Thursday, 7/19/2007

Today we left for Brooklyn in a rather different way than we normally
do, namely over the water. Although we had to wait for 30 minutes for
our boat to arrive, it was a worthwhile experience as we got to see
the skyline of the financial district from the top of the water taxi.
When we arrived back on the mainland we rushed over to the subway as
we were very late. After an interesting detour along the highway of
red hook, we were finally picked up by Matt who gave us correct
directions to the Red Hook Community Justice Center. The justice
center, an initiative from the an organization called court innovation
(www.courtinnovation.org), has had a major positive influence on the
highly criminalized community of Red Hook. Combining a criminal,
family and housing court the community justice center seeks to find
solutions for the many problems which used to be invested in the
community of red hook. Rather than punishing offenders of low level
crimes through incarceration, red hook tries to look at the underlying
problems which motivate many of the recurring criminal offenders. The
center has a clinic, social workers and offers legal aid to the
defendants, through which it tries to address the root of the
problems. After watching several hearings, many of us were highly
impressed by this almost 'commonsensical' alternative to the American
obsession with incarceration.


The wonderful wonderful thing that day of course was Herbert Sturz,
whom we met at his Vera Institute of Justice (www.vera.org). He
founded this institute together with Louis Schweitzer in 1961, soon
working with New York Citys government to improve the situation of
people in pretrial detention. Vera moved on, soon working on minority
rights with the Kennedys. The Vera website doesn't say so, just like
it is quite sure that Herbert Sturz concealed many more things. He is
such a humble person, despite having built more than 250 000 houses
for the poor of South Africa, despite Vera being involved with
virtually everything, from court system to housing to evaluating a
police in many countries all around the world. Many of our questions
for him began with "There seems to be a big problem with ..." and
ended with "Has the Vera institute been involved in something to solve
this?" Mr. Sturz answer always was 'yes'. Actually Nina constantly had
a big smile on her face listening to this elderly man who was
predestined to form to a mentor and inspiration in our heads.