Courting the community: Organizational flexibility and community courts
| Author | Christine Zozula |
| Published date | 01 April 2018 |
| Date | 01 April 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1748895817709864 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2017
Article
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2018, Vol. 18(2) 226 –244
Courting the community:
© The Author(s) 2017
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Organizational flexibility
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895817709864
DOI: 10.1177/1748895817709864
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and community courts
Christine Zozula
University of Rhode Island, USA
Abstract
This article examines how a community court in the United States framed its mission to a
diverse population of stakeholders. Drawing from 11 months of ethnographic data, I show how
community courts’ embrace of both punitive and therapeutic goals help the courts appeal to a
variety of audiences. I argue that by adopting a flexible mission which allows for both punishment
and treatment, community courts are better able to create and maintain organizational legitimacy.
This article not only adds to the literature on the flexibility of punishment logics, but it also brings
a new focus by considering the organizational utility of mutable penal goals.
Keywords
Legitimacy, problem-solving courts, punishment, rehabilitation, specialized courts
Introduction
Community courts are a particular kind of problem-solving court, which exclusively
handle low-level, quality-of-life crimes. Community courts maintain that so-called “vic-
timless crimes” (such as littering, graffiti, and public drunkenness) jeopardize the well-
being of residents, businesses, and visitors of an area. Community courts subscribe to
two main jurisprudential frameworks: punish low-level crimes meaningfully, harshly,
and swiftly, and provide treatment for any issue perceived to cause an individual’s
criminal offending. This dual framework of punishment and treatment allows commu-
nity courts to be simultaneously “tough-on-crime” and therapeutic.
Corresponding author:
Christine Zozula, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University
of Rhode Island, 10 Chaffee Lot Road, Kingston, RI 02881, USA.
Email: zozula@uri.edu
Zozula
227
The dance between retributive and therapeutic orientations could leave community
courts seemingly conflicted in their goals. Are community courts punitive or rehabilitative?1
This is a key question because the growth of non-traditional courts requires support from a
public whose views on justice are divided along political lines and determined by their per-
sonal and professional stakes in the criminal justice system (Nolan, 2001). Yet community
courts themselves embrace both punitive and rehabilitative strategies, under the umbrella
designation “problem-solving courts” (Berman and Feinblatt, 2005). This article illustrates
how community courts negotiate their dual mission of punishment and treatment and shows
how this negotiation helps community courts strategically maximize their organizational
legitimacy.
I argue that community courts embrace a dualistic model of sanctioning because it is
organizationally effective. Using data from a larger ethnographic study of one commu-
nity court in a city in the United States, I show how community courts make legitimacy
claims on the basis of the flexibility of their judicial model. In examining how the court
interacts with key stakeholders in the community, we see that the court’s flexible mission
is an organizational asset rather than a detriment. Other scholarship has pointed to the
existence of multiple penal logics, focusing on how those logics impact decision making
and sanctioning (Baker, 2013; Burns and Peyrot, 2003; Paik, 2011). This article adds to
scholarship by focusing on how flexible penal logics operate at an organizational level.
Drawing from the literature on organizational legitimacy, this article also argues that
community courts’ flexible mission is a valuable asset, as it allows courts to draw on
multiple sources of legitimacy.
Flexible Punishment
Scholars debate the content and goals of the United States’ contemporary criminal justice
system. Some describe the current criminal justice system as more inhumane, detached,
and punitive than in previous eras (Bottoms, 1995; Feeley and Simon, 1992; Garland,
2001; Harcourt, 2010; Simon, 1999; Wacquant, 2009). This “punitive turn” in the crimi-
nal justice system is characterized by a commitment to efficiency, risk management and
cost-effectiveness over due process and adjudication. Many of these scholars argue that
rehabilitative and emotive aspects of punishment have largely been eviscerated from the
current penal system. Yet other scholars point toward the nuances of the contemporary
criminal justice system, thereby counteracting the punitive grand narrative (Hannah-
Moffat, 2005; Hutchinson, 2006; Matthews, 2005; O’Malley, 1999; Pratt, 2000;
Robinson, 2008; Werth, 2013). The popularity of restorative justice practices, therapeu-
tic jurisprudence, and the use of the risk/needs assessment and programming tools show
that rehabilitation is actually alive and well in penalty (Hutchinson, 2006). Even prac-
tices considered to be inherently punitive may be more flexible, and imbued with mean-
ing that suggests rehabilitative orientations (Hannah-Moffat, 2005; Robinson, 2008;
Werth, 2013). These competing claims point us toward contradictions and tensions
within criminal justice goals, values, and practices. These contradictions pose important
challenges to more fully understand the current state of the criminal justice system.
Research on specialized courts is particularly well suited to describe the ways that
multiple and, at times, contradictory logics are enacted. Specialized courts (sometimes
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Criminology & Criminal Justice 18(2)
called problem-solving courts) address a specific offender population with the goals of
“making the punishment fit the crime … and the process fit the problem” (Berman and
Feinblatt, 2005: 5). These specialized courts act as “hybrid organizations” (Baker, 2013)
by combining punitive and therapeutic logics into the same judicial process. Drug courts,
for instance, use 12-step programs to motivate addicts to get clean (Nolan, 2001; Tiger,
2012). Mental health courts require defendants to regularly meet with case workers who
oversee a defendant’s medical treatment while under court supervision (Redlich, 2005).
These specialized courts marry punitive and rehabilitative tactics with the understanding
that both punishment and treatment, when deployed simultaneously, can work to solve
root causes of offending.
Research that looks at specialized courts and other sites of multiple punishment
logics2 reveals a great deal about the processes and the implications of this form of jus-
tice. Some work highlights decision making in specialized courts, examining how court
actors arrive at particular sanctions or presentation tactics, and how they determine
which defendants deserve leniency and which deserve “tough love” (Baker, 2013; Paik,
2011). Decision makers use both rehabilitative and punitive understandings of their work
to decide when, how, and why offenders should be sanctioned. Another body of work
examines how the marriage of punitive and therapeutic logics creates a new kind of penal
subject. This scholarship argues that agencies that both punish and rehabilitate create an
offender disciplined through responsibilization tactics (Burns and Peyrot, 2003; Hannah-
Moffat, 2005; Hutchinson, 2006; Werth, 2013). Offenders are expected to be accountable
for their own rehabilitation, yet since they are not considered fully capable of doing so,
they are deeply governed by criminal justice agencies. Punishment may then be less
about producing people who desist from crime and more about resocializing people into
productive self-regulating citizens (Hannah-Moffat, 2005; Hutchinson, 2006; Nolan,
2001; Tiger, 2012). These instances show how seemingly contradictory punishment
goals and tactics are understood and debated in practice and how they produce particular
kinds of control.
What is left to be uncovered is the utility of competing logics to criminal justice
organizations themselves. If we consider the specialized court as an organization which
seeks to garner support, maintain its existence, and ultimately proliferate, then we must
ask why an organization would invoke two seemingly contradictory goals of rehabilita-
tion and punishment. In addition to understanding how sites of multiple punishment
logics arrive at sentencing practices and how those practices impact the offender, we can
also examine how multiple punishment logics operate at the organizational level. We
may consider these sites as agentic institutions that operate in their own organizational
best interest. While competing logics and external pressures can sometimes create inter-
nal conflict, I argue that heterogeneous logics may also serve as an organizational asset.
Community Courts
Community courts, and other specialized courts in the problem-solving justice move-
ment provide a rich site to study competing penal logics. Courts in the problem-solving
justice movement adopt their sanctions, case processing, and bureaucratic structure to
address a niche area of criminal offending. Though specialized courts address different
Zozula
229
problems and populations, they share certain features including a non-adversarial rela-
tionship between court staff, intensive supervision, voluntary participation, individual-
ized justice, and integration of...
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