Community Justice Centres

New Trajectories in Law

Sarah Murray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000480252
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

This book examines the phenomenon of Community Justice Centres and their potential to transform the justice landscape by tackling the underlying causes of crime.

Marred by recidivism, addiction, family violence, overflowing courtrooms, crippling prison spending and extreme rates of incarceration, the criminal justice system is in crisis. Community Justice Centres seek to combat this by tackling the underlying causes of crime in a particular neighbourhood and working with local people to redesign the experience of justice and enhance the notion of community. A Community Justice Centre houses a court which works with an interdisciplinary team to address the causes of criminality such as drug addiction, cognitive impairment, mental illness, poverty, abuse and intergenerational trauma. The community thus becomes a key agent of change, partnering with the Centre to tackle local issues and improve safety and community cohesion. This book, based on research into this innovative justice model, examines case studies from around the world, the challenges presented by the model and the potential for bringing its learnings into the mainstream.

This book will appeal to academics in law and criminology as well as psychology; it will also be of considerable interest to people working in the criminal justice system, including the police, government policy advisers, psychologists and social workers.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780367823320-1

Court reform and the community justice centre experience — Midtown and beyond

Introduction

Like throwing a drowning man a floatation device.¹

(Downtown Community Court, Vancouver participant)

The principle goal of a Community Justice Centre is quite simple: addressing the root causes of criminality at the grassroots level. The Community Justice Centre model focuses on reducing recidivism and social dislocation by partnering with the local community and co-locating a range of support services with a courthouse. While the model operates in varying forms, it centres on a solution-focused approach, which uses the opportunity of a court appearance as a chance to work with the defendant to address any issues that might be contributing to their offending behaviour. The first community justice pilot emerged in the Midtown area of New York City in 1993 in the Times Square precinct² and was followed by others in Portland, Oregon, and Red Hook, Brooklyn. There are now close to 40 in operation across the United States³ as well as many examples worldwide, including in Canada, Australia, Israel and Scotland.⁴

This book takes on the challenge of exploring the Community Justice model and the extent to which it has the potential to change the way we interact with, and experience, justice. In looking at different examples of Community Justice Centres it investigates the opportunities and limitations of the approach exemplified by these Centres and the degree to which aspects of their operation can influence mainstream justice environments and the role/s that they undertake. It concludes by exploring the future prospects of the Community Justice model and its likely imprint on the criminal justice landscape.

The community justice concept and solution-focused justice

‘Community justice’ can mean different things in different contexts,⁵ but it is often used to refer to engaging and partnering with community in undertaking a justice activity,⁶ whether that be community policing, community sentencing or Community Justice Centres:

Building upon the broken windows theory, the community policing model seeks to take police officers out of their patrol cars and integrate them into the fabric of the community, where they can better exercise both formal and informal control over conditions of disorder.° . .. In a similar fashion, the community court model aims to relocate the production of justice out of large centralized courts and into the local community.⁷

The Community Justice Centre model as a justice solution fits within a wider solution-focused movement. This, with an array of related appellations – non-adversarial justice, therapeutic jurisprudence or problem-oriented/problem-solving justice – includes a suite of court innovations, including drug courts,⁸ mental health courts⁹ and family violence courts.¹⁰

The solution-focused movement aims to recalibrate the way the justice system is conceived. Rather than as a ‘system’ which must continue to process defendants day-in and day-out, the movement asks whether the system can stem the tide by tackling the problems that entrap people within a cycle of offending. Solution-focused justice sees ‘the authority of the courts’ being harnessed ‘to address the underlying problems of individual litigants, the structural problems of the justice system and the social problems of communities [through] a collaborative multidisciplinary approach’.¹¹ The terms ‘problem-solving courts’ or ‘problem-solving justice’ are also sometimes used; however, Freiberg has pointed to the limitations of a name which suggests that there might be only one ‘problem’ in an individual’s life¹² and prefers the term ‘problem-oriented’ justice, which is ‘slightly less hubristic [and] signifies the effort rather than the result’.¹³ Solution-focused has the benefit of shifting away from there being a ‘problem’, to concentrating on what the process is directed at: finding a way or ways through a justice challenge. It has various theoretical underpinnings, which while overlapping, also diverge in their focus.

Therapeutic jurisprudence emerged in the early 1990s out of the mental health law scholarship of David Wexler and Bruce Winick.¹⁴ Its prime contribution is to better explain how interactions with the legal system can benefit individual well-being, to the extent that legal processes allow.¹⁵ For therapeutic jurisprudence ‘[t]he underlying concern is how legal systems actually function and affect people’.¹⁶ It is interdisciplinary in focus and recommends procedural justice practices which prioritise courts treating defendants with respect and dignity and so that they feel truly heard throughout the court process.¹⁷

‘Non-adversarial justice’ has been described as ‘capturing the constellation of philosophical and practical innovations currently emerging that are changing the face of the justice system’ and which prioritise ‘prevention’, ‘cooperation’ and ‘problem solving’.¹⁸ It is therefore an umbrella term which can encompass other streams such as therapeutic jurisprudence and restorative justice.

Restorative justice concentrates on the ‘restoration’ of relationships between the victim and the offender but also the wider community.¹⁹ This can happen parallel to court processes or independently of them, whether through sentencing circles, problem-solving meetings or victim-offender mediation.

Community Justice Centres, while drawing on aspects of all of these innovations, are distinct in housing the court inside a Centre designed and ‘owned’ by the local community. Unlike drug courts, family violence or mental health courts, Community Justice Centres are not focused on a singular ‘problem’ but rather work to address the causes and effects of local crime and distress. This ‘physical presence’ in the suburbs ‘signals that the relationships of citizens and communities to courts differ in meaning, tone, and content’.²⁰ Like other solution-focused models, Community Justice Centres co-locate a range of interdisciplinary support services, including counsellors, mental health personnel, housing workers, employment officers, First Nations community liaisons and family violence staff. These allow for more holistic service provision and are in the defendant’s local neighbourhood, which can in turn facilitate greater engagement. Additionally, the Centre can become a place of connection and support for local residents as they can typically access Centre services without needing to have a concurrent matter before the court.

The connection to the community is also a key feature of Community Justice Centres. Local advisory boards and volunteers keep the Centre engaged with the local community, key stakeholders and neighbourhood issues. Centre staff also work with the community to identify trouble spots in the locality at an early stage and work to provide community education, outreach and activities such as sports programs, art exhibitions and forums. What is evident in the model is a fundamental rethink of the role of the community and its place in justice processes. King has noted that:

Court-community collaboration marks a departure from previous thinking about court’s functions. Previously it was thought that the courts’ ability to address community problems was limited as the causes were beyond the courts’ province. The courts were institutions apart from the community, simply there to resolve conflict by determining legal disputes and enforcing sentences and remedies. But separation from the community carries the risk of a perception that courts are ignorant of community concerns.²¹

Community Justice Centres tend to adopt a one-court/one-judicial officer model. The judicial officer gets to know the local community and works to develop strong connections across the district in which the court operates. Magistrate David Fanning from the Neighbourhood Justice Centre in Victoria, Australia, explains:

I am the single and only judicial officer for the City of Yarra, so rather than have a number of different judicial officers or magistrates in the one court, it is just myself. So that will give consistency or hopefully give consistency in regard to sentencing and the administration of justice generally.²²

There is considerable variation internationally in relation to the kind of offences that are heard at Community Justice Centres and the sentencing options available. One of the benefits of the model is that the court’s focus can be tailored to the justice need. For instance, in the United States most Community Justice Centre courts focus on minor misdemeanours such as prostitution, theft, littering, graffiti and street drinking. As one Washington-based coordinator explained, ‘[i]f you deal with the quality-of-life crime, it reduces the chances that more serious crimes will also fester in those neighborhoods’.²³ Other categories or matters are also addressed, for example tenancy or family matters, such as at the Red Hook Community Justice Center, where Judge Alex Calabrese notes that ‘problems don’t necessarily confo...