During his time in the United States Marine Corps., Tom Barbour experienced many things. But one in particular was the catalyst for his decision to bring innovation to Richmond's criminal justice system.
Barbour graduated from the University of Virginia in 2007 then spent six years in the Marine Corps. While he was deployed to Afghanistan, he said he spent days in poppy fields talking with Afghan farmers.
"I listened as they talked about how they are just trying to care for their families," he said. "It gave me a bit of a zoomed out view of why people do the things they do, and I wanted to use that perspective to help create public safety in a positive way and a humane way."
After retiring from the military, Barbour returned to UVA to obtain his Masters in business administration and criminal law degree. He then worked for the office of the Commonwealth's attorney and currently runs a criminal law practice, Defense on Call.
In 2019, Barbour founded the Virginia Holistic Justice Initiative, a nonprofit that connects people in the system to the service they need to move out of it. It was out of the initiative that RVA Justice Hub was born.
"The real work of long-term public safety is social work. It’s addressing the reasons people are offending and then working on those issues," he said. "What we are trying to achieve with RVA Justice Hub is take that social work mindset and put it in the hands of criminal justice practitioners — people like prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, police officers and probation officers — so they can identify needs people have and immediately map to resources that address them."
Barbour's newest venture, RVA Justice Hub, is a web-based application and database that hosts information from various nonprofits and other agencies in Richmond.
"When you're in the criminal justice system, what you find out pretty quickly is that what you really are, if you care about public safety, is a social worker, but none of us are trained to do that work," he said. "This hub provides connectivity from that customer segment to these services."
The platform includes 327 programs in and around Richmond, divided up into more than a dozen categories, such as food instability, medical health, transportation and employment. Each program listing includes details on intake procedures, eligibility restrictions, procedures for sharing progress with the court and other information that typically is not readily available.
Barbour said the beauty of the platform is that it can be accessed by anyone, at any time. If a defense attorney, for example, is arguing for a client to receive an alternative to incarceration, they will be able to use the hub to explain why it's the better option.
"What RVA Justice Hub does, is takes all the information the judge or prosecutor or defense attorney would need to understand the program, and brings it into the courtroom," he said. "It is, in the strictest sense, a database, but it also provides a strong argument for alternatives to incarceration."
Barbour said a group of interns spent last summer calling each organization and collecting the relevant information. At the end of 2020, consulting firm CapTech agreed to design and develop the app pro bono.
"What we’re doing this summer is training the nonprofits to update this information themselves, so we have a sustainable loop in terms of keeping their programming up to date," he said.