Welcome
Welcome to the first installment in the Center for Court Innovation’s Technology Blog. Here at the Center, we work to create a justice system that is more just and humane for all involved: defendants, victims, their families. One of our principal goals is to limit the use of incarceration in New York City and other communities, and build trust in the justice system from all sides. Our work is quite extensive. The Center, in collaboration with numerous partners, influences reforms in policy, conducts original research, and creates and operates projects in New York City and Newark, NJ. These projects range from the Brooklyn Mental Health Court, to the Harlem Community Justice Center and even to the Youth Domestic Violence Court. In creating these projects we have recognized and incorporated a fair amount of technological innovation.
As our society increasingly embraces new forms of technology, the criminal justice sector has naturally followed suit, albeit a step or two behind. In 2017, the private sector finds itself in close proximity to futurist John Naisbitt’s “third stage” of progress: we have adopted information, sensor, and computational technologies to improve or replace older tools, and we are in the process of exploring new uses for them based on their potential. The public sector, on the other hand, lags behind. We are arguably still in the first stage of development, following the line of least resistance, applying technologies to what we believe (or have heard) works.
We’ve created this blog for a few important reasons. First, to pursue the ends of our own as well as our colleagues’ intellectual curiosities, exploring how technology is applied in the criminal justice system and sharing information about new technologies that have the potential to impact our work. We also created this blog to share accounts of our colleagues’ and partners’ successes and failures, because, as we’ve learned from two decades of planning and operating projects, there are valuable lessons to be learned from both. We aim to examine, through the lens of our technology principles, the past, present, and future uses of technology in the criminal justice world. How can we utilize automated systems to maximize effectiveness without ignoring the importance of human interaction? How can electronic monitoring programs be used to rehabilitate rather than punish? What are video visitation programs and what do they mean for incarcerated individuals and their loved ones?
We believe in humane and inclusive problem-driven technology and human-centered solutions; we believe in sustainable technology that is implemented with true consent from all parties. We hope this blog will help you to better understand criminal justice tech and prompt the questions that we should be working through regarding this fast-developing and ever changing sector.
You can follow us on twitter at @CourtInnovation or find me at @jantoine; questions about this blog can be sent to ccitechblog@courtinnovation.org.
