Conflict Intervention as Crime Prevention

Report Author

Justin R. Corbett

Linkedin | Google | ORCID

Table of Contents

Service Provider Profiles

This evaluation examines the current and potential impact of numerous prevention- relevant interventions developed and deployed by five specific MOCJ service providers. These include CMS (Queens, and the Queensbridge North and South Catchment Area), IMCR (The Bronx, and Butler, Castle Hill, Edenwald, and Patterson Catchment Areas), NYCID (Staten Island, and the Stapleton Catchment Area), NYPI (Brooklyn and Manhattan), and RHPP (Red Hook East and West Catchment Area).

These service providers offer the public a portfolio of dispute resolution and restorative practice-oriented programming – collectively, ‘conflict assistive services’ – with varied client foci and both broad Borough-wide and narrow Catchment Area geotargeting. They serve their respective communities’ fence-strewn and multi-floored frontlines; coordinate conflict assistive interventions for the ordinary and outrageous alike; and bring constructive conflict engagement skills and services to the masses that reside beyond immediate magisterial or market interests.53

Each provider has its own storied connection with its respective communities, to MOCJ, and to the broader fields of practice. Four of the programs (CMS, IMCR, NYCID, and NYPI) are members of the community dispute resolution practice area, an international movement of professionalized conflict assistive service providers. These CDRCs frame their programming – variably designed to constructively prevent, engage, manage, reduce, resolve, or transform conflict – as a core social service of, by, and for their local communities. Many are also varyingly connected with the field of restorative justice and restorative practices, a field in which RHPP’s parent organization, the Center for Court Innovation (CCI), is a noted contributor. Collectively, these two practice areas – community dispute resolution and restorative justice – are the conceptual homes and innovating foundries contouring the boundaries of conflict-oriented crime prevention. The service providers’ local, state, and field-wide leadership within these realms uniquely qualify their inclusion within MOCJ’s polyphonic approach to crime prevention.

For this evaluation, each service provider has been evaluated in the context of their current contractual relationship with MOCJ, which includes the provision of Borough-wide services, Catchment Area services, or both. An executive-level overview of the providers, their programmatic portfolios, and their more recent contributions to MOCJ’s efforts is provided in the following profiles.54 It is worth noting, however, that these profile synopses do not fully capture the breadth of consequence streaming forth from providers’ interventions. Documentation prepared by the providers, as well as interviews with provider staffs, volunteers, clients, and partners generated countless case studies and abstract anecdotes of criminal impact, only a select few of which could be accommodated within the confines of this report. For those interested in witnessing first hand the impact and importance of these services, many providers have extended open invitations for partners to observe their interventions at work.

Figure 8. Aggregated Dashboard: Borough-Wide and Catchment Area Service Providers53

This dashboard presents select aspects of service providers’ programming, prevention, and presence as reported by the providers and various external sources. Full details and citations for this and the subsequent provider-specific organizational dashboards are provided in the referenced endnote.


Footnotes

53. This combined organizational dashboard and the subsequent provider-specific dashboards include a mix of providers’ internal data, data derived from evaluation-specific projections, and externally-sourced data. Given their prominence in summarizing the nature and number of providers’ MOCJ-relevant activities, each of the nine categories are briefly reviewed and cited here. The first three focus on key programming characteristics, the second three: prevention-relevant features, and the final three: various measures of organizational presence. Specifically, they are as follows:

    • (1) Service Area: This first nondrant indicates the assigned Borough service area highlighted in white, as well as a list of Catchment Area(s) where appropriate for the featured service provider.
    • (2) Signature Programming: This segment indicates the providers’ most prominent dispute resolution or restorative process(es), as identified by their intervention disaggregated client volumes.
    • (3) Case Volume History: This segment provides a trend line for total cases from 2006 to 2015 for CDRCs (CMS, IMCR, NYCID, NYPI) by UCS in its annual County-level workload summaries (New York State Unified Court System, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015), and for RHPP from 2013 to 2014 (Lambson, S.H., 2015) and 2015 (provider report), and for all providers’ 2016 anticipated volume via their self-reports.
    • (4) MOCJ-Related Financing (FY2017): This panel includes service providers’ total contracted amount for FY2017 to deliver Borough-wide and/or Catchment Area services. It also includes the projected socio- institutional return on investment (ROI: $8.10:$1.00) from crimes prevented as a result of those services (Sherman, L.W., et al., 2015b).
    • (5) Prevention-Relevant Clients: This panel includes the total annual number of direct service recipients as anticipated and reported by the service providers, as well as the total number of individuals constructively affected by those services as a result of the interventions’ networking effects, projected through this evaluation as 5.5 individuals per direct service recipient.
    • (6) Key Referral Partners: This panel indicates the current number of entities service providers identified as having contributed at least 10% of an intervention-specific, MOCJ-relevant case volume. The list of specific entities having achieved this threshold is included within the descriptions of their respective interventions. Its inclusion in this dashboard is as a signal to the embedness of the providers and their resonance among community and institutional stakeholders positioned to refer criminogenically vulnerable individuals. The complete list of referral partners that supply10% or more to at least one service providers program, includes: (1) self-referrals; (2) previous clients; (3) parents; (4) local schools (faculty, staff, and students); (5) education advocates; (6) 311; (7) NYPD; (8) NYCHA; (9) co-op managers; area courts, including court attorneys, clerks, and judicial staff at (10) housing court, (11) Kings County Supreme Court, (12) Queens County Supreme Court, (13) Red Hook CJC, and (14) small claims courts; (15) Brooklyn DA’s Office; (16) Brooklyn Defender Services; (17) Legal Services; (18) Department of Probation; (19) various CBOs; (20) college and university ADR programs; and (21) volunteer mediators.
    • (7) Distribution of In/Formal Representatives: This includes the self-reported total number of (a) staff members assigned to MOCJ-relevant programming, (b) individuals who have volunteered with the reviewed provider within the past 12 months, and (c) annual trainee recipients for their most recently concluded service year. The inclusion of this panel is intended to demonstrate the scale of human infrastructure available to each provider to help deliver interventions and subsequently constructively propagate their impacts.
    • (8) Unique Website Visitors (Monthly): This reports the estimated number of visitors to each providers’ respective website during the month of September 2016, as projected by SimilarWeb.com. It is included here as an indicator of providers’ accessibility for discoverability among those actively seeking assistance for troublesome conflicts.
    • (9) Social Followers: This reports the total number of social followers on both Facebook and Twitter for the providers’ respective account(s), as of October 19, 2016. It is included here as a signal of the resonance of the providers’ public messaging and their capacity to distribute that message into their communities.

54. Unless otherwise attributed, data, quotes, and the ‘Profiles in Prevention’ referenced throughout the Service Provider Profiles section of this report are sourced from providers’ responses to an evaluator-designed reporting instrument used to uniformly capture prevention-relevant information from each of the providers. As this instrument requested providers limited their responses to what they perceived to be MOCJ-relevant programming and outcomes, the data may not reflect the entirety of their service portfolio and almost certainly understates the true impact of their work. Annual budget figures stated within the service snapshots are inclusive of all funding sources utilized for the identified service/activity, not just that contributed by MOCJ. Finally, unless specifically identified by name and title within a block quote, the names referenced in the ‘Profiles in Prevention’ anecdotes have been changed to protect client confidentiality.