Professor Miller presented a paper on problem-solving courts to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit chief judges on Thursday, August 3, 2017 as part of a panel on specialty courts. Below is an excerpt from the presentation.
The first problem-solving court was founded by Chief Judge Klein of the Florida State Eleventh Judicial Circuit as an alternative to other, "fast-track" drug courts. The single great advantage of offender-supervision courts is that they respond to a failure in the federal sentencing guidelines that recent reforms do nothing to remedy. The guidelines presuppose incarceration as the organizing principle of punishment to the exclusion of non-incarcerative sanctions. The guidelines focused the question of punishment on the moment of sentencing as applied to individual offenders. But the guidelines failed to consider the direct and collateral consequences of imprisonment and reentry for both the offender and his or, increasingly, her family and community. The guidelines effectively channeled individuals into and up the criminal justice system, with little thought about what happens to them in prison, where they become less healthy, less employable, and more antisocial through losing family contacts, and what happens after prison, where often prisoners lose a variety of state and federal benefits as a collateral consequence of imprisonment.
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