Mr. Julius Lang:

Ideally, in creating a community court, what we recommend to jurisdictions is to figure out the problems their client population have and document that, identify the providers in their jurisdictions which are available and make the case to them that this is an opportunity to deploy resources more smartly and to co-locate with other providers and with the justice system, which is giving a kind of extra push to link the staff to the clients they are intended to assist, and when there are gaps, to figure out a way to fill them.

The Midtown community court was the very first project to take this approach. Probation from the get-go said it could not deal with that level of stuff as it was so under-resourced. Probation in the United States is always facing cuts. The public finds it very hard to support the work of probation which, as we know, is so important. Probation was not an option. A number of other agencies were willing to come on board, such as the New York City education department which was willing to offer adult education classes for people who had dropped out of high school, and the health department, which was willing to send staff. Different agencies were willing to listen to that argument about being able to co-locate.

However, what was required was co-ordinating staff. Somebody had to run it. I acted as the co-ordinator for five years. That needed to come from somewhere. Community service supervisors were a combination of staff who had to be paid for as well as agencies that were co-operating. Local agencies would contribute in kind by supervising participants doing community service. There needed to be a handful of other case managers who could run groups and provide services on site when other agencies were not there. In that particular instance, that ended up costing about $1.2 million per year to run.

During the pilot period, the sources for that - we are going back a long time here - were a combination of the court budget, the City of New York and a number of foundations and local businesses which chipped in to help fill out the budget. The only caveat I would mention is that people were very careful that private money was not going to fund the core court functions, such as paying for the judge or the clerks or anything like that. It is important that any private money is used for non-traditional purposes.