Chronicle’s Nevius: An Unlikely Supporter for the Community Justice Center

This morning’s Chron includes an article by C. W. Nevius, reporting about yesterday evening’s Community Justice Center informational meeting at Glide Memorial Church. His description of the meeting depicts a typical San Francisco scenario: people with different agendas speaking past each other, not to each other, thinking how to shoot down a project without understanding what it is about.

The real failing is that the backers of the court haven’t convinced the neighborhood that the effort is worthwhile.

Instead, at the meeting there were accusations that the Community Justice Center is part of a plan to rid the Tenderloin of poor people, build tall luxury apartment buildings, and encourage the police to arrest anyone on the street who looks shabby.

“It’s just the opposite,” sputtered Superior Court Judge Harold Kahn, who is presiding over the Justice Center this week while Commissioner Ron Albers is on vacation. “There is not a single case charged here that wouldn’t have been charged at the Hall of Justice. The difference is, here they can go upstairs and qualify for services.”

The court’s director, Tomiquia Moss, was stressing that the court had heard more than 100 cases, and that they’d gotten 40 individuals into services, such as drug and alcohol treatment.

“And as far as this huge conspiracy to wrangle the poor out of the neighborhood,” Moss said, “I really disagree with that.”

Not that anyone from the opposition was listening. Activists wanted to know what the court was doing to end homelessness and why the money for the court – most of which comes from federal grants and can’t be used for other purposes – isn’t being used for building more shelters and housing.

Oh Boy.

The fact is, the people behind the Community Justice Center – people like Moss, Albers and the myriad social workers – have long and distinguished records of helping the homeless. So how did they get to be the enemy?

“I think people expect that there is never going to be a solution,” Moss said. “So they keep complaining.”

Now, it may be that the court won’t ultimately work. It is just a pilot program. But I can tell you this – simply complaining is a dead end.

I’ve been following Nevius’ commentary on the situation in the Tenderloin for quite a while, and I often disagree with him; when he reported about a homeless man found dead in the San Francisco public library, and linked this tragedy to his defense attorneys successfully battling his quality-of-life offense citations, I fumed for days. But this time, I think, he is right on the money. Nevius understands something that strikes me as very basic: If you have to choose between appearing more-righteous-than-thou and doing the right thing, it’s a no-brainer. One of the regrettable features of our City politics (which are admirable in many other ways) is that, in this kind of debate, too many invariably opt for the former, even before obtaining enough information to make the choice. The conversation stops being about the issue at hand, and becomes an absurd contest of who is more enlightened and whose conspiracy theories are more extreme.

I constantly worry about criminalizing poverty, and am well aware of the many ways in which we do it every day. And, yes, in our flawed system, and within the constraints of a very imperfect social structure, there is a whole host of criminal offenses that act as proxy for social class (and, in many cases, race). However, rallying against people who are trying to make the situation better within this imperfect social structure, I believe, will not change matters. I would really like us to give this experiment a real shot before knee-jerk politics kick in and shoot down the efforts of people who are genuinely trying to do good and who have the qualifications and authority to do so.

Jeff Adachi Shows Up in Person to Defend Clientele at the CJC

(image courtesy sfgate.com)

Here’s another piece of news that got away during our conference preparations: the new battle arena between San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi and the Mayor is the Community Justice Center.

As reported by the Chronicle a few days ago, Adachi had said that, if the Public Defender’s budget would not be adjusted, he would have to staff the CJC in person, which he did, representing a homeless woman he located himself on the street. I really recommend reading the article – Albers’ and Adachi’s personalities really shine through. And, those interested in seeing more of Adachi as a litigator will enjoy the PBS movie Presumed Guilty.

Restorative Justice and Sentencing

(this post by Keith Ogden)

This panel, chaired by Hastings Professor Kate Bloch, brought to light several different models of restorative justice in practice in California today. A common theme in this morning’s panel was, “What are we not addressing in our traditional approach to criminal justice system that causes (or doesn’t mitigate) high recidivism rates?”

Professor Bloch opened up the panel with introductions and a few remarks about restorative justice. She noted that restorative justice is an ancient model for resolving issues of crime and harm in communities. She highlighted several features common to the various iterations of restorative justice practice in world today, including offender responsibility/empowerment and creation of understanding and healing between victims and offenders. She framed the discussion by introducing the general concepts of Victim-Offender Mediation (VOM) and noting that VOM is used in some settings as a replacement for incarceration and sometimes, in various forms, as a supplement to incarceration.

Sunny Schwartz, Director of the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department’s Resolve to Stop the Violence Project (RSVP), shared reflections on her groundbreaking work with us. She reminded us that we’ve been implementing some form of criminal justice system in our state for 150 years without effectively including criminals, prison staff and others in the conversation about the purposes and outcomes of incarceration. She challenged us to think about who benefits from the system as it is.

Working within the system for over 25 years, Sunny has witnessed corrections fail the men and women who spend time in prison over and over again. She has seen three generations of family members in prison at the same time. She has seen recidivism persist at consistently high rates. She decided to do something.

In 1990, Sunny initiated programs to bring education and pro-social living (via open dormitories) to a prison drug program for women in San Francisco. However, recidivism remained high. In the 1990s she stumbled across restorative justice. Inspired by the emphasis on accountability, community involvement, and the underlying premise that crime hurts everyone, she told her boss, Sheriff Michael Hennessey, “we’ve got to start this” in our prisons. She did, and the RSVP program took flight.

Sunny’s greatest professional joy is her work with RSVP. The program takes 60 men who’ve been involved in violent crimes and who would traditionally be locked up in guarded prison cells, and places them in a dormitory setting with counselors. It brings victims who have suffered violent acts to share their stories with violent offenders. Sunny showed a short and powerful video depicting the program in action. One victim shared that “the violence does not end when the act is over.” An offender responded by saying that hearing such stories helped him become more aware of what it’s like to be on the other side. The video resonated with many audience members’ sense – the sense that drives Sunny – that inmates, even the many of the most violent inmates, can change for the better. An evaluation of the RSVP program by a Harvard psychiatrist has demonstrated that for participants who spend at least four months in the program, violent re-arrests drop by 80%.

Marissa Wertheimer, an attorney mediator at Marin Mediation Services and coordinator of their Victim-Offender Restorative Justice Program, shared her journey from social justice and children’s advocacy to restorative justice work.

Marissa raised the important question: “What do we as a community want to do when harm occurs?” The traditional answer is that we outsource our response to crime and harm to others – the police, the courts, the criminal justice system. Restorative justice challenges us to think well beyond rehabilitation and towards empowerment, healing and the responsibility of the community.

In her work with juvenile offenders, Marissa noted that follow-up surveys report 95% satisfaction with the Victim-Offender Mediation process. One might imagine that neither victims nor offenders would report such a high rate of satisfaction with the traditional criminal justice system.

Marissa’s description of restorative justice circles was fascinating. She first learned about the process a few years ago, and viewed it instantly as a means to improve upon traditional Victim-Offender Mediation. The restorative justice circle process involves three steps. (1) “Pre-circle.” The juvenile offenders and the victims have the opportunity to discuss who they feel needs to be in the circle and what they hope to achieve by participating in the circle. They also have an opportunity to opt out if they do not want to participate. (2) “Circle.” Victims and offenders meet in a mediated setting to attempt to reach a mutual understanding and develop a plan of action. Marissa emphasized that it is critical in this step to nail down specifics in order to be able to hold all involved accountable. (3) “Post-circle.” Follow-up. Is the plan being implemented? If not, why not, and what can be done to fix it?

Audience members brought up several questions and concerns. Is it possible for a criminal justice to utilize restorative justice to the exclusion of incarceration? Both panelists commented that some inmates will not respond to their programs and incarceration is necessary. Marissa noted that in New Zealand restorative justice is always the first option in addressing a crime and its attendant harm to the victim, the offender and the community. If restorative justice fails, then the traditional retributive system is invoked. Sunny shared that there all prisons should have programs like RSVP.

The question of whether restorative justice can work for violent offenders was raised. Sunny designed her RSVP program to offer hope for the most egregious offenders. Marissa noted that she is seeing more and more success with violent offenders.

Time was short and some questions were either not raised or not fully answered. For example, can restorative justice circles be used successfully for adult inmate populations? If restorative justice is supposed to be about making victim, offender and community whole, what role is/should the community be playing? How should studies be designed and implemented to assess the success and promise of restorative justice initiatives? Do we want to be “tough” on crime, or “smart” on crime? Marissa noted that the public’s concern for public safety will drive our choices about what system we put in place to address crime. That begs the question, “Does restorative justice meet the goal of increasing public safety?” Our panelists made a strong case that it does. The evolving practices within the realm of restorative justice offer hope that we can be smarter in how we address crime and harm in our communities by creating opportunities for healing and empowerment, and by reducing recidivism.

Neuroscience, Treatment, and Drug Courts

After the morning panels, it seemed that reforming our sentencing scheme was almost as impossible as being in three places at once, which is why I was only able to attend one of the concurrent panels on alternative sentencing. Dr. Emily Murphy, a behavioral neuroscientist working at Stanford, provided us with some fascinating information on the potential of neuroscience in rehabilitation in general, and in drug addiction situations in particular.

One of the problems with the emerging trend of neurolaw, which is otherwise a fascinating and promising field, is the tendency of some professionals to aggrandize its promise and advocate it as a cure-all, magic bullet for social ills. Murphy strongly advised against such simplistic perspectives, and her talk was an excellent example of nuanced, intelligent, sane discourse on the promise and limitations of science. Having briefly examined California’s history with brain-altering therapies, in particular the controversial UCLA Violence Project of the 1970s, Murphy turned to dicussing three avenues in which neuroscience could be helpful in criminal justice enterprises.

The first of these, prediction, focuses on the ability to foresee who might recidivate or benefit from a certain kind of treatment. This is a goal we are, at this point in time, far from achieving; there is no such thing as a single “crime spot” or a “violence spot” in the brain we can identify. One thing some scientists have done is focus on the category of psychopathy; psychopaths, sophisticated and manipulative, are highly overrepresented in the incarcerated population. Current diagnostic tools are not very helpful for screening purposes, since they consist of lengthy interviews by extensively trained people; however, Dr. Kent Kiehl has done some research on this on New Mexico inmates using a portable MRI scanner and is optimistic about its predictive potential.* Another issue is the possibility of predicting dangerousness. The Macarthur foundation has devleoped some multifactorial quantitative measures which, albeit imperfect, might have some predictive value. The key would be to obtain brain mapping, follow up on the inmates after their release from prison to see recidivism patterns, and then use the correlation to offer predictions. It should be remembered, however, that typical analysis of MRI relies heavily on statistical correlations, rather than on identifying a single spot on the brain, and therefore cannot be dispositive. It is also quite difficult to predict whether a certain type of treatment would be suitable for a certain offender; pharmacological treatment is akin to a sledgehammer in that it impacts the entire brain, and therefore often has complicated side effects.

Some treatment options are also being explored. In drug addiction cases, this mostly consists of substitution (replacement of the drug with another drug) and/or direct antagonism (drugs which suppress the craving by creating adverse consequences). Going through the existing substitutes – the well-known methadone and several others – was fascinating; naturally, treatment efficacy is seriously impacted by compliance. Also, some of the antagonizing drugs produce other bad reactions that might, ironically, exacerbate drug use.

Some more extreme treatment measures include psychosurgery and brain stimulation, which share an ugly, frightening history. However, brain stimulation has been found to be effective for treating Parkinson’s disease, and may also be valuable for various addictive conditions. The problem is finding dependable studies, based on ethical research, and published in reputable journals, that would confirm the efficacy of treatment.

The mixed results of treatment led Murphy to advocate a research focus on prevention. Several avenues were explored, such as the possibility of vaccination against addiction (which raises compliance issues) and the potential for actual erasure of drug-related memories, thus eliminating the positive associations to drug use. The problem is, as some audience members pointed out, that drug use becomes such a pervasive aspect of a person’s whole life, that a great many things and situations may be associations.

Murphy closed her talk by emphasizing the fact that neuroscience cannot be, in itself, a magic answer to drug prevention, and that holistic, environmental factors should also be taken into account. The perfect environment for considering all these factors is a drug court, which could create the sort of support system that would enhance the efficacy of any treatment chosen. She also reminded us of the need to be subtle and sophisticated about raising ethical questions – not accepting things at face value, but also not ruling them out with a knee-jerk reaction.

————-
* props to Nadja Habinek for the link.

Community Justice Center Opens Its Doors

(image courtesy SF Chronicle)

The Chronicle reports this morning that the Community Justice Center opened its doors yesterday for the very first time. The article documents the CJC’s history, including the struggles for funding that we examined here and here.

In the traditional court system, defendants are given citations and told to appear at the Hall of Justice in 45 days. But many of them are homeless or struggling with mental health or substance abuse problems, so remembering a court date several weeks later is unlikely. At the new court, people will be arrested and seen by a judge within days – and in the same neighborhood where the crime occurred.

Getting people to show up is just one of the many challenges that have plagued the court since Newsom borrowed his idea from Manhattan’s Midtown Community Court, which is credited with turning around the once-notorious Times Square.

The court, which has been replicated in cities around the world, sentences perpetrators to a mix of community service to pay back the neighborhood and social services like mental health or drug treatment to address underlying issues. The idea is to keep perpetrators from cycling in and out in jail.

I found the Chron report to be surprisingly negative. In its subheadings, the article reports that “even voters rejected court”, and somewhat ridicules the fact that the first five “clients” of the court were no-shows (a very common phenomenon at the Hall of Justice as well). I have no horse in this race, but at the risk of sounding over-protective, I wish the Chron had given this a fair chance before introducing the gloomy undertone.

At the last town hall meeting, Commissioner Albers and coordinator Tomiquia Moss were very conscious of their accountability to the community, and said they would closely monitor their progress and report to the public. Part of this includes external evaluation, and I understand that the RAND corporation will be pursuing a study of recidivism rates among CJC defendants. Program evaluation takes time; look at what the Red Hook Community Justice Center has achieved since it opened its doors in 2000. We already know that the old program doesn’t really work. I would urge Chron writers, and readers, to reserve their judgment of the new program until there is actually something to judge.

I hope the collaborative justice blog will provide us with updates on the new court’s function.

Community Justice Center: Alive and Kicking!


View Larger Map

Community Justice Center Commissioner Ron Albers, and the CJC coordinator Tomiquia Moss, held a town hall meeting yesterday at the Tenderloin police station, in which they discussed the findings of the baseline survey conducted by the Department of Public Health as a phone and street survey (multilingual, and involving a cross-section of the Tenderloin population). The findings are a pleasant surprise to those who thought that the objecting supervisors accurately represented community concerns. Despite a rather low level of trust in courts in general, 59 percent of those surveyed expressed “positive” or “very positive” attitudes toward the opening of the CJC. Just 8 percent reported a negative opinion about the CJC.

A few other findings of interest: respondents identified drug dealing and homelessness as the main problems in the area. They reported feeling very safe during the day, and confident that people would come to their aid, but unsafe during the night. As opposed to the mistrust in the court system, respondents expressed faith in the police.

It seems that the rumors on the CJC’s death were premature. Despite the Board of Supervisors’ vote on the one-time construction fund, the CJC is determined to proceed on its regular yearly budget, albeit with less resources then it hoped for.

Many issues, which were up in the air in previous town hall meetings, appear to have been more carefully thought of, such as the court’s jurisdiction over drug dealers arriving to the community from the East Bay. It seems that the court would exercise authority on a case-by-case basis, deciding in which cases it makes sense for the person who offended the community to provide community service in it.

Another interesting issue that came up involved the relationship between the community justice center and other specialized courts, such as drug courts and mental health courts. With respect to those follow-up programs, the CJC would act more as a referring agency; the CJC itself would have the capacity and the budget to intervene only in short-term, acute crisis situations, and chronic care would have to be handled by other services. The CJC would ideally hope to preserve the status of its clientele vis-a-vis their existing aid situation, and work on creative solutions to long-term problems.

An audience member mentioned the issue of representation. According to Commissioner Albers, the CJC is to be staffed by two full-time DAs and two full-time PDs. His belief is that, as time goes by and the Hall of Justice caseload is diverted to the more productive CJC, this presence will increase. One can hope that this is in the realm of the possible in light of the cuts to the PD budget.

A spirit of hope was in the air. The police and probation seemed to be much more on board with the program than they were at the meeting a year ago. And, President Obama’s job creation plan was mentioned as a possible ray of hope for CJC defendants in search of a long-term betterment plan; his acquaintance with community organization and collaborative justice efforts might be helpful in creating a regime hospitable to these programs.

FYI: the CJC Advisory Board, comprised of members of the involved agencies and community representatives, meets every 2nd Wednesday of every month, between 4-5, at the Civic Center Courthouse (400 McAllister Street, Room #617). The meetings are open to the public.

Commissioner Albers will also be among our speakers at the California Corrections Crisis conference.

An interview with Sunny Schwartz


(image courtesy SF Chronicle)

Today’s Chronicle features an interview with Sunny Schwartz, whose thoughts on rehabilitation and restorative justice are inspiring and thought provoking.

A small excerpt:

My dream is that every jail and prison will be a place of no-nonsense change and responsibility. And that we build the safety nets for continuing education and programming – through our probation departments, churches, synagogues, chambers of commerce – that continue to invest in people’s success.

Can you imagine if we had economic incentives for jails and prisons so they get more money if people don’t return?

Ms. Schwartz will speak at our California Correctional Crisis Conference on March 19-20.

Community Justice Center Budget Killed


This little morsel of information is hidden somewhere in the middle of this Chron piece about the San Francisco budget crisis:

Arguing that they cannot start new programs when existing services are being cut, a majority of the board voted Tuesday to kill nearly $1 million in funding for a pet project of the mayor’s, a Tenderloin community court that will prosecute crimes like aggressive panhandling and selling drugs.

The supervisors voted 6-4 against the Community Justice Center, with supervisors Bevan Dufty, Sean Elsbernd, Michela Alioto-Pier and Carmen Chu pushing to keep it. Outgoing Supervisor Gerardo Sandoval, who was elected to be a Superior Court judge, abstained. The mayor can veto the measure; it would take eight votes to override his veto.

This, coupled with the defeat of Prop L, may very well be the end of something that could be a very promising solution to a problem of large magnitude. Granted, there is not a lot of independent research examining recidivism rates in community justice programs (and more research should be generated, because programs like Red Hook in Brooklyn have been around for a while.) However, it does not seem as if the current court system has provided such as successful answer to the mix of homelessness, poverty and drugs in the Tenderloin. Much of the critique leveled at the court by the Coalition for Homelessness stems from misunderstandings about how it is supposed to operate (see for yourselves). And, as those who followed previous posts on this may recall, the sad thing is that this court – whether Mayor Newsom vetoes the decision to kill it or not – seems to have become no more than a pawn in the power struggle between Newsom and Supervisor Chris Daly. While this bickering is going on, we are stymied in a legal system that does not address problems in a holistic way.

If we don’t try progressive solutions to our sentencing system, particularly in quality-of-life issues, we’ll never know for sure whether they do, indeed, reduce recidivism. There is only one way to know, and that is to give this a try. And, much as it pains me to say this as a music and dance lover, this might be worth a bit more to the city as a whole than keeping the opera, symphony, and ballet budgets intact.

CJC Update: The Aftermath of Prop L’s Failure

(image: http://www.daylife.com)

One of the less reported developments following the elections was the failure of Prop L, which aimed to provide more financial support to the Community Justice Center. As reported this morning, Opponents of the new court, led by Supervisor Chris Daly, are gathering some momentum, encouraged by Prop L’s failure. Others, however, point to the broad consensus behind a court that aims to solve social problems in the Tenderloin, and to the flaws in the opponents’ position. The CJC is still scheduled to open in February; stay tuned.

Funding the Community Justice Center? SF Prop L


(image taken from a great report on SFmetblogs.com)

Today’s Chronicle reports on the controversy regarding the sources of funding for San Francisco’s Community Justice Center, scheduled to open its doors on February 2009.

The article presents the following analysis of the CJC proposition:

Proposition L

What it is: The measure would guarantee funding for the Community Justice Center, a special court to prosecute misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies in the area bounded by Gough, Bush, Kearny, Third and Harrison streets. It would also grant the mayor and Superior Court power to determine which crimes are handled there and expand its jurisdiction.

Arguments in favor of it: Nobody is served by the current system, which cycles perpetrators of low-level crimes in and out of jail without addressing their underlying problems, such as drug and alcohol addictions and homelessness. The court would sentence them to social services and community service to pay back the neighborhoods.

Who supports it: Mayor Gavin Newsom, District Attorney Kamala Harris, the Chamber of Commerce.

Arguments against it: The court would criminalize behavior that comes with being poor like illegal camping and aggressive panhandling. Also, the Board of Supervisors already funded the court, so what’s the point of the ballot measure?

Who opposes it: The majority of the Board of Supervisors, advocates for homeless people.

Some inaccuracies in the report should be mentioned: while it would appear that the court is especially aimed at “quality of lifers”, its jurisdiction is, in fact, more geographic than anything else. The court’s jurisdiction extends over several blocks of the Tenderloin and SOMA. According to Commissioner Albers, who spoke recently at a town hall meeting about the CJC, the only offenses excluded from its jurisdiction would be violent felonies.

The other big issue is whether the court would lead to criminalization of poverty. Proponents argue that city residents will be entitled to the social services pre-conviction, and sometimes even pre-charging; this might ease the concerns on the part of community advocates. However, it does raise the more general issue of “widening the web”.

The concept was first introduced by Stanley Cohen, in his masterful 1985 book Visions of Social Control. Analyzing, among other issues, the movement toward decarceration (we could all use some of that!), he suggests that the addition of non-incarceration, welfare-oriented sentencing alternatives carries the risk of dragging into the government’s net people who would otherwise be left out of supervision. Cohen sees this aspect of the alternatives in a grim light, but your mileage may vary.

In any case, it is an open question whether, by voting for or against Prop L, you would be sealing the court’s fate. As reported by the Chron, the court does count on grants, and other sources, for a large part of its operation over the first year.

Happy voting, and stay tuned for a final election post, on SF’s Prop K.