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By Charles J. Hynes, Brooklyn District Attorney
San Francisco Sentinel

If the community justice center concept can work in Red Hook, Brooklyn, it can work anywhere.

Why am I so certain? Because as Brooklyn’s elected district attorney for the past 18 years, I have seen the neighborhood of Red Hook transformed. Ten years ago, Red Hook was a high-crime community that had lost much of its hope and energy. Today, the waterfront neighborhood—which includes both the largest public housing development in Brooklyn and blocks of quaint row houses—is revitalized, with safe streets, safe parks, new businesses, and supportive citizens who are working together on even greater improvements.

Who is responsible for this transformation? There are many who can take credit. But there is no question that the Red Hook Community Justice Center is among the vital players.

The Justice Center was launched in the wake of a tragedy. In 1992, a much loved elementary school principal, Patrick Daly, was killed in a shootout between drug dealers as he left the school to help a student. But Daly’s tragic murder was a symptom of a larger problem: rampant crime, fear and public distrust of the justice system. In response, I worked with New York Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye and the defense bar to create a community justice center with the hope of expanding the then-experimental community court model to produce tangible benefits, like those that we were beginning to see in Midtown Manhattan, where the nation’s first community court had been recently established.

The Red Hook Community Justice Center opened in phases. First we established an AmeriCorps program of 50 volunteers who fix broken windows in public housing developments, tutor students who need extra help, and link victims to crime assistance and other social services. Later, we established a youth court that trains local teenagers to serve as jurors, judges and attorneys, handling real-life cases involving their peers. Finally, in 2000, the full court—christened the Red Hook Community Justice Center—opened for business.

Why has the Justice Center been so successful? One of the keys to its success is that sentences for low-level offending involve community service—more than 79,000 hours a year. That means that the people in the community—both the law-abiding citizens and those who might be inclined to commit a crime—see those people who ran afoul of the law picking up trash in the park, painting over graffiti and polishing the brass in the courthouse. The punishment is therefore immediate (community service sometimes begins the very day of an offender’s first appearance in court) and local (right in the neighborhood where the offending took place).

But the Justice Center isn’t only about punishment. The Justice Center also links offenders to treatment—drug treatment, mental health treatment, counseling. The prosecutors at the Red Hook Community Justice Center rely heavily on creative sentencing strategies and non-traditional approaches to crime. Prosecutors work with Justice Center staff to identify offenders’ problems and to craft sentences that reflect the concerns of the victim and the needs of the community while also contemplating educational and rehabilitative needs of the defendant.

The Justice Center has a clinic onsite that performs assessments, makes treatment recommendations and even offers direct services to offenders, victims and anyone in the community who comes in seeking help. Sentences frequently include intensive drug or alcohol treatment, mediation, batterer’s programs, anger management classes, GED classes, youth groups, vehicular programs, “John School” and more. At any given time, the Justice Center monitors over 100 defendants in court-mandated treatment, usually for low-level drug offenses. And the Justice Center can offer these services at low or no extra cost to the justice system because it works closely with community-based partners: city agencies, nonprofit treatment agencies, and other social service providers.

Red Hook is also a multi-service court. It hears housing cases and family cases—and it brings those cases, along with criminal cases—before a single judge. Because there’s only one judge, that judge gets to understand the community’s problems and gets to know the people who live there. He often attends community meetings, speaks at civic events and helps serve as a catalyst for solving people’s problems.

In addition, the Justice Center created Operation Toolkit, which brings together on a monthly basis representatives from my office, the Police Department, the city Housing Authority, other government agencies, and community groups to discuss neighborhood problems as they arise. The Justice Center’s multi-agency “team” approach represents a radical departure from an old way of doing business – prosecutors’ historically reactive methods of dealing with crime. Prosecutors play an essential role in coordinating activities at the Justice Center and also participate in task forces and community events designed to target crime problems and improve safety.

Because the Justice Center is in the community, collaborates actively with community partners, sends offenders into the community to perform community service, and runs all kinds of proactive programs to keep adults and kids involved (for example, in addition to the Youth Court mentioned above, the Justice Center also coordinates a highly popular youth baseball league), the Justice Center has changed public attitudes about justice. Before the Justice Center opened, only 12 percent of community members approved of local courts. Today, more than 75 percent view the court favorably, according to a recent community survey.

But even more importantly, crime in Red Hook has dropped—dramatically. 2006 marked the second year since the Justice Center opened that there was not a single murder in Red Hook. The first time this happened was in 2003—the first time Red Hook had seen no homicides in 30 years. Not only that, other categories of crime have also been dropping. 2006 alone saw a 16 percent decrease in crime, with massive drops in burglary reports, muggings and car thefts. And everyone seems to agree that the Red Hook Community Justice Center has played an important role in that reduction, along with the police, prosecutors, church groups, schools, community leaders and ordinary citizens.

People used to think that prison building was the only means to keep communities safe and decrease crime. But that’s utter nonsense. We have been able to establish in Brooklyn that recidivism reduction is the key to public safety—that if you contain recidivism, you maintain public safety.

And one very effective way to deal with recidivism is by establishing a community justice center. These centers represent the way of the future. If we can prevent people from getting involved in the commission of another crime, if we can get offenders back into the job market, who benefits? The offender. The community. And the justice system. You eliminate the cost of future prosecution and the cost of incarceration. You improve safety and public confidence in justice, you increase the tax base and you can turn a life around. Everyone comes out a winner.

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The longest serving District Attorney in Brooklyn’s history, Charles J. Hynes has been the chief law enforcement officer of Kings County, New York, since 1990.  A proponent of innovative criminal justice strategies, he has launched several alternative-to-prison programs, including the nation’s first prosecution-run drug treatment diversion program for addicted repeat felony offenders.  He also created one of the first specialized domestic violence bureaus in the country and then worked with court administrators to establish one of the first domestic violence court parts and community justice centers in New York State.  He is a member of the Commission on Effective Criminal Sanctions and vice-chair of the Criminal Justice Section of the American Bar Association, a vice-president of the National District Attorneys Association, and the author of the recently published novel, Triple Homicide.

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