Introduction to the Court

Maricopa County , AZ , is the fourth most populous county and geographically the 14 th largest county in the nation 1. Home to the state capitol of Phoenix, Maricopa had a population of 3.6 million in 2005, a growth of more than 18% since 2001. Persons of Hispanic or Latino origin make up 28% of the population; another 9% of the population is African American, Native American, Asian or Pacific Islander. Of the total population, 14.4 percent are foreign-born, and 24 percent of households report languages other than English spoken at home 2.

Case filings in the Superior Court and the Justice Courts totaled more than 530,000 in 2006. The Superior Court bench has 94 judges and 52 commissioners. There are 23 Justices of the Peace and a judicial branch staff of 3,600. Adult probation in the county supervises over 24,000 probationers 3.

 Nature of Challenges Facing the Court

The court in Maricopa County has been involved in a major effort to institute a system of court performance measures in seven major areas. Three of those areas are integrally related to the issue of diversity:

• The public’s access to justice and the fairness and integrity of the court processes;
• The strength of the court’s workforce/employees; and
• Jury utilization.

Within this context, the court has come to define diversity and cultural competency as a cornerstone of its ability to inspire the respect of the communities it serves and fulfill its mission of assuring access to justice.

In Maricopa County, the dimensions of diversity are defined to include not only race, ethnicity, language, and gender, but also generation. A rather complex definition of “culture” is also used—a definition sensitive to the fact that organizations and professions can develop their own culture, which may be quite unfamiliar to those outside the organization. The court has recognized that it operates within its own organizational and professional culture, which may be quite unfamiliar to most of the citizens involved in court proceedings. Its efforts seek, among other goals, to recognize these organizational cultural dimensions and to take steps to demystify court culture—language, protocols, norms, etc., to make the court more accessible on this level as well.

Given this understanding of diversity, the court’s goals include:

• assuring that all members of the community feel equally able to seek justice from the court, regardless of race, ethnicity, culture, language, age, or gender;
• assuring that the court itself—bench and staff—should reflect the diversity of the community it serves;
• assuring that language is not a barrier to court access, putting significant efforts into providing professional translation services to all in need of them, and providing access to court forms and self-help assistance in languages spoken by those involved with the court; and
• assuring that jury membership is reflective of the community—including those called for service, those appearing for service, and those ultimately serving as jurors.

The court in Maricopa County has gone beyond these diversity goals, however, to embrace a commitment to developing cultural competence among judicial officers and staff. Indeed, key leaders in the court believe that becoming culturally competent is essential to courts today. Court user beliefs and expectations about the essence of justice, what is right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, and fair or unfair, are shaped by culture. Moreover, beliefs about how justice is established and maintained, and how the institutions of justice should work and be changed, are all shaped by the complicated interplay among ethnic/national, professional, and organizational cultures. By culture, we mean the commonly shared, largely taken for granted assumptions about goals, values, means, authority, ways of knowing, and the nature of reality and truth, human nature, human relationships, and time and space, that a group has learned throughout its history.

Cultural competency means first understanding where, how, and why culture matters. In particular, as suggested previously, cultural competency means understanding how culture influences people when they:

• define justice, conflict, and disorder;
• determine how and when it is appropriate to involve third parties, including the state, in resolving problems and conflicts;
• describe events or what happen; and
• fashion responses or solutions to problems and conflicts.

In addition understanding culture means assessing how culture might influence:

• the ways people communicate;
• perceptions about the sources of legitimate authority;
• beliefs about individual and group responsibility;
• beliefs about what are fair processes;
• fundamental, underlying beliefs about cause and effect – such as the causes and treatment of illness; and
• beliefs about people and their motivations.

Moreover, cultural competency also means developing individual, organizational, and system capacity for culturally appropriate service delivery that helps individuals successfully navigate the courts and justice system, process information, make wise decisions, and comply with court orders.

Finally, cultural competency stresses that it is important to avoid stereotyping people on the basis of ethnic identity. For example, while there are aspects of a particular culture that can have a significant effect on both the sources and the treatment of family violence, not all families within a culture will fit the same patterns. Cultural competency does not mean that one can understand the motivations, needs, and expectations of a particular individual simply because one has a general understanding of the individual's cultural background. Instead, cultural competency provides tools to help unravel the complexity of individual circumstances. The focus should be on helping the people who work for the courts and justice system to increase their awareness and understanding of culture in general and of particular cultures to better assess the individual circumstances of a specific case and to help develop appropriate responses in a case. This includes understanding the characteristics, nuances, and implications of one’s own professional, organizational, and ethnic cultures.

Strategy for Mobilizing a Change Effort

The effort undertaken by the courts is one of long-standing and has deliberately been embedded in the over-arching effort to establish and meet performance standards. That effort employed an internal task-team structure that has involved eight teams of judicial officers and court managers working in committee teams of up to 29 individuals 4. Two staff support the effort, supplemented by a group of outside consultants. The Partner Court Initiative has assisted the court by providing additional support to its training efforts with respect to cultural competency and sharing its experiences with other courts. Its strategy has had a number of components. Examples include:

Citizen and Employee Surveys. The court has undertaken to explore the perspectives of citizens as they have come to the court for a variety of reasons through surveys. Using the National Center for State Courts CourTools framework, citizen surveys ask questions about whether the individual felt that he or she was treated fairly, understood what took place in court, felt safe, etc. In addition, the court has surveyed its own employees to explore their understanding of the court’s standing in the community, but also to track the levels of respect they feel as employees of the court. This information can then be analyzed across the dimensions of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, education, and so forth.

Diversity Councils. In concert with other leadership of Maricopa County which has challenged all county agencies to form internal diversity councils, the court has commissioned an Adult and Juvenile Probation Diversity Council. This council, drawn from a cross section of staff, has articulated a vision of the future where collaboration between the community and probation ensures a work environment representative of the citizens and reflective of the community. The council is working toward specific goals including developing performance measures to support a culturally competent organization.

Judicial Formation. The formation program springs from an understanding that the mission of the judicial branch is unique in our society. The judge is entrusted with fulfilling the mission of justice for all – and such great responsibility should be supported by some ongoing formation. “Formation” simply means preparation for response to a call or mission.  The term is used to express the journey from profession (job) to vocation (life calling). Formation is not training or even education – it is a method of immersion in values to inspire action consistent with mission. The court has chosen to include cultural competency as one of the values in which to immerse its new judges as part of its formation effort.

Strategic Planning. One of the most significant strategic decisions of the court as it has been focusing on cultural competence, is the decision to imbed the work in the larger efforts of the court to develop a unified strategic plan for all its departments. This has had the effect of infusing cultural competence into virtually every discussion of the court—from budget, to human resources, to case management, to direct services.

At present, the court is focusing on creating a unified vision and strategic planning effort. Previous to this, the individual departments had been engaged in independent strategic planning efforts, creating individual strategic plans. This is also reflected in a newly integrated budget process – with all divisions of the court working together on development of a budget.

Accomplishments

Major change is underway in the court, with diversity permeating virtually all aspects of operations and strategic planning.

The court now routinely conducts surveys of members of the public who have occasion to appear in court—as litigants, witnesses, jurors, etc. Measures include public perceptions of how fairly they are treated and how understandable the process is, how easy or difficult it was to secure the information they needed, whether they were treated with respect, and so forth. The court also surveys staff members on their perceptions of the degree to which the court is respected in the community. The survey results have been very encouraging with high percentages of agreement with statements on the survey describing the court experience in positive terms.

Increasing numbers of bi-lingual staff have been recruited, as have staff who are competent in American Sign Language (ASL). Significant training is delivered each year to a wide range of staff on diversity and cultural competency. A talent group is focusing on ways the court can improve recruitment, hiring, and retention practices.

Lessons

Those involved in enhancing the cultural competency of the court in Maricopa County report a number of key lessons from the experience thus far:

• The capacity of the court to provide equal access to justice to the community requires the court to understand the community it serves. Therefore cultural competency is a quality essential to the court’s core mission;
• Because there are so many competing demands for the attention of judicial officers and managers of the court, it is essential that the leadership of the court articulate cultural competency as a critical concern worthy of the time and attention of everyone associated with the court; and
• In order to infuse cultural competency as a core value of the court, it is important to integrate a consideration of the topic into all aspects of the court’s work. Rather than making cultural competency a special project, apart from the core operations of the court, it is best addressed by integrating it into the core strategic work on performance measurement and operations at all levels. Maricopa County has chosen to integrate cultural competency as a dimension in all of its strategic planning working teams, to emphasize its centrality to the values of the court.

For further information about the diversity and cultural competency initiatives of the Superior Court of Arizona in Maricopa County, AZ, please contact Noreen Sharp, Special Court Administrator, Superior Court of Arizona in Maricopa county, 125 West Washington, Room 421, Phoenix, AZ 85003 602-372-0416, sharpn@superiorcourt.maricopa.gov

1 Arizona Department of Commerce, www.azcommerce.com/

2 U.S. Census Bureau; State and County Quick Facts, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/04/04013.html

3 http://www.superiorcourt.maricopa.gov/publicinfo/annualrep/FY2006AnnualRpt.pdf

4 “Judicial Branch Diversity Initiatives, FY05/06”, p.1