Mr. Julius Lang:

It is a pleasure and an honour to be invited to make a presentation to the joint committee today. I am representing the Center for Court Innovation in New York and am accompanied by my colleague, Mr. Phil Bowen, from our UK-based affiliate, the Center for Justice Innovation. Ours is a non-governmental and not-for-profit organisation. If we had a tagline, it would be "research and development for justice reform". In practice, our work falls into three categories, the first of which is demonstration projects such as community courts which are created in our role as the external research and development arm of the New York state court system. The second category is research. We have 15 social scientists on our staff who support our demonstration projects with action research and study the impact of other justice interventions in the United States and internationally.

The third area of our work is technical assistance, both in the United States and internationally. This is the part of the organisation in which Mr. Bowen and I are chiefly involved.

In the time we have been allotted, I will speak about our experience with New York's longest-running community court, while Mr. Bowen will cover replication of the original model and evaluation of results. In New York, community courts have endured and, in fact, thrived since the first one was created in Times Square in 1993. I was reminded of the Midtown Community Court's staying power just a few weeks ago as our newest mayor was preparing to take office. The court was planned and opened under Mayor David Dinkins, who was followed by Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg. While those three mayors had differing positions on many issues, each was enthusiastically supportive of the community court. Twenty years after the court opened its doors, our newest mayor, Bill de Blasio, has also embraced the community courts model. In fact, he chose the Red Hook Community Justice Center, a Brooklyn-based replication of the Midtown model, as the location to announce his appointment of the new police commissioner, Bill Bratton, in December.

The fundamental idea behind the Red Hook Community Justice Center's work, as Mayor de Blasio explained, is that the way to fight crime is with the community. That idea has been epitomised to great effect in New York, and it is an idea that animates my entire view of public safety and how we can move forward as a city. The incoming mayor called the justice centre an "extraordinary institution" that "epitomizes what I believe in terms of a progressive approach to public safety". The Midtown Community Court was opened under the then New York State Chief Judge, Judith Kaye, and has been just as strongly supported by her successor, Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, through good economic times and bad.

The bottom line is that crime, although it can be politicised, is not really a political issue. More often, except in the case of career criminals, it is a combination of complex social, economic, health and other issues and, as such, it defies easy solutions. The crime problem facing Times Square back in 1993 is a problem that afflicts many urban centres. It was a type of crime that did its damage through an accumulation of relatively small but constant insults to the social fabric. Times Square had gone slowly but surely from a jewel of the city - home to theatres and fine dining and one of New York's two central business districts, along with the Wall Street area - to a mecca for the small and ugly, including street prostitution, open-air drug dealing, drunken brawling, assaults, shoplifting, and illegal street trading. Many offences were relatively small but their collective impact was to ruin the quality of the experiences of workers, tourists, residents and everyone who passed through the neighbourhood.

New York's traditional response to this kind of lower-level offending had become something of a treadmill or, in an oft-used cliché, a "revolving door". The police officer would issue a ticket or make an arrest, the accused would go downtown to a massive anonymous courthouse where all cases, large and small, were heard, and would typically get a short-term jail sentence, a release without conditions - known in New York as a "walk" - or a fine that was rarely paid. In the words of the frustrated supervising judge of the time, sentencers had only two choices, namely, brain surgery, meaning prison, or a band aid, meaning the other options. The problem was that many of those cycling through the system were habitual offenders with very complicated lives, facing minimal accountability while the neighbourhood continued to be victimised.

In setting up the Midtown Community Court, the justice system was proposing something different, a way of administering punishments that were meaningful and might actually serve as a disincentive to further offending while also being proportionate to the crime. It was also about helping offenders get on a better life track. Thus, what we call the community court model was born - a court with a geographic focus which would harness the power of the justice system to work with the community to solve local problems. Instead of an overnight in jail, the Midtown Community Court's typical punishment consists of a combination of a community restitution assignment and mandated social services. These responses are delivered quickly, not days or weeks after the fact, often on the same day or next day after sentencing.

Research has shown that swift and certain responses make more of an impact on re-offending than the severity of the sanction itself. A day of community restitution might consist of a team, under the supervision of a court staffer or partner agency, going out into the neighbourhood to paint over graffiti, clean a local park or even stuff envelopes for a non-governmental organisation. Key social services are housed on-site. Drug and mental health counselling, even job training and fatherhood classes, take place on the sixth floor of the building, a few flights above the courtroom. These sanctions are meaningful because, unlike a fine or a night in jail, they seek to address factors associated with underlying behaviour.

The local nature of the response is important. Community courts are usually, although not always, based in the neighbourhood they serve. The Midtown Community Court is on West 54th Street, a few blocks from Times Square and right in the middle of its catchment, which is actually slightly larger than Times Square. Its location makes it easier for members of the local business, residential, faith and academic communities to come in and volunteer. They can serve on advisory boards, work with court participants and can even access the same services as the court's clients. In other words, the court also serves the law-abiding members of the community. That is the Midtown Community Court in a nutshell. I thank members for their time and will be glad to answer any questions they might have.