CJ 220
Chapter 1
Criminal Justice and the Community
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Introduction
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High Impact Areas
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Places where public safety is a significant
problem and criminal justice is significant fact
of life
Criminal justice elements, especially the
police, are continually visible in these areas
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Introduction
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Two assumptions are inherent within the
idea of community justice
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Communities are different and criminal justice
strategies need to be tailored to fit those
differences
Formal systems of self-control, such as the
criminal justice system, are not the main
mechanism of public safety
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Informal social controls – families, neighbors,
social organizations, and friendship relations – for
the most important foundation for public safety
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Introduction
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Community justice has as one of its main aims
strengthening the capacity of informal social
control within that location
The C.J. system identifies offenders, apprehends
them, and imposes criminal sanctions on them
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In high impact areas, this focus on processing
individual criminal cases through the justice system
does not take into account the cumulative impact of
these individual decisions when they
disproportionately concentrate in specific places
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Introduction
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The collective impact of all these arrests,
convictions, incarcerations, and returns
can be a major destabilizing force in the
neighborhoods, making the effects of
poverty, broken families, unsupervised
youth, and unemployment much worse
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The actions of the CJ system can
unintentionally damage the neighborhood
fabric
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Introduction

High impact target areas are where
problems are and where any progress
made by community justice has the most
pay off
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The impact for purposefully tailored strategies
is much higher in these locations than in other
areas in which problems are less severe
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Introduction

Community justice is a broad strategy
including the following priorities:
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Selects high-impact locations for special
strategies
Works to strengthen the capacity of informal
social control: families, neighborhood groups,
friends, and social supports
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Instead of reactive strategy, it undertakes a
proactive strategy designed to work in partnership
with those informal social control sources to
strengthen the foundation for public safety
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Introduction
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Develops partnerships with residents,
businesses, and other social services to
coordinate the way public safety problems are
addressed
Community justice is both a strategy and
a philosophy
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Criminal Justice and Social Justice
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Criminal justice is a type of “negative”
justice
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It is concerned with the way a society
allocates undesirable experiences to its
members
The study of criminal justice is the study of
rules, procedures, and practices under which
citizens experience the application of a
criminal label and the imposition of a sanction
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Criminal Justice and Social Justice
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Social justice is concerned with the
distribution of “good” things within a
society
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In a socially just society, these benefits are
provided by a fair set of roles and are applied
to everyone equally
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Criminal Justice and Social Justice
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How are they connected?
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Both are concerned with what people “deserve”
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Criminal justice is a set of institutions and procedures for
determining which people deserve to be sanctioned because
of their wrongdoing and what kind of sanctions they deserve
to receive
Social justice is the set of rules by which people get the good
things they deserve as a consequence of heir talents and by
the fruit of their efforts
It can be said that they are the flipside of the same
coin
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Criminal Justice and Social Justice
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Although perfect criminal and social justice is a
laudable desire, we live in a society with wellknown flaws in its criminal and social justice
systems
The most obvious relationship is that where
people face the toughest odds against living out
the “American Dream” are also the places where
there is the most criminality
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Crime and disadvantage are mutually reinforcing
aspects of community life
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Criminal Justice and Social Justice
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Community justice is a strategy of criminal
justice because it is concerned with the
problems that contribute to and result
from crime
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The essence of community justice as a
strategy is to strengthen the capacity of
places that are hard hit by crime; in that
sense, community justice has a concern for
broader matters of social justice
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Criminal Justice and Social Justice
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The marriage of criminal and social justice is
most evident in the way community justice
approaches local areas with an eye toward
building social capital
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The central premise of social capital is that social
networks have value
Social capital refers to the collective value of all
“social networks” (who people know) and the
inclinations that arise from these networks to do
things for each other (“norms of reciprocity”)
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Social Capital
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How does social capital work?
The term social capital emphasizes not just warm and cuddly feelings, but a
wide variety of quite specific benefits that flow from the trust, reciprocity,
information, and cooperation associated with social networks. Social capital
creates value for the people who are connected and - at least sometimes for bystanders as well.
Social capital works through multiple channels:
information flows (e.g. learning about jobs, learning about candidates
running for office, exchanging ideas at college, etc.) depend on social
capital
norms of reciprocity (mutual aid) are dependent on social networks.
 Bonding networks that connect folks who are similar sustain
particularized (in-group) reciprocity.
 Bridging networks that connect individuals who are diverse sustain
generalized reciprocity.
Collective action depends upon social networks (e.g., the role that the black
church played in the civic rights movement) although collective action also
can foster new networks.
Broader identities and solidarity are encouraged by social networks that
help translate an "I" mentality
into a "we" mentality.
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Social Capital
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What are some examples of social capital?
When a group of neighbors informally keep an eye on
one another's homes, that's social capital in action.
When a tightly knit community of Hassidic Jews trade
diamonds without having to test each gem for purity,
that's social capital in action. Barn-raising on the frontier
was social capital in action, and so too are e-mail
exchanges among members of a cancer support group.
Social capital can be found in friendship networks,
neighborhoods, churches, schools, bridge clubs, civic
associations, and even bars. The motto in Cheers "where
everybody knows your name" captures one important
aspect of social capital. (from Putnam, Robert. 2001.
Bowling Alone)
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Social Capital
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“Hunkering down” effect in diverse
communities
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Based on research done by Putnam in the
area of immigration
Possible implication for the relationship
between past offenders returning to the
community and those law-abiding citizens
who live there
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Social Capital
Another source:
http://www.cpn.org/tools/dictionary
(scroll down to “social capital and click on
the hypertext)h
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Social Capital
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Communitarianism
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There are some moral duties we are required to do
even if there is no immediate benefit realized
Behaving in a manner that is best for the greater
good and not for individual gain
Appears to dovetail well with the idea that informal
social control is the most effective method of crime
prevention
Developing collective moral values in the community
vs. individualism
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Community Justice
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Community is no simply about a desire to
increase public safety. It is also
concerned with the quality of public
safety.
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It is also concerned with the quality of public
life and the efficacy of collective community
action
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Community Justice
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Criminal justice strategies are typically
individual and negative: they remove
residents, one by one, from their everyday
lives and impose negative, undesirable
sanctions on each
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Community justice gives attention to social, in
that it is not merely negative and individual in
its orientation
It seeks a positive, collective outcome as a
response to crime: better communities
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
The Importance of “Place”
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Community justice begins with an
important insight about contemporary life:
places matter
Where a person lives turns out to be one
of the most important aspects of what
that person’s life is like
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America, one of the wealthiest nations in
history, is extremely segregated in the layout
of its living areas – its neighborhoods
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
The Importance of “Place”
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The place where a person lives greatly
affects which schools that a person’s
children attend, the leisure-time activities
used to occupy time, the places a person
eats, and so on
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Lack of transportation opportunities can very
much affect “place” issues
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
What is Community?
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Often the terms “neighborhood” and
“community” are used interchangeably
The term “neighborhood” is almost always used
to refer to a particular geographic area within a
larger jurisdictional entity
The term “community” can used to indicate a
neighborhood, but usually it has more personal
significance
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Sometimes the term is used to refer to a group of
people who share a common personal identity
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
What is Community?
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Community and neighborhood are related in
America because people who share common
backgrounds or collective purposes often live
near each other
Many European immigrants have been able to
keep their identity as community, but they have
been able to leave restrictive neighborhoods in a
pattern of upward mobility
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Ethnic integration and even intermarriage have
occurred, a process called the “melting pot”
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
What is Community?
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People of color have not had the same
experience
When social isolation is coupled with
economic disinvestments, we face a
growing problem of concentrations of poor
members of certain communities in certain
neighborhoods with little prospect of
change
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
What is Community?
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Many times the conditions affecting those
with little or not resources are unknown
until a major event occurs
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Evacuation of victims during Hurricane Katrina
Often these persons “fall between the
cracks”
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Place
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How do neighborhoods affect community
life?
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The place a person calls home affects the way
a person lives
The most important way a person’s residence
affects quality of life is through the way
location influences later life chances
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Life chances – refers to the possibilities people
encounter in their lives and the likelihood that a
person will be able to achieve personal and social
goals
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Place
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The concept of life chances holds that most of
the pivotal experiences of one’s social and
economic life – from getting into college to
landing a good first job; from developing
social skills to meeting people who can help
along the way – are established by the
circumstances of one’s birth
One of these important circumstances is the
place a person lives
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Place
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Neighborhoods differ dramatically in the
degree to which they experience crime
and criminal justice
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This is why a “cookie-cutter” approach will
probably not be effective everywhere
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Place
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Recent scholarship has uncovered the importance of
place as an element of public safety
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This is most commonly understood through the idea of hot spots
Crime is much more likely to occur in hot spots than in
immediate surrounding areas
A small number of specific locations account for a
disproportionate number of police calls for assistance and
reports of criminal events
What almost all hot spots have in common is not so much their
physical attributes but the fact that they are configured to allow
criminals to engage in crime with relative ease, and they exist in
neighborhoods where crime is generally higher than elsewhere
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Place
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New tools available to diagnose
communities
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Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
Can be used to track crime information as well
infrastructure and social data
 Combining this data can provide a more thorough
snapshot of the status of communities
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© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Place
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Today, there are three main schools of
thought about how to overcome problems
of public safety that concentrate in certain
areas
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Disorder
Disorganization
Informal Social Control
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Place
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Disorder Models: Broken Windows
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The “Broken Windows” theory is one of the
most popular ideas about why crimes comes
about in urban settings
Law abiding citizens feel uncomfortable in
disordered areas and do not remain there long
 Offenders, however, feel empowered in these
locations and when they are not deterred in small
offenses, they interpret this as encouragement
 The Broken Windows idea has led law enforcement
to arrest minor offenders
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© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Place
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Disorganization Models: Systemic Theory
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The first important theory of crime and place, called
social disorganization theory, was developed by Shaw
and McKay in the mid 1940s
Their analysis highlighted three sociological
characteristics that seemed to matter most: poverty,
ethnic heterogeneity, and mobility
When these attributes are present, the society in
these places becomes “disorganized,” and young
people fail to become adequately socialized
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Place
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Recent studies have found evidence that cuts both
ways: not only have poverty and mobility contributed
to crime, but reciprocally, crime itself has come to
perpetuate poverty and mobility
Social disorganization theorists seek strategies that
“organize” neighborhoods by building social groups
and creating political capacity
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The idea that a community is organized can counter the
forces of poverty, ethnic conflict, and outward mobility,
which serves to promote disorganization in an area
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Place
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Informal Social Control Models: Collective
Efficacy
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The thesis of collective efficacy idea is that crime is
reduced when there are strong forces of informal
social control at work in the neighborhood
Informal social control comes from two sources
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From families and other loved ones who exert controlling
influences on the young people near to them
From social groups and friendship networks that serve a
similar function either in addition to or in place of families
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Place
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Social networks – interpersonal relationships that
people value and sustain – provide the ability for
people to be collectively effective at producing control
in the places they live
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When social networks are weak or thin, there can be little
collective efficacy
Advocates of collective efficacy try to prevent crime
by building social relationships in problem
neighborhoods
Collective efficacy strategies try to build a strength
from within by forming groups that attend to
neighborhood matters
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Place-based Strategies and Public
Safety Goals
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The most important way that criminal justice
changes its strategic approach in a community
justice organization is by focusing on the
attributes and circumstances of places more
than on cases
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Dual-track strategy: clean up the broken windows
aspect of the neighborhoods that tend to encourage
criminal behavior and organize residents so that
more effective services can be provided to improve
their prospects
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Strategies and Goals
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Become proactive rather than simply reactive
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Proactive means that community-oriented criminal
justice tries to head off problems before they occur,
particularly by identifying the causes of public safety
problems and overcoming them
Criminal justice has always been evaluated on
how well it responds to crimes that have
occurred
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The advent of community justice has meant that
criminal justice is also evaluated on the extent to
which it has been able to build strategies to prevent
crime from occurring in the first place
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Strategies and Goals
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Traditional criminal justice has been described
as a “blaming” and “sanctioning” institution
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Community-oriented criminal justice recognizes that a
much broader view of the problem of criminal justice
is needed
Because criminal justice so often places a
premium on the use of authority in response to
crime, there is a tendency for criminal justice
organizations to have a hierarchical,
authoritarian style
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In this kind of an organization, authority is
concentrated at the top, and discretion is limited at
the bottom
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Strategies and Goals
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Criminal-oriented criminal justice strategies
cannot operate within a rigid, hierarchical
organizational culture. Two reasons for this are
prominent:
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Because these strategies tend to be oriented to
particular places – neighborhoods – that exist within
larger legal jurisdictions, it is necessary to
decentralize leadership to those subjurisdictional
levels
Neighborhoods are not all alike, so a degree of
flexibility is needed to tailor activity to fit the
particulars of the given neighborhood
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Strategies and Goals
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Traditional criminal justice agencies have a
sense of their “turf” and work hard to protect it
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In classic organizational theory, criminal justice
organizations work hard to protect their boundaries
from incursion by other organizations, even sister
organizations serving the same constituency
Community-oriented approaches for
partnerships at the neighborhood level, and
protecting organizational boundaries takes a
backseat to the need to form and sustain crossorganizational strategies that produce public
safety
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Comprehensive Community
Change Initiatives
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Political Empowerment
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Economic Development
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Alignment with strong interests vs.
confrontation
Partnerships among investors, housing
interests, and renovators
Service Sector Improvements
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Forging a coalition of organizations whose
interests align to help solve problems
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Evaluation of Community
Justice Initiatives
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New methods will need to be developed to
evaluate community justice initiatives
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Quantitative methods alone will not be
adequate
Thorough evaluation will include outputs,
outcomes, impacts, and processes
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Evaluation of Community
Justice Initiatives
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Some approaches to evaluation
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Intuitive vs. scientific
Passive vs. active
Narrow vs. broad
Summative vs. formative
Insiders vs. outsiders
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Evaluation of Community
Justice Initiatives
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PERF perspectives in approaching the
implementation of community policing
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Deployment
Community revitalization
Problem-solving
Customer
Legitimacy
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora
Community Justice Within
Traditional CJ Functions
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Police
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Courts
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C.O.P. and innovation
Probably to most progressive of the three
Tend to be placed-based, which is an
advantage
Some community programs
Corrections
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Tend to be located in Probation and Parole
© 2012 Todd R. Clear, John R.
Hamilton, Jr. and Eric Cadora