Interview with Center for Court Innovation Director, Greg Berman

I recently conducted an interview with Center for Court Innovation Director and co-founder, Greg Berman for the University of Chicago’s policy publication, The Chicago Policy Review.

You can read the whole interview here. An excerpt is below:

Why should we be concerned about effective and efficient criminal justice and court systems? How do they improve lives and communities?

The criminal justice system is one of our most important democratic institutions. An effective criminal justice system (and when we talk about the system, we’re really talking about many agencies–police, probation, courts, prosecutors, defenders, corrections, pre-trial services, etc) is important for two main reasons.

One, maintaining law and order and a sense of fairness is an essential building block for everything else society wants to do. Two, about every problem you’d ever want to address—race, poverty, homeless, addiction, mental illness—is enmeshed in the criminal justice system. This is one of the key underlying insights of The Center for Court Innovation: you can use the criminal justice process as a jumping off point for addressing a lot of social issues. This is also one of the main things that motivates me to do this work.

Chicago Appleseed has learned a tremendous amount from the Center’s research, demonstration projects, and knowledgable staff.