
Biology student Dario Gaston is one of many young New Yorkers charged with low-level offenses who has sought-out diversion programs like the Midtown Community Court, an initiative that strives to reduce convictions for misdemeanors – a common entrance into the criminal justice system. Judges can prescribe anywhere from one to 15 program sessions as an alternative to fines or jail time for crimes ranging from driving without a license to small theft.
The 24-year-old from Brooklyn is studying at St. John’s College in Queens. He’d sent threatening messages to an acquaintance who’d sold him a few luxury clothing items, and failed to deliver Gaston the items. Months later, Gaston was caught by the police for hopping a turnstile and after they looked him up, saw that the vendor had filed a complaint against him.
“I texted the person basically saying I was going to harm him,” Gaston admitted. “But I’m not that person.”
Gaston wound up in jail for a day, where he was presented with a choice: fight his aggravated harassment charge out in court, involving lawyer fees and stressing his mother out, or work with whatever the community court prescribed. He opted for the second, where he was charged with aggravated harassment by the Community Court judge and sentenced to three social work sessions to discuss stress management.
In hindsight, he feels working with the court’s Emerging Adults diversion program offered him an opportunity to improve.
“It prevents you from repeating the same mistake,” Gaston said.
Since the 1990s, New York has heavily policed misdemeanors as an effort to crack down on behaviors that lead to felonies and heavier sentences. The Midtown Community Court was established in 1993. Times Square was a booming commercial center, but individuals would cycle in and out of jail for days and weeks at a time for charges involving prostitution, petty theft and graffiti.
The court became the first of its kind in New York City, and influenced community justice models to reduce recidivism and jail populations around the world. In the last thirty years, it’s developed a variety of programming, including Project Reset, which went from 170 cases in November 2023 to 500 currently.
The Midtown Court has been slowly reopening its hearing days following Covid shutdowns, and earlier this month, reopened its Wednesday programming.
“We’re working with the city to try to unlock more funding,” said Danielle Mindess, program director of Midtown’s Community Court. “We still have the exact same budget as we had when we were responsible for a quarter of the number of cases.”
But misdemeanors continue to be the largest portion of court charges in New York City in spite of efforts to decriminalize small offenses like turnstile jumping and cannabis. The organization overseeing the community court, the Center for Justice Innovation, has community court operations in all five bureaus.
Sonia Chowdhury, a coordinator at the Community Court with a degree in Criminology, still remembers when the courthouse had a holding cell in which offenders would wait in handcuffs.
“You put a drug addict in jail for 15 days, they come out and do the same thing,” Chowdhury said. “Like, why is this person just sitting in jail?”
The Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, which did not respond to requests for comment, plans to build five jails in the place of Rikers Island, where Mindess said conditions amount to “a humanitarian crisis.”
That plan follows other recent criminal justice reform laws including a bail reform passed in 2021, which eliminates cash bailouts for inmates, and criminal record sealing in 2023, which erases criminal records after three years and an offender has completed his sentencing requirements.
“[Programs like these have] completely changed the landscape because there’s been a shift over the last eight years to try to reduce the volume in Rikers Island and keep as many out of jail as possible,” Mindess said. “It’s a moving target.”
Some bills have sought further systemic change, like a proposal to change criminal court proceedings to make it easier for people to argue in court that they were convicted of a crime they did not commit and potentially stay out of jail entirely, but have been vetoed by Governor Kathy Hochul. Instead, the governor has supported efforts to curb recidivism.
The court’s Emerging Adults program, in which Gaston participated, serves adults between the ages of 18 and 25 with the thinking that people in this age group are still brains are still developing and prone to making poor decisions.
“We’re trying to take our brief opportunity of meeting with folks to help them stabilize and figure out what’s missing in their lives and what they really need at that moment in order to move forward in a different way,” Mindess said.