Does Community Justice Work?

Source: (2003) Crime and Justice International. 19(73): 21-24.

Community justice principles of crime prevention, in conjunction with reparations, offer great hopes of securing peace and justice, and rendering community satisfaction. This article attempts to answer whether community justice programs work in effectively achieving their goals. Focusing on Vermont’s Reparative Probation program which combines neighborhood-based programming, citizen involvement, and offender reintegration with restorative justice, the author found that partnerships are often formed between members of the local community and the justice system. Furthermore, crime victims often report having their needs met by community justice programming, and community members indicate that they feel that community justice does work to restore their communities. Only 1.5 percent of the offenders profiled in the example used to address Vermont’s community justice program were re-arrested for violent offenses. Vermont’s strong and successful community justice program suggests that community justice programming needs to remain a high priority for law enforcement officials and lawmakers. Abstract courtesy of National Criminal Justice Reference Service, www.ncjrs.org.