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UC Law Journal

Abstract

A new, previously unstudied institution is addressing felonies, including violent felonies of the highest levels, without imposing incarceration as the sanction. Attempts to abolish prisons, or at least reduce racialized mass incarceration, must consider how to respond to serious and violent crimes. This Article offers an analysis of a real-world, ongoing experiment in doing so.

The Manhattan Felony Alternative-to-Incarceration Court (“ATI Court”) is the first and, thus far, the only court in the country that systematically offers defendants of any demographic and any charge the opportunity to be diverted from the traditional criminal legal system and to avoid prison. Defendants are mandated instead to engage with community-based social services, such as education, mental health treatment, job skills training, substance use programming, and housing support.

This Article is the first academic work to describe and conduct an institutional analysis of this paradigm-shifting phenomenon, and the first text providing an in-depth, publicly available account of the court. I collected empirical data using qualitative methods. Based on my site visits, my interviews and correspondence with court actors, and court documents, this Article describes the court, situates it in the context of existing “alternatives to incarceration,” and analyzes the court’s design.

This court has three innovative features that transform the genre of specialized criminal courts, which already provide opportunities to avoid incarceration. First, it is a non-specialized specialized court: It employs no eligibility restrictions based on demographic, need, or charge. Rather than siphoning off low-level cases or sympathetic groups (such as veterans) from the traditional criminal system as older specialized courts do, this court opens the non-incarceration option to all defendants. Second, the court performs the function of probation without probation officers and their law enforcement tools and approaches. Third, the court makes operational changes to the traditional specialized court model that, with the first two innovations, avert the usual effect of specialized courts: widening and strengthening the “net” of carceral supervision.

This court is the latest among a number of approaches already operating on the margins of the criminal system, but some of the court’s stakeholders intend for its model to become the default criminal legal response, replacing the current default: prison. This Article assesses the role the court plays within the wider criminal legal system. While imperfect, this new court expands the realm of possible responses to crime and provides further evidence of the obsolescence of prisons.

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