The courtroom erupted in applause. The defense attorney, the prosecutor, and even the court officers joined in. Rafael managed an uncomfortable smile. It was clear that he was not used to this sort of reception. Judge Alex Calabrese extended a beefy hand across the front of the bench and beckoned the slight, lightly bearded defendant to come closer.

The man in the docket looked a little embarrassed. He half-sidestepped, half-strode over, and then he shyly took the judge’s hand. The celebration: Rafael had kicked his heroin habit.

“I’m proud of you,” Judge Calabrese said, releasing his grip.

Five months ago, Rafael – his last name is being withheld to conceal his identity – stood before Judge Calabrese at the Red Hook Community Justice Center as a self-described drug addict. Police in Red Hook picked him up with a glassine container of heroin in his pocket and the judge decided to send him to rehab.

Had Rafael been arrested anywhere but Red Hook, his story would probably have had a different ending. He very likely would have found himself before a judge in the city courts who would have released him for possession with time served, or he would have emerged from a week in prison with a police record that would follow him like a tin can tied to a dog’s tail. It would have disqualified him from jobs. Made it difficult to get housing. A single vial of heroin, the size of a perfume sample, would have changed Rafael’s life.

The Red Hook Community Justice Center treats misdemeanor offenders such as Rafael a little differently. The court’s model is based on the familiar “broken windows” theory: that if small crimes are left unchecked in a community, bigger crimes will follow. So the best thing to do is fix small crimes at their source. Drug addicts steal to support their habits. If you break the habit, burglaries, too, can be expected to decline.

“Some people say that this is a kind of soft justice, but they don’t understand what we are doing here,” said Greg Berman, director of the Center for Court Innovation, a New York City think tank that helped develop the idea of the center. “This is really about reducing the ability to play the system. If you have someone following your case closely, there is no way you can make a lame excuse. If you don’t show up to rehab, the people at the Justice Center know it right away and find out why.”

Many of the people like Rafael who are in long-term treatment were found with a crack pipe that had residue in it. They don’t even have the drugs on them, but they are sent to the Justice Center anyway, to stop the problem before it develops into something worse. To get rehab, defendants must plead guilty and waive their right to a trial. Then Judge Calabrese decides their fate.

“This isn’t soft justice, far from it,” said a prosecutor from the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, Gerianne Abriano. “If anything, this is a deferred sentencing system. These people are pleading guilty to the top count. They know if they mess up they are facing jail without a trial. If they stay clean, it works out to be half the cost of prison.”

Red Hook seemed an unlikely place for such an experiment. In the late 1980s, Life magazine featured Red Hook in a story entitled “Downfall of a Neighborhood.” It focused on the raging epidemic of crack cocaine. Then in 1992,a beloved elementary school principal, out looking for a truant, was killed in the crossfire between rival drug gangs.

The Kings County district attorney, Charles Hynes, not only promised to bring the killers to justice, but also said he would find a way to bring justice to the 12,000 residents, most of whom are packed into the Red Hook Houses, one of the oldest and largest housing projects in New York City. The Red Hook Community Justice Center was part of that solution, and the city’s legal experts, such as Mayor Bloomberg’s criminal justice coordinator, John Feinblatt, and the chief judge of New York’s highest court, Judith Kaye, are trying to apply what has been learned in Red Hook to the rest of the city.

“We are trying to mainstream those lessons into the city’s regular court system,” Judge Kaye told The New York Sun. “It isn’t easy, because you need just the right people and just the right community. But what we have learned, and what does apply universally, is that justice isn’t so well served when defendants are treated anonymously.”

Rafael was a prime example.

“What was different this time?” Judge Calabrese asked him, looking over his record. He’d been in drug rehab before and it hadn’t worked. Yet, this time, for the past five months, Rafael had been a model of behavior. He never missed a drug treatment session. He showed up for all his court dates. He never tested positive for drugs – submitting to testing is a requirement of the program – and he stayed out of trouble.

Rafael shrugged. “If you really want to stop using,” he told the judge, “you’ll stop using.”

While Rafael made it sound so simple, in fact what the Justice Center is attempting is revolutionary. It has become a one-stop shop for the community, linking crimes with their underlying causes and helping with everything from child care to housing to GEDs and jobs. Defendants get rehab assignments and, in the same building, are given community projects, such as painting over graffiti or cleaning up nearby Coffey Park.

Some critics say the link between disorder and crime is tangential, at best, and experimental courts such as Red Hook’s are inefficient. At any one time, the Justice Center is handling perhaps 200 or 300 cases. Rehab is expensive, and sometimes defendants, to kick their habits, must go through drug treatment more than once. There are no hard numbers on whether the Red Hook Community Court is directly responsible for bringing crime down in this isolated enclave of Brooklyn. A research team from Columbia University’s Center for Violence Research and Prevention is studying that question.

Judge Kaye said the issue was more fundamental. Misdemeanor defendants were not being served by the larger court system as judges dealt with more serious crime. These experimental courts remedy that deficiency.

“We have to do more than recycle people through courts,” she said. “We’re setting up a system that is trying to end the repeat business in the courts. The Justice Center is part of the community. They coach Little League, they have movie nights in the park, they walk the neighborhood. The court officers at Red Hook grew up there. Many of the people who work there are from Red Hook. That’s part of the reason this works so well.”

Deputy Inspector Tim Harris, commanding officer of the 78th Precinct, one of three that police Red Hook, said the Justice Center has changed the community by bringing small-town justice to Brooklyn. Red Hook didn’t have a single homicide last year, the first time that has happened in 35 years, he said.

“I have been in the Police Department for 19-1/2, and a common thread in recidivists is narcotics,” he said. “If you can focus on the problem and correct it, that has an overall impact on the community. It is as simple as when they are in rehab they aren’t out on the streets, and if they kick their habits they have less of a reason to commit a crime. The court has helped turn Red Hook around. We don’t have numbers, but we can see it with our own eyes.”

More anecdotal evidence comes from Community Court surveys. Since the court opened in 2000, the number of Red Hook residents who identify drugs as a major problem in the community has dropped 31%.Their faith in the court system and law enforcement more generally has also changed. They tend to see both arms of the law as making a positive contribution to the community. Before, the courts and police were viewed as suspect.

Shona Bowers is a community organizer employed by the Red Hook Community Court. She remembers a time when people in the community wouldn’t open their doors to anyone associated with the Justice Center. When volunteers came around with surveys, people in the nearby housing projects pretended they weren’t home. Residents were sure the surveys were a clandestine way to gather evidence. Ms. Bowers said her own mother was suspicious in the beginning.

“Then we started convincing people that you don’t have to be in trouble to get help from the Justice Center,” she said. “Kids have started coming here for help with their homework. People who were having trouble with their landlords show up. It became a different kind of place, a positive kind of place. That’s a new way for us to think about a court.”