Center for Justice Innovation

This article contains promotional content. Please help improve it by removing promotional language and inappropriate external links, and by adding encyclopedic text written from a neutral point of view. (November 2017) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

The Center for Justice Innovation, formerly the Center for Court Innovation, is an American non-profit organization headquartered in New York, founded in 1996, with a stated goal of creating a more effective and human justice system by offering aid to victims, reducing crime and improving public trust in justice.^[1]

Originally founded as a public/private partnership between the New York State Unified Court System and the Fund for the City of New York, the Center for Justice Innovation creates operating programs to test new ideas and solve problems, performs original research to determine what works, and provides assistance to justice reformers around the world.^[2] The center’s projects include community-based violence prevention projects, alternatives to incarceration, reentry initiatives, and court-based programs such as the Midtown Community Court^[3] and Red Hook Community Justice Center as well as drug courts,^[4] reentry courts,^[5] domestic violence courts,^[6] mental health courts^[7] and others. Their goal is to reduce the use of unnecessary incarceration and promote positive individual and family change.

The center works with jurisdictions around the U.S. and the rest of the world to disseminate lessons learned from innovative programs and provide hands-on assistance to criminal justice practitioners interested in the deployment of new research-based strategies to improve the delivery of justice. The center received an Innovations in American Government Award from the Ford Foundation and Harvard University.^[8] The center's first director was John Feinblatt, who went on to serve as a senior advisor to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. From 2002 to 2020, Greg Berman served as director. The current leadership is executive director, Courtney Bryan, along with an advisory board.