On the evening of April 8, 2024, Colleen Gibbons stepped up to the front of a crowded banquet hall to receive the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) Alumni Award of Merit, which is presented to ACES alums with a record of outstanding personal and professional accomplishments and who made extraordinary humanitarian contributions.
Gibbons was being honored for a life and career dedicated to reforming the criminal legal system to improve the lives of individuals, families and communities. As a senior project manager at the Center for Justice Innovation (CJI), Gibbons works closely with treatment courts—formerly known as drug treatment courts—to integrate elements of accessibility into court operations with the understanding that addiction is a disability.
Her passion for this work began as a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies. Her professional interests in participatory projects, capacity building, advocacy for families and research translation mirror those of the Family Resiliency Center.
“I came here thinking I would study youth development and participatory experiences, and I discovered I like systems work and systems change,” Gibbons said. “I didn’t like academic writing as much; I could sit and stare at a paper for a long time and never finish it. But I felt strongly about translating research and putting it into practice.”
Gibbons translates research findings into actionable strategies for practitioners within the criminal legal system by providing technical assistance that can bridge the gap between research and practice. She advocates for evidence-based approaches that can improve outcomes at the population level for individuals involved in treatment courts.
One overlooked element, she noted, is a comprehension of how the impacts of the criminal legal system cascade down to families and across generations.
“Something that’s missing is an understanding of what systems look like,” Gibbons said. “Practitioners don’t visualize the ‘justice system’ as including more than the carceral system. But it does—it includes the family system too. What does it look like if one member of a family is in the criminal legal system? What does that do to the rest of the family? How can you build support around and engage that family too?”
The first step to her career in justice reform was a postdoctoral research position at Syracuse University studying how individuals with intellectual disabilities participate in research experiences generally. Most research studies exclude individuals with intellectual disabilities due to the difficulty of getting informed consent, but these exclusionary criteria generate a large gap in knowledge about those individuals. This project led Gibbons to enroll in the university’s disability law and public policy program before practicing at a disability law firm that helped build appropriate living situations for people with disabilities. Despite the good that she could see resulting from her work, she felt uneasy in a model that charged clients. Nothing was changing in the system. When the opportunity arose to supply technical assistance to mental health and treatment courts through CJI, she leapt at it.
Gibbons noted that one of the more rewarding aspects of this work is transdisciplinary collaboration in addressing complex social issues.
"Translating accessibility practices to treatment court practitioners means interacting with more than just lawyers,” she said. “For example, we have a social worker on our team who understands elements on the ground in a way that I couldn’t even pretend to know. I can’t speak that language. But if we go as a team, we can do that work together.”
The result of such collaborations is better storytelling, or carefully crafted narratives that more effectively highlight the clients’ circumstances for well-meaning court practitioners. Gibbons can even find a judge who will serve as a champion and advocate through storytelling. She offered the example of Judge Robert Russell, who created and began presiding over the nation’s first Veterans’ Treatment Court in Buffalo, N.Y. in 2008.
“The model for a Veterans’ Treatment Court, which includes volunteer mentors who are veterans themselves, and his story of founding the court is so compelling,” Gibbons said. “He’s such a champion for it. He tells the story beautifully, and that really demonstrates how we need not only to tell the right story but to tell it the right way.”
Doing so may lead to the development of systems and tools that focus on prevention rather than intervention, as with the establishment of the Veterans’ Treatment Court. One prevention tool that Gibbons is now piloting is an improved simulation for matching participants with services and programs based on their risk and need factors. Currently, these tools do a poor job of accounting for racial disparities and the unique needs of some populations, such as veterans. But finding funding for prevention systems is difficult, since an effective prevention tool does not show up in the data. Gibbons noted that an ideal prevention approach yields an absence—that is, when someone avoids the commission of a crime or an overdose.
“An opioid tracker, for example, provides powerful numbers, and those scare people into action,” Gibbons said. “But those numbers also signify that we’re too late. How can we build a model so that we’re not seeing those downstream effects? Likewise in Veterans’ Treatment Courts, for which I am the point person for CJI’s New York statewide strategic planning implementation, I’m helping to create screening systems that will allow courts to be more effective.”
With her focus on prevention, translation and systems thinking—elements all fundamental to the discipline of human development and family studies—Gibbons is helping individuals and communities thrive.