More Than Just A Court: Credit to Mayor Dinkins for Midtown Community Court

Earlier this week, I spoke at the David N. Dinkins Leadership and Public Policy Forum at Columbia University.  It was a nice event, highlighted by a keynote address by former US Attorney General Eric Holder, who talked about the need to address the over-use of incarceration in this country.

When it was my turn to speak, I decided to tip my hat to the evening's host, former New York City Mayor Dinkins.  If you follow the dominoes, you could argue that I owe my career to Dinkins -- his decision to invest in the Midtown Community Court helped set the wheels in motion that ultimately led to the creation of the Center for Court Innovation.

This is a version of what I said at the Dinkins forum (definitely not verbatim):

I got my start in criminal justice in 1993.  Working for John Feinblatt, I played a small role in the planning of the Midtown Community Court.  Midtown was (and is) a neighborhood-based court that seeks to focus on misdemeanor crime in and around Times Square, offering alternatives to fines and short jail sentences.   It also seeks to treat individual defendants with dignity and respect, and to link them to the kinds of social services – drug treatment, counseling, job training – that might help them get their lives back on track.

In attempting to do all this, Midtown was tilting into a pretty strong head wind.  Remember, the context was 1993.  We were coming off a decade when they regularly made movies like Escape from New York, The Warriors, and Fort Apache the Bronx that offered a fairly bleak portrait of life in New York City. The crack epidemic was still very much in the forefront of people’s minds.  This was an era of tough-on-crime legislation.  Megan’s Law, Three-Strikes-and-You’re-Out, mandatory minimums…the net effect of all this was to toughen penalties for criminal behavior and tilt the scales of justice in the direction of prosecutors.

Given this backdrop, it took a measure of political courage to greenlight a project like the Midtown Community Court which explicitly sought to provide help to criminal defendants and was vehemently opposed by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. The Mayor who made Midtown happen was David Dinkins. 

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