The Red Hook Community Justice Center: An Evaluation of a Community Court

Abstract

The archival data base of the Red Hook Community Justice Center was analyzed to describe the defendant population, the nature of the cases, the types of sanctions imposed, and the extent of compliance with sanctions. The data base contained a total of 6,245 cases that came under the jurisdiction of the court between June 2000 and June 2003. As anticipated, the data indicated that the most frequent type of offense was drug related and the most frequent sanction was mandatory substance abuse treatment. Incarceration was infrequent (4.9% of all cases). Other sanctions included community service, mandatory academic or vocational training and social service interventions such as anger management groups. Compliance with sanctions ranged from 63.7% for mandatory drug treatment sanctions to 75.5% for community service.

Solving Her Problems? Beyond the Seductive Appeal of Specialist Problem-Solving Courts for Women Offenders in England and Wales

“…According to the Centre for Social Justice, there are more than 3,000 problem-solving courts in the United States and Canada (2017: 17), and the model has spread across the world, notably in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Norway and Belgium. The US was an early adopter, with examples including the Miami drug court (established in 1989), the New York Midtown community court (established in 1993) and the Red Hook Community Justice Center, established in 2000. International evaluations have variously highlighted improvements in offender compliance with court sanctions, greater levels of offender accountability, and improved collaboration with external agencies (see Flynn, 2005 and Lee et al, 2013 for US evaluations;Richardson et al, 2013 for an Australian analysis;…”