Community Justice

Wong, Kevin (2017) Community Justice. In: The Encyclopedia of Corrections. Wiley. ISBN 9781118845424

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Abstract

Community justice offers a nontraditional approach to delivering justice and broadly encapsulates any crime prevention and justice activity that involves local communities. It is based on the principles of inclusion and social justice, restoration, public safety, stewardship, and norm affirmation. Operationally, it is based at a neighborhood level and involves problem solving and a decentralization of authority and accountability, prioritizing the quality of community life and emphasizing community involvement. In practice, there are few examples of community justice that are integrated across the criminal justice system or operate wholly outside of it. The implementation of community justice schemes is limited by community capacity and the extent to which citizens want to be involved. There is continuing debate about the meaning of the term, the desirability of expanding the domain of community justice, its application to a widening range of activities as well as its use as a convenient label to denote an unequivocal public good that is beyond being challenged.