In The Multi-Hatted Court: Community Courts as Boundary Organizations, Professors Dixon and Dancig-Rosenberg have given us a rich description of one of the more exciting criminal justice innovations in the past couple of decades—the Red Hook Community Justice Center, probably the best-known problem-solving court in the United States. Both the Red Hook court (RHC) and problem-solving courts in general have been investigated empirically and analyzed conceptually by numerous other authors. What The Multi-Hatted Court and related works by the same authors contribute is a more qualitative, sociological look at the Red Hook experiment. While the main focus of the authors’ earlier sociological work was to pinpoint the various outcomes stakeholders hope to achieve through the court, this latest article relies on the authors’ focus group methodology to examine the court through the prism of three “tensions”: welfarism versus penal control, transformation versus reproduction of the carceral state, and harm reduction versus full desistance.
In this Essay, I use the three tensions identified by the authors as a template for analyzing the Red Hook Community Justice Center. But I also suggest, in possible contrast to the authors’ view, that these tensions should be welcomed. Some aspects of the RHC could certainly be improved. But this “boundary organization” (a term the authors use to describe a site “where distinct professional fields interact”) ultimately melds together, better than either traditional criminal courts or current “abolitionist” proposals, the competing demands of societally-defined criminal law, local justice, and the service needs of the community. If the description of the court provided by Dixon and Dancig-Rosenberg is accurate, the RHC is close to the best we can hope for in an imperfect world.
Author
Milton Underwood Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University Law School.