What impediments block greater cooperation among correctional agencies, such as probation, and other government services, such as the police or social welfare? How can these impediments be overcome?
WRITING IN NATION, JOURNALIST KATY RECKDAHL TELLS THE STORY OF STEVEN ALEXANDER, who was a sixth grader in New Orleans when his mother, Carmen Demourelle, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for pickpocketing.1 By all accounts, Demourelle was always a good, loving mother to Steven and his three siblings—she supported them financially, was strict about their schoolwork, enforced an early bedtime on school nights, and kept them away from peers who were troublemakers. But she supplemented her sporadic work as a beautician by occasionally picking pockets and selling small amounts of drugs. It eventually caught up with her. The prison she went to was only an hour away, but contact between Demourelle and her children dwindled to once a year or so. The rest of the story is all too familiar. The four Demourelle children moved in with their grandmother, who worked nights. Supervision waned, schoolwork went unfinished, and the kids began hanging out at night with “bad influences.” Steven never finished the seventh grade, and soon enough all his siblings had dropped out of school and were pregnant, addicted to drugs, or both. Eventually, Demourelle got out of prison—her prison record was exemplary, and she was released early. But for the children, a lot had already happened—in Steven’s case, his functional illiteracy made it hard to keep a job and almost impossible to get into a job training program. With the enormous growth in imprisonment since the 1970s, these family experiences have become more common. More than five million minors have had a parent in prison during their childhood years; up to two million have a parent currently incarcerated at the time of this writing (2017).2 For children, the consequences of parental incarceration are substantial: Having a parent go to prison increases a child’s chances of dropping out of school, developing learning disabilities, acting out in school, and suffering medical and emotional illness.3 Given all of this, it is not surprising that having a parent go to prison also increases a child’s odds of getting in trouble with the law.4 These effects are particularly concentrated among the urban poor, and while 1 out of 28 children has a parent in jail, black children are six times more likely to have a parent in prison than are white children.The consequences for these largely impoverished communities that send people to prison are not much better than the consequences for children. For one thing, incarceration is a highly concentrated experience, based on location. Some urban neighborhoods have as many as one-fourth of their adult males in prison at any given time, while in other places incarceration is rare. High-incarceration neighborhoods are more economically disadvantaged, struggle with greater deficits in housing and other human services, find it difficult to support effective public schools, and have fewer institutions that promote physical health.5 In fact, social scientists have shown that the advent of mass incarceration in the United States has degraded the nation’s overall public health.6 Because of this concentration of social problems, there is a tightly coupled cycle in which the problems associated with impoverished urban areas tend to reproduce themselves over time: Poverty leads to disadvantage, which leads to criminality, which leads to prison, which leads to poverty.7 This situation is worsened by the extensive exposure to violence that occurs for children and adults in high-incarceration places, leading to a kind of debilitating trauma that also continues through the generations. The way that people cycle in and out of prison in these places aggravates symptoms of poor mental health, as people struggle with dual forces of trauma and hopelessness.8 It is now well accepted that high rates of incarceration concentrated in the poorest neighborhoods of our cities have exacerbated economic inequality, and without addressing mass incarceration it will be very difficult to overcome the extreme level of social inequality in the United States.9 Something needs to be done. The Need for a New Approach It is impossible to understand the U.S. penal system without also recognizing that it is the largest in the world. As shown in Chapter 1, it incarcerates more people per capita than does any other nation, and several times more people than some other democracies incarcerate. When we factor in the people under community supervision, the U.S. system is currently punishing 1 out of every 37 adults—2.7 percent of all adults.10 Nowhere else in the world, and at no other time in history, has an equivalent of this massive system of punishment existed. The growth of the penal system is not random. It has been concentrated among four groups, according to the following characteristics: ■ Age: Most people in the penal system are ages 20–45. ■ Race/ethnicity: Two-thirds of those under correctional control are minority group members. ■ Gender: Nearly nine-tenths of correction’s clients are men. ■Socioeconomic status: The penal population is dominated by poor people, the frequently unemployed, and those who have little education and few skills. These four characteristics of the penal population result in an important spatial dynamic in the corrections system: Most of the people who cycle through probation, prisons, and parole come from a limited number of impoverished communities. Not every correctional client hails from our nation’s poorest places, of course; people who get convicted of crimes come from every neighborhood. As we have seen, in some places the concentration of residents who have experienced the corrections system is astoundingly high. This neighborhood effect is referred to as the spatial concentration of criminal justice. In these neighborhoods, arrests are common, especially for drugs, and going to prison is a common problem, alongside others such as poverty, broken families, joblessness—and crimeWhy does this happen? We have spatial concentration because U.S. neighborhoods are segregated along racial/ethnic and income lines, and these are two of the ways that corrections is also concentrated. Our prisons and probation offices deal frequently with poor people of color, and the neighborhoods where they live become places where the business of corrections is a dominant theme. In these places the criminal justice system traditionally works, one case at a time, to help clean things up. People who have committed crimes are arrested, prosecuted, and punished. Increasingly, they are removed from the streets for a term of incarceration. Almost all return after a period behind bars. At times it seems that the police, courts, and corrections systems work at odds with one another and with these troubled places. Police arrest “bad guys”; courts put them in prison, where they get no better and often get worse; and corrections watches them closely once they are back on the streets, waiting to start the process all over again. For these communities, many people are “missing” on any given day, behind bars somewhere, but because they cycle through the justice system, the actual ones who are missing change from one day to the next, and almost every young man gets his turn. What is to be done? The people being processed through the justice system have committed crimes and cannot be ignored. But more of the same kind of response seems to be counterproductive. In the face of this conundrum, a growing group of reformers has argued that in these communities, community justice is a better approach. Community justice seeks not just to apprehend lawbreakers and punish them; it also seeks to improve and strengthen the communities from which they come. In this chapter we explore the developing idea of community justice. We discuss it as a philosophy of justice and a strategy of corrections. We ultimately investigate its strengths and weaknesses as an emerging strategy for troubled communities that are hit hard not just by crime but also by criminal justice. Definition of Community Justice Community justice is a new idea that has gathered considerable support among practitioners and policy makers across the country. A large number of municipalities have recently undertaken community justice initiatives of one sort or another. The particulars of these initiatives vary because different places tailor strategies to the particulars of their own crime problems. However, all pursue similar goals. The rapid growth in new and innovative community justice projects is remarkable for two reasons. First, these projects have arisen as a result of local desires to develop more-proactive responses to crime. Second, they receive funding not from large federal grants but rather from local resources that are redirected from traditional approaches to community justice strategies. As you may have gathered, community justice is not a simple idea that can be explained in a single sentence. It can be thought of as a philosophy of justice, a strategy of justice, and a series of justice programs. A Philosophy of Justice As a philosophy, community justice is based on a pursuit of justice that goes beyond the traditional three tasks of criminal justice—apprehension, conviction, and punishment. Community justice recognizes that crime and the problems that result from it greatly impede the quality ofcommunity life. Thus, the community justice approach not only seeks to respond to criminal events through traditional means; it also sets as a goal the improvement of quality of community life, especially for communities afflicted by high levels of crime. Robert Sampson and his colleagues have coined the term collective efficacy to denote the type of life that communities need in order to reduce crime.11 A Strategy of Justice The strategy of the community justice approach combines three contemporary justice innovations: community policing, environmental crime prevention, and restorative justice. Each of these innovations holds promise as a way of preventing crime and reviving community safety. Community Policing The community policing approach to law enforcement employs problem-solving strategies to identify ways to prevent crimes by getting to root causes instead of relying on arrests as a way to respond to criminal events. Rather than reacting to 911 calls for service, community policing attempts to identify crime “hot spots” and change the dynamics of those places that seem to make crime possible. Rather than keeping citizens at arm’s length, police officers actively seek partnerships with residents and citizen groups in pursuit of safer streets. Rather than a hierarchical paramilitary structure, community policing seeks to decentralize decision making to officers at the local areas; it also seeks to design area-specific strategies for overcoming crime. By the end of the 1990s, the community policing movement had become enormously successful. Over 80 percent of police departments said they practiced some form of community policing, and most observers credited the approach as being partly responsible for the drop in crime in the latter half of the decade. Environmental Crime Prevention In some cities, 70 percent of crimes occur in 20 percent of the city’s locations. What produces such high concentrations of crime? And what can be done about those places? The environmental crime-prevention approach begins with an analysis of why crime tends to concentrate in certain locations and certain times. Next, environmental crimeprevention specialists try to change the places that crimes tend to occur—to change them in ways that reduce crime. They bring light to darkened street corners that otherwise attract gangs as hangouts, establish procedures to keep elevators in repair so that people need not use isolated stairways to get to their apartments, change the traffic flow in streets that used to serve as drug markets, and restore open areas so that they serve as playgrounds rather than vacant lots. Restorative Justice The restorative justice approach to sanctioning seeks to restore the victim, the lawbreaker, and the community to a level of functioning that existed prior to the criminal event. The restorative justice approach calls for an admission of what was done and affirmative steps to make restitution. There are four basic types of restorative justice strategies: mediation, community reparative boards, family group conferencing, and circle sentencing. In all of these strategies, the parties to the criminal event are brought together to decide what steps must be taken to help victims recover from the crime. Then the person who caused the harm takes responsibility by becoming involved in programs designed to help reduce the chances of new criminal behavior. With growing support from studies, restorative justice programs are becoming increasingly popular (see “Common Justice”). Research has shown that when compared with traditional criminal justice, restorative justice programs result in greater satisfaction for all parties affected by a crime. Some studies also suggest that recidivism rates may be lower for some restorative justice strategies, though research results are mixed.12 Critics point out that the rhetoric of restorative justice is not always matched by the activities of corresponding programs because coercive methods are sometimes employed to enforce participation in “restorative” strategies.On the subway in Brooklyn, New York, a group made up mostly of Christian youths attacked a group of youths who were wishing fellow passengers “Happy Hanukkah.” A number of participants were involved in the attack, and a number of people were harmed. One of the assailants, a young female, attacked and beat one of the Hanukkah celebrants, pulling out her hair and causing her injury. The district attorney referred the case to a restorative justice program called Common Justice. Common Justice brings people who have been harmed by violent crime together with the person who harmed them, offering to work with both parties to develop solutions for each person’s situation that will produce better results for everyone affected by the crime. Rather than prison, people engaged in violent crime get a chance to make true amends for what they have done and to change their lives; those who are injured by the crime get a chance to confront the person who hurt them, explain why the crime was so very hurtful, and get a different kind of closure as the person who hurt them comes to grips with what was done in a way that the regular criminal justice system rarely seems to promote. The victim (whom Common Justice calls the “harmed party”) agreed to participate in the Common Justice program. The defense counsel was contacted, and the defendant (whom Common Justice calls the “responsible party”) was screened. The responsible party then entered a plea of guilty to assault in the third degree as a hate crime, and sentencing was suspended so she could participate in the program. Common Justice provides an important opportunity for healing to those harmed by a range of crimes, including assault, burglary, and robbery. The project involves those harmed by younger adults (ages 16 to 24) facing felony charges. If—and only if—the harmed parties welcome the opportunity, these cases are diverted into a conferencing process designed to recognize the harm done, identify the needs and interests of those harmed, and determine a range of appropriate actions to hold the responsible party accountable. Common Justice’s staff closely monitors responsible parties’ compliance with the resultant agreements—which may include extensive community service, rehabilitative and educational programming, violence-intervention classes, and restitution, among other sanctions—and connects those harmed by crime with appropriate services. The project serves as an alternative to incarceration for those responsible and an avenue to healing for those harmed. Common Justice cases proceed through four stages: engagement, in which the parties are enrolled in the program; preparation, in which the parties and their support people (who may be family, friends, neighbors, and so forth) are prepared for the conference and those harmed are connected with urgently needed services; circle or dialogue, in which the parties and their support people come together to address the harm and reach agreements that the responsible party can fulfill to make things as right as possible; and supervision and follow-up, in which harmed parties are supported and referred to uniquely tailored services, and responsible parties are rigorously supervised as they complete their agreements. In the case between the Christian and Jewish youths, after the conclusion of the preparatory period, Common Justice staff started a dialogue between the two people who had only had one terrible connection before this. The program convened first one and then a second and final conference in the case. Together, the parties reached a robust and powerful set of agreements. Once they had done so, in the final go-round the moderator asked each person to say just a couple of words about how they were feeling. The responsible party’s mother said this to the harmed party: If someone did to me what my daughter did to you, I don’t know if I would have anything but hate in my heart for them. You have to be the most generous, kind, compassionate person I have ever met. Your family must be very proud of you, and they must be beautiful people to have raised someone like you. My family is indebted to you forever for what you’ve given us, and while I know I’ll never know how you suffered, and I can’t imagine what you’ve been through, I pray that what my daughter does in this program brings you a little bit of the peace you deserve. Thank you. The harmed party was next to speak. She had suffered from post-traumatic stress since the incident, and her life had been profoundly changed by what happened. After she became involved in Common Justice, those symptoms began to relent. She paused before speaking, smiled, and said, “I feel relieved. I feel excited and grateful about what happened here. This is an amazing experience. I don’t know what to say. . . . I feel joyful. Just joyful.” The responsible party, who had agreed to everything asked of her and was therefore faced with a demanding set of agreements to complete, said through tears to the harmed party in a solemn and unwavering voice, “I know you’ve said apologies don’t mean a lot to you, so instead let me just say: thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. I owe you everything I have, and I won’t let you down.” When the participants finished going around the circle, they all broke bread together, and after the harmed party agreed, the harmed party and the responsible party hugged. They had touched only once before in their lives—during the violent incident that initiated this process.Justice Programs Programs of community justice include a varied package of methods. Listing just some of them illustrates the range and innovative nature of community justice: ■ Crime mapping identifies where the problem of crime is most concentrated. ■ Citizen advisory groups help identify and prioritize local crime problems. ■ Citizen partnerships between justice agencies and citizen groups improve the legitimacy of justice programs and help justice officials tailor the programs to address community needs. ■ Local organizations of police, prosecutors, judges, and correctional officials develop local strategies of crime prevention. ■ Citizens and victims are involved in sentencing decisions to increase their confidence in the wisdom of the sanctions. ■ Community service sanctions people who committed a crime and restores victims and their communities. ■ Restorative justice is used as a means of strengthening a person’s integration into the community. Most of all, community justice is concerned with taking seriously the problems faced by people who live with high levels of crime, some of whom are themselves involved in crime. When Walter Harrison, a Boston probation officer working on a community justice project, goes to work, he practices community justice in a way that reflects all of these particular programs, not just one or two in isolation. He is not out to arrest young people but is there to help keep them safe. He is not saying, “I am a probation officer, not a policeman”; rather, he is trying to practice probation in a way that is relevant to the particular needs of the people on probation, their families, and their neighbors, each of whom is concerned about being safe. How Community Justice Differs from Criminal Justice Community justice differs from traditional criminal justice in four important ways: It is based on the neighborhood rather than on the legal jurisdiction, it uses problem-solving strategies rather than adversarial strategies, it is restorative rather than retributive, and it strives to improve the community through a strategy called “justice reinvestment.” Neighborhoods Neighborhoods are typically quite different from legal jurisdictions. For most important crimes, the state or federal government has legal jurisdiction within politically determined boundaries. But crime problems vary greatly within those jurisdictions. We see this when wecompare cities such as Miami with towns such as Lake City; both lie within Florida, but each has unique crime and justice problems. Even within a city, crime problems vary with the income levels, racial composition, and economic status of each neighborhood. The Miami neighborhoods of Liberty City and Coconut Grove show stark contrasts in their socioeconomic and crime characteristics. Chicago is said to have 343 discrete neighborhoods, each with a different social profile and crime problem, as well as different justice concerns. Would we want to apply standardized criminal justice policies to these different neighborhoods in Miami and in Chicago? It follows that these local areas have different needs for justice services and priorities. Traditional justice attempts to develop standardized approaches to crime problems that are applied uniformly across the entire legal jurisdiction. By contrast, community justice attempts to tailor strategies to fit important differences across neighborhoods within the same legal jurisdiction. Problem Solving Problem solving in the context of community justice differs from that of adversarial justice in its fundamental aims. The adversarial process is thought to have succeeded when the innocent citizen is found not guilty and the guilty citizen is fairly punished. In contrast, the problem-solving approach succeeds when the problem behind a crime is resolved. That is why the traditional criminal justice system is concerned almost exclusively with the person who was convicted of the crime and ends this concern once the punishment has concluded. Community justice extends its sights to solving the underlying problems faced by everyone affected by the crime, even including others in the neighborhood. Problem solving as a core aspect of criminal justice is gaining support through a variety of means—from police decisions to correctional policy. A recent report by the National Institute of Justice found that crime fighting has evolved away from isolated arrest and prosecution strategies toward coordinated efforts that cut across agencies and levels of government. The idea is to continue to fight crime in the traditional way—by arresting and prosecuting people—but to try as well to identify the problems that produce the crime and address them systematically. Restoration Restoration is the solution sought in the problem-solving philosophy of community justice. This means that the losses suffered by the victim as a result of the crime are restored, the threat to local safety is removed, and eventually the person returns to being a fully participating member of the community. When the crime is so serious that full restoration is not possible, Michael Robinson Chavez/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images ▲ Members of Project Fatherhood support community justice efforts when they walk through the Jordan Downs Projects in Watts, setting a positive example for younger people growing up there.community justice seeks as much restoration as can be provided (see “For Critical Thinking”). Justice Reinvestment The most elaborate vision of community justice is expressed as justice reinvestment. 13 The idea of justice reinvestment begins with two related realizations. First, more than $80 billion is spent annually on prisons in the United States,14 often incarcerating people with little or no hope of access to rehabilitation services. The vast majority of people convicted of drug crimes come from disadvantaged communities where schools are poor, family life is pummeled by poverty and disruption, and chances for good jobs are minimal. Second, the places that experience the highest levels of crime do not seem to change much, despite this extraordinary concentration of funds spent to protect them from crime.15 That means that our crime policy requires people convicted of crimes to spend a year or two in prison yet eventually return to the same disadvantages as before, with no improvement in their life prospects and no changes in the places they are returning to.16 In the long run the $80 billion accomplishes little more than interrupting and disrupting the lives of community residents. The community justice ideal is to improve the quality of community life. Justice reinvestment is a strategy that seeks to funnel the vast resources of the criminal justice system into activities and projects that improve community life (see “Do the Right Thing”). In place of prison sentences, justice reinvestment advocates envision (1) work programs in which people who have been convicted of crimes help renovate neighborhood spaces, both public and private; (2) family programs that increase support to improve children’s school performance; (3) housing strategies that provide low-cost places to live; and (4) health care support for people without health insurance. Through reallocating criminal justice funding toward education, housing, health care, and jobs, the long-term aim is to improve community life in ways that can specifically decrease crime rates and promote further improvement of the community’s quality of life. Justice reinvestment strategies rest on the idea that improving communities will not only reduce crime; it will also strengthen those communities.17 For a long time, the evidence on the effectiveness of community investments was seen as mixed. In particular, most programs based on the idea of “weed-and-seed” (arrest people who are criminally active first, then build social programs) have had disappointing records in preventing crime.18 More-recent studies have shown that financial support for local community infrastructure in highcrime areas has a direct effect on reducing violent crime.19 In fact, one project in Richmond, California, found that paying gang members a stipend of only $1,000 per month to stop the violence results in very substantial reductions in gun and other violence.20 The justice reinvestment movement has had significant governmental support from the U.S. Department of Justice, which gave $6 million in2008 to test run the Justice Reinvestment Initiative. The work in more than half the U.S. states has succeeded in some places but not in others.21 Overall, officials believe the results have been promising enough that $27.5 million is now committed to this work each year.22 Overview of Differences These four differences—concerning neighborhoods, problem solving, restorative justice, and justice reinvestment—show how the community justice approach strikes a different path from that of traditional criminal justice. Community justice does not replace the need for criminal justice, but it fills in where the justice system fails to meet community needs. Table 22.1 compares these differences between community justice and traditional criminal justice. The latter operates as a centralized bureaucracstaffed by professional workers whose job is to process criminal cases. Community justice strives to be a localized, community presence of specialists who develop partnerships with various agencies and citizen groups in order to deal with the problems that result from crime. Of course, community justice is not the opposite of criminal justice. All agents of justice operate under the same penal code, use the same legal authority, and face the same constitutional constraints. Community justice is not as concerned with the individuals and their criminality as much as it is with the general issue of community safety. Because of this variation, community justice work tends to use the tools of justice in different ways and sets different priorities for taking action. For example, community-policing officers make arrests just as traditional law enforcement officials do. But criminal justice often sees the arrest as “closing” a case, especially when it is followed by a conviction. Community justice workers see the arrest as a first step in the problem-solving process involving the impact of the crime and the future of the person who has been arrested. In cases where crimes do not result in arrest, community justice workers see just as much a need for problem solving and restoration of community safety as in those cases with arrests. Community justice concerns itself with the life of the community, and the community includes the crime victims, the convicted person, and others alike. Arguments for Community Justice Community justice has gained public support because although crime damages community life, traditional criminal justice does not address that damage. Citizens’ groups and justice system leaders are coming together to develop ways to use criminal justice resources to address the damage that results from crime and crime fighting in high-crime localities. The arguments for community justice can be illustrated by three common assertions of the community justice movement. Crime and Crime Problems Are Local Community justice concerns itself with the quality of life in a community. Two deficits prevent a reasonable quality of life: lack of resources and lack of safety. In communities that have high concentrations of crime, these impediments to quality of life go hand in hand.Ever since the landmark work of Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay,23 criminologists have known that crimes tend to concentrate in certain areas. These high-crime areas are also the areas with other social problems: poverty, broken families, unemployment, and other maladies that criminologists refer to as “social disorganization.” The concentration of social problems, the most troublesome of which is crime, makes these areas the least desirable places to live. People who live there tend to do so because they have few other choices. For people stuck in socially disorganized areas, life is dominated by problems of safety. Troublemakers rule the public spaces, making the streets unsafe. Lacking financial and personal resources to create safety, residents of high-crime areas live under a permanent risk of harm. Problems of violence stem directly from problems of social disorganization. These neighborhoods also tend to become the places where those who were incarcerated live after release from prison or jail or while under community supervision. Figure 22.1 is a map of Brooklyn, New York, showing the number of prison and jail admissions in 2004. This extraordinary concentration in some neighborhoods of residents involved in the criminal justice system represents but one year’s involvement. Stretched across the three to five years that a typical person is under correctional control, a picture emerges of a neighborhood of residents who are quite frequently under supervision. Part of what makes high-crime residential areas different from other places is the high concentration of justice system clients who live there. Community justice is particularly concerned with these locations. Taking into account the families, associates, employers, and neighbors of people who have committed crimes, the distinction begins to fade between those formally under control of the state and those with whom their lives are directly intertwined. By focusing on quality of life in neighborhoods, community justice accepts responsibility for services to those who are not targets of state coercive penal control. The rationale is that because so much of community life is affected by the large number of justice-involved people living in these locations, corrections must focus not only on those actually under correctional authority but also on the many people whose lives they affect. These place-based strategies are most effective when they are focused on quite small unit targets, such as individual neighborhood blocks. Crime Fighting Too Often Damages the Quality of Life What can be done in high-crime communities? The “trail ’em and nail ’em” approach of many criminal justice agencies seems to work poorly for the justice-involved people and their families living in these areas. The criminal justice system is designed as an adversarial attack on crime, implemented by identifying and accusing people of crimes, then removing them from the community upon conviction. Nationally, 640,000 people are released back into the community each year, having served an average of just over two years in prison. The usual correctional thinking about them calls for individualized case management: assessing each person’s risk and needs, then developing a supervision plan for reentryRecently, some researchers have begun to consider the impact of high incarceration rates on community life.24 They point out that removing people from the community often disrupts families and, when it becomes pervasive in a neighborhood, leads to a sense of alienation from the law. Imagine, they say, living in a neighborhood where just about everyone has been arrested and almost every man has been to prison or jail. Under those conditions the legitimacy of the legal system itself comes into question, and the impact of the threat of punishment erodes. (See “Myths in Corrections.”) Problem communities in our cities may have reached critical levels of justice system involvement in residents’ lives. Rather than coming from a response to violent crime, this involvement has stemmed from drug policy, one of the main reasons that some neighborhoods have high rates of arrest and incarceration.25 In several of our major cities, as noted earlier, one-fourth or more of all African American men are under some form of justice system control. In particularly hard-hit sections of some cities, as many as one-fourth of that group is behind bars. Thisproblem does not belong just to the ghettos of large cities. A study of a medium-sized southern city found one neighborhood in which 2 percent of all residents had been removed and placed in prison in one year alone, and one of the results may have been increases in crime.26 If the community justice advocates are correct, such neighborhoods suffer repeated challenges— absorbing the losses incurred as these residents are removed while at the same time dealing with those who have returned from prison or jail.27 By pursuing restorative justice, community justice seeks to ameliorate some costs of crime for these residents. By using a problem-solving, crime-prevention approach, community justice seeks to break the cycle of criminal behavior that has a grip on these communities. The federally funded “weed-and-seed” projects, which sought to work in high-crime communities and build the capacity for residents to deal more effectively with the problems that cause crime, showed that where communities mobilize well in partnership with criminal justice and other social services, crime goes down. Although most weed-and-seed projects failed to mobilize communities effectively—and thus failed to reduce crime—the few that did had good results. Proactive Rather Than Reactive Strategies Are Needed Restorative justice and problem-solving strategies illustrate one of the essential differences between the philosophies of traditional criminal justice and community justice: The former is reactive, whereas the latter is proactive. Reactive approaches begin only after a crime has occurred—and only after victims and communities have suffered the costs of crime. Proactive approaches seek to prevent crimes from occurring in the first place. The proactive approach is based on the assumption that preventing crimes is the most efficient aim of justice. Crime prevention not only saves money because of fewer people being processed, but it also avoids costs to the victim and the community. Advocates of traditional criminal justice often point out that one way to prevent crimes is to incapacitate through incarceration. Proponents of community justice respond that because most of those who go to prison eventually return to society, and because many of these are less capable of making it after having been to prison than before, the effects of incapacitation on the crime rate are overstated. They also present evidence that strategies based on arrest and incarceration do not work in the long run.28 Proactive strategies for environmental crime prevention are becoming increasingly popular. These approaches seek to identify and overcome the problems in a community that lead to crimes: Vacant lots that attract idle youth groups are turned into appealing playgrounds that attract children and their parents; corner liquor stores are turned into corner grocery stores; dark alleyways are cordoned off and made available to residents as backyards; drug thoroughfares have their traffic patterns rerouted to enable residents to feel safer. Individual problem-solving strategies can also be proactive. After incarceration, people who have trouble finding a job may work instead on community reclamation projects for pay, and children who have limited adult supervision are encouraged to attend fun after-school programs that strengthen skills and provide adult contact outside of school settings. David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is developing a new form of proactive strategy. In this effort he works with community leaders to present the community’s norms to gangs and others involved in crime. The crime-prone members often feel connections to their families and neighbors; the work aims at using this sense of connection as a force for change. Examples of this work have yielded remarkable results in cities as diverse as Washington, D.C.; High Point, North Carolina; and Indianapolis, Indiana.29 The common thread in all this is to move away from an individual-based, reactive, retributive criminal justice system toward a community-based, proactive, restorative justice strategy (see “Thinking Outside the Box”). Community justice seeks to build a greater experience of justice for those communities hardest hit by crime.Problems of Community Justice The image of community justice presented by its advocates is attractive. This is one reason why the concept of community justice has become more popular in recent years. Yet community justice is a new idea, and observers have raised several important questions about its prospects. In particular, three central questions have been raised concerning individual rights, social inequality, and increased costs. Any attempt to embrace community justice will inevitably face these issues. Impingement on Individual Rights In a community justice model, different communities vary in the ways they pursue public safety and improved quality of life. For example, if localities determine justice (and crime) priorities, then services such as policing and prosecution may differ in the ways they allocate resources or take practical actions, even though they operate under identical criminal codes. How far can these differences go before they violate our belief in equality under the law? To what extent can a locality exert its unique vision of social control without infringing on freedoms of “deviant” members who are in the minority? Will a neighborhood justice movement take on characteristics of vigilantism? If so, what will stop that trend? As citizens become more active in various aspects of the justice process, they undercut the state’s role in presiding over that process. The adversarial ideal assumes that the state accusesa citizen and brings to bear evidence that supports the accusation. The dispute is between the state and the accused person. Inserting neighbors and residents into that arrangement muddies the water by creating a third party to the dispute. It is unclear what the precise role of the third party ought to be—observational, participatory, advisory, or even advocative? Whichever, the presence of that third party means that the state and its adversary can no longer be concerned only about each other. The concern for rights’ protections extends beyond those of the accused person to the rights of victims and, indirectly, to affected community members. The question is this: What does the growth of interest in the community mean for the rights of a person suspected of a crime? Communities are important, but because individual characteristics promote serious delinquency more than community characteristics do, some people wonder if a focus on communities will lead us to ignore individuals’ problems that need to be addressed. We must be uneasy about the implications of any developments that undermine the protection of rights. Perhaps the finest contribution of Western civilization to modern life is the idea of the sanctity and dignity of the individual. This idea is given life in the form of legal rights, in which citizens stand equal to one another as well as to the state. Any movement toward community justice taken at the expense of this priceless heritage would impose a cultural cost of profound dimensions. Community justice ideals will alter established practices of substantive and procedural criminal law. The test will be to devise changes that protect precious civil liberties. Social Inequality Neighborhoods differ not only in their crime control priorities but also in their capacities, resources, and resilience in meeting crime problems. The same inequalities that individuals face in the United States play out as a community dynamic. The justice system really operates as two different systems, one for those with financial resources and another for those without them. Is there any assurance that the same kind of inequality will not come to characterize community justice? This is not a small concern. The higher victimization rates of African Americans and Latinos are caused, almost completely, by the fact that they live in disadvantaged places where violence persists. Further, poor communities, particularly those hit hard by crime, also tend to lack resources to regulate neighborhood problems and pursue social control.30 These communities do not come together to solve problems, and they have low rates of citizen participation in civic life. One lesson of community policing has been that in troubled neighborhoods, getting citizens to take responsible action in regard to their crime problems is often difficult. The more-prosperous localities will also have disproportionate political influence in many city and county governments. They will be better at organizing to influence the crime priorities, directing the funding decisions, and protecting their residents from negative effects of change. A community justice model that enables localities to pursue interests and preferences will inevitably raise the potential for these more-successful communities to strengthen their position in relation to other localities. Community justice cannot treat all communities as having equal importance or as being independent from one another. The most effective community organizations tend to be “neighborhood associations” that advance the needs of identifiable sections of a city, but the poorest communities tend to lack them. Therefore, we must recognize that communities exist within larger social and political systems and that local problems and the public policies created to address them must be understood within this broader context. Inequality breeds crime. It would be a dismal irony if community justice, advanced to help places deal more effectively with their crime problems, instead contributed to the very dynamics that make those problems worse. If the problem of inequality is to be avoided, some local areas will likely require more help than others to take advantage of the promise of community justice. Increasing Criminal Justice Costs We spend nearly $100 billion on the criminal justice system every year. The cost of justice is increasing, and the burden it places on local areas through taxes interferes with the capacity to fund schools, provide health care, and maintain basic services. A community justice model calls for criminal justice organizations to augment current services. How will this arrangement be paid for?The disparity between community resources and crime rates means that local revenues cannot provide the basis for funding community justice. As indicated, the very communities that most suffer from crime are the least able to pay to combat it. Some mechanism for shifting financial resources from affluent communities to impoverished ones will be needed. This will obviously raise sensitive political issues because taxpayers are leery of spending for services that do not directly benefit them. In addition, some way of shifting costs within the existing justice budget will be needed. Money for new programs is scarce, and a proposal to greatly increase the funding of justice work will be met with skepticism. Community justice programs that shift the onus for crime fighting to the community without providing resources to do it are doomed to fail. Community justice therefore depends on a shifting of resources within existing justice functions. The overall dollar costs of justice cannot be expected to rise too much; what can occur is a change in the allocation of justice dollars to provide support for new activities in place of previous functions. Community justice calls for collaboration between criminal justice agencies and other government and community social welfare agencies and services. Coordinated efforts will enhance effectiveness by combining the resources of different agencies that are using similar strategies to obtain different ends. For example, while one agency’s objective may be increasing employment within a neighborhood, doing so may also reduce criminal activity. The Future of Community Justice Community justice is a new idea. It has proved very popular, but the important question of any new idea in correctional work is whether it has staying power. We might wonder whether the community justice movement will be a brief aspect of today’s justice politics or, as its advocates intend, a long-term force in the reform of the justice system. The popularity of community justice derives in part from deep dissatisfactions with contemporary justice politics. Many have become alarmed by the trends described in earlier chapters, such as the increased use of surveillance and the ever-growing size of correctional populations. Because it embraces community safety without the emphasis on “toughness” or surveillance, community justice provides an attractive alternative for many who are disillusioned with existing strategies. In some ways community justice is a throwback. Those who promote local, informal, and citizen-supported responses to crime seem to have an image of the way that communities traditionally dealt with misbehavior in the past—by collective effort to overcome it. If community justice is desirable because it calls us to a nostalgic past, it is likely to be short-lived. Modern problems call for modern solutions, not fuzzy history. Ironically, the past has also been marked by a harsh and dehumanizing approach to dealing with deviance. If the community justice movement successfully develops and demonstrates a true alternative to traditional criminal justice—with local, problem-solving, restorative, and proactive solutions to crime problems—then traditional bureaucratic justice will itself someday be a thing of the past.
Katy Reckdahl, “Mass Incarceration’s Collateral Damage: The Children Left Behind,” Nation, January 5, 2015. 2 Annie E. Casey Foundation, A Shared Sentence: The Devastating Toll of Parental Incarceration on Kids, Families, and Communities (Baltimore, MD: Author, 2016). 3 Leila Moresy and Richard Rothstein, Mass Incarceration and Children’s Outcomes (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2016). 4 David P. Farrington, Maria M. Ttifi, and Rebecca V. Crago, “Intergenerational Transmission of Convictions for Different Kinds of Offenses,” Victims & Offenders 12 (no. 1, 2017): 1‒20; Michael E. Roettger and Raymond R. Swisher, “Associations of Fathers’ History of Incarceration with Sons’ Delinquency and Arrest Among Black, White, and Hispanic Males in the United States,” Criminology 49 (no. 4, 2011): 1109–48; Joseph Murray, Rolf Loeber, and Dustin Pardini, “Parental Involvement in the Criminal Justice System and the Development of Youth Theft, Marijuana Use, Depression, and Academic Performance,” Criminology 50 (no. 1, 2012): 255–302; Christopher Wildeman, “Parental Incarceration, Child Homelessness, and the Invisible Consequences of Mass Imprisonment,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 651 (no. 1, 2014): 74–96. 5 SanetadeVuono-powell, Chris Schweidler, Alicia Walters, and AzedahZohrabi, Who Pays? The True Cost of Incarceration on Families (Oakland, CA: Ella Baker Center, 2015). 6 Christopher Wildeman, “Incarceration and Population Health in Wealthy Democracies,” Criminology 54 (no. 2, 2016): 360–82. 7 Patrick Starkey, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 8 David Cloud, On Life Support: Public Health in the Age of Mass Incarceration (New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2014). 9 Michelle S. Phelps and Devah Pager, “Inequality and Punishment: A Turning Point for Mass Incarceration?” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 633 (January, 2016): 185–203. 10 Lauren E. Glaze and Danielle Kaeble, Correctional Populations in the United States, 2015 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2016). 11 Robert J. Sampson, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Felton Earles, “Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy,” Science 277 (August 15, 1997): 1–7. 12 USAID, What Works in Reducing Community Violence: A Metareview and Field Study for the Northern Triangle (Washington, DC: Author, 2016). 13 Susan Tucker and Eric Cadora, Ideas for an Open Society: Justice Reinvestment (New York: Open Society Institute, 2003), 1. 14 Michael McLaughlin, Carrie Pettus-Davis, Derek Brown, et al., “The Economic Burden of Incarceration in the U.S.” Working Paper #CI072016, Concordance Institute for Advancing Social Justice, Washington University, Saint Louis, MO, 2016. 15 David Weisburd, “The Law of Crime Concentration and the Criminology of Place,” Criminology 53 (no. 2, 2015): 133–57. 16 David J. Harding, Jeffrey D. Morenoff, and Claire W. Herbert, “Home Is Hard to Find: Neighborhoods, Institutions, and the Residential Trajectories of Returning Prisoners,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 647 (no. 1, 2013): 214–36. 17 Marshall Clement, Matthew Schwarzfeld, and Michael Thompson, The National Summit on Justice Reinvestment and Public Safety: Addressing Recidivism, Crime, and Corrections Spending (New York: Justice Center of the Council of State Governments, 2011). 18 Maria B. Velez and Christopher J. Lyons, “Making or Breaking Neighborhoods: Public Social Control and the Political Economy of Urban Crime,” Criminology & Public Policy 13 (no. 2, 2014): 225–35. 19 David M. Ramey and Emily A. Shrides, “New Parochialism, Sources of Community Investment, and the Control of Street Crime,” Criminology & Public Policy 13 (no. 2, 2014): 193–216; Rob Allen, Rehabilitation Devolution—How Localising Justice Can Reduce Crime and Imprisonment (London: Transform Justice, 2015). 20 A. M. Wolf, A. Del Prado Lippman, C. Glesmann, and E. Castro, Process Evaluation for the Office of Neighborhood Safety (Oakland, CA: National Council on Crime and Delinquency, 2015). 21 Samantha Harvell, Jeremy Welsh-Loveman, and Hanna Love, Reforming Sentencing and Corrections Policy (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2016). 22 Council of State Governments, Justice Reinvestment Initiative, www.pccd.pa.gov/Documents/Justice%20Reinvestment /JRI%202016_TwoPager.pdf, April 24, 2017. 23 Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay, Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942). 24 For a review, see Todd R. Clear, Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Places Worse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 5. 25 Ryan S. King, Disparity by Geography: The War on Drugs in American Cities (Washington, DC: Sentencing Project, 2008); see also Scott Duffield Levy, “The Collateral Consequences of Seeking Order Through Disorder: New York’s Narcotics Eviction Program,” Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 43 (no. 2, 2008): 539–80. 26 Todd R. Clear, Dina R. Rose, Elin Waring, and Kristen Scully, “Coercive Mobility and Crime: A Preliminary Examination of Concentrated Incarceration and Social Disorganization,” Justice Quarterly 20 (no. 1, 2003): 33–64. 27 Robert DeFina and Lance Hannon, “The Impact of Mass Incarceration on Poverty,” Crime & Delinquency 59 (no. 4, 2013): 562–86. 28 Bernard E. Harcourt, Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); see also Ralph B. Taylor, Philip W. Harris, Peter R. Jones, and Doris Weiland, “Short-Term Changes in Arrest Rates Influence Later Short-Term Changes in Serious Male Delinquency Prevalence: A Time-Dependent Relationship,” Criminology 47 (no. 2, 2009): 657–797. 29 David Kennedy, “Making Communities Safer: Youth Violence and Gang Interventions That Work” (testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, February 15, 2007). 30 Robert J. Sampson, Jeffrey D. Morenoff, and Stephen Raudenbush, “Social Anatomy of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Violence,” American Journal of Public Health 95 (no. 2, February 2005): 224–32.
