Eye on the Courts: The Promise and Shortcoming of Neighborhood Courts

A recent statewide publication trumpeted the DA’s Neighborhood Court program, stating that Davis has earned another distinction, “becoming the second California city to institute a restorative justice program to deal with misdemeanors as an alternative to the traditional court system.”

Yolo County has earned a lot of mileage from the program. DA Jeff Reisig notes that “courts are overcrowded, the system is costly, and there are too few judges and too few courtrooms.”

He recently told one community group, “There’s gotta be a better way to allow victims to be heard.”

He noted recently, “The goal of the program is to restore the victim and to fix the harm, as well as to engage and rehabilitate the offender.”

While that is the overall thrust of a restorative justice approach, the specifics of this program, in its early stages, is that for the most part they are dealing with crimes where there is no victim and the community itself acts as the de facto victim.

The article notes, “The benefit to the public is that the Neighborhood Court resolves cases quickly, the victims feel like they are part of the solution and process, and the perpetrator avoids a criminal conviction,” Reisig said.  “The process can result in victim restitution, community service, and even a letter of apology.”

However, the goals of the program are modest. According to the article, Mr. Reisig’s goal is just 100 cases heard and decided by the end of 2014. In a county with over 5000 misdemeanors and 2000 felonies, that is a tip of the iceberg.

Two weeks ago, the Vanguard Court Watch Council meeting in Woodland listened to Yolo County Sheriff Ed Prieto and Woodland Police Chief Dan Bellini talk about AB 109. The most interesting thing is that both men, veterans in law enforcement, agreed that the criminal justice system needs to change the way it does business.

While AB 109 gets the non-violent, non-sexual and non-serious felons out of the California prison system, the clear next step is to move from punishment-based approaches to more rehabilitative approaches.

In many cases, what people need is not more punishment, but more treatment – particularly in the area of drug crimes.

Other crimes require different approaches, like job training and education. I firmly see a restorative approach fitting in with these sorts of crimes.

At the same time, law enforcement and other entities are realizing that our rush to install more and more serious punishment for various crimes has not worked. We have created a cycle of crime and poverty with each leg reinforcing itself.

People with few resources and economic opportunities end up committing crimes – sometimes it is drug crimes, other times it is property crimes, but in the end, they end up in the same place, in the system as a convicted felon. Once in the system, there is no way out for most.

As a convicted felon, one ends up a second-class citizen, unable to work, unable to vote, unable to even live in certain places. The cycle continues. We need to find ways to break the cycle, Sheriff Prieto said. That means we need to intervene, and create more programs to get people out of the system so that they no longer recidivate at a rate of 70 percent.

Law enforcement and prosecutors are late to the game, but they are finally arriving here. The support from law enforcement for using evidence-based approaches and less than traditional means for punishment and rehabilitation gives these reform efforts energy and strength.

The problem is that, at the same time, these reforms are being undercut by those worrying that the release of prisoners will trigger a crime wave. It is dangerous to look at the first results of the new policy, because it results in a huge displacement of people, new systems and new rules, and therefore everyone needs a period of time to adjust.

The second problem, however, is self-induced. While Jeff Reisig trumpets his pilot program, getting statewide recognition for what looks like 100 cases by the end of next year (nearly two years into the program), his charging policies seem to remain the same.

If you recognize that the courts are overcrowded, the system is costly and there are too few judges and too few courtrooms, then why perpetuate that problem?

Right now, we have one courtroom for misdemeanors with a second courtroom for drug offenders under drug court prohibitions.

But we have five felony courtrooms and none of the policies in place now or in the near future are aimed toward them. Instead, what we see are too many people with too many charges placed on them compared to the severity of the crime.

Despite high exposure, most of the offers are not reasonable enough for the defendants to take them.

In short, we see cases that are charged high enough in efforts to avoid local sentencing, cases that are charged that could be handled as non-crimes through mediation or a restorative justice process, and even felony cases that are serious, but could be mitigated with restorative justice.

If the end game here is for the DA’s office to slowly ramp up its Neighborhood Court concept, that is fine. But why keep the same broken charging system in place when everyone knows it does not work?

Places as conservative as Fresno County have gone to much more expansive restorative justice programs, encompassing juvenile crimes as well.

Jeff Reisig is right, there is a better way to allow victims to be heard. Restorative justice approaches are not just for the defendants. In fact, it has to be both the victim and the offender who come together, agree on the harm and find collective ways to restore justice.

If it works properly, the victim, while never becoming fully whole again, at least has the opportunity to gain some sense of closure, to have the offender have to accept responsibility and then seek ways to restore justice, seek redemption. What those ways are depend on the nature of the crime.

It is our hope that in ten years the criminal justice system looks very different than it does today. There are truly dangerous people and, for them, punishment and banishment from society is appropriate. But we believe far more people have been sentenced to lengthy, if not life, sentences who do not truly fit that mold.

The true question is, can we get to the point where they apparently already were in Florida, where Sujatha Baliga – who spoke at Davis’ MLK Day event – talked about her involvement in a first degree homicide case where a young man in Florida took the life of his fiancée.

“They didn’t think that his taking their daughter’s life somehow severed him from humanity,” Ms. Baliga explained.  “They were willing to grapple with what that interconnectedness between them meant in the wake of this unthinkable harm.”

She described the dialogue that took five hours in Conor’s jail in Tallahassee, Florida.

“As we worked together to fashion Conor’s sentence,” she said, the mother of the victim “looked Conor in the eye and said these words, ‘Conor now you have the burden of doing the good works of two people because Ann (the victim) would have done wonderful things with her life.’ “

“When Kate (the mother) said this, she was living Dr. King’s definition of justice,” Ms. Baliga said.  “That justice is… ‘love correcting that which revolts against love.’ “

Conor would receive a twenty-year prison sentence.  That sentence was followed by a term of parole that included the things the family of the victim needed to see in order for Conor to redeem himself.

“This was in lieu of mandatory life,” Ms. Baliga said.  She said that the family was happy with this outcome, “although they would have preferred to see Conor do ten years – instead of twenty – that’s what they asked for.  His second ten years would have been that time where he was doing acts within the community.”

It is not that he avoided a lengthy prison sentence, but if he can be redeemed, why do we need to banish “Conor” or people like him from humanity?

That’s what the current prison system does, both physically and even post-sentencing, by making people into second-class citizens who must register and report, who can’t work in certain fields and can’t even vote – and then we wonder why they go right back to their life of crime.

That is the challenge ahead of us. We have taken a relatively easy step with the Neighborhood Court, but the true test will be when the DA’s office changes the way it charges crimes and the way it punishes criminals.

—David M. Greenwald reporting

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