ABSTRACT
Of the three main divisions of the criminal justice system – police, courts, and corrections – the middle justice function, the courts, has the furthest conceptual distance to travel to become community oriented. As we shall see, one reason for this is that the natural subject matter of the courts is the problems in criminal cases, not the problems of diffi cult places. Another reason has to do with the way the courts work, processing defendants through what looks a bit like an impersonal assembly line of decisions, from charging to sentencing. And yet another has to do with the traditional values of detachment and impartiality in the courts, which tend to disconnect judges and lawyers from their clients and the communities in which they live. Despite these impediments, the courts have been in recent years a setting for enthusiastic experimentation with community justice concepts and strategies. After decades in which change was very slow in the courts and traditional models of court processing remained virtually undisturbed by pervasive changes elsewhere in the system, courts have become a beacon for community justice thinking, especially with regard to the handling of vexing problems that seemed intractable under the usual methods, such as drug abuse or minor crime. In this chapter, we explore the way the courts have embraced major concepts of community justice and particular strategies of community-oriented court practices. We will see that innovation in the courts has resulted in fundamental changes in the way the court system relates to citizens, including victims, offenders, and their families. As extensive as these changes have been, however, we will also see that some advocates call for even more far-reaching reform, and the courts have only barely begun to address the needs of multiproblem communities.
