ABSTRACT
Community justice is an emerging, innovative idea about the way criminal justice operations ought to be carried out in places where public safety is a signifi cant problem and criminal justice is a signifi cant fact of life. We call these locations high-impact areas because they are places where both crime and criminal justice responses to crime exist in concentrated levels. Community justice offers a way of rethinking how traditional criminal justice approaches to public safety can be reformulated to help make those high-impact locations better places to live and work. Two assumptions are inherent within the idea of community justice. First, it is assumed that within existing jurisdictions, such as states or large cities, there are critically important differences from one community to another, and these differences suggest that criminal justice strategies need to be tailored to fi t those differences. The same criminal law applies to everyone living in, say, California, but criminal justice strategies, if they are to be successful, will need to take different forms in locations as divergent as the crowded and impoverished Watts section of central Los Angeles and the pristine, wealthy neighborhoods of La Jolla. The second assumption is that formal systems of social control, such as the criminal justice system, are not the main mechanisms of public safety. Rather, informal social controls – families, neighbors, social organizations, and friendship relations – form the most important foundation for public safety. Community justice, therefore, builds varying strategies of formal social control, depending on the particular problems facing the local area, and always has as one of its main aims strengthening the capacity of informal social control within that location. High-impact areas are the logical targets of community justice initiatives because the formal and traditional methods of criminal justice have proven so inadequate in these locations. The criminal justice system identifi es offenders, apprehends them, and imposes criminal sanction on them; but in high-impact areas, this focus on processing individual criminal cases through the justice system does not take into account the cumulative impact of these individual decisions when they disproportionately concentrate in specifi c places. In some high-impact areas, for example, more than 10 percent of the adult males are arrested, convicted, and incarcerated in any given year (Cadora and Swartz 2000)
However, the impact of removing these active offenders is blunted by the fact that an equivalent number of males re-enter this same neighborhood each year from prisons or jails. The collective impact of all these arrests, convictions, incarcerations, and returns can be a major destabilizing force in the neighborhood, exacerbating the effects of poverty, broken families, unsupervised youth, and unemployment. Without tackling these important aspects of community life in high-impact areas, traditional criminal justice is little more than a debilitating revolving door. Community justice targets high-impact areas for another reason: these are where the problems are and where any progress made by community justice has the most payoff. A 10 percent reduction in crime in a neighborhood that has 10 crimes a year will barely be felt; but a similar impact in a high-crime location with, say, 1,000 crimes each year, will be a major improvement in the life of the community. This is the reason these areas are called high impact – the potential for impact by purposefully tailored strategies is much, much higher in these locations than in other areas in which problems are less severe. Thus, community justice can be thought of as a broad strategy that includes the following priorities:
1 Community justice selects high-impact locations – places where there is a concentration of crime and criminal justice activity – for special strategies designed to improve the quality of community life, especially by promoting public safety.
