ABSTRACT
Compared to law enforcement and the courts, the correctional function has been a latecomer to community justice. As Chapter 3 indicated, communityoriented policing activity has a long history but did not become a core aspect of American policing until the 1980s; community-based courts have had a long tradition in America, but the community court movement did not gather momentum until the early 1990s. Corrections, by contrast, has begun to embrace community justice ideas only very recently. Correctional operations are generally grouped into two types: (1) institutional corrections and (2) fi eld-service corrections. Institutional corrections encompass jails (usually locally run by the city or county and where defendants await the disposition of their cases or serve short sentences of incarceration), prisons (usually run by states and where offenders serve longer-term sentences), and federal penitentiaries (where offenders convicted of usually more serious federal crimes serve the terms of their sentence). In contrast, fi eld-service corrections usually encompass two sorts of activities carried out by two types of agencies. Probation is a nonincarcerative form of community supervision that is often understood as an alternative to jail (in some jurisdictions, a probation sentence is termed a suspended jail sentence). Parole is a form of community supervision that is meant to monitor the reintegration of offenders into their home communities as they return from prison. This late arrival of the corrections fi eld to the community justice arena is understandable, yet also ironic. It is understandable because to most people, the correctional functions call forth the imagery of prison and jail, and these seem to have a problematic relationship to everyday community life. Yet there is an irony because the most commonly used forms of corrections occur in the community (probation, parole, and community corrections), and these aspects of correctional activity would seem to be naturally related to the ideals of community justice. As we will see, correctional activity has a historical focus on individual offenders that makes a community justice orientation diffi cult to sustain, and this is as true for community as for institutional correctional strategies. Even though correctional leaders have come late to the community justice scene, there is now an energetic interest in the way community justice principles apply to essential correctional tasks. In this chapter, we begin with a brief review
of traditional correctional services. We then explore community justice in the correctional setting, and we describe ways in which correctional services are changing to incorporate community justice ideas. We conclude with a description of the challenge of community justice for correctional functions.
