Editorial: The Ideals of Community Justice
| Author | Jean Hine |
Several of the papers in this issue got me to thinking about the key concept for this journal – community justice. As Brian Williams said in our very first editorial, we aim “to encourage debate about the contested meanings of the concept of community justice, with a view to clarifying the issues” (Williams, 2002:1). For many people community justice is essentially about community sentences – those non-custodial sentences of the court which require some supervision in the community. For others it is about the actions of all criminal justice agencies which take place in the community, particularly the police and probation, and for yet others the remit is much broader and is about involving the community more directly in all aspects of criminal justice. This journal inclines to the latter position, and, as can be seen from the wide ranging papers which have been published over the years, explores aspects of criminal justice broadly within a remit of social justice.
Perhaps the most comprehensive statement about what community justice is and should be is the work of Karp and Clear (2000). In this piece they describe community justice as “a vision of justice practices with particular concern for the way crime and justice affect community life” (p.324) and talk about a partnership between the formal criminal justice system and the community. The term community is itself widely debated as to its meaning though all at their root have the notion of people coming together in some way. In relation to community justice this is often about place and issues of localism, and frequently about neighbourhoods. Karp and Clear explicitly state that for them it is about local geography and the work of ‘police, courts and corrections’ in those places, what they call ‘blocks of space’. A key element of this process is that the neighbourhood or community should be identified by the people living there, not determined by administrative boundaries which frequently do not match people’s lived experiences (Camina, 2004). This is not just about criminal justice agencies however, as they argue that other agencies, such as local authorities, have a responsibility to reduce local ‘criminogenic conditions’, some of which (e.g. housing) will be outside the remit of criminal justice agencies. In this vision the community builds the capacity to exercise informal social control and thus reduce crime. What Karp and Clear (2000) present is an ideal type model. They acknowledge that this will be difficult to achieve, but offer seven principles which can act as ‘guideposts’ for taking small steps towards this end: norm affirmation, restoration, public safety, equality, inclusion, mutuality, and stewardship - themes which are present in the papers in this issue.
A fundamental requirement of the Karp and Clear (2000) model is that “criminal justice agencies must make themselves accessible to the community, and the community must take an active role in the justice process” (p.352), both of which they acknowledge are difficult to achieve in practice. Very little research has been undertaken into community perspectives on criminal and community...
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