“Community Justice” by Clear et al. is a concise reading that teaches learner's the importance of an approach that embraces a diverse concept to crime management. While the traditional justice system is primarily punitive, integration of community justice seeks to understand partnerships with the community to guarantee impactful results. The book addresses the current failures of the American justice system and provides strategies that can reduce crime within communities. Through division into five parts, the authors ensure that readers can connect the topics, analyze and synthesize information with a central focus on community justice.
Description of the Book
The book addresses the role played by community justice within the criminal justice system. Although laws are mostly equally applicable, community justice is based on assumptions. This includes tailoring criminal law to fit in a community and public safety that is not dependent on criminal justice. Community justice recognizes high-impact areas requiring more attention and stabilization efforts, especially since the criminal justice system ignores them. It is a philosophy and a strategy to deal with criminal events and improve life quality where justice is most needed (Clear et al., 2011). Therefore, justice system should be tailored to suit each neighborhood's needs and priorities to promote public safety and positive impact. In the United States, neighborhoods play an essential role in determining the level of crime rate.
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Community policing is an agency of community justice that is needed as an approach for building stronger and impactful relations. Police should rely on the public to combat crime and at the same time, establish better relations. When police encounters are not good, the relations are adversely impacted. Police are a symbol of culture, a function of the legal system and power (Clear et al., 2011). Therefore, they establish a sense of control, demand order, and conduct investigations for arrests. While their functions and powers are informed, rethinking how they address crime issues in underprivileged communities is essential. Community-building strategies create a relationship between the police and the community.
Community justice challenges the traditional role played by the courts in promoting change in the criminal justice system. The authors argue that courts are solely based on adjudication and sanctioning of wrongdoers to face the consequences of their crimes. However, shifting focus to community-oriented court practices results in better impact for victims, offenders, and the community. For the victims, they want a voice not only to understand the details of an offense but to voice their experiences with crime and heal their pain. On the other hand, rehabilitation of offenders ensures that they can be reintegrated back to society. Some adaptable strategies include community-oriented adjudication, community prosecution, community defender services, community judiciary, and community-oriented sanctioning (Clear et al., 2011). Through different courts for specialized communities, including drug and domestic violence courts, society is served better when the problem is targeted with the right approach.
Community justice aims at building support for corrections to offer better reintegration results. Neighborhoods and communities provide the shelter that an offender goes back to after serving time. After incarceration, relationships are damaged, which can be rebuilt through partnerships between the community, the police, offenders, and the private sector which provide opportunities for ex-convicts. Such integration is based on a problem-solving philosophy to address questions through partnerships (Clear et al., 2011). For instance, a partnership between victims and communities helps the victims overcome a tragedy while neighborhood-based probation, aids in easier adjustment in society. Since crime is destructive, the solutions aim to restore and find stability for tangible and emotional losses.
The future of community justice is dependent on the ability to consider the primary role it plays and the determination to transform the current system. Although there might be a reluctance to adapt to changes, community justice's essentials should guide the transformation. These include place, adding value, and public safety by focusing on a broader perspective of achieving the essentials. This is achievable by adapting prototype models such as involvement, means, partnership, and mobilization, with each having its fair share of advantages and disadvantages. Challenging traditional criminal justice will be difficult but possible through leadership and the political class.
Analysis
The authors vividly compile, explain and express the information of a complex criminal justice concept in a straightforward manner. The text utilizes simple language to indicate that community justice aims at implementing change at the local levels. Each topic helps coordinate ideas and strategies central to the accomplishment of better ways to address crime. The arrangement of the topics helps the reader transition but, at the same time, remember the book's primary objective. For instance, by indicating the correlation between the community and criminal justice, they also outline policing and community justice to indicate the role played by each participant towards community justice. Overall, the importance of community-based crime-fighting is maintained. For instance, they give real examples where community justice has thrived, including Vermont, where the public has influenced sentencing decisions. The examples are essential in assuring the readers that the suggested strategies are indeed implementable with a possibility of yielding more significant results.
Although the suggestions for community programs are essential, the viability of the strategies is highly questionable. The authors suggest that community building strategies should aim on restoration purposes that do not focus on blame but rather problem-solving. For instance, during incarceration, jails can be decentralized through transition planning and treatment programs that jail staff can help build (Clear et al., 2011). However, the approach does not clearly state which kind of offenders would qualify for the programs and the financial costs of ensuring that the plan is sustainable in the long run. Annually, it costs $182 billion to provide services and programs in incarceration centers (Wegner, 2017). Restoration must include volunteers, evaluate offenders, and create programs for offenders and victims which requires resources. Considering how much it would cost to provide any additional programs is essential to taxpayers to ensure the costs do not outweigh the benefits.
The findings are intuitive and presumptuous without the provision of complete data. Community justice is a complex system that is multidimensional with an overall goal of restorative justice. However, the complexity to prove the association between community, justice professionals, and offenders requires data as evidence to prove that the integration can lead to a positive impact. For instance, when discussing themes of community justice, such as community justice and jail, there is no clarity as to whether the transition planning is worth the taxpayer's money or not. Additionally, the components to be managed under the system are more significant than the traditional system thus, requiring data to indicate that every participant will provide the results.
The book's essence lies in the fact that community justice is a new approach to criminal justice. The text's arguments are geared towards community activism and strategies on how to improve social order. However, the authors emphasize community as the local area while criminal justice broadens the term community. For instance, the author’s target improving individual’s self towards accomplishing the end goal of public safety with a central idea on high impact areas. Through models such as broken windows, the argument criminalizes people based on locality, and ignorance of individual choice of actions. Indeed, the incarceration of individuals under criminal justice recognizes that offenders can cause harm beyond their neighborhoods as constrained by space. They indicate that community justice "offers a way of rethinking how traditional criminal justice approaches to the public can be reformulated” (Clear et al., p.1, 2011). Throughout the discussion, the book emphasizes the importance of valuing the essentials of community justice focused on place rather than on ties that influence the possibility to offend.
While the authors recommended strategies centered on society, the legal community is immensely ignored. For justice and restoration to prevail, the legal fraternity's role cannot be overlooked. Indeed, the law community's role is not only to arrest and punish, but they also focus on maintaining a law-abiding society and preventing the occurrence of crime in the near future. During arrests and convictions, the law community reactions is mostly in proportion to consideration of age, crime committed, culpability, and long-term needs of the society (Dandurand, 2017). Therefore, the strategies suggested should be in line with the legal community, including judges, police, lawyers, and attorneys, which can balance order, and maintain a peaceful society. For example, the authors argue that their strategies have a commonality in “increasing interaction among residents between the community and the police” (Clear et al., p.48, 2011). However, increasing interaction creates a notion that there is a standard formula for preventing crime which is disputable.
The strategies fail to consider the will of participation in the restoration process, the intensity of the crime, and the impact of restorative justice on victims. Through community-oriented sanctioning, the author's claim that community justice changes the aims of sentencing to cater to the needs of the community (Clear et al., 2011). However, the approach overlooks the fact that offenders have to be willing to participate in the restoration and overhaul of the harm. Additionally, restoration of all losses is relative to the kind of harm inflicted by the offender. For instance, a burglary crime does not compare to an assault or murder. Therefore, victims might be forced to relive their pain in the event of facing the offender. Relieving the pain might cause more psychological harm to the victim such that they choose to discontinue a program. Ultimately, both parties must be willing to participate in the process to yield the intended results.
The authors explain the importance of economic development of high crime areas without emphasis on interdependence. Wealth is unevenly distributed, which is a major cause of crime due to economic hardships. However, ignoring the local community's role in creating a conducive environment is limiting. For instance, investment decisions are affected by the future expectations, which includes an unstable environment due to insecurity (Dandurand, 2017). Despite the investment niche in low employment areas, investors continue to ignore the areas due to the uncertainty they pose in the future. Programs that emphasize public safety to influence investment decisions are essential.
Conclusively, the text provides detailed piece of information that promotes understanding of the community justice system. Much of the information allows the audience to understand how community-oriented criminal justice can decentralize authority to foster community progress through crime reduction. While the authors provide an overview directed towards community activism, the strategies are theoretical without data to support the claims. The authors lack consideration for the programs' economic viability, ignoring the concept of choice in crime and the emotional strain rehabilitation has on victims. Ultimately the book fails to prove that community justice can be successful or how the programs and strategies can be implemented without causing adversities and financial losses.
References
Clear, T., et al. (2011). Community justice . New York: Routledge
Dandurand, Y. (2017). Criminal Justice Reform and the System’s Efficiency. Criminal Law Forum. 383-440. DOI: 10.1007/s10609-014-9235-y
Wegner, P. (2017). Following the Money of Mass Incarceration. Prison policy initiative
