The Center for Justice Innovation is a community justice organization that centers safety and racial justice in partnership with communities, courts, and the people most impacted.

We are attorneys, social workers, community organizers, researchers, urban planners, trainers, mentors, and people with lived experience in the justice system, all united by a common mission: to reimagine justice and build safe communities.

Goal One: Rethinking Incarceration

Goal Two: Engaging Communities and Preventing Crime

Goal Three: Advancing Fairness

The Center has a Learning Institute where professional development is encouraged and supported via training. Recently, the Center ran a management training for leaders across the organization and will continue to do so periodically. The Center also established a Leadership Team that works to strategically collaboration across the organization, establish policies, and roll out new programs

The Center for Court Innovation grew out of a single experiment, the Midtown Community Court, which was created in 1993 to address low-level offending around Times Square. The project’s success in reducing both crime and incarceration led the court’s planners, with the support of New York State’s chief judge, to establish the Center for Court Innovation to serve as an ongoing engine for justice reform in New York. The Center’s founding director was John Feinblatt. From 2002 to 2020, Greg Berman served as director. Our current executive director is Courtney Bryan, and we also have an advisory board. Over the years, we have helped design, implement and run over three dozen operating programs (many of which now function independently of the Center, such as the Brooklyn Treatment Court), produced original research about hundreds of justice initiatives, and hosted tens of thousands of visitors interested in justice reform. We are proud to have received numerous awards for our work, including the Peter F. Drucker Prize for Non-Profit Innovation and the Innovations in American Government Award from Harvard University and the Ford Foundation.