In New York's Times Square, they're trying to move justice from expert witnesses to expert systems.
Times Square, 10 p.m., a Friday: Cats is just letting out, sending streams of tourists into the streets, most of them petrified because they believe everything bad they've ever heard about New York. Some make it to their hotels; others are carried by the currents down side streets bathed in pink - the neon glow of the triple-X porn palaces. The air smells like jasmine and gyros as Jamaicans sell incense next to sidewalk souvlaki stands. On every corner, homeboys, Jersey girls, and club kids are jostling for the best view of the nightly freak parade.
Other than the street missionaries selling Jews for Jesus buttons, who in his right mind would pick Times Square to start a war on declining community values? Try John Feinblatt, a criminal justice futurist looking for a way to reinvent the nation's urban courts by starting from the ground up - with quality-of-life crimes. "If we're going to attack the revolving door, we have to use the criminal justice system to attack the root causes," says Feinblatt, a polished attorney with an easy smile. "And that means attacking with a broader brush."
His brush is the nation's first entirely computerized courthouse, which has been built inside a landmark 19th-century building on the West Side that also houses the American Theater of Actors, a troupe best known for giving Bruce Willis his start. The experimental court will handle 15,000 misdemeanor cases annually and, in doing so, will feed millions of tiny details about the offenders into a master database. At the end of a three-year test run, it's hoped that the database will help researchers answer a simple question: How can the nation's courts turn around small-time hoods before they become screaming tabloid headlines?
"New York spends $3 billion a year on criminal justice, yet we do no research about what we do," Feinblatt says, mystified. "We're churning these cases day in and day out, giving the same punishment to the same defendants in the same fashion. Forty percent of the defendants that come to criminal court have three or more misdemeanor convictions. You don't have to be a genius to know something's wrong here."
Feinblatt, a native New Yorker whose mane of red hair seems perpetually at war with itself, started out as a legal services lawyer in the late 1970s, only to switch careers and become a magazine writer. Deciding he liked eating more than writing, he returned to the legal fold with a job at New York's Victims Services agency, and stayed there until the fall of 1991. That year, a group of powerful Times Square landlords came up with an idea to finance their own court, a specialty boutique that wouldn't deal with rapists or murderers but rather with shoplifters and sidewalk hustlers - the very people they felt were standing in the way of a gentrification juggernaut that was reshaping the tourist capital.
Developers had spent billions in the late 1980s building gleaming new office towers, condemning the fabled porn theaters along 42nd Street, and erecting new hotels to serve Theater Row. Yet the downtown courts, overrun with felony crime, were turning the quality-of-life cons back onto the streets faster than a three-card monte dealer. Taking matters into their own hands, the Times Square cabal prevailed on city officials to give them a building on 54th Street and $450,000 in city money each year for three years. The city also kicked in $1.2 million to renovate the building, while the merchants added more than $2 million for operating costs.
Feinblatt's background won him the job of running the new court. From the start, the attorney decided he wanted to create a prototype for the future - a computer-driven laboratory that could help him test his post-punitive philosophy. Years of working with crime victims had taught the 42-year-old attorney that pushing punishment for its own sake never made people feel any safer on the streets. You could send an armed robber to jail for a year, but if no one in the neighborhood he terrorized knew about it, what good did it do for the communal psyche? Moreover, New York's jails were overflowing with prisoners. Riker's Island had gone from having 6,750 jail beds in 1977 to more than 14,000 today, causing the city's corrections budget to balloon. A drumbeat for alternatives to incarceration was sounding.
Against this backdrop, Feinblatt sketched the idea of creating a fishbowl that would put a judge under the same roof as city health workers, drug counselors, school teachers, and nontraditional community service outlets. With all those choices laid out like an extravagant banquet, perhaps a judge could have a fighting chance in turning around some lives. And maybe the community could get something back in the process. Feinblatt called the idea restorative justice. And it matched the needs of his Times Square patrons exquisitely.
But would it work?
Rochelle Austin certainly isn't biting. On a bright autumn day, the transvestite prostitute is sitting in the court's sixth-floor treatment center, complaining that he "spent 24 hours in the lockup. Then I waited here for six hours. I was dirty. I wanted to wash my ass. I wanted to go home, but they made me spend two hours talking to some guy about bullshit. I'm just doin' this for bidness. I want my sheet clear in case I get busted. You gotta be practical."
If Rochelle represents everything Feinblatt is up against, Randy (a pseudonym) represents everything he hopes for. Gaunt but expectant, the 46-year-old was nabbed in Macy's for shoplifting to sate a heroin habit that's hung on him like radiation disease on a downwinder. The court's intake staff sized him up for what he was - a three-time loser with one foot in God's waiting room - and flagged him for the judge, who in turn sent him upstairs to visit a drug counselor. Having cleared detox and fulfilled his sentence, Randy has been back for counseling four times. "If I ran into something like this years ago, maybe I wouldn't be where I am now," he says, crediting the new court with turning his life around. "More than anything, I want to know me again."
A Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) computer keeps tabs on Randy and the approximately 40 other quality-of-life cons who make it through court every day. It acts as the receptor for an elaborate system of remote feeds which, when combined, create the equivalent of a three-inch court file that can be accessed from a single screen. The process usually begins with a beat cop issuing a complaint to an offender, complete with a date for him or her to appear in court. Copies of the complaints are sent to the Manhattan DA's office, which in turn faxes them to the court.
When the defendant arrives in the new courthouse, his presence is noted on large screens that hang in the entranceway like airport flight monitors, displaying the names of all those scheduled to appear that day. (The monitors are fed from remote terminals at the smoked-glass and terra-cotta entranceway. Guards stationed there log everyone in as they arrive.) In addition, a dozen monitors jam the interior well of the courtroom - a high-gloss chamber designed to look like an art gallery with ceilings that slope up like cathedral spires, rich wood benches, and red clay floors. If all has worked, the faxed complaint from the DA's office has been scanned into the computer and can be pulled up from any of those monitors. Ditto the defendant's rap sheet, which gets fed into the database by an online hookup with the state's Division of Criminal Justice.
Before long, an interviewer approaches the defendant with a laundry list of queries: Does he or she have a drug habit, a home, a job? Each answer is typed into a laptop computer and downloaded into the DEC machine. (Sometimes these interviews take place at a local police precinct if the accused is being held.) The next person to use that database is the court's resource coordinator - an intermediary between the court and the clinicians upstairs. He or she will scan the person's history, make suggestions for treatment, and enter the comments into the system so they'll be available for the judge and attorneys at sentencing time.
By now thousands of bits of information about a single defendant are swimming around the electronic file folder. How to place it in any order? This was one of the most formidable hurdles Feinblatt faced. The solution that his team engineered may help wire countless courts in the years to come.
Using a Windows environment, they decided to route everything into a single screen using a four-grid display. The rap sheet occupies the top-right grid, the complaint the top-left, and the interview data the bottom-left. (The bottom-right is reserved for the judge). The software lets the user "maximize" any of the quadrants and go into more detailed sub-routines. For instance, in its normal state, the bottom left interview screen displays the defendant's education level (ReadingProb: Y), Housing Status (Can Return Home: N, Homeless: Y) and drug habit (Requests Treatment: N). Maximized, it details everything from what drugs the person uses to whom he or she lives with and where. One of the more user-friendly elements of the software is that problematic answers light up in red; anyone looking at an all-red screen knows to expect a major headache.
By the time the defense and prosecution are ready to call up the defendant's file by entering his or her criminal complaint number, everything they need to fashion a plea is flashing on a 19-inch monitor on the desks before them. After working a deal out, they'll inform a clerk who operates from behind the judge's bench in the cramped well of the court. The clerks, in turn, enter the agreement into the bottom-right screen saved for the final disposition, and then wait for Judge Judy Kluger to take the bench.
At the most minimal level, Kluger could approve the plea by simply clicking her mouse, and it would be routed into the state court's main memory banks. But Kluger, a rail-thin woman with a native New Yorker's restlessness, doesn't see herself as a robojudge. "This isn't Disney World," she says, "if someone has a long record, they're going to jail." Still, she says she can't deny "feeling like a pioneer."
Feinblatt and his team expect to add another twist soon: Mapping technology that will display a defendant's prior arrests as flashing specks on a grid of the city. It's hoped that if a computer can graph the precise area where a defendant has done the most harm, Kluger will be better armed to craft a community service sentence that includes appropriate payback.
Feinblatt becomes most animated when talking about this part of the court's work. "When people talk about fleeing our cities for the suburbs, they're really talking about being worn down by the quality-of-life crimes," he says.
"So we're trying to be reflective of what's on their minds. We're taking the victims' rights movement to the next level. We're treating the neighborhood as a victim." So far, that has mostly translated into sending trios of quality-of-life cons dressed in court-issue white jumpsuits onto the graffiti-laced avenues of the West Side to repaint storefronts. Which happens to be exactly what Giovanni Velez is doing when I find him standing out like a scarecrow in his white jammies. "If I wasn't here, I'd be hangin' wid my boys," says the 18-year-old, who was nabbed the day before for jumping a subway turnstile at Grand Central station.
I'm curious if, having added a few coats of paint to the neighborhood, he feels more a part of it. "Nah," he says. "If I lived 'round here, I'd graffiti over it tomorrow just to fuck wid 'em, ya know?"
Maybe not the rehabilitated do-gooder that Feinblatt is looking for, but hey, the kid showed up. Only four out of every ten defendants at the chaotic courts downtown fulfill their community service; so far, Kluger's community sentences are being carried out 80 percent of the time. Of course, each case is being micromanaged because there's a lot riding on the project. The downtown courts are decrepit, and critics of the project say the money could have gone to better uses. As Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau wrote in a letter to City Hall in 1991, "I fully appreciate that the concept of a community court is fashionable and that it will bring us a few days' good press. But it is a diversion of our resources and energies."
A point well worth noting. Feinblatt's project is, ultimately, a vanity affair for the deep pockets who own real estate in Times Square. Clearly, cash-starved New York City has better things to do with its money. But enough criminal justice pros think Feinblatt is onto something - the project is garnering a good deal of research money.
"In the past, there hasn't been a lot of creative thinking about the sanctions judges can use," says Laurie Bright, a social science analyst with the federal National Institute of Justice in Washington, DC, which has kicked in $212,914 to fund a study of the project. "We're very interested in specialized courts like this."
The institute is also helping fund a court in Miami that sentences domestic abusers to counseling as well as jail. That project grew out of an earlier experiment, approved by US Attorney General Janet Reno when she was State Attorney in Miami, in which defendants sentenced through a "drug court" were offered unconventional treatments. Acupuncture drug therapy, for instance, was used there; Feinblatt saw it and exported it to New York.
Certainly the Manhattan court's database is expected to generate first-time data about such things as which community service sites are the most effective, and whether the outpatient drug treatment offered at the court works as well as scarce and more expensive inpatient programs. But on a broader level, Feinblatt's lab may well become a prototype for the self-contained justice center of the future. Instead of justice being meted out from monstrously large edifices built to manage an endless flow of bodies, Feinblatt's 21st-century vision calls for dozens of smaller complexes scattered around an area and linked by computer. They wouldn't be designed as courthouses, but restoration centers, with everything from schools to hospital clinics interlinked with the courts.
"Technology is never the goal," Feinblatt says. "The whole point is to use it to be as reflective as possible. We know very little about the 100,000 people who come through this system. In three years, we're going to know a whole lot more."
