Corrections and community justice
Compared to law enforcement and the courts, the correctional function has been a latecomer to community justice. As Chapter 3 indicated, communityoriented policing activity has a long history but did not become a core aspect of American policing until the 1980s; community-based courts have had a lon...
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Published in | Community Justice pp. 104 - 138 |
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Main Authors | , , |
Format | Book Chapter |
Language | English |
Published |
United Kingdom
Routledge
2011
Taylor & Francis Group |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Compared to law enforcement and the courts, the correctional function has
been a latecomer to community justice. As Chapter 3 indicated, communityoriented policing activity has a long history but did not become a core aspect of
American policing until the 1980s; community-based courts have had a long tradition in America, but the community court movement did not gather momentum
until the early 1990s. Corrections, by contrast, has begun to embrace community
justice ideas only very recently.
Correctional operations are generally grouped into two types: (1) institutional
corrections and (2) fi eld-service corrections. Institutional corrections encompass
jails (usually locally run by the city or county and where defendants await the
disposition of their cases or serve short sentences of incarceration), prisons
(usually run by states and where offenders serve longer-term sentences), and
federal penitentiaries (where offenders convicted of usually more serious federal
crimes serve the terms of their sentence). In contrast, fi eld-service corrections
usually encompass two sorts of activities carried out by two types of agencies.
Probation is a nonincarcerative form of community supervision that is often
understood as an alternative to jail (in some jurisdictions, a probation sentence is
termed a suspended jail sentence). Parole is a form of community supervision that
is meant to monitor the reintegration of offenders into their home communities as
they return from prison.
This late arrival of the corrections fi eld to the community justice arena is
understandable, yet also ironic. It is understandable because to most people, the
correctional functions call forth the imagery of prison and jail, and these seem to
have a problematic relationship to everyday community life. Yet there is an irony
because the most commonly used forms of corrections occur in the community
(probation, parole, and community corrections), and these aspects of correctional
activity would seem to be naturally related to the ideals of community justice. As
we will see, correctional activity has a historical focus on individual offenders
that makes a community justice orientation diffi cult to sustain, and this is as true
for community as for institutional correctional strategies.
Even though correctional leaders have come late to the community justice
scene, there is now an energetic interest in the way community justice principles
apply to essential correctional tasks. In this chapter, we begin with a brief reviewof traditional correctional services. We then explore community justice in the correctional setting, and we describe ways in which correctional services are changing to incorporate community justice ideas. We conclude with a description of the
challenge of community justice for correctional functions. |
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ISBN: | 0415780268 9780415780261 9780415780278 0415780276 |
DOI: | 10.4324/9780203855805-8 |