Operationalizing the Community Variable in Offender Reintegration: Theory and Practice for Developing Intervention Social Capital

Source: (2003) Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice. 1(3): 246-275.

Perhaps as a result of the large influx of incarcerated offenders during the 1990’s heyday of mandatory minimum sentences, a great deal of current policy and research has been focused on the reintegration of offenders back into the community. Missing from this research, however, is a focus on how the community affects the reintegration process for offenders. Traditional parole and aftercare programs continue to focus on the professional services of risk management and needs assessments. In order to fill a void in the understanding of reintegration, the authors begin to articulate a research agenda and basic theoretical model that would operationalize the role of community in the reintegration of released offenders. Grounded in the principles of restorative justice, the authors posit that community support and informal social controls are crucial to the success of offender reintegration. The authors underscore the importance of borrowing tools from the restorative justice model and the emerging research on neighborhood informal social control and support mechanisms, to develop reintegration policies and practices that recognize community support as an independent variable in the process of offender aftercare services. Abstract courtesy of National Criminal Justice Reference Service, www.ncjrs.org.