2019

Community Justice:
What’s in to For You?

Centre for Court Innovation

 The primary goal of community Justice is the empowerment of victims, offenders, and

communities. Communities first must be empowered to control their own conflicts, control the

apparatus of criminal justice processes. The overwhelming majority of police, courts, and jails

operate at the municipal level of government. The criminal justice system is really not a separate

entity from communities. Community policing and community level corrections should be

encouraged further, to come under local community control and involve local community

citizens more directly. Community self-improvement programs need to be encouraged and

strengthened.

The communities need to be empowered to create and nurture the restorative justice

process. The nature of the process involves direct empowerment of victim and offender too, as

they interact and agree on restorative terms. Local communities need to provide a model for

managing personal conflicts throughout the community. Crime prevention and conflict

management strategies need to be geared more toward primary and secondary prevention and

tertiary prevention efforts need to be personal, integrative and local. The primary purpose in

society's response to wrong doing needs to include a strong denunciation of punishment,

aggressively favor healing approaches and preventative efforts intended to minimize criminal

injuries.

One of the most consistently mentioned principles of Restorative Justice is that the

process should provide the mechanism to question norms and alter existing social structures.

Some of the needs uncovered can be met by the community, such as parenting education and

alternative conflict resolution mechanisms. The resources required to alter structural inequities

can only be met from larger political structures. If democratic political institutions were
responsive to the needs of communities, they would be the source for social justice more

broadly.  

The primary individual victim, the community has a need to bring meaning to crime, and

to develop an emotional understanding of the conflict. This requires a personalized

understanding, rather than "an explanation of criminals as non-humans. In crimes such as sex

offenses, for example, the tension for the community is to personalize the hurts of the victim and

the needs and responsibilities of the offender without over-individualizing the crime issue. To

over-individualize in family violence is to leave unchallenged the role of sexism and the

tolerance of violence in our society. To over-individualize other crimes may leave unchallenged

the roles of racism and classism.

Society must have a system to sort out the truth as best it can when people are denying

responsibility. Some cases are simply too difficult to be worked out by those with a direct stake

in the offense. We must have a process that gives attention to societal needs and obligations that

go beyond those of the immediate stakeholders. We also must not lose those qualities that the

legal system at its best represents: the rule of law, due process, a deep regard for human rights,

and the orderly development of law.

 The community needs to understand the human dimensions involved in criminal conflict.

It needs to understand that most criminal harms are committed between persons known to each

other, members of the local community. The community needs an understanding of crime as

interpersonal conflicts, and as an opportunity to reconcile victim with offender, and offender

with the community.

Every conflict represents an opportunity for reaffirming the importance of every member

of the community to its overall health. Each is an opportunity to demonstrate helpful problem
solving approaches to conflict and reaffirm the right of every member to be free of violence and

secure in their possessions. Everyone who injures another should accept responsibility to repair

those injuries. This should be the public lesson of a restorative response to crime.

Now the need is for a new system of restorative justice based on social and economic

justice and on concern and respect for all victims and victimizers. A new system based on

remedies and restoration rather than on prison punishment and victim neglect, a new system

rooted in the concept of a caring community, where power and equality of all social primary

goods, liberty, opportunity, income, wealth, and the bases of self-respect are institutionally

structured and distributed to all members of the community and where the spirit of reconciliation

prevails.

Community Justice is about public safety through community capacity, but it cannot be a

way for a community to act out its prejudices. Community justice can never supersede the basic

protections of the constitution and the bill of rights. Community justice seeks to reallocate public

safety investments from traditional criminal justice activity toward community focused activity.

This is easier to accomplish with some justice functions than others. For example, police already

expend their resources at the community level, so far them the community justice is primarily a

matter of shifting from traditional policing models toward more community oriented models and

this shift has been occurring broadly. For the courts, the shift could bring up additional costs;

community should eliminate such costs which are unnecessary. When there are court rooms to

serve openly than investing on something unusual is not perfect.

The toughest resource redistribution problem arises in regard to corrections. The greatest

correctional costs apply to prisons; by comparison, probation and parole. The obvious

community options are as little as one twentieth the costs per case. The most correctional dollars
by far go to support incarceration. This means that the only way to reinvest the money into

community settings is to move offenders, who would otherwise have been in prison to the

community. Otherwise community justice programs require more new funding.

In order to overcome, community justice leaders must deal with each directly. To

confront community attitudes there is a need to involve residents in the planning of the

community justice correctional strategies. This will reduce the impact of fear and give residents

confidence they can build community justice programs that enhance community safety rather

than endanger it. Second, the resources that go to incarceration need to be thought of as being

shifted to new investment opportunities with financial interest at stake in the community context.

This provides incentives for an interest group coalition to push for community justice

reinvestment.

The very idea of a restorative model reflects a deep interest not only in repairing harm

done in the past, but also in striving toward a better future, a future in which people are living in

right relationship with one another materially, socially, and spiritually. Future emphasis requires

a commitment to making serious inquiry into the factors that contribute to crime, conflict, and

injustice and to acting to alleviate or eliminate them. It will help separate individuals from their

community of care, rationality from the emotions, or justice from needs. Reconciliation system

gives the community of people most affected an opportunity to seek some sort of resolution.

They have as good a chance as anyone of achieving a resolution, and deserve an opportunity to

do so.

Community justice initiatives are not arrest focused. They are oriented toward problem

solving, they try to identify the conditions that contribute to diminished public safety and
determine how they can be overcome because citizens are involved in that process a much richer

more comprehensive and more promising set of answers can be developed.

Through reconciliation, we can identify what is best for everyone, not for the sake of the

community or society. The goal of reconciliation is quite simple; to bring together the estranged

elements of the community and restore the original trust among these elements. Among those to

be reconciled are the transgressor, the victim, and, most importantly, the community at large. If

the community itself does not reestablish trust with the transgressors, they remain isolated and

alienated from the community. Reconciliation repairs the damage of conflict. It restores harmony

and balance to the community.

A strategy of empowerment enables local communities to meet their need for peace.

Empowerment of the victim allows them to meet their needs for control and order. Empowering

the offender allows them to accept responsibility and become responsible. This much

empowerment creates the potential for dynamic and innovative solutions to problems producing

crime, including the social norms themselves.

Both the offender and the community share responsibility for responding to criminal

injuries. Transformative justice recognized that both the offender and society have played some

role in creating the problem and both share responsibility for providing restitution. If the

offenders are to be held accountable, and expected to behave responsibly, the community too

must shoulder its responsibility to both the injury and its healing.

In the end, community justice is a set of programs that operated at the community level

but these programs are not simply the brainchild of the community justice agencies involved.

They are place specify design to confront problems particular to the location for which they are

designed. They use citizens as resources in implementation; they leverage resources by

partnering with residents, business and other governmental services so that a broader more

complete program is developed. The measure of success of all programs of community justice is

not more criminal justice as is often the case in traditional programming but less need for

criminal justice as public safety problems begin to be resolved.

Works Cited
Bazemore, G. &. (1994). Rehabilitating community service: Toward restorative service sanctions
in a balanced justice system. Federal Probation , 24-35.
Gohar, H. z. (n.d.). The Little Book of Restorative Justice.
McCold, P. (1995, March 31). Restorative Justice: The Role of the Community.
Todd R Clear, J. R. (2011). Community Justice.