Senator Gianaris, the author
When I went to cast my vote, in the same polling location I have voted all my life, the line was out the door. I’ve never seen it that crowded before. At other polling sites in my district, wait times lasted up to two hours, often scuttling voters' other plans for the day or causing upheaval for families. Observing the chaos, I thought about the 34 states that have already enacted early voting, a process proven to increase voter participation and enhance convenience.
Why hasn't New York adopted this common-sense measure?
The American voting system is known to erect hurdles to participation and discourage voters in too many cases. Aside from the lack of early voting, we have other problems: in New York alone, more than two million eligible citizens are not registered to vote. This is why I introduced the Voter Empowerment Act, which would implement automatic voter registration among other needed reforms.
The enactment of the Voter Empowerment Act would solve problems plaguing our election system. We would automatically register every eligible citizen to vote through the Department of Motor Vehicles and other government agencies. In addition, voters would be able to automatically update their information, we would permit pre-registration of 16- and 17-year-olds, automatically transfer registrations of New Yorkers who move within the state, provide access to voter registration records and registration of eligible citizens online, and remove cumbersome registration deadlines to allow people to register or change their party affiliations later in an election cycle.
It is several sensible and essential pieces that we should pass immediately.
This year’s elections reminded us of the scale of the problem we’re facing. Year after year, New Yorkers become increasingly frustrated with the flaws entrenched in our voting system while too many of our representatives sit idly by. In the last year, Oregon, California, and Vermont became among the first states to approve automatic voter registration, and both President Obama and Governor Cuomo have voiced their support.
In the annual U.S. Election Assistance Commission analysis, New York State is ranked 46th in voter turnout, an embarrassing distinction routinely. We will continue to rank among the worst in the nation if we don’t act.
This rambunctious election captured the attention of millions. It's showroom feel attracted voters to the polls, increasing turnout in New York City from 2.46 million in 2012 to 2.52 million this year.
Unfortunately this was the exception, not the rule, and it’s also not a big enough jump. Too often, average Americans' voices are ignored. Electoral reform is a critical step that would help restore faith in our democracy and give our citizens a bigger stake in their government. By continuing the current outdated system, government has failed to do its part to provide voters with effective methods of convenient registration and voting.
Isolating voters does our democracy no good. The more we expand access to voting, the less we suppress voter participation through our inaction.
On November 8, more than two million New Yorkers were unable to vote for our next President despite being eligible to do so. It is time to eliminate barriers to participation in our democracy and ensure the fundamental right to vote is equally provided to all New Yorkers. I continue to urge every citizen currently registered to continue to get out and vote. We've got to make voting easier, not harder, because your voice matters.
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State Senator Michael Gianaris is a Democrat representing Astoria, Long Island City, Sunnyside, Woodside, Ridgewood and Woodhaven in Queens. On Twitter @SenGianaris.
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Red Hook Community Justice Center
Do problem-solving courts prevent New Yorkers from receiving their basic constitutional rights? Are defendants forced to make a Faustian bargain, pleading guilty to avoid incarceration when they should be challenging the legality of their arrest?
Steve Zeidman, a professor at CUNY School of Law, thinks so. In “The Treatment Court Cottage Industry & Its Unintended Consequence,” published Oct. 27 by Gotham Gazette, Zeidman argues that problem-solving courts create a “mindset of cooperation among all the institutional players” that prevent defendants from receiving their basic due process rights.
As an illustrative example, Zeidman tells a story (presented as an individual case but actually a composite) of a defendant named “CB” who is arrested for drug possession but wants to fight his case because he believes he was set up by an undercover police officer. Instead of receiving vigorous defense from his attorney, he is pressured to plead guilty in order to enter a drug treatment court. When CB decides instead to fight the legality of his arrest, he is left at Rikers Island, while his case proceeds. To Zeidman, this injustice is repeated again and again with problem-solving courts. “Countless defendants,” Zeidman writes, “stated that their lawyers simply urged them, forcefully, to plead guilty.”
Zeidman’s critique raises several important questions. Why have problem-solving courts proliferated in New York in recent years? What impact have they had? And do they in fact undermine the fairness of the criminal justice system?
The answer to the first question is simple: because they provide a better brand of justice.
Take drug courts, for example. These programs link addicted defendants to treatment in lieu of incarceration. Drug courts are among the most well-researched interventions in the history of American criminal justice reform. A national study underwritten by the U.S. Department of Justice found reduced drug use and crime among drug court participants when compared to defendants who went through regular case processing.
Nor are positive findings restricted to drug courts: researchers have also documented solid results from community courts, re-entry courts, mental health courts, and other alternative-to-incarceration programs. The human implications are enormous – thousands of New Yorkers given a second (and third and fourth) chance in life. Thanks to problem-solving courts, these individuals have been linked to potentially transformative interventions, including mental health counseling, employment training, and youth development programs.
As Vincent Schiraldi and Judith A. Greene noted recently, the number of New York City residents behind bars declined by 31,120 between 1996 and 2014, even as the city’s population increased by one million and crime rates continued to fall.
New York’s problem-solving courts played an important role in this remarkable success. New York’s drug courts demonstrated to policymakers that treatment instead of incarceration wasn't just notionally the right thing to do -- it actually makes a difference in the lives of defendants. That’s why the New York court system has made such a large institutional investment in these programs under the stewardship of the last three state chief judges. And that’s why Governor David Paterson, when announcing the reform of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, chose to do so at the Brooklyn Treatment Court. Closer to home, the Mayor’s Office has trumpeted the role that problem-solving programs have played in reducing the Rikers population.
In the aggregate, problem-solving courts have achieved demonstrably better outcomes for the clients that Zeidman purports to represent. But they have done more than just this. The research also suggests that they have actually improved the process as well, increasing defendant perceptions of fairness.
Many researchers are coming to the conclusion that the active ingredient in problem-solving courts, the element that makes them work better than conventional courts, is procedural justice.
Procedural justice is an idea, developed by Yale Law School professor Tom Tyler, that suggests that how defendants are treated is just as important, if not more, than the outcome of their cases. By treating defendants with dignity and respect – and communicating with them in plain language – courts can not only improve public perceptions of justice, they can promote voluntary compliance with the law.
This idea was tested most recently in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where my agency helped to develop the Red Hook Community Justice Center in partnership with the court system, the DA’s Office, and local defense attorneys. In Red Hook, we have altered the atmospherics of the criminal justice system in some fundamental ways: eliminating the bars in holding cells, shrinking the height of the judge’s bench so that he can look most defendants in the eyes, and improving signage so that court users understand how to navigate the building. The Red Hook judge, Alex Calabrese, also takes pains to ensure that defendants understand their obligations to the court and praises participants when they succeed in alternative programs.
Researchers from the National Center for State Courts conducted an independent evaluation of the Red Hook justice center, tracking participants in the program over the course of three years. It found that Red Hook reduced recidivism among both juvenile and adult defendants. It also found that Red Hook had improved perceptions of justice – defendants preferred Red Hook to the regular criminal court. This quote from a defendant was typical:
I went to Brooklyn Criminal Court before Red Hook, horrible place, horrible. They should do a tour there, just so people could see. I wouldn't wish that place on my enemy. Red Hook is 100 times better...[The Red Hook judge] allows you to speak...he likes to interact and get your opinion. I don't get the feeling that he's one of those judges that looks down on people. To me, he's fair, I'll put it that way. The court officers treat you like a person too, not like that other court over there. I learned that there's two different types of ways that courts treat people. You have these obnoxious goons and then you have those that look at you like, ‘ok, you made a mistake.’
Zeidman may be wrong on the merits, but he raises important warnings. Defense attorneys need to play an active role in the development and operation of problem-solving courts. And the structure of these courts should not exacerbate the coercive nature of the criminal justice system.
But make no mistake: if we want to continue to reduce the use of incarceration while preserving public safety, we don’t need to halt problem-solving courts – we need to spread the lessons from these programs as far and as wide as we possibly can.
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Greg Berman is the director of the Center for Court Innovation. On Twitter @GregBerman50 and @courtinnovation.
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(photo via @NYPDnews)
Tyrone Tomlin was standing outside of a deli holding a soda and drinking straw when two police officers from Brooklyn North Narcotics arrested him for possession of drug paraphernalia. The officers asserted that, “based on their training and experience,” Tomlin possessed an item commonly used to package heroin -- the drinking straw. An Assistant District Attorney took the officers at their word and recommended bail, which Judge Laura Johnson set at $1,500 cash. Tomlin didn’t have the $1,500 and was sent to Rikers Island.
Junior Weems was arrested by two undercover officers who asserted that, “based on their training and experience,” Weems had possessed cocaine and intended to sell it. A prosecutor requested bail, which Judge Jane Tully set at $2,000 insurance company bond or $1,000 cash; like Tomlin, Weems told the judge he didn’t have funds to make bail and he too was sent to Rikers Island.
But neither Tomlin nor Weems (whose name has been changed) actually possessed any drugs, a fact that was only verified by the New York Police Department (NYPD) laboratory after each had spent days incarcerated at Rikers Island. Both cases were eventually dismissed, but considerable harm had already been done. Just one day in jail can mean the loss of job, housing, or even parental custody; plus exposure to the horrors and dangers of NYC jails, which have been well documented.
These stories are not unique, unfortunately. More than 20,000 people were arrested for misdemeanor drug possession (excluding marijuana, which is a separate offense) in New York City in 2015, making it the fourth most common arraignment charge citywide. In 2015 alone, Brooklyn Defender Services represented more than 2,000 people – three quarters of whom were black or Latino – whose most serious charge was possessing trace amounts of a drug other than marijuana. The difference between felony and misdemeanor drug possession is weight.
A deeper look into the data shows how fraught many of these low-level cases are, in part because they deal with amounts of substances, either illegal or not, that are so tiny that they are often difficult to identify. Meanwhile, although corroborating lab results are required shortly after arraignment for prosecutors to secure an indictment for a felony, similar due process protections for misdemeanors do not exist. The operating notion is that police officers’ “training and experience” is good enough -- despite evidence that they get it wrong frequently -- and many cases resolve through plea deals before the evidence is even accurately tested.
Of the 2,091 Brooklyn Defender Services cases we reviewed, a full 25 percent -- 534 cases -- were eventually dismissed because the drug lab returned a result contradicting the officers’ “training and experience;” or because they involved an illegal search; or due to other reasons.
Nearly 300 Brooklyn Defender Services clients accused of misdemeanor drug possession (non-marijuana) had bail set, nearly all of whom spent at least some time at Rikers Island. Another 741 defendants pled guilty at arraignments, sometimes to a lower charge. While we cannot say for certain how many people did so under coercion from the prospect of bail and jail, we know anecdotally that many people in cases like this plead guilty -- regardless of guilt or innocence -- simply to avoid more jail time. Everyone arrested and booked in New York City spends around 24 hours locked up in NYPD custody, before even seeing a judge.
At a time when public opinion nationwide favors treating drug use as a public health issue, we must stop and ask why these problematic arrests and incarcerations, which do not improve public safety, are happening in the first place. In some of these cases, people are arrested and incarcerated even when they do not actually possess illegal drugs. In cases when a person possesses drugs in an amount so small that it can’t be identified properly, should we really be sending them to Rikers Island -- interrupting their life and introducing collateral consequences that can haunt them for years after?
Ultimately, the simple possession of all drugs, especially in amounts so small they are routinely misidentified, should be fully decriminalized in New York State, as Human Rights Watch eloquently argues in its recent report “Every 25 Seconds.”
As an interim measure, the State Legislature should immediately take action to amend court procedural rules to include due process protections for people accused of possessing small amounts of drugs -- for example by requiring a lab report to hold anyone in custody longer than 24 hours and prohibiting District Attorneys from making recommendations about bail other than release when a lab report is absent. District Attorneys, with an ever-growing mandate to do justice, could resolve the issue immediately by declining to prosecute these cases.
The Mayor of New York City should require the police department to end its prioritization of these arrests, and to limit enforcement only to cases with a clear public safety justification. This aligns with the New York City Council’s work under the 2015 Criminal Justice Reform Act.
The City Council should adopt legislation that would require District Attorneys and the NYPD to report on drug possession cases where an officer’s “training and experience” was contradicted by lab results. These officers should, at minimum, be required to undergo retraining, and repeat offenders should be disqualified from making street-level arrests.
In this time of national reckoning over mass incarceration and the drug war, New York -- both City and State -- have an opportunity for leadership. It’s time for a change.
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Melissa Moore is the deputy state director of the New York policy office of the Drug Policy Alliance. Nick Malinowski is the Community Advocacy Coordinator at Brooklyn Defender Services. On Twitter @mooremeliss and @nwmalinowski.
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