Book Review: Good Courts: The Case for Problem Solving Justice

• Author: Ali Adnan Al-Feel
• Published date: 01 December 2006
• Date: 01 December 2006
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0734016806295612
• Subject Matter: Articles

create a gap in criminal justice offerings. There are far too few books written specifically

for the criminal justice practitioner.

At the conclusion of the book, Bannon supplies the sources and citations used in the cre-

ation of the text. These references will direct the more discriminating reader to additional

sources of information pertaining to more abstruse legal precepts. For the field of criminal

procedure, this type of information is inappropriate for inclusion into a book of this nature.

The author was surely aware of this and opted to supply interested readers with supple-

mentary references and citations.

Wendy L. Hicks

Loyola University, New Orleans

Berman, G., & Feinblatt, J. (Eds.). (2005). Good Courts: The Case for Problem Solving

Justice. New York: New Press.

DOI: 10.1177/0734016806295612

This book is about a quiet revolution among American criminal courts. Criminal courts

are at an all-time low: Victims, communities, and even offenders view courts as unable to

respond adequately to complex social and legal problems including drugs, prostitution,

domestic violence, and quality-of-life crime. Even many judges and attorneys in the United

States think that the courts produce assembly-line justice.

This book describes problem-solving courts, which offer an effective alternative and

which are increasingly being embraced by even the most hard-on-crime jurists.

Greg Berman and John Feinblatt were instrumental in setting up New York’s midtown

community court and the Red Hook Community Justice Center, two of the nation’s premier

models for problem-solving justice. These alternative courts reengineer the way everyday

crime is addressed by focusing on the underlying problems that bring people into the crim-

inal justice system to begin with.

In this book, there are seven chapters and a conclusion. Chapter 1 addresses justice in cri-

sis: why change is necessary. This chapter takes a hard look at the current state of American

criminal courts. Chapter 2 describes the problem-solving alternative and explores the intel-

lectual foundations of this new movement. The problem-solving movement represents a pas-

tiche of good ideas and interesting strategies borrowed from other disciplines and other

movements, including alternative dispute resolution, the victims’ movement, reforms such

as problem-oriented and broken-windows policing, therapeutic jurisprudence, and juvenile

court. In both theory and practice, these developments have set the stage for problem-

solving courts. Chapter 3 offers a snapshot of several problem-solving courts in action, provid-

ing case studies of three primary types of community courts: drug courts, domestic violence

courts, and community courts—two in New York and one in Oregon—whose stories paint a

vivid picture of problem-solving justice in action. Chapter 4 takes a look at how problem-

solving justice affects the work of judges, with a particular focus on issues of judicial dis-

cretion, neutrality, impartiality, and independence. Chapter 5 tells the stories of four individuals

including a victim and several offenders whose lives were changed for the better by problem-

solving courts—a community court, drug court, and domestic violence court. Both chapter 6

386 Criminal Justice Review