week of 3/27/02
 
 
 

The human side of efficiency
By Scott McLeod
I remember vividly the one time a tragedy forced my family to interact intimately with our justice system over an extended period of time. A day before the case was settled, the district attorney called us to the courthouse, took us into a small room, and laid out the case.

“Do you feel justice is being served here?” he asked. “If you don’t, we’ll scrap the deal and go in a different direction.”

The next day, moments before the case was called, he took me aside and asked again if I was comfortable with the expected outcome and the proceedings that were about to take place.

It was in those few moments, in my mind, when justice was served. It put a human, personal face on a tragedy, and I was reassured by the fact that this man was working to “do justice” for our family, a concept too often relegated to the dust heap as the bureaucratic machinery lurches along.

The concepts of “justice” and the “human side” of the court system came to the forefront this week as Haywood County leaders gathered once again to discuss the proposed new justice center. Local leaders are almost always mired in spending wars, struggling to find the right mix of taxation and services that will keep their constituents satisfied and their own conscience clear. Almost always, these debates emanate around a common central point — bricks and mortar. We struggle to reach a consensus about how big and how large a building should be, about where it should be located.

Many argue that those arguments, though, should be the ending point of the debate, not the beginning. In other words, a school, a courthouse or the tax collector’s office are the means to the end. They are built and outfitted as a means of delivering certain services, whether that service be education, justice or the payment of one’s annual fees to the government.

All this seems like common sense, but the point crystallized a few days ago as I attended that meeting. Two men addressed this point, although they came at it from different perspectives.

Danny Davis has a been a judge in Western North Carolina for 18 years. After he spoke publicly about the needs for the justice center in Haywood County, I had a private conversation with him about the court system and any radical changes that might be occurring here or anywhere else that will alter the basic way cases are disposed. Davis cautioned that we must be careful when we look for ways to make court move faster and more efficiently.

“The court system is not a business, it is about people. We are there to do justice, not conduct business. It is not a quick system. We will take what time it takes to do it fairly and judiciously,” said Davis.

A few sentences later, Davis did tell me how he and court officials were trying to make the best use of space and staff to make the court system more responsive to the needs of those charged with speeding offense and other minor crimes. Davis wasn’t disparaging efficiency, but he cautioned that the justice system must give people the time they need to ensure justice is carried out.

His appeal was to remember the human side of what transpires within the courthouse walls between judges, lawyers, prosecutors, witnesses, juries, family members of victims, and even the accused. Speed and efficiency are not what’s most important.

Another speaker, Lee Shelton, also spoke to the human, personal side of what takes place in a justice center. But his argument came from a different angle. Shelton argued that planners and designers have focused too much on cost, location and size. In doing so, they have not programmed for the special needs required in child and domestic abuse cases, custody battles, divorce proceedings, juvenile matters and all of the nontraditional cases that make up a big part of the court caseload. These cases force victims and their families to spend many hours and long days in the courthouse, and he said architects and planners did not gather enough information from these agencies — DSS, guardian ad litem, KARE, REACH, etc. — when it designed the justice center.

He didn’t say it, but Shelton too was arguing that the new justice center needed to serve this human element. It’s not just a building, it is a means of delivering services to taxpayers, Shelton said.

I’ve watched many public building projects as they were debated, planned and eventually built. Almost always the conversations were about square footage and costs.

And they have to be. But employees must be protected. Abused children, battered women, witnesses who fear for their safety, and spouses afraid of their partners are also the users of a justice center. Some of the questions and blank looks at this week’s work session certainly indicated that their needs, perhaps, had not been a major part of the planning process for this justice center.

In many cases government tries too hard to mimic the capitalist ideals of economy and efficiency, and often when that occurs it’s in the name of saving tax dollars and serving citizens. In doing so — whether it’s a justice center, a school, or any government service — we mustn’t forget what it is we are trying to accomplish.

(Scott McLeod can be reached at info@smokymountainnews.com)