Taking a Collaborative Approach to Addressing Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Justice System

Tshaka Barrows, deputy director of the Burns Institute, discusses his organization’s collaborative and community-centered approach to addressing and eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in the justice system. Barrows spoke with Robert V. Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, after participating in a panel on Race and Procedural Justice at Justice Innovations in Times of Change on Sept. 30, 2016. TSHAKA BARROWS: We call it a system, but it really isn’t a system. It’s much more of a grouping of semi-autonomous agencies that have very little accountability to each other. ROB WOLF: Hi I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation and today I’m in North Haven, Connecticut at the Justice Innovation in Times of Change conference. Sitting down with me is TShaka Barrows who is Deputy Director of the W. Haywood Burns Institute, which works to address racial and ethnic disparities in the justice system. The institute is based in Oakland, California. You’ve come a long way to attend the conference and participate and to sit and talk with me, thank you very much. BARROWS: I’m glad to be here. WOLF: Let’s talk about the work of the Burns Institute and in particular, how you work with jurisdictions to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in the justice system. You have a specific approach you take to looking at this issue and trying to address it. Maybe you could summarize for me what that approach is. BARROWS: At the Burns Institute, our approach is to build a collaborative of the different agencies that make up the justice system and I always tell people, I just told the group, we call it a system, but it really isn’t a system. It’s much more of a grouping of semi-autonomous agencies that have very little accountability to each other. The whole notion of trying to address disparities has to be done with that context in mind because much of one agencies decision bump into the next, bump into the next and the impact is felt by the individuals who are going through it and we see it in the disparity numbers. To really create a strategy to address it you have to have all those key players from each of those agencies as a part of your collaboration. We also fundamentally don’t think that just having those kind of traditional stakeholders is enough. Our process requires that we engage meaningful participation from community stakeholders who’ve had experience with the justice system, who live in the neighborhoods that our data shows are the target neighborhoods, where more people are coming from, so that they can both bring that experience from having traveled through the system, though the various agencies, being passed from one to the other, but also what it’s like living in the community that is targeted for higher involvement for various reasons, policies, policing policies, could be that there’s a lack of resources, any number of conditional factors. This whole notion of creating more fair notion of procedural justice can’t be done without accounting for that fact that certain neighborhoods are much more highly representative in the system, our process we really aim for participation with community stakeholders, which is very different. People are a little bit afraid of that. The idea that you’re sitting in a meeting sharing data with people who are upset with the agency, who did not feel that they were treated fairly, who are angry about the realities that folks in their community face, is a threatening notion for most traditional stakeholders who already a conversation of race in this country, typically is a bit unnerving for people, it’s not like that’s a regular practice that we have. WOLF: And you literally bring everyone together in the same room? That’s the process, it’s like, “Let’s all sit down together.” What does that look like, how many people are actually sitting around a table or in a auditorium? BARROWS: That’s a great question. We build a collaborative and it’s a process to even build it. We don’t try to just come in with a cookie cutter kind of prescription. We want to understand from the local players. Justice happens locally, there’s culture. Who do they think are the key people they need to be there and how many? So sometimes we may get huge representation from one agency, where it’s like, “You guys are kind of dominating the meeting.” and we may need to adjust that so there’s a need to attend to the actual formation. Typically it’s, I’d say, between 10 to 20 stakeholders depending on the size of the jurisdiction. We work in very small rural places, they may not have a huge collaboration. I’ve worked in jurisdictions that have had up to 30 people who meet every month, but that becomes to be a challenge in and of itself because if everybody just introduced themselves that would take time. For us to have meaningful dialogue about certain issues in a meeting of that size, it can be a challenge and so we really want to look for a sweet spot that allows for equal representation across the agencies and doesn’t leave behind any one particular group. WOLF: What happens then there, what’s the process? You said every month, so it’s an ongoing … Are you trying to build a permanent infrastructure for dialogue or is it a time limited, let’s meet for an x number of times to work on this? BARROWS: That’s another great question. Our process would be monthly, we hope as we’re setting the jurisdiction up to maintain the process without us. We do a whole orientation to really try to help everybody to fully participate. We don’t people just sitting there and they’re like, “I don’t know what this is, I don’t know what’s going on,” acronyms are flying over their head. We spend time doing coach ups for the community stakeholders and we also orient the system folks to what the meeting would be like when they have community members there who might be more frustrated or going to ask lots of questions. Rarely, our systems stakeholder, is very good at telling the story of their institution and how they’ve got to this point. We have also started working with them, they’re telling a story, you’ve got to own this. You didn’t do all this, you don’t have to apologize for the history but you need to own the fact that there were some practices that were not the best that we were doing and we’ve been working on trying to address, because that engenders a level of respect for the process and opens up the community to thinking that, “Okay, you really are serious about doing something different.” WOLF: And when everyone sits down, have they already accepted the premise that there are racial and ethnic disparities – BARROWS: Yeah. WOLF: Or do you also need to establish that as the facts on the ground? BARROWS: We will likely re-visit, lot of times people will say, “Oh yeah, no we’ve all … We understand we have a problem.” And then it’s like, “Let’s talk about it.” And then we start asking. “What do you think is contributing to the problem?” It’s one thing to say, “Yeah our jail or our juvenile hall is full of people of color.” It’s another thing to say, “And we think we have a responsibility for that, we think we’re contributing to that.” When we ask the question, “What do you think drives this?” Everything but them usually is the response that we get which let’s us know you probably don’t realize what this is going to feel like and you’re going to feel like, “Well why are you guys asking us about what our decisions are?” It’s because you have control over that, you don’t have control over external factors like Hollywood violence and movies, culture of violence in music, or just the fact that there is this history of segregation in the country. You can’t just undo that in your collaborative, you don’t quite have the power to say, “You know what, let’s just change the zoning and all the ways that the neighborhoods are set up and let’s go ahead and make it so that job discrimination doesn’t happen anymore.” It’s like those things aren’t really in the purview of that particular collaborative but their decision making practices are. You can control who you violate for probation, do you send out bench warrants before actually reaching out to people in their native language? Do you know if your court letters are landing on folks who couldn’t understand it in the first place and so now you’re putting a warrant out for someone who never fully engaged in the information in the beginning. So we then analyze each decision point by race, ethnicity, gender, geography, and offense. It’s a way to understand that each decision point, what are we doing, what is the impact of our decisions, where are people going, what’s happening? WOLF: How do you know what the impact on all those factors you just said at each decision point, meaning at arrest, or a decision to charge, or a decision to carry a case forward, or a decision to sentencing or to plea. All those things are decision points right? Do you just ask people, “What do you do?” Or you’re looking at...