New Thinking, from the Center for Justice Innovation - Taking a Collaborative Approach to Addressing Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Justice System

Taking a Collaborative Approach to Addressing Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Justice System

10/25/16 • -1 min

New Thinking, from the Center for Justice Innovation

Tshaka
Barrows, deputy director of the Burns Institute, discusses his organization’s collaborative and community-centered
approach to addressing and eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in the justice system. Barrows spoke with Robert
V. Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, after participating in a panel on Race and
Procedural Justice at Justice Innovations in Times of Change on Sept. 30, 2016.

TSHAKA BARROWS: We
call it a system, but it really isn’t a system. It’s much more of a grouping of semi-autonomous agencies
that have very little accountability to each other.

ROB WOLF: Hi I’m Rob Wolf, Director of
Communications at the Center for Court Innovation and today I’m in North Haven, Connecticut at the Justice Innovation
in Times of Change conference. Sitting down with me is TShaka Barrows who is Deputy Director of the W. Haywood Burns
Institute, which works to address racial and ethnic disparities in the justice system. The institute is based in
Oakland, California. You’ve come a long way to attend the conference and participate and to sit and talk with
me, thank you very much.

BARROWS: I’m glad to be here.

WOLF: Let’s
talk about the work of the Burns Institute and in particular, how you work with jurisdictions to reduce racial and
ethnic disparities in the justice system. You have a specific approach you take to looking at this issue and trying
to address it. Maybe you could summarize for me what that approach is.

BARROWS: At the Burns Institute,
our approach is to build a collaborative of the different agencies that make up the justice system and I always tell
people, I just told the group, we call it a system, but it really isn’t a system. It’s much more of a grouping
of semi-autonomous agencies that have very little accountability to each other. The whole notion of trying to address
disparities has to be done with that context in mind because much of one agencies decision bump into the next, bump
into the next and the impact is felt by the individuals who are going through it and we see it in the disparity numbers.
To really create a strategy to address it you have to have all those key players from each of those agencies as a
part of your collaboration. We also fundamentally don’t think that just having those kind of traditional stakeholders
is enough. Our process requires that we engage meaningful participation from community stakeholders who’ve had
experience with the justice system, who live in the neighborhoods that our data shows are the target neighborhoods,
where more people are coming from, so that they can both bring that experience from having traveled through the system,
though the various agencies, being passed from one to the other, but also what it’s like living in the community
that is targeted for higher involvement for various reasons, policies, policing policies, could be that there’s
a lack of resources, any number of conditional factors.

This whole notion of creating more fair
notion of procedural justice can’t be done without accounting for that fact that certain neighborhoods are much
more highly representative in the system, our process we really aim for participation with community stakeholders,
which is very different. People are a little bit afraid of that. The idea that you’re sitting in a meeting sharing
data with people who are upset with the agency, who did not feel that they were treated fairly, who are angry about
the realities that folks in their community face, is a threatening notion for most traditional stakeholders who already
a conversation of race in this country, typically is a bit unnerving for people, it’s not like that’s a
regular practice that we have.

WOLF: And you literally bring everyone together in the same room?
That’s the process, it’s like, “Let’s all sit down together.” What does that look like,
how many people are actually sitting around a table or in a auditorium?

BARROWS: That’s a
great question. We build a collaborative and it’s a process to even build it. We don’t try to just come
in with a cookie cutter kind of prescription. We want to understand from the local players. Justice happens locally,
there’s culture. Who do they think are the key people they need to be there and how many? So sometimes we may
get huge representation from one agency, where it’s like, “You guys are kind of dominating the meeting.”
and we may need to adjust that so there’s a need to attend to the actual formation. Typically it’s, I’d
say, between 10 to 20 stakeholders d...

TSHAKA BARROWS: We
call it a system, but it really isn’t a system. It’s much more of a grouping of semi-autonomous agencies
that have very little accountability to each other.

BARROWS: I’m glad to be here.

Previous Episode

The Potential for Bias in Risk-Assessment Tools: A Conversation

In this New Thinking podcast, Reuben J. Miller, assistant professor of social work at the University of Michigan,
and his research collaborator Hazelette Crosby-Robinson discuss some of the criticisms that have been leveled against
risk assessment tools. Those criticisms include placing too much emphasis on geography and criminal history, which
can distort the actual risk for clients from neighborhoods that experience an above-average presence of policing
and social services. “Geography is often a proxy for race,” Miller says. Miller and Crosby-Robinson spoke
with the Center for Court Innovation’s Director of Communications Robert V. Wolf after they participated in
a panel on the “The Risk-Needs-Responsivity Framework” at Justice Innovation in Times of Change, a regional summit on Sept. 30, 2016
in North Haven, Conn.

Reuben J. Miller,
assistant professor of social work at the University of Michigan, and his research collaborator Hazelette Crosby-Robinson
participate in a panel at “Justice Innovation in Times of Change,” a regional summit.

WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications
at the Center for Court Innovation and today with me at the Justice Innovation in Times of Change Conference here
at the Quinnipiac School of Law in North Haven, Connecticut are two of the panelists who participated in a discussion
about risk needs assessment tools. They are Professor Reuben Miller, who is an assistant professor of social work
at the School of Social Work at the University of Michigan and his research assistant at the School of Social Work,
Hazelette Crosby-Robinson. Thank you so much for taking the time after your panel to sit down and talk
with me.

MILLER: Thank you for having us.

WOLF: So, I wanted to
just start off talking about the risk assessment tools and some of the criticisms that have been leveled against
them because, as we heard on the panel from Sarah Fritsche, a colleague of mine at the Center for Court Innovation,
their use has exploded and they’ve been embraced as a decision-making tool in the criminal justice setting.

MILLER: Sure.

WOLF: But you raised some potential concerns about them and some of their
limitations and I wondered if you could share what some of those limitations are as you see them.

MILLER:
Sure, I’m happy to. So, Hazelette is my research associate and collaborator. She’s super modest.

So, I’d like to first preface this by saying, some scholars have suggested that we’ve really entered
an actuarial age. So it’s not just risk assessment in criminal justice, but a whole cost benefits calculus,
a whole risk calculus that’s based on actuarial models that try to predict future harm. So they try to predict,
much like an insurance company would try to predict the future risk of a car accident. In a criminal justice setting,
these risk needs assessments are trying to, one, gauge the needs of incarcerated individuals or people who have been
convicted of a crime to try to figure out where they could shore up deficits in their skill sets or in their general
stability. So for example, they might examine things like housing stability, or whether or not one was employed,
or what kinds of service needs they may have. So for example, if one has a history of substance use and abuse, that
would indicate that they need treatment or some sort of intervention based around these things.

And
at the same time, they’re trying to gauge the risk of re-offense, so the risk that they will commit a crime.
So there are a number of criticisms. The literature that engages this is fairly long. I tend to think about some
of the movers and shakers in this field, Kelly Hannah-Moffat, Bernard Harcourt, Sonia Star, Faye Taxman. Faye Taxman’s
work is actually helping us to think about important ways that we can implement risk assessment that reduce some
of the biases that are sort of baked into it, but just to talk about some of the critiques that have come from this
literature and of course my own, on the one hand there are static factors like where one lives, so geography, their
prior criminal history. These are things that they can’t avoid. And the privileging of recidivism as an indicator
of success. These are all problematic for the following reasons.

So geography is often a proxy
for race. We know that we live in a country that has a pattern of residential racial segregation. And we know that
policing and criminal justice resources of all kinds are overwhelmingly distributed in areas where poor people of
color tend to live. The problem is, people are now being arrested from, returned to, and even given programs designed
to rehabilitate them all withi...

Next Episode

Houston’s SAFE Court Offers Victims of Human Trafficking a New Path

In this New Thinking podcast, Ann Johnson, an assistant district attorney and the human trafficking section
chief with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, discusses her office’s strategies for combating
human trafficking, including increased enforcement against traffickers and buyers, and diversion from prosecution
for victims. One of the office’s diversion programs, SAFE Court, gives those aged 17 to 25 who are charged with
prostitution the opportunity to clear the charge from their criminal records by completing a year-long program of
monitoring and social services. SAFE Court was created with support from a Smart Prosecution grant from the U.S.
Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance. To learn more, visit the Association of Prosecuting Attorney’s
Smart
Prosecution website.

ROB WOLF: Hi. I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications
at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome to another New Thinking podcast. Today I am speaking with Ann Johnson,
who is an Assistant District Attorney with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office in Texas. She is also
the Human Trafficking Section Chief of that office. For those who may not realize, Harris County is where Houston
is located, very large county. Thank you very much, Miss Johnson, for joining me today.

JOHNSON:
Thank you. It’s an honor to be here. It’s an honor to speak with you on behalf of District Attorney Devon
Anderson and the other folks that are working tirelessly to combat human trafficking in the Houston area.

WOLF: You’re here today and tomorrow to observe what goes on here in New York at some courts that are
also working to address human trafficking.

JOHNSON: Yes, we are very fortunate that our SAFE court
team, which is a prostitution diversion court, our defense attorney, our probation officer, our judges and our research
partner and myself have been able to come up and visit two of your companion courts to be able to work with our peers
and exchange ideas and see about the innovations that are taking place here locally.

WOLF: Well,
as I said when I introduced you, you are the Section Chief for the Human Trafficking Division in your office. You
do have a robust program going on there as well. I wanted to talk to you about that. In particular, I thought we
could focus on what you guys are calling the SAFE court, which I understand stands for Survivors Acquiring Freedom
and Empowerment court. I was hoping you could tell me a little bit about how that court got started and what its
goals are.

JOHNSON: The vision for this court actually started about four years ago when then
District Attorney Mike Anderson hired me to come in as a human trafficking specialist. I had been with the DA’s
Office. I had left for health reasons and I was actually doing juvenile defense work and began representing children
who were charged with prostitution. Through the course of that time in private practice, not only did we challenge
a case of an individual charged with prostitution of which the Texas Supreme Court ruled in the case of IN RE: B.W.,
that children are the victims of child prostitution not the offenders.

Myself and District Attorney
Devon Anderson were actually the two founding defense members of a court called GIRLS court, which is for Growing
Independence and Restoring Lives, which assist children at risk of human trafficking, who are in our Juvenile Justice
System between the ages of 10 and 17. With this background, I came back to the DA’s Office in February of 2013
and the commitment at that time was just recognizing that Houston was well known as a hub of human trafficking and
District Attorney Anderson had this vision to see how we could best combat the issue and reenergize our focus within
the DA’s Office.

At the time, we began looking at cases of individuals charged with prostitution
because we knew from the Texas Human Trafficking Prevention Task Force report that the State Department was estimating
that we identify about 0.04% of victims in existence. We knew that we had hundreds of people being charged with the
offense of prostitution. The commitment was to start with the new vision from the legislature, which was that now
in Texas, if you are a victim of human trafficking, it’s a defense to prosecution for prostitution.

Our office has taken this commitment that that’s a defense that we value and want to assist the defense
bar in identifying. We began this new procedure of reaching out to the defense bar, talking with individuals who
were charged with prostitution and helping them identify and disclose a human trafficking defense. We’re very
proud of those efforts, but what w...