Community Prosecution: Action

The Office of the Albany County District Attorney has made it a top priority to implement a progressive philosophy of restorative justice. A strong and healthy community is not best served by a justice system that regards the “problem” of any criminal act to be “solved” by a conviction. Victims have suffered. Families of offenders have undergone hardships. Communities have been damaged. Costs have been incurred by taxpayers. The criminal justice process must address all of these matters with the dual goal of mitigating the damage and preventing recurrence. This is most effectively achieved through Community Prosecution.

Community Prosecution is founded on the idea that in addition to prosecuting cases, prosecutors have a responsibility to solve public safety problems, prevent crime, and improve public confidence in the justice system. Around the country, prosecutors are taking on new tasks that reflect this shift—working out of neighborhood offices and collaborating with others in the development of problem-solving strategies.

Community Prosecution involves a long-term, proactive partnership between the prosecutor's office, law enforcement, public and private organizations, and the community. Through these partnerships, the authority of the prosecutor's office is used to solve problems, improve public safety, and enhance the quality of life of community members. This redefined approach to crime is driven by a new commitment to pursuing the priorities of the citizens themselves. The connection between the community's fear of crime and crime itself is considered to be of paramount importance. This broadened focus leads prosecutors to emphasize those cases and offenders that residents identity as high priority or as having a significant impact on the quality of life in their neighborhoods.

Community Prosecution is not merely putting prosecutors into the community to conduct the usual responsibilities, or to solve only one type of crime; rather, it is a comprehensive program designed to address livability issues in a target area. By capitalizing on existing resources to deal with low-level offenses that are important to neighborhoods, crime can be reduced and even prevented. Community Prosecution is a dynamically proactive approach to the business of prosecution. It is based on six principles:

1) It gives members of the community a greater voice in prioritizing and solving problems that plague their neighborhoods.
2) It promotes restorative justice benefiting victims, the community, and offenders.
3) It provides prosecutors a greater opportunity to be proactive in fighting crime.
4) It changes the focus of prosecution from simply obtaining convictions on assigned cases to solving problems in neighborhoods. This ensures that crime problems will not reoccur.
5) It assists law enforcement agencies in their community policing efforts.
6) It assists law enforcement and residents of the community in their fight against crime by involving local citizen's groups that can provide information to police regarding crime evidence.

Community Prosecution has become more than just a new "theory" in law enforcement; it is proving to be a promising approach embraced by prosecutors, police and communities alike. The "proof" is that community members, special interest groups, civic associations, businesses, and the faith community are consulting regularly with prosecutors about the problems in their neighborhoods. Consequently, these community members feel a sense of ownership in their community and feel empowered to confront problems as they arise.

A.C.T.I.O.N.: A Community Prosecution Plan For Albany

Community Prosecution will be initiated in Albany by establishing four satellite sites of the District Attorney’s office in the city’s most challenged neighborhoods. These Community Prosecution Offices (CPO) will be staffed with a Community Prosecution Coordinator, an Assistant District Attorney, a Probation Officer and a Community Representative. The CPOs will interact with the community at the neighborhood level to recruit volunteers and to identify and solve problems that contribute to crime and pose hazards to public order and safety. They will provide the neighborhood-based structure around which specific Community Prosecution initiatives will be built. They are intended to be co-occupied by representatives of other governmental agencies that may wish to partner with us to maximize resources and problem-solving results.

Establishing these CPOs will enable us to create close working relationships with neighborhood, landlords, tenants and business associations. These relationships will help us to recruit volunteers and identify community service opportunities for participants in a variety of our programs. The CPOs will also serve as a powerful catalyst to help organize a strong network of Neighborhood Watch chapters to be encouraged by the dissemination of crime and safety information from the District Attorney‘s office, such as the CitizenObserver Alert Network. CitizenObserver's crime prevention tool set provides two-way communication between law enforcement and the public that enables accuracy and immediate notification of critical information. The service is available on-line 24 hours a day and information can be received via e-mail, fax, pager and cell phone. The system features information about crimes or other incidents that may threaten the community's safety; information about open cases to be disseminated to area businesses and citizens with a focus on fugitives, missing persons, and unsolved crimes; and a Neighborhood Watch Group Alert that gives watch captains and registered members direct access to crime alerts and other information generated by the District Attorney’s office.

The CPOs will catalyze many activities that will strengthen and benefit our community at the neighborhood level. At the outset, however, our planning will target the following key objectives:

1. We will maximize potential for successful reintegration of re-entering prison inmates.
2. We will keep middle-school-aged kids out of the drug distribution economy.
3. We will make public safety services more responsive to the needs and concerns of our aging population.
4. We will foster the development of a strengthened and expanded infrastructure of Neighborhood Watch organizations.
5. We will expand the Community Accountability Board Program to more venues throughout the county.

Prisoner Re-Entry

Today, unprecedented numbers of prison inmates are being released into our communities. Research has found that two-thirds of them will re-offend within 3 years of release. Too many individuals leave prison with serious health, mental health and chemical dependency problems, educational and employability deficits, no financial resources and lost or attenuated ties to their families and home communities. When they get home, they are on their own. In a Community Prosecution county, the prosecutor assumes responsibility for making the county as crime-free as possible. There is a clear and present danger posed by having a significant number of people in the jurisdiction who face the real possibility of failure to reintegrate -- failure that often takes the form of a crime against a citizen and always has the community as its victim. Accordingly, the prosecutor has an obligation to minimize the potential of failure.

There is ample research that indicates that successful re-entry initiatives involve collaboration between governmental agencies, social service agencies and partnerships with other community-based programs and businesses. The primary keys to successful re-entry will include education, job training and placement programs, availability of referral for social service agencies, and equally important, community involvement and buy-in to the rehabilitative process.

Carefully managing each and every prisoner's return to their home community -- as 90% of them do -- can positively impact upon the likelihood of their re-offending. With proper planning and supervision, the negative effects of the social, economic, physical and psychological problems confronting parolees when they leave prison can be minimized and removed as impediments toward their leading crime-free lives. Effective re-entry management should not begin at just the moment of re-entry, but as early as the pre-sentence investigation. It is a transitional process that can and should involve a range of stakeholders beyond correctional authorities and individual offenders.

The Albany County District Attorney’s prisoner re-entry program will be an essential responsibility of the CPOs. Each will interface with and guide the re-entry transition process for parolees who take up residence in its sector. Our emphasis will be on parolees ranging in age from 18 to 24, the age group with the highest recidivism rate. Our focus will be on specific neighborhoods where parolees have tended to settle.

Under an agreement to be negotiated with Prisoners Legal Services, at least one year prior to release, a review of inmate documentation will be conducted. Under this system, PLS will ensure that at the time and place of release the inmate will have: proper identification, necessary legal documents, and a current file of family, educational achievement, work history and other information that will assist the Community Prosecution Office in overseeing the re-entry process. PLS will also ensure that inmates nearing release are afforded the benefit of employment and housing preparation services that may be available.

Upon release, parolees will meet with the CPO Case Manager, a trained and experienced individual who will provide continuing contact and feedback to them as they go through the reintegration process. The Case Manager will assist the parolee in securing housing and health care services.

Parolees will be provided access to an Employment Counselor who will provide assistance in preparing resumes, filling out job applications, preparing for interviews and basic job-hunting skills.

The District Attorney’s Office will establish cooperative relationships with nonprofit organizations that offer services that may be of assistance to reintegrating parolees. These may provide assistance with anything ranging from obtaining a drivers license to accessing social, family and health care services.

The re-entry process we create must, to the greatest extent possible, build, strengthen and repair relationships between the offender, his or her family, neighbors, communities of faith and the community at large. More than anything that service providers can do to meet the needs of re-entering offenders, this foundation of relationships is the key to successful reintegration. To achieve these goals, we will organize Re-entry Assistance Boards (RAB), panels of neighborhood residents to meet with returning parolees. These RABs will have reviewed the parolee’s file and will be prepared to provide a formal introduction to the community in which the parolee is to settle. Like the Community Accountability Boards, the RABs will engage in a personal dialogue with the parolee, getting to know and impressing upon him/her the standards and expectations of the community. The offender will be given the opportunity to express acceptance of responsibility for the harm caused to the community by the offense that led to incarceration and make a gesture of restitution, perhaps by rendering voluntary community service. The RAB will provide the community itself with a process for accepting responsibility both for creating an environment in which the offender’s chances for success are maximized and for recognizing and correcting any condition that might have contributed to the offense in the first place.

As returning prisoners gradually get on their feet, they will need some form of subsidy for obtaining many of the necessities of life. They are ineligible for many forms of public assistance. Time banks are economic microcosms based on the exchange of goods and services rather than currency. Time Dollars, invisible and non-taxable, are the units of time exchange. One hour of one kind of work has the same value in Time Dollars as one hour of any other kind of work. Most time banking services utilize the Internet, are localized, and are funded by a combination of foundation grants and individual donations. Just as the CAB offers an alternative to the judicial process, substituting valuable community service for expensive criminal sanctions, Time Dollars offer a socially valuable alternative to the money economy. This concept has great potential for the re-entry process. Accordingly, with the support of the business community, we will create a Time Dollar Emporium stocked with those necessities of life purchasable with Time Dollars earned by performing community service or for participating in self-improvement activities.

St. Joseph's Housing Initiative

The St. Joseph’s Housing Corporation is a nonprofit entity that owns a city block of houses on Clinton Avenue in downtown Albany comprising seventy-five apartments. Most of them are vacant and in need of rehabilitation to make them habitable. Our flagship Community Prosecution Office is located nearby. We propose adopting this block as a demonstration project to establish the viability and effectiveness of an intensive, integrated prisoner re-entry program.

Time Banking

Our Community Accountability Board provides an alternative to the standard judicial process that focuses on reconciling the community with the offender and setting the offender to the task of undoing the harm caused to the community. Another alternative with similar potential for public order is Time Banking. Time banks are economic microcosms based on the exchange of goods and services rather than currency. Time currencies, invisible and non-taxable, are the units of time exchange -- one hour of one kind of work has the same value as one hour of any other kind of work. Most Time Banks utilize the Internet, are localized, and are funded by a combination of foundation grants and individual donations. Just as the CAB offers an alternative to the judicial process , substituting valuable community service for expensive criminal sanctions, Time Banking offers an alternative to the money economy. Time Banking builds grassroots, community-based social networks that value and reward the contributions of individuals working together with professional social service agencies to eliminate the sources of social injustice and inequity. The potential of this concept for community-based justice is largely unexplored. We believe its potential to promote strong, resilient, crime-free communities is limited only by the imagination.

Youth Time Banking

Raised in families divided by years of drugs and despair, too many kids are left to fend for themselves. Too young to obtain working papers, they're savvy enough to find employment in the underground markets: transporting drugs, or stealing cars or jewelry. With couples working overtime to make ends meet, even kids from solid families are being babysat by violent video games, violent TV shows, violent music. Says Chris Sumner of the Boston Ten Point Coalition, a faith-based group working with at-risk children: "The culture of violence is the new after-school program.”

There are many issues facing our young people that drag them into crime, gangs and the justice system. One of particular urgency is the recruitment of middle-school-aged youngsters into the street-level drug trade. A drug dealer advances a kid some desirable commodity such as designer sports shoes or pricey electronics. The kid then has to work off the obligation by serving as a look-out or passing drugs. Our objective is to create a means of satisfying the desire for these goods and cutting out the drug dealers. We will do so by adapting the Time Banking concept.

Administered out of our Community Prosecution Offices, which will monitor participation and maintain records, it will involve the creation of a partnership with the retail business sector to provide goods or discount credit for kids who earn time dollars through organized community service, participation in educational and self-improvement programs, serving as mentors to younger kids or as escorts to or running errands for senior citizens and shut-ins. Additional opportunities for earning Time Dollars will derive from a variety of community crime prevention, Neighborhood Watch and other initiatives that will emerge from the partnership that the CPOs will develop with neighborhood associations, public service organizations and faith-based community groups.

One of our greatest challenges regarding at-risk youth is the problem of inappropriate secure placement. This is the most expensive and destructive option for dealing with juveniles who come in contact with the justice system. The Youth Advocate Program (YAP) is a Time Banking initiative that serves youth who face or have already experienced compulsory residential placement. YAP trains community members, who become advocates and mentors for the youth for a specified number of hours each week. This assistance can lead to appropriate or least restrictive placement of the juvenile.

Time Banking and the Elderly

Time Banking also has great potential for benefiting another special needs population - the elderly.

Triad is the nation’s preeminent crime prevention program focusing on senior citizens. It began as a three-way agreement – hence, Triad -- signed in 1988 by the American Association of Retired Persons, the National Sheriffs’ Association and the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The signatories represented seniors and county and municipal law enforcement. Today, Triads at the community level may consist of partnerships between law enforcement, prosecutors, fire and emergency services, seniors’ organizations and agencies that serve older citizens in a variety of ways. Together the Triad partners develop and implement crime prevention and education programs for older individuals, law enforcement and senior service providers. Working together, they reduce elder victimization, increase access to victim/witness assistance services and enhance law enforcement responsiveness to the needs and concerns of older persons. Working through an advisory group known as a SALT (Seniors and Law Enforcement Together) Council, Triad focuses on reducing fear of crime by identifying misconceptions, educating seniors on criminal activity that affects them and creating programs to reduce elder crime, abuse, neglect and exploitation with a strong emphasis on information between law enforcement, senior services agencies and older persons themselves.

We will be implementing a unique local permutation of the Triad concept for Albany. Given the growing population of older citizens and the increase both in their needs and in the career opportunities for young people in the industries that serve those needs, using the Triad as a structure for bringing young people and seniors together in a mutually beneficial partnership serves both parties. It would also get young people to think about finding rewarding career opportunities in service to our elderly. Many of the initiatives that have been developed under the auspices of Triads around the nation have manpower and resources implications for participating police agencies. Creating this youth component would minimize that burden and encourage more police agencies to participate as Triad partners.