criminal justice reform Archives - Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts

Summer 2019: Violence was down and Homicides were at their lowest in five years

Now that October has come and the summer is decidedly over, policy makers and journalists alike are engaging in a yearly, grim calculus: How bad was the gun violence in Chicago this summer? Did it get worse? Is it getting better? And most importantly, why? This summer, however, has been unusually p...

ACT Court Milestone

Last week, the Access to Community Treatment Court achieved a major milestone, celebrating its first graduation for individuals who have successfully completed the problem-solving court program. 16 individuals were recognized for their efforts. Several graduates shared powerful remarks about their...

Creative Commons License, attribution Randy von Liski

Chief Judge Evans Orders Indigence Hearing Reform in Response to Chicago Appleseed Investigation

Chief Judge of the Cook County Circuit Court, Timothy C. Evans, issued General Administrative Order No. 2013-11 yesterday in response to a Chicago Appleseed investigation that uncovered a practice where judges were denying defendants a public defender without the required indigence hearing. The Chi...

“A Thousand Small Sanities” and Why Judges Matter

"A Thousand Small Sanities" is worth a look for anyone interested in learning about rational, incremental criminal justice system reform. It's a succinct, straightforward history of criminal justice reform in New York City. In Small Sanities, the Center for Court Innovation Director Greg Berman writ...

Doctors’ Orders: Treat, Don’t Incarcerate, Mentally Ill and Addicts

One of the world’s most respected academic journals, The New England Journal of Medicine, recently published a piece offering a fresh perspective on the US policy of incarcerating drug users and the mentally ill. “Medicine and the Epidemic of Incarceration” (pdf) takes a public health approach to a...

1 2