Cohort 2023

Justice Management Institute

Assessing Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the New Orleans Community Court

New Orleans, LA

Orleans Parish is home to the city of New Orleans, which with more than 350,000 residents is the most populous city in Louisiana. Most of the city’s residents are African Americans, who, as research and data have shown, are overrepresented in the criminal legal system. There is a growing need to address racial and ethnic disparities in that system, advance front-end system reform in prosecution and prevention, and remove barriers to access and opportunities for historically marginalized communities. In pursuit of this, the Justice Management Institute has worked with numerous jurisdictions across the country to identify where disparities emerge in the legal process and to implement strategies to address them. In addition, it is researching how prosecutorial charging policies related to the nonprosecution of certain misdemeanors and low-level felonies impact racial and ethnic disparities as well as public safety. The study focuses on four prosecutors’ offices, examining differences in outcomes based on different types of policies and within jurisdictions before and after policy adoption.

With Catalyst Grant funding, the Justice Management Institute will partner with the City of New Orleans Municipal and Traffic Court to reduce inequities by assessing differences in treatment at subsequent decision points in the criminal legal system. In partnership with the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the Justice Management Institute and the Municipal and Traffic Court will launch the newly formed New Orleans Community Court in 2023. The Justice Management Institute will work with the New Orleans Community Court program team to initiate the project and leverage court data to investigate the assessment and outcomes of the initiative. This effort and its activities are intended to enable the community court to be fully equipped to continue the assessments, and to reduce inequities in the criminal legal system in the long term.