Community Justice

Jane Winstone, Francis Pakes

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781843921288
• eBook ISBN: 9781134037384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides and accessible text and critical analysis of the concepts and delivery of community justice, a focal point in contemporary criminal justice. The probation service in particular has undergone radical changes in relation to professional training, roles and delivery of services, but now operates within a mosaic of a number of inter-agency initiatives. This book aims to provide a critical appreciation of community justice, its origin and direction, and to engage with debates on the ways in which the trend towards community justice is changing the criminal justice system. At the same time it examines the inter-agency character of intervention and the developing idea of end-to-end offender management, and familiarises the reader with a number of more specialist area, such as hate crime, mental illness, substance abuse, and victims.

Chapter 1

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Community justice: the smell of fresh bread

Francis Fakes and Jane Winstone

I am passionate about tackling anti-social behaviour in our communities. It is about respect for other people. It's about decency. It's about hardworking families who play by the rules not suffering from those that don't. It's everything that strong communities should stand for, protecting the vulnerable, sticking up for what is right.

These are the words of Tony Blair in a speech delivered on 28 October 2004. ‘Community’ is without doubt one of New Labour's most prolific buzzwords, and unsurprisingly it has attracted a good deal of academic interest. The term community features in the title of many a recent book on criminal justice policy in the New Labour Era, including Crawford's Crime Prevention and Community Safety (1999), Matthews and Pitts's (2001) Crime, Disorder and Community Safety, as well as Crime Control and Community, edited by Hughes and Edwards (2002). In addition, there is the collection edited by Bottoms, Gelsthorpe and Rex on Community Penalties from 2001. There is no doubt that in both policy and in academic circles, community is the place to be.

This book arguably boarded the same bandwagon as it carries ‘community justice’ as its title and was beset by the same difficulty: that community justice is hardly less vaguely defined than its even more fashionable cousin, community safety. To us, community justice comprises working with offenders, crime prevention, community safety as well as working with victims and vulnerable groups. In addition, it is also about revisiting the concept of ‘justice’ and exploring whether the current arrangements can or will deliver community justice for some or all sections of what we understand to be ‘community’.

The problem with the term, as with many other community buzzwords, is that it is part aspirational, part symbolic. Separating the wheat from the chaff is therefore no mean feat. Clear and Karp (1999) are clear about the value of the ideal of community justice. They argue that community justice is primarily about restoring the damage to victim and community rather than about punishing offenders. This vision is closely aligned to restorative justice. The ideal type represents a localized form of justice that supports effective and communicative communities whose propensities for self-governance are harnessed. Working in partnership is vital and so is the inclusion of schools and civic and religious organizations in enhancing community cohesion and informal social control (Clear and Karp 1999, 2000). Being both cohesive and inclusive, these communities are yearning to be empowered by the state to be involved with justice proper. Their sense of justice is one that centres on rehabilitation, in putting right the wrongs of the crime and the damage it inflicted on victim and community, and by bettering the offender in order to prevent re-offending. The ideal community fits the ideal of community justice, but suffers from the caveat that communities, by their very nature are both inclusive and exclusive, a point to which we return later.

The principles of community justice have been outlined as follows. First, the community is the ultimate consumer of criminal justice. Rather than offenders, or even victims, it is communities that the system ought to serve. Second, community justice is achieved in partnership at a local level. Third, it is problem focused: problems are addressed rather than cases processed. The extent to which these principles actually inform practice in Britain, or anywhere else for that matter, is highly debatable. At this point it is as inevitable as it is a cliché to lament the politicalization of the field of community justice. There is indeed an oft-noted disparity between the imagination and positive energy associated with community justice and the administrative ‘one size fits all’ reality of local implementations.

Deconstructing community

The symbolism associated with usage of the term ‘community’ is pervasive and widespread. To take a rather obvious example, the controversial Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003 is filled to the brim with references to communities. The government's anti-social behaviour plan that carries the slogan ‘Putting communities first’ was published in November 2003 under the title Together Tackling Anti-Social Behaviour. It contains 99 references to community and communities. In his foreword, then Home Secretary David Blunkett used the term no less than ten times in a piece that is no more than 600 words long – few sentences, let alone paragraphs, have no reference to community in some shape or form.

There is something immensely compelling about the term community. It is associated with a naive immersion in togetherness: as it were, primitive man sitting round a fire after a successful hunt, what Rosenberg calls a ‘warm circle’ (in Bauman 2001: 10). Bauman emphasizes the naturalness of community as a self-explanatory state of belonging, of knowing to be surrounded by like-minded people. As social animals, being part of one all-embracing community appears to be our Garden of Eden. It is something we like to think we once had and we are forever trying to get it back.

Community is possibly the most native of social arrangements (Bauman 2001). In today's society, the fact that community is so often talked about is possibly a sign of trouble. ‘Never was the word community used more indiscriminately and emptily than in the decades when communities in the sociological sense became hard to find in real life’ (Hobsbawm 1994: 428). Communities are not what they used to be, or at least not how we collectively like to remember them.

What constitutes the essence of community? Redfield (1971) lists three criteria. The first is distinctiveness. The archetypal community is clearly set apart from others. It is clear who is included and who is not and its boundaries are beyond question, understood by both members and non-members. Second, the essential community is small; all members know each other and are often in each other's sight. Ontologically, the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is that you are familiar with the sight of the members of your own community whereas the rest of the world is a stranger. Communication among insiders is all-embracing whereas interactions with others are scarce and superficial. The third defining feature is self-sufficiency. The community does not really need the outside world; at once there is pristine unity and splendid isolation (Redfield 1971). It can be added that communities provide a ‘cradle to grave’ sense of belonging. A further characteristic of such archetypal communities would be their self-governance. All of this, of course, harks back to Durkheim's conception of mechanical solidarity (cited in Giddens 1971), which is a form of social cohesion where people live and work within a tightly constrained radius and where roles, values and beliefs are prescribed and adhered to throughout the generations.

The problem, as Durkheim was the first to recognize, is that we no longer live in a mechanical-type society. We inhabit a society where difference, not similarity, is the distinguishing factor, which Durkheim labelled organic solidarity. This presupposes that social cohesion arises not from the acceptance of a common set of beliefs and sentiments, but from a complex system of interdependence which recognizes the pursuit of individual goals, provided they are legitimate and socially sanctioned. The modern technological world requires a fragmentation of living and working arrangements; concepts of family, that cornerstone of community, have undergone radical changes as the demands of modern living have restructured values, roles, ideals and economic arrangements. Unity and togetherness are no longer a ‘given’ commodity of social life; they need to be worked at, harnessed, cherished and protected. We are all members of all sorts of diluted communities that with varying levels of success try to fulfil our need to belong. Communities, so indiscriminately alluded to in political rhetoric, come in any number of shapes and sizes, a notion understated in the field of criminal justice policy:

The need to ‘define’ or ‘profile’ communities is often regarded by practitioners to be a luxury which has little relevance to doing their jobs. Yet, many efforts to galvanise, develop and work with ‘the community’ end in failure precisely because this has not been done. The challenges facing high crime neighbourhoods, their connections with globalisation and other broader socio-economic change (for example with increasing individualism and changing patterns of trust), the competing interests and demands among different groups of people, the fact that different localities have different ‘community careers’ (Bottoms and Wiles 1986) and characteristics, and diverse, different and often competing needs which eschew the often formulaic and standardised agency approaches – is rarely understood by practitioners. (Foster 2002: 175)

Running the risk of identifying discursive types of community to death, we can distinguish the following types of late modern communities.

First there is the idea of community that represents a nostalgic indulgence. It refers to the spurious memory of a community that never was and typically represents an idealized version of our parents' or grandparents' time, using phrases such as, ‘During the war we all stood together’, and ‘Nobody locked their houses when I was young’. Young notes that the feeling of ‘paradise lost’ seems ubiquitous:

Politicians of all persuasions, from social democrats to conservatives, share a preoccupation with the notion of returning to the past, or rekindling the half-warm memories of family, work and community. (Young 1999: 49)

Although widespread throughout Western civilization, there is something particularly British about how deep this notion has permeated popular discourse. Television was, allegedly, much better 30 years ago, and so were trains, teachers, and grandma's cakes. Often forgotten are the hardships, insecurities and worries of the time.

The second type is the oft-bemoaned divided community. We reserve this term for communities occupied by members of a limited set of mutually exclusive groups. Cohesion within these groups might be high, but interactions between the groups are shallow and often hostile. The division often occurs along religious lines where, say, Protestants and Catholics live side by side but lead by and large separated lives. These communities are multi-level: there is hardly a community at all as such, given that the different groups frequent their own religious, social and cultural institutions whilst failing to engage meaningfully with each other. At the same time, however, enclaves might be thriving, and the mere presence of ‘outsiders’ within the community boundaries might serve to increase members' sense of belonging within their group as both in-group and out-group sentiments are likely to be enhanced (Hogg and Abrams 1988). This can be understood as the ‘siege mentality’ community spirit is only apparent when the members perceive themselves to be threatened by a hostile outside force. We see this in the current focus upon fear of crime and anti-social behaviour, which is used as a device to engender community spirit where none apparently existed before.

More indicative of the post-modern era are disintegrated communities in which cohesion does not really extend beyond the front door. These are the communities to which the maxim ‘There is no such thing as community’ applies best. People in these typically urban neighbourhoods tend to have a wide variety of backgrounds and the population tends to be young and transient. When policy-makers refer to ‘our communities’ they do not tend to have these in mind.

Gated communities tend to be in affluent neighbourhoods and have sharply defined physical boundaries. They are also called propriety communities as they are often set on private land. These communities tend to have private security arrangements in place, such as CCTV and access restrictions, and are also characterized by low crime rates and high levels of fear. Such communities offer the possibility for a more extreme form of stratification: ‘us’ and ‘them’ defined by the power literally to buy into such schemes. Having said that, it has been alleged that the sense of belonging within such communities is not particularly high: members feel more bound by the legal than by the social contract (Blakely and Snyder 1999). Davis (1990) also emphasizes the need felt by the middle classes to be insulated, both spatially and socially, from underclass undesirables. Urban planning and city design are increasingly geared to keep the underclass, and the disorder they are feared to inflict, out of sight of the middle classes.

Policy-makers also tend not to refer to virtual or otherwise despatialized communities. Increasingly, internet-based groups engage in interactions that give rise to what we might call communities. Distance-learning students engage with each other and their course via online learning centres. Chess aficionados play in online leagues and tournaments and first-time mothers share experiences via chat-rooms and user groups. Community no longer requires proximity.

It is worth mentioning the phrase ‘communities of choice’. We might decide to send our children to public school, to become a school governor or to take part in the organization of a local five-a-side league, the reward of such actions being admission into a social structure that, as long as it is defined loosely enough, constitutes a community. Belonging is increasingly optional and our wish to become immersed in a social entity with its inevitable code of conduct and formal or informal social control, is offset against the demands that the community might place on us and the freedom that will be lost as a result. Of course, the luxury of choice is primarily reserved for the more affluent cushioned by an economic comfort zone; evicted tenants and excluded pupils will find the issue of choice by and large an anathema.

These are obviously crude descriptions: few would recognize their neighbourhood in any of these discursive community types. The fact remains that the use of the term community is simply over-stretched to the point that it hardly serves any purpose at all. It is like a supermarket spreading the smell of fresh bread throughout their store: it is a ‘feel-good’ factor, hinting at the way things used to be when the world was smaller and less bewildering.

Community justice and community spirit

The enthusiasm for anything with ‘community’ added to it is exemplified by the reception of New York City's so-called community courts. The Red Hook Community Justice Center was launched in Brooklyn in 2000. Since then, a number of similar courts have been established throughout the USA. The idea is that a single locus exists that serves as the hub for a variety of community justice efforts. A single-sitting judge can hear family, civil or criminal cases concerned with what are often termed ‘quality of life’ crimes. Solutions include mediation, restitution and community service orders with drug training and education programmes also available. Part of the Center is an unconventional youth court. Youths receive about 30 hours of training to serve as either judge, juror or prosecuting attorney, and they gain school credits for their participation. It is described as a true jury of peers, but it must be emphasized that this Youth Court deals with only about 100 minor cases a year and invariably when the guilt of the person is not at issue. At present it is too early to say whether such community centers represent a new level of the institutionalization of community justice. It is, however, safe to say that the idea appeals: after the marketing successes of zero tolerance policing (Pakes 2004), it seems that New York City has again produced a winner. In the time-honoured tradition of US/...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Dedication
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Community justice: the smell of fresh bread
• 2 The probation service, public protection and dangerous offenders
• 3 Dim prospects: humanistic values and the fate of community justice
• 4 The police service: from enforcement to management
• 5 Police and community justice in partnership
• 6 ‘Tough on probation’: probation practice under the National Offender Management Service
• 7 Working for community justice: a Home Office perspective
• 8 A new chance for rehabilitation: multi-agency provision and potential under NOMS
• 9 Crime prevention: the role and potential of schools
• 10 The identification and management of anti-social and offending behaviour
• 11 Community youth justice: policy, practices and public perception
• 12 Community responses to hate crime
• 13 Marginalized and disenfranchised: community justice and mentally disordered offenders
• 14 Improving confidence in criminal justice: achieving community justice for victims and witnesses
• 15 Is research working? Revisiting the research and effective practice agenda
• 16 Community justice in a safety culture: probation service and community justice in the Netherlands
• Index