MILWAUKEE – District Attorney John Chisholm, who says he will investigate how Darrell Brooks gained release on a felony for $1,000 just days before he allegedly killed five people and injured 40 in last Sunday's Waukesha massacre, anticipated possible tragedy in an article for Harvard’s criminal justice school in 2019.
But Chisolm and fellow author Tom Reed decided the potential of reformative justice policies outweighed the risk.
“Significant change is impossible in a justice system culture that protects traditional roles and decision making at the expense of openness to new ideas and approaches,” they wrote.
“Many decisions in our criminal justice system impose some risk of public criticism when it appears that new or experimental approaches are being taken.
“Fear that a single decision might be tragically wrong can be disabling.”
Fear didn’t deter Chisholm and Reed, who encouraged prosecutors everywhere to copy their model without offering a single statistic to show it works.
They claimed data didn’t matter because the system needed different data.
They opened by sketching a vision of vast problems sweeping down a funnel and Milwaukee capturing the flood for irrigation.
“This reimagined system features multiple diverse channels for intervention and response, working throughout the community and reflecting broader social dynamics,” they wrote.
They claimed prosecutors and public defenders should act as partners outside of adversarial court proceedings.
They claimed all sorts of agencies should act as partners under judicial direction.
They traced the idea to an academic address from 2009, where a speaker said policy makers confused the pursuit of justice with the adjudication of cases.
The speaker said policy makers believed the only powers of the justice system were powers to arrest, adjudicate, and sanction.
“We need to harness the moral authority of the agencies of justice, not just their legal power,” the speaker said.
Chisholm and Reed wrote, “Collaborations with health and social service providers mean that criminal justice professionals can address the needs of people accused of committing crimes, victims and communities in a variety of ways.”
“Prosecutors, public defenders, and judges use data informed assessment tools to determine which approach is optimal for each individual who encounters our system,” they wrote.
“These initiatives work because they integrate into the broader cultural and intellectual landscape of criminal justice in our community.”
They wrote that the purpose of the system was preventive, remedial, and punitive.
“Embedded in our instinct to punish is the desire to identify moral failing in the individual and to publicly condemn it in strong terms, and in so doing to set ourselves apart from it, or at least imagine that we do,” they wrote.
“Alienation is part of, and near the core of, punishment.
“In societies like ours, which feature significant inequality, the legitimacy of our response to crime, of who we alienate and why, is always under scrutiny.”
They wrote that meaningful partnerships offer the best opportunity to address social disorder with the least possible alienation.
“Punishment on its own, or as traditionally understood, does not make a community stronger,” they wrote.
They wrote that it’s appropriate only when it advances a preventive or remedial purpose and never as an end in itself.
They wrote that in most cases, the punitive function must be subordinate to preventive and remedial functions.
They backed off a bit and wrote, “The public must be allowed to see and invited to accept that punitive sanctions and remedial measures are equally important.”
They wrote that policy makers should study imprisonment decisions, “to learn what went wrong with the offender and with the community.”
They questioned the limit on what qualified as evidence in critical decisions.
They wrote that certain information sources were accepted and others were ignored or incompletely considered.
They wrote that the cost of ignoring information outside the rules was too high and that research into trauma and addiction held great promise.
“The mind sciences have a place in both making policy and making individual case decisions, even when the rules of evidence have not yet acknowledged that,” they wrote.
In a discussion of mental health, they wrote that 35 percent of the jail population received psychotropic medication on a daily basis.
In a discussion of domestic violence, they wrote that it was common to see schools, child protection, criminal justice, and courts working with a family.
They wrote that routing families through criminal justice was rarely effective and problems were often made worse by piecemeal efforts.
Their discussion of racial disparities opened with dilution of guilt and closed with faint hope.
They wrote that no entity in the system or the community was responsible and that, “Progress in resolving these disparities is inevitably slow.”
“Without real change affecting this entire system, driven by innovative thinking on the part of criminal justice policy makers and a new commitment to cross sector collaboration, we cannot fully reform criminal justice policy, they wrote.
On measuring success, they wrote, “We can create better system metrics.”
They hinted at early efforts to establish a data hub combining public health and education resources with criminal justice records.
In a discussion of police, they wrote that politicians misrepresented innovative practices as soft on crime or “hug a thug.”
They wrote that polling showed public acceptance of the need for effective and smart criminal justice.
“There has to be a tolerance for risk and the inevitable failures associated with change,” they wrote.