Broken Windows by James Q Wilson and George L Kelling
Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.
Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.
A successful strategy for preventing vandalism, say the book's authors, is to fix the problems when they are small. Repair the broken windows within a short time, say, a day or a week, and the tendency is that vandals are much less likely to break more windows or do further damage. Clean up the sidewalk every day, and the tendency is for litter not to accumulate (or for the rate of littering to be much less). Problems do not escalate and thus respectable residents do not flee a neighborhood.
The theory thus makes two major claims: that further petty crime and low-level anti-social behavior will be deterred, and that major crime will, as a result, be prevented.
'Untended disorder and minor offences give rise to serious crime and urban decay'
Red Hook
Located in the southwestern corner of the New York City borough of Brooklyn, the neighbourhood of Red Hook boasts a long and turbulent history. The neighbourhood’s name comes from its shape as a “hook” of land protruding from the coast of Brooklyn. Red Hook is geographically isolated: surrounded by water on three sides and by the Gowanus Parkway and Brooklyn Battery Tunnel on the fourth, it is separated from the rest of Brooklyn and at some distance from local subway lines. With stunning views of the Statue of Liberty, the neighborhood’s western side, nicknamed “the Back,” was a natural location for one of the nation’s busiest ports.
From the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, Red Hook’s port made it a thriving industrial neighbourhood of mainly Italian and Irish American dockworkers. It was also home to one of the first Puerto Rican neighbourhoods in New York City. By 1950, Red Hook had 21,000 residents, many of them longshoremen living in the Red Hook Houses, a public housing project built in 1938 to accommodate the growing number of dockworkers and their families. The neighbourhood had a tough reputation—with such notorious figures as Al Capone getting their start there as small-time criminals.......
.........and its seedy side was immortalized in movies such as the On the Waterfront (1954), starring a young Marlon Brando.
When containerization shipping replaced traditional bulk shipping in the 1960s, many businesses at the Red Hook ports moved to New Jersey—as did the jobs. Unemployment increased quickly as industries abandoned Red Hook, and the neighbourhood’s economy underwent a rapid decline. By the 1970s and ‘80s, it became known as being a crime-ridden, desolate neighbourhood, severed from the rest of Brooklyn.
One of the largest public housing projects in New York City and in the country, the Red Hook Houses were first built as a Federal Works Program initiative under former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Red Hook has long been divided between the residents of “the Back”—predominantly white homeowners living on the waterfront—and the residents of the Houses, who are predominantly black and Latino and constitute the majority of the neighbourhood’s population, outnumbering residents of “the Back” two to one.
In 1990, the towering Houses, comprised of East and West clusters, were home to 11,000 residents, more than a third of which were under the age of 18. Unemployment was high and by the early 1990s, Red Hook was suffering from very serious problems: the deterioration of its physical fabric, abandoned buildings, illegal dumping of trash, poverty, skyrocketing drug use and violence. Life magazine named it one of the ten worst neighborhoods in the U.S. and called it “the crack capital of America.”
In 1992, beloved school principal Patrick Daly was killed in broad daylight at the Houses, caught in a crossfire when he went to look for a student who had left school upset after a fight that day. This well-publicized incident became a pivotal point in the neighborhood’s history, bringing in a high level of police and criminal justice attention. It was at this time that the idea to establish a community court in Red Hook first began circulating, and by 1995, community outreach efforts and a neighbourhood Public Safety Corps were firmly in place.
Launched in June 2000, the Red Hook Community Justice Centre was the USA’s first multi-jurisdictional community court. Operating out of a refurbished catholic school in the heart of a low income Brooklyn neighbourhood, the Justice Centre seeks to solve neighbourhood problems like drugs, crime, domestic violence and landlord-tenant disputes.
At Red Hook, a single judge, the Honorable Judge Alex Calabrese, hears neighbourhood cases which under ordinary circumstances would go to three different courts – civil, family and criminal. The goal is to offer a coordinated, rather than a piecemeal, approach to peoples problems.
The courthouse is the hub for an array of unconventional programs that engage local residents in doing justice. These include mediation, community service projects and a youth court where teenagers resolve actual cases involving their peers. The idea is to engage the community in crime prevention and solving local problems before they even come to court.
Today, the Houses are home to 8,000 of Red Hook’s 11,000 residents. Crime has dropped dramatically: between 1993 and 2003, homicides were down 100 percent, felony assaults down 68 percent, robberies down 55 percent and rapes down 33 percent, and the neighbourhood is continuing to change.
Like most New York City neighborhoods, Red Hook is enmeshed in the real estate game, with property owners and more affluent renters perpetually looking out for the next big market. But due to its past reputation and physical isolation, an influx of commercial wealth has been slow to come to the neighbourhood.
From across the Atlantic
The Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales (Lord Woolf) visited Red Hook in 2002 and was impressed with the problem solving approach there. Upon his return, he wrote to the then Home Secretary, Lord Chancellor and the Attorney General about the Red Hood Centre. The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, visited Red Hook and it was decided to test some of the Community Justice concepts in a pilot based in the UK.
The Government set out an agenda to tackle anti social behaviour and the crime associated with it. Key to this is bringing justice closer to the community. This is particularly important as the places where anti social behaviour is most common are often the ones where people feel excluded, let down by the Criminal Justice System and helpless to tackle the problems they face on a daily basis.
The first community justice projects in North Liverpool and Salford were launched in 2005. North Liverpool had a substantial investment from the Government and enjoys the benefit of having Criminal Justice System and partner agencies collocated within one building. This has not since been replicated and there are currently 11 additional Community Justice sites each with a very local identity. These are Bradford, Birmingham, Devon and Cornwall, Hull, Leicester, Merthyr Tydfil, Middlesbrough, Nottingham and three projects in London at Haringey, Newham and Wandsworth.
