Criminal Justice Collaboration and Partnership

Between 2017-2022, the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative (ABA ROLI) implemented the Criminal Justice Collaboration and Partnership (CJ-CAP) program, which empowered small groups of criminal justice actors to develop a coordinated interagency approach to tackle intractable challenges beyond the scope of a single organization or entity. Funded by the US Department of State Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), the CJ-CAP program worked to promote effective coordination to combat corruption in Bosnia and Herzegovina; and deploy effective, efficient, and humane alternatives to pre-trial detention in Armenia and Kenya. The tailored fellowship included learning through seminars and workshops with subject-matter experts, exposure through institutional visits, and mentorship by US peers with expertise in the area of the intended change. Fellows learned core concepts of change management and developed a detailed change plan, including a clear problem statement, goal, theory of change, objectives, activities, timelines, and responsibility. 

In 2018, the first class of CJ-CAP Fellows, from Armenia, established an interagency working group to reduce pre-trial detention and improve the use of alternative mechanisms. The CJ-CAP Armenia fellows contributed to revisions of the Criminal Procedure Code with support from their mentors from the Kentucky Department of Pretrial Services and Department of Public Advocacy. Based on the fellows’ contributions, Armenia adopted a new criminal code and a new code of criminal procedure that went into effect on January 1, 2023. The fellows’ primary project was implementing alternative measures to pre-trial detention. The anticipated project entails technical help to Line Ministries implementing the new responsibilities created by Criminal Procedure revisions. 

In 2020, ABA ROLI welcomed its second class of CJ-CAP Fellows, which included fellows from five Kenyan criminal justice agencies who sought to implement a reform project to improve access to legal aid and increase the use of trial waiver systems for pre-trial and juvenile detainees in order to clear court backlogs, reduce prison overcrowding, and improve the efficiency of the criminal justice system. The CJ-CAP Kenya fellows’ reform project was motivated by a 2017 audit of the Kenyan criminal justice system. The audit showed that, despite progressive reforms, the criminal justice system is skewed against the poor—with a majority of prisoners having been accused of economically motivated or social disturbance crimes and a majority of pretrial detainees unrepresented by counsel. Seventy percent of prosecuted cases involved petty crimes, while serious offenses had high rates of dismissal and acquittal. Bail is granted in only 8% of cases, and the remaining 92% of defendants spend an average of three years in pretrial detention. The average duration of a criminal case is 2.4 years for cases tried in the magistrate's court and 4.5 years for cases tried in the high court. Facing these stark statistics, the CJ-CAP Kenya fellows took a coordinated inter-agency approach to increase access to legal aid for persons accused of crimes, raise public awareness of defendants’ rights, and increase the use of trial waiver systems in order to reduce pretrial detention and trial backlogs. Their pilot targeted pretrial detainees and children in conflict with the law held in prisons, police stations, and juvenile detention centers in Kilifi County, which includes Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. Following the pilot, the fellows planned to expand the reform project nationwide. The Kenyan fellows completed study visits in Washington, DC; Virginia; Maryland; New York; and Kentucky. The Kenyan fellows were mentored by justice sector and civil society professionals working in the areas of family law, prisoner’s rights, and legal aid.  

In the year since their return to Kenya, following their month-long fellowship in the United States, the fellows achieved tremendous success in the implementation of their reform plan, despite the COVID-19 pandemic.  The quality of legal representation improved with two more paralegals who assisted the local community and pretrial detainees through the welfare department at the Kilifi Prison facility. Through the National Committee on Criminal Justice Reforms, the fellows assisted with the development of laws and practice guidelines on arrests and conditions of pre-trial detention, the development of laws and practice guidelines on the Management of petty offenders, and the development of a fair trial checklist. The fellows also strengthened the link between the community justice system, arbitration and mediation, and other alternatives and formal justice. The Kilifi community accepted the use of alternative dispute resolution methods as a way of resolving their cases.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, CJ-CAP led a virtual program for the third class of fellows, six criminal justice professionals from Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). ABA ROLI, facilitated by the Center for Court Innovation, hosted a workshop focused on interagency collaboration. The workshop aimed to define principles of collaboration; define the CJ-CAP project vision; create a list of stakeholders with whom to pursue collaboration; and discuss how to measure performance to ensure sustainability of collaboration efforts, how to categorize interagency collaboration stakeholders, and how to measure interagency collaboration and mitigate risks. Additionally, ABA ROLI hosted the “Creating Strategic Change” workshop to define the problem the fellows’ reform plan sought to fix, define the overall goal for change, develop a theory of how to achieve the change, understand the context in which the change will take place, and define the steps by which the change will be implemented. The BiH fellows were mentored by justice sector professionals in ethics, risk and crisis management, fraud, and public corruption. 

The CJ-CAP Team implemented the second portion of the US based fellowship program from September 4-17, 2022. The delegation of Bosnian officials—which included prosecutors, investigators/police, and anticorruption officials—traveled to Boston, Massachusetts; New York City, New York; and Washington, DC.