courts. They want courts to address low-level crime that is part of daily life. The Midtown Community Court offered a model for addressing these problems by emphasizing the following;

• Locating the court in the community, close to where crimes take place.

• Repaying a community damaged by low-level crime by requiring offenders to compensate neighborhoods through community service.

• Using the leverage of the court to sentence offenders to complete social services that will help them address problems such as drug addiction or involvement in prostitution.

• Bringing the court and the community closer by making the courthouse accessible, establishing a community advisory board, and publishing a quarterly newsletter.

• Using the court as a gateway to treatment and making social services available to offender’s right at the courthouse.

The Midtown model was thoroughly documented in an independent evaluation conducted by the National Center for State Courts and in publications prepared by the U.S. Department of Justice. With a well-defined and carefully documented model in New York City, community court planners elsewhere faced questions about whether the Midtown model would meet the needs of their jurisdictions. Planners in other jurisdictions have made significant departures from the Midtown model, reflecting both the distinct needs of their communities and the practical reality of what they believed they could accomplish given local resources and local support.

Community courts are complex projects that involve rethinking court operations, raising substantial resources, and building partnerships within and without the justice system. Decisions about who should lead the planning of a community court varied from state to state. Judges, District Attorneys, or local court administrators can lead the planning efforts.

Many projects recognized early that a dedicated planner would be needed to move the community court from conception to implementation. This approach reflects the complexities of raising money, building community participation, developing sanctions, establishing partnerships, and so forth. Some operating community courts were staffed with a full-time coordinator during the planning period. Some courts are led by a staff person who dedicated a majority of his or her attention to the project. To ensure that the partnerships necessary for success were established early in the planning process, formal planning committees should be established. The committees typically included representatives from the courts, district attorneys’ offices, police departments, social service agencies, and communities. Public defenders can be included on the planning teams.

The scope of the community court project, the readiness of local players to support the concept, and the planners’ success in garnering funds and in-kind support all affected the length of the planning process. Jurisdictions can open community courts between 1-3 years.

How Should the Court Link Offenders to Social Services?

It is important for the community court planners to make social services available to defendants. An important consideration is to decide whether to locate these services onsite or provide services through other agencies. Services such as drug treatment, counseling, and assistance with entitlements, require case management by project staff to ensure defendants attend mandated services and receives long-term treatment.

As more of these treatment style courts develop, additional options have become available to courts to manage treatment. Historically, services were provided through governmental agencies such as mental health agencies and case management by probation to monitor and manage compliance. However, these government agencies often become overwhelmed with the number of offenders to manage. As this became more evident, private companies have become to form that provide evidence-based treatment programs and case management services to provide support to the offenders. These agencies contract with the court to provide services and prepare compliance reports directly to the court.

Can Punishment and Help Be Combined?

One of the challenges of Community Courts is what type of sanctions should occur for failure to comply with mandated treatment or court ordered activities such as community service or job seeking. The goal of community courts is to improve the offender’s situation and reducing the criminal activity. But how can you help and punish at the same time. Most courts require what is called graduated sanctions when a violation by an offender occurs. To be effective and fair, the offender must be aware of the requirements, what is expected of them and the time frame they must complete tasks. A probation officer or case manager usually provides this direction at the beginning of the program. They also provide the consequences that may occur if an offender does not comply. The officer or case manager must maintain records of the offender’s compliance and provide a record to the court. Often, there will be a committee consisting of the court (judge), treatment provider, district attorney, defense counselor and other advocates to determine what the sanction should be when a violation occurs.

Graduated sanctions consist of increasingly sever punishments depending on the violation which occurs. Often times the offender may receive a verbal admonishment for the first violation. This is where the case manager or officer reminds the offender of the program requirements and admonishes the offender for his/her failure to comply. The offender is given an opportunity to explain why he/she could not complete the assignment. An admonishment is often followed up with a plan on how to comply. Further, violations will require additional sanctions, such things as restrictions on privileges (curfew), additional assignments, or required to return to court and explain to the judge the reason for non-compliance. Often the last sanction is a return to custody (jail) for a specific amount of time.

Pin It! Graduated Sanctions

For graduated sanctions to be valid the case manager must track each violation and sanction.

Each violation is maintained independently. For example, a positive drug screen is one violation and needs to be tracked individually. So, if an offender provides a positive drug screen in one week, and the next week they fail to attend community service that is not the same violation. Each violation is independent and needs to be addressed separately.

This way of managing offender compliance and sanctioning can best be described as a “parental” relationship where the court guides the offender through the process using fairness and impartiality. While not friendly, the offender can rely on the court to look out for their best interest. However, like a parent, if the offender fails to comply consequences or sanctions will result. In this sense, both sides have a vested interest in seeing the offender improve. The offender becomes a better or contributing member of society and the community becomes better through a reduction in crime.

What Role Should the Community Play?

Projects should recognize that community involvement is a critical goal, so planners have to determine how and when to involve the community, raising the question: Who is the community? For most court planners, the answer included residents, social service providers, beat officers, and local merchants. Community members can participate in the planning of all of the courts, but in different ways and to differing degrees.

Planners can use a variety of tools to establish community participation. Community, planners and criminal justice professionals attended neighborhood meetings and conduct interviews with a broad range of stakeholders. Courts can create a community advisory panel during the planning period and hold community meetings to determine priorities for the new court. Focus group discussions to better understand community members’ concerns and recommendations. In Portland, Oregon, community members were involved in shaping sanctioning options. In Brooklyn, New York, community members chose the building in which to locate the court.

Are Community Courts Effective?

Research on specialty courts has largely been centered on the legal and social outcomes for offenders who participate in these programs. Most studies show that drug courts are effective at reducing future criminal activities and drug use during and after the time court supervision was mandated for the offender. Most results for mental health courts were consistent with the drug court results.

Critics of the program point out that community courts have a great deal of discretion with regards to which offenders are offered programs versus those they avoid. Critics concern are that community court staff could be selecting the offenders which are believed would be successful in their court’s program. If this type of selective process was routinely happening, community courts would appear more successful than they really are.

To address these concerns, researchers compared similar offenders who were randomly assigned to participate, or not participate, in community court programs. Researchers track them over time and recorded whether people commit new crimes or commit new crimes. The research found that drug court participation, tends to reduce future crimes for as long as two to three years after the offender leaves community court supervision.

Community courts for drug recidivism seem to work well really do work quite well. Improved behavior of drug offenders can save public money the community would have to spend on recovery services or criminal justice for offenders who did not benefit from drug court programs. Community court programs have the potential for being cost effective.