Economic benefits from civil legal aid

My fellow bloger Richard Zorza from the inspirational accesstojustice.net blog has brought to my attention a succinct depiction of the direct and indirect benefits of civil legal aid. The analysis has been prepared by the Laura K. Abel from the National Center for Access to Justice at Cardozo Law School. Briefly, the value of civil legal aid delivered to people who cannot afford to procure legal services from the free market comes to:

– Savings of public money by reduction of domestic violence. Requests for protective orders within the serviced area fall by 35.2%. Less public money is spent on medical care, special education for affected children and police and prisons resources devoted to perpetrators;

– Savings of public money by helping children leave foster care more quickly. “In Washington State, the rate at which children were reunited with their parents was 11% higher when the parents were represented by lawyers whose caseloads were kept to a manageable level than when the parents were represented by high-volume contract attorneys.”;

– Savings of public money by reducing evictions. Tenants who are represented are significantly more likely to retain possession. In 2009-2010 New York state saved $116 million in shelter costs’;

– Savings of public money by protecting patients’ health. Civil legal aid helped patients of asthma improve their housing conditions which allowed them to stop taking steroids for about 6 months. Others were helped with health insurance, disability benefits or alleviation of health-related job discrimination;

– Savings through helping low-income people participate in safety-net programs. In 2011 the federal benefits awarded to beneficiaries of civil legal aid totalled to $348 million.

Download the Economic Benefits of Civil Legal Aid from here

Study finds that UK Family Drug & Alcohol Courts outperform regular courts

Researchers from Brunel University announced results from a study of the impact of a pilot Family Drug and Alcohol Court in London. Main objectives of the study are to assess the effectiveness, added value and costs of FDAC as compared to regular courts dealing with the challenges of parental substance misuse. Small samples of problem parents dealt with by FDAC is compared to a sample of individuals and families suffering from similar problems but subjected to regular court proceedings.

Parental drug and alcohol abuse is a complex social and legal problem which is often passed across generations. The traditional responses to the problem are plagued by  “poor child and parent outcomes; insufficient co-ordination between adult and children’s services; late intervention to protect children; delay in reaching decisions; and the soaring costs of proceedings, linked to the cost of expert evidence.” The individuals who comprised the two samples suffered from multiple and serious problems.

“High rates of domestic violence, mental health problems, criminal convictions, housing problems and a history of parents being in care. Parents in each sample had a long history of substance misuse The children had many difficulties as well as child protection needs. Emotional and behavioural problems affected a third of the FDAC children and half the comparison children, and a quarter of all children had physical health problems. A higher proportion of FDAC children were under five and were born withdrawing from drugs.”

The pilot FDAC courts focus on problem-solving and integrate the efforts of specialized judges, and care specialists. In practice FDAC works as  a multi-disciplinary team of practitioners. Lawyers have relatively limited role and are largely excluded from the proceedings. Not surprisingly one of the findings is that FDAC proceedings show lower level of conflict.

Despite the limitations the study finds conclusive support for the effectiveness of FDAC in several dimensions:

• Troubled parents receive quicker access to effective services addressing the full range of problems resulting from their substance abuse. Most importantly – parents treated by FDAC received more help than the parents from the comparison sample;
• FDAC coordinated the access of the substance abuse parents to multiple sources of help and coordinated the provision of services;
• “FDAC assessments uncovered more unmet needs in relation to substance misuse, domestic violence and maternal mental health than had been identified by the local authority in the documents accompanying the application for care proceedings”;
• “A higher proportion of FDAC than comparison parents had ceased misusing substances by the end of proceedings”;
• More FDAC parents were reunited with their children;
• Although procedural duration does not differ time is allocated in a more constructive way.

Read the executive summary of the study on the Family Drug & Alcohol Courts here

Peru: Study finds that access to justice programme increases the use of formal dispute resolution mechanisms

In the 1990s Peru expanded the access to justice in selected underserved areas. The program aimed to make justice more accessible through so called “one-stop” service centers called Modullos Basisos Justicia. These were composed of judges, prosecutors, public defenders, police officers and the court, making the most important judicial services available in the same building. The intervention was designed to improve judicial coverage in populations located far from important urban centres where most of the courts are located, by reducing transport time, increasing judicial demand and the rate of judges per inhabitant.

Recently published impact evaluation study explores how Modullos Basisos Justicia impacted several outcome indicators:

–          Use of informal and formal mechanisms (hypothesis: the intervention will shift problems to the formal system);

–          Consumption of complimentary services such as hiring of lawyers (hypothesis: increase in the use of legal services provided by lawyers);

–          Number of conflicts that are resorted to a judges and solved;

–          Incidence of conflicts;

–          Number of conflicts involving domestic violence, probability of obtaining child support and the risk of land expropriation;

“The main findings of the paper regarding utilization are that when services are provided they are  used, and utilization shifts away from traditional mechanisms to state-sponsored mechanisms.  The  results are both empirically robust and large in magnitude, with a shift in 16 percentage points  toward formal resolution of conflicts.  We also see the use of lawyers increase substantially in the  areas where the program intervened (about 10 percentage points in comparison to the control areas).

However, the results also point to improvement in outcomes associated with an increase in the  percentage of conflicts resolved, and in the case of child support, an increase in child support  payments.  There were no results in other type of conflicts, although this may be due to small  sample sizes in each of these cells, limiting the power of the estimator.  Finally, the results indicate a  reduction of the order of 4 percentage points in the proportion of residents who report having had  an incidence of conflict.  This result, which is unexpected, may reflect lower levels of conflicts  initiated, due to a higher degree of impunity, be it real or perceived.”

Read the whole study here

 

Nicaragua: paper provides details on Programa de Facilitadores Judiciales Rurales

Margot Kokke and Pedro Vuskovic have recently published a paper entitled “Legal Empowerment of the Poor in Nicaragua”. The study analyzes the historical development and current trends of the Programa de Facilitadores Judiciales Rurales in Nicaragua. In a nutshell the program’s objectives are to: “…improve access to justice and to contribute to the legal empowerment of the poor, but also to strengthen prevention mechanisms, to introduc ealternative dispute resolution methods and to improve social stability and harmony.”

As of 2007 there were 1 260 active judicial facilitators in 120 Nicaraguan municipios. Facilitators are lay people who “should serve as an example within his community; he must abide to principles of honesty, impartiality, dignity and competence”.  Furthermore, the paper outlines that the facilitators should be leaders in their communities, not belong to political parties and do the job voluntarily. Most importantly the facilitators provide legal assistance and counselling to people from the served communities, mediate in civil and criminal disputes and refer cases to the official and unofficial dispute resolution institutions.

Download the paper from here