ABSTRACT
Community justice is a new idea. Although many of the elements of community justice have a rich heritage in social thought – reparation, community, pragmatic problem solving – the idea of community justice as an expression of criminal justice is barely a decade old. We are in a time of rapid changes in criminal justice, but nobody can know in certainty where the changes will lead. What role, if any, will community play in the development of criminal justice in coming years? To answer this question, we must shift our level of analysis from the specifi c to the general. The preceding chapters investigated particular applications of community justice to the three main functions of the criminal justice system: apprehension of offenders, adjudication of charges, and imposition of sanctions – police, courts, and corrections. In this analysis, we saw that community justice concepts have begun to receive broad and serious application in each of the traditional criminal justice functions. Throughout the apparatus of criminal justice, community justice ideas are increasingly common and increasingly important as foundations for new projects and innovative practices. To understand the signifi - cance of community justice as an idea, however, requires that we reach beyond these new projects to consider the core of the idea of community justice and how it transforms the current system. In this concluding chapter, we fi rst consider the core ideas that compose the community justice model. We then address a series of questions about community justice as a new way of doing justice. We conclude with a comment on the future of community justice.
