Alternative justice update

NY Times - Teenagers arrested for minor crimes will soon be diverted to counseling before they ever come before a judge under a new pilot program in Brooklyn and Manhattan, prosecutors said. The program will apply to 16- and 17-year-olds arrested for the first time for low-level offenses, like jumping a subway turnstile, shoplifting or trespassing, the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said

Christian Science Monitor -  Community courts allow for the best of both worlds, according to Chris Pleasanton, the program coordinator at the Hartford Community Court. With community courts handling all quality-of-life crimes, criminal courts are able to focus their attention on more serious and violent crimes. In turn, the community courts can work with defendants to address the root causes of their offenses, which often stem from mental illness and substance abuse. “We have to kind of decode the person and figure out how to best help them,” Mr. Pleasanton says. “We don’t want to see people continually spiral because they’re not connecting with the services they need.”

Greg Berman, Talk Poverty - When I first started working in criminal justice in the early 1990s, it was almost impossible to have a conversation with an elected official or a high-ranking criminal justice policymaker of any political persuasion without talking about the need to be “tough on crime.”  The backdrop for these conversations was a pervasive sense of fear (of lawlessness on the streets) and despair (about the prospects of successfully rehabilitating offenders). Today, I turned on my computer to discover that Newt Gingrich has endorsed the idea of reducing incarceration in the United States.  He is not the only voice on the right calling for change.  Indeed, hopeful analysts have cited criminal justice reform as one of the few potential areas where Democrats and Republicans in Washington might find common ground in the final two years of President Obama’s term.  Clearly, the center of gravity has shifted in terms of the politics of crime.