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 eighteen 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 fifty 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).
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