Title: Crime and Place: Plenary papers of the 1997 Conference on Criminal Justice Research and Evaluation.
Series: Research Forum
Author: Ralph B. Taylor; Gordon Bazemore; Barbara Boland; Todd R.
Clear and Ronald P. Corbett, Jr.; John Feinblatt, Greg Berman, and
Michele Sviridoff; and Christopher Stone
Published: July 1998
Subject: Crime patterns and future trends, restorative justice, community-
based corrections, court management, crime mapping
151 pages
380,000 bytes

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U.S. Department of Justice 
Office of Justice Programs 
National Institute of Justice

Crime and Place: Plenary Papers of the 1997 Conference on Criminal
Justice Research and Evaluation

NIJ Research Forum
Cosponsored by 
Office of Justice Programs
Bureau of Justice Assistance
Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention 

U.S. Department of Justice 
Office of Justice Programs
810 Seventh Street N.W.
Washington, DC 20531

Janet Reno
Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice

Raymond C. Fisher
Associate Attorney General

Laurie Robinson
Assistant Attorney General

Noel Brennan
Deputy Assistant Attorney General

Jeremy Travis
Director, National Institute of Justice

Nancy E. Gist
Director, Bureau of Justice Assistance

Shay Bilchik
Administrator, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

Department of Justice Response Center
800-421-6770

Office of Justice Programs 
World Wide Web Site
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov

National Institute of Justice
World Wide Web Site
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij

Crime and Place: Plenary Papers of the 1997 Conference on Criminal
Justice Research and Evaluation

Ralph B. Taylor, Gordon Bazemore, Barbara Boland, Todd R. Clear and
Ronald P. Corbett, Jr., John Feinblatt, Greg Berman, and Michele
Sviridoff , Christopher Stone

Cosponsored by the Office of Justice Programs, the National Institute of
Justice, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, and the Office of Juvenile Justice
and Delinquency Prevention

July 1998

NCJ 168618

NIJ

Jeremy Travis
Director

John Thomas
Program Monitor

The Professional Conference Series of the National Institute of Justice
supports a variety of live, researcher-practitioner exchanges, such as
conferences, workshops, planning and development meetings, and similar
support to the criminal justice field. Foremost among these forums is The
Annual Conference on Criminal Justice Research and Evaluation. The
Research Forum publication series was designed to share information from
this and other forums with a larger audience.

Opinions or points of view expressed in this document are those of the
authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the U.S.
Department of Justice.

-------------------------------

The National Institute of Justice is a component of the Office of Justice
Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the
Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention, and the Office for Victims of Crime.

-------------------------------

Contents

Crime and Small-Scale Places: What We Know, What We Can prevent,
and What Else We Need to Know
Ralph B. Taylor, Ph.D.

Evaluating Community Youth Sanctioning Models: Neighborhood
Dimensions and Beyond
Gordon Bazemore, Ph. D.

The Manhattan Experiment: Community Prosecution
Barbara Boland

The Community Corrections of Place
Todd R. Clear, Ph. D., and Ronald P. Corbett, Jr., Ed. D.

Neighborhood Justice at the Midtown Community Court
John Feinblatt, Greg Berman, and Michele Sviridoff

The Lessons of Neighborhood-Focused Public Defense
Christopher Stone

-------------------------------

Foreword

In the course of a year, researchers studying crime and criminal behavior
have a number of opportunities to present their work to their peers at
conferences and other meetings of professional organizations, in seminars
at academic institutions, through publication in scholarly journals, and in
other ways. The Annual Conference on Criminal Justice Research and
Evaluation is distinctive among these forums. It is the major annual event
at which federally sponsored criminal justice research is showcased.
Federal sponsorship means recognition at the highest level of government
of the need for and value of empirically based, objective research in the
field. It also ensures that the projects funded by the National Institute of
Justice (NIJ), as well as the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, and other bureaus of the U.S.
Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs will respond to the needs
of practitioners--police chiefs and sheriffs, district attorneys, judges, and
correctional officials and administrators, among others--as the major
"consumers" of research findings. 

The centrality of practitioner needs in the work of NIJ and the other OJP
bureaus and the scope of the conference combine to make it a major
annual event for the sponsoring agencies. To ensure the conference
reaches an even broader audience, NIJ is publishing the plenary papers.
This inaugural volume presents the six plenary session addresses delivered
at the 1997 conference. 

Each paper explores a variation on the 1997 conference theme, "crime and
place." For a number of reasons, researchers are revisiting at the
microlevel the locations where crime is committed and at the macrolevel
community involvement with criminal justice agencies in addressing
crime. Not least among these reasons are the advent of computerized
mapping as an aid to tracking and studying crime, the trend toward
devolution of government to the local level and, perhaps, the need to
recover a sense of community. With law enforcement leading the way,
other components of the criminal justice system are redefining their
visions and missions to better address crime within the context of
community. Many of these plenary addresses detail specific programs and
experiments that have adopted promising new models. 

We are confident the plenary papers will whet readers' appetites for more.
Abstracts of the other presentations at the 1997 conference can be obtained
from the Institute for Law and Justice, which organized the conference on
behalf of the sponsoring agencies (Web site: http://www.ilj.org). 

Jeremy Travis
Director
National Institute of Justice

-------------------------------

Crime and Small-Scale Places: What We Know, What We Can Prevent,
and What Else We Need to Know*

Ralph B. Taylor, Ph.D., Temple University, and Visiting Fellow (1997),
National Institute of Justice

*This paper is an updated version of the author's presentation at the 1997
Conference on Criminal Justice Research and Evaluation. The author
received support from grant IJ-CX-96-0022 from the National Institute of
Justice while preparing this manuscript. Opinions are solely the author's
and reflect neither the opinions nor official policies of the U.S.
Department of Justice or the National Institute of Justice. Comments on
earlier drafts from Alex Piquero, Keith Harries, Darcy Kim Rossmo, Ron
Davis, and especially Christy Visher and Lorraine Green Mazerolle,
contributed substantially to improving the paper. The author benefited as
well from conversations with Philip McGuire, Steve Edwards, and Nancy
La Vigne. Address correspondence to Ralph B. Taylor, Department of
Criminal Justice, Gladfelter Hall, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA
19122 (e-mail: V1008E@VM.TEMPLE.EDU).

Criminal justice researchers and practitioners recently began to shift their
focus from people to places--from people who commit offenses to specific
places where offenses occur (Weisburd, 1997). Some argue that such a
shift in focus will result in more effective crime prevention and
suppression policies.

My presentation reviews the lessons learned from this new emphasis on
specific places.[1] I examined results from a small number of interventions
designed to reduce crime or disorder (or both) in "hot spots"; that is, in
specific places with high crime rates. These efforts showed some success
in reducing crime or disorder at specific sites, but they also showed
stronger effects on some crimes than others and greater reductions in
disorder than crime. Some of the benefits produced by these targeted
interventions were both more modest and shorter lived than expected.

It appears that changing from an offender-centered view to a place-
centered view has brought police some success and shows potential for
other areas of criminal justice practice, such as parole and probation. We
may be able to prevent crime or disorder more effectively if we integrate
our theorizing and practice in this area with the work of analysts outside
criminal justice who have been studying places for some time. More
specifically, I propose turning to ecological psychology, changing our
units of analysis from hot spots to behavior settings, and using tools in
spatial epidemiology to help us describe and understand how crime and
disorder cluster in both time and space. These viewpoints may help us
predict how crime differences will shift in the future, dramatically
enriching what we know about crime and place and what we can do about
it.

Progressing down the cone of resolution 

Geographers use a "cone of resolution" to organize knowledge about
spatial processes at different levels of analysis (see exhibit 1)
(Brantingham et al., 1976; Harries, 1974).[2] Spatial patterns observed for
crime rates vary as you progress down the cone to increasingly smaller
scales of analysis. But even more important than the shifting spatial
patterns, as you change levels of analysis "from national to city-block-
level[s of] analysis, . . . this changes our perception of the 'where' and the
'what' of the crime problem . . . [and] the questions that can reasonably be
asked of the data at each level" (Brantingham et al., 1976, p. 264). The
theoretical processes behind the spatial patterns also shift as you move
down the cone of resolution. The appropriate theoretical tools for
understanding the spatial and temporal differences should be used at each
level of display and analysis.

Over the last century and a half, criminological researchers have moved
progressively down this cone of resolution (Brantingham and
Brantingham, 1981; appendix A). In the past 10 years, criminological
researchers and police departments have looked closely at the relationship
between crime and specific street addresses. The following section
describes what is being learned about both crime and prevention at this
level. But first we consider why we have moved in this direction.

Forces leading research down the cone 

Three sets of forces have contributed to focusing on progressively more
detailed relationships between crime and place: growing frustration, better
tools, and increasingly well-supported theories.

Frustration. Understanding that crime is higher in some neighborhoods
than others has only limited relevance to a broad range of public agencies,
including social services and police. Even in a high-crime neighborhood,
most blocks will have low crime rates, and most addresses will have no
reported crimes. Links between crime and community do not provide the
data on specific places needed to guide deployment of police officers.
Police hope to be more efficient and productive by focusing on high-crime
places (or hot spots), rather than on high-crime communities. Crime data
and police service calls that are "geocoded" reveal concentrations of crime
in a few hot places (Sherman, 1995). Increasing patrol deployments to
higher crime neighborhoods without knowing where and when crimes are
likely to occur within those neighborhoods appears to produce only
modest gains in crime control (Kelling and Coles, 1996). If we know
exactly where and when crimes are taking place, we should be able to
control crime more effectively.

Tools. In the last few years relatively low-cost, personal computer-based
geographic information systems have become increasingly available to
criminal justice practitioners, with far-reaching impact on the police.
Numerous departments have sought to integrate these capabilities into
patrolling, detective, and community policing operations. For example, in
1994 the New York City Police Department started holding monthly crime
strategy meetings, allowing precinct commanders to report current
conditions to top management and collaboratively form strategies and
review results. Initially, precinct pin maps were transported to the monthly
meetings; shortly thereafter crime data were downloaded to personal
computers, geocoded, and mapped. Practitioners felt that the electronic
mapping successfully supported these monthly meetings (McGuire,
1997).[3]

Researchers have begun to document how these tools are used or not used,
who uses them, for what purposes, and with what impact (Chicago
Community Policing Evaluation Consortium, 1996; Maltz et al., 1991;
McEwen and Taxman, 1995). Even though mapping led to some
extraordinary successes in the Chicago Alliance for Neighborhood Safety
(CANS) mapping evaluation, many officers still reacted negatively to it.
Negative reactions from officers in other jurisdictions implementing crime
mapping tools also have been documented. In Jersey City, researchers
found it a challenge to shift narcotics detectives' thinking from people to
drug markets (Braga et al., 1997; Mazerolle et al., in press).

In addition to helping officers patrol more strategically, crime maps can
support police-community interactions (Maltz et al., 1991), focusing
attention on key locations and documenting that some locations of concern
to residents may not be crime-prone spots. The crime maps also can serve
as beat institutional memory. Officers themselves can't do this because
they don't serve all tours and often spend on-duty time away from their
beats. 

A decentralized information base such as crime mapping facilitates the
local police-community responses to crime and disorder envisioned by
advocates of community policing or problem-oriented policing.

Theory. The tools for understanding crime-place links have improved
dramatically; the empirical support for key theories about crime and place
has improved as well. Several theoretical models point toward features of
the social and physical environment below the neighborhood level (see
appendix A).

Several forces have encouraged researchers and practitioners to learn more
about the microscale connections between crime and place. Police
departments have sought to target their resources in a more spatially
focused way. In addition, easily used tools for mapping crime locations
have become more widely available. We are just beginning to learn how
these tools are implemented in police strategies, community policing, and
problem-oriented policing. Finally, several relevant theoretical
developments support the trend. Situational crime prevention has gained
respect as more studies have accumulated data, as displacement-of-crime
effects have proved less than feared, and as diverse benefits have been
documented. The evolution of routine activities theory grounds it more
firmly in microscale dynamics.

Theory, operations, and research regarding crime and places

We have arrived at the bottom of the cone of resolution and are examining
links between crime and specific addresses or clusters of addresses. How
are researchers thinking about places? What theoretical tools are they
applying? What difficulties confront researchers and operations personnel?
This section discusses the concept of hot spots and the issues related to it,
notes operational challenges when using the concept, and reviews some
recent field experiments using the hot-spot notion to guide interventions.

Hot spots: Defining and operationalizing 

What are they? Crime and place researchers have adopted the term "hot
spot" to describe a location of extremely high crime. (The term is
borrowed from geology; hot spots are places where hot magma rises, often
causing volcanoes to erupt.) A hot spot may be a single address, a cluster
of addresses close to one another, a segment of a streetblock, an entire
streetblock or two, or an intersection. Reviewing data on calls for service
in Minneapolis (Sherman et al., 1989), researchers discovered crime hot
spots, "small places in which the occurrence of crime is so frequent that it
is highly predictable, at least over a 1-year period" (Sherman, 1995, p. 36).
Many service calls to police came from a relatively small number of
addresses. 

For example, in the case of calls for domestic violence in Minneapolis,
had they been spread evenly over all street addresses and intersections
throughout the city without any repeat calls coming from the same
location, 21 percent of those locations would have generated a domestic
disturbance call. But the data showed that because of the repeat calls from
the same addresses, only 9 percent of the street addresses and intersections
generated these types of calls. The researchers also found that the
clustering of crimes at the same address varied as a function of the type of
crime. Not surprisingly, for example, the clustering was stronger for
domestic disturbance calls than for robbery. For a number of economic,
psychological, and practical reasons, a physically abused woman often
will remain with the abuser for a long period before moving out--or may
not move out at all (Buzawa and Buzawa, 1990). If the victim and
offender remain together, it seems likely that calls will continue to be
generated from that address.

Attention on hot spots has moved to many different types of calls for
service. The concept also has expanded to concerns about the location of
drug markets, uncivil or disorderly behaviors such as prostitution (Maltz et
al., 1991), and the fear of crime (Fisher and Nasar, 1994; Fisher and Nasar,
1995).

Differential utility. At first, it would seem that the identification of hot
spots has enormous policy implications. Lawrence Sherman wrote, "If
future crime is six times more predictable by the address of the occurrence
than by the identity of the offender, why aren't we doing more about it?
Why aren't we thinking more about 'wheredunit,' rather than just
'whodunit'?" (Sherman, 1995, pp. 36-37).

I agree that for some crimes the policy implications are substantial.
Domestic violence, burglary, and perhaps convenience store robberies
represent the clearest cases in point. For domestic violence, both the
offender and the victim are fixed in place as long as they live together at
the same address. Building in part on the expectation of repeat domestic
violence and domestic disturbance calls, a number of experiments have
shown positive effects of police intervention for some types of households
(Sherman, 1992).

For burglary, the victim's site is fixed--a continuing source of
vulnerability. After analyzing victimization data, researchers concluded
that a burglarized household was most likely to be reburglarized soon after
the initial burglary (Polvi et al., 1991) and the risk of another burglary
increased with each burglary victimization at the household (Ellingworth
et al., 1995). They also learned that burglary hot spots were "hot" due in
part to the high numbers of repeat victims (Bennett, 1995). (For a
comprehensive review of repeat victimization, see Farrell, 1995, and
Spelman, 1995b.) These insights have led to projects in Kirkholt and
Huddersfeld, United Kingdom, where council households (public housing
households) victimized by burglary received immediate assistance from
the police following the event. 

For the two types of crimes most rooted in space--domestic violence and
burglary--there are some successful interventions, although important
questions remain. In domestic violence the victim and offender are
placebound and in burglary the victim is placebound; hence, the concept of
hot spots seems to be worthwhile. 

In the case of general street crimes, such as robbery or assaults, where
neither victim nor offender is fixed in place, the relevance of the hot-spot
idea may be weaker. Certainly, with some types of these street crimes,
place-based interventions also may prove successful. In the case of
convenience store robberies (where the victim's location is fixed) or
assaults at bars or taverns (where specific facilitating conditions are fixed),
localized interventions may prove relevant.

Conceptual questions. Numerous questions arise about hot spots (La
Vigne, 1997). The underlying mix of person- and place-based factors
making a hot spot hot may vary considerably. Two underlying person-
based factors may contribute to victimization: state dependence and risk
heterogeneity. High victimization risk may be dependent upon the state the
person is in at the time of victimization. For example, if a burglary victim
has had her front door jimmied, she is more susceptible to another
burglary until the lock is repaired; this is called state dependence. By
contrast, some people are more likely to be victimized because of their
habits, routines, or occupations; this is called risk heterogeneity (Lauritsen
and Quinet, 1995; Lauritsen et al., 1991). A bouncer at a popular night
spot in a tough part of town is at more risk of assault than an elementary
school crossing guard in a quiet neighborhood. These two underlying
factors contribute in varying degrees across the population of users at a
site and across sites to making hot spots hot (La Vigne, 1997). In regard to
street crime, hot spots may vary in their intensity, depending on the mix of
land uses and facilities at the site (La Vigne, 1997). Some sites (called
crime generators) may attract many potential victims simply because they
generate large volumes of pedestrian traffic. Other sites (called crime
attractors) may attract many potential offenders because of their
reputations. The appropriate policy response at the site may depend
substantially on these underlying place- and person-based variations from
site to site.

Some have even questioned the source of information used to define calls
for service, suggesting it may be too limited (Maltz et al., 1991).
Community residents may have other high-problem locations but not call
the police about them through 911. Community-defined hot spots may be
quite different from police-defined hot spots. Reports of these differences
emerged from citizen-police interactions in the Chicago CANS project. At
meetings, police officers would sometimes find that residents' concerns
centered on sites that were neither crime-based nor 911-call-based hot
spots. 

An additional limitation of dependence on calls for service is that the hot
spot is "tied to a physical place; thus, events that are precipitated by
activity at a neighboring place are not considered" (Maltz et al., 1991, p.
42). In other words, a hot spot may appear hot because of something going
on nearby, outside the hot spot. For example, fights in a parking lot at 2
a.m. may occur because a bar down the street closes around that time. In a
study of public housing in the Bronx, when violence in the public housing
projects increased, violence in surrounding locations also increased (Fagan
and Davies, 1997). In the case of assault, crime not only diffused outward
from the projects; it also diffused into the projects from adjoining areas. In
the case of homicide or robbery, a crime hot spot might appear in a
location outside a project, but be "driven" in part by crime from inside the
project. Thus, we need to understand how activities in, attitudes toward,
and crime in the hot spot itself are shaped by the surrounding context
(Rosenbaum and Lavrakas, 1995). 

Operational questions. Locating and bounding (that is, defining the
boundaries of) hot spots are not straightforward processes. In the
Minneapolis Hot Spot experiment, for example, if officers left their car
parked in the hot spot and walked on foot through the alley behind the hot
spot, were they counted as having a presence in the hot spot, even though
they were walking outside it part of the time (Buerger et al., 1995)?
Reading the research literature reveals similar difficulties. For example,
Lawrence Sherman and David Weisburd (1995, p. 630) described how
their research began with 5,538 "lukewarm to hot" addresses: 

We defined hot spots operationally as small clusters of addresses with 
frequent "hard" crime calls as well as substantial "soft" crime calls for
service. . . . We then limited the boundaries of each hot spot conceptually
as easily visible from an "epicenter." 

They next applied a number of restrictions to these sites and procedures
for resolving disagreements about hot-spot boundaries. The disagreements
were resolved using the following general principles: 

o No hot spot is larger than one standard linear streetblock (although a few
exceptions were allowed on the basis of visual sightings on very short
blocks).

o No hot spot extends for more than one-half block from either side of an
intersection.

o No hot spot is within one standard linear block of another hot spot
(again, a few exceptions were made).

With this final list of 268 reconfigured address clusters, Sherman and
Weisburd looked for sites with at least 20 hard-crime and 20 soft-crime
calls in the year studied. They also eliminated sites with high variance
from year to year: clusters "with greater than 150 percent increases or 75
percent decreases in hard-crime calls from one year to the next" (Sherman
and Weisburd, 1995, p. 632). When all these operations were completed,
150 hot spots remained in which the number of calls for service ranged
from 6 to 50 per month. In this same study it also appeared that narcotics
detectives held very different views of drug market activities; the way they
bounded hot spots depended considerably on the types of drugs sold there
(Eck and Wartell, 1998).

Such complexities suggest that it may not be easy for police to define
crime hot spots precisely and allocate patrol resources accordingly. This
raises general questions about the clarity of the concept of hot spots.

Can crime mapping programs resolve the "fuzziness" of hot-spot
boundaries and precisely locate them? Spatial and Temporal Analysis of
Crime (STAC), developed by researchers at the Illinois Criminal Justice
Authority, is probably one of the most widely used crime mapping
programs, in part because it is free. It analyzes geocoded crime data and
draws circles or ellipses around the hot spots. Although the program has
proved extremely useful in a number of contexts and criminal justice
practitioners strongly embrace it, its limitations probably prevent it from
identifying clear boundaries of hot spots. Two restrictions illustrate the
point: The shape of the hot spots produced is limited to circles and
ellipses, and the hot spots defined by the program depend in part on the
specific area searched (Block, 1993).

Also, officers may encounter difficulties in decoding what is happening at
a hot spot and deciding who should be policed (Braga, 1997; Green,
1996). This may be a particular challenge when a hot spot extends beyond
a single address to cover a corner or block. Onsite officers need to
distinguish between legitimate users, such as teens waiting at a bus stop
after school lets out, and illegitimate users, such as teens trying to sell
drugs at a bus stop. Narcotics officers, used to chasing dealers rather than
cleaning up drug markets, may have little patience for this kind of onsite
detail work (Braga, 1997; Braga et al., 1997; Eck and Wartell, 1998). In
summary, conceptual definitions of hot spots are understandably broad,
resulting in wide variation from study to study, since researchers and
practitioners want to search for hot spots for different types of crimes and
disorders. The broad scope not only results in a conceptual jumble, but
also creates considerable operational difficulties--both for field
practitioners deciding on deployment strategies and for evaluators.

Hot spots research: Examples

Researchers have used the hot-spot idea to guide interventions for
reducing drug market activity, disorderly street behavior, dilapidated
physical conditions, and crime. Some of the interventions have been
traditional or community-oriented policing initiatives; others used
multiagency responses to the sites. This section briefly reviews a small
number of experiments or quasi-experiments. 

City park. Police in Oslo, Norway, learned through observation and citizen
surveys that a particular downtown city park caused concern among
pedestrians and store personnel (Knutsson, 1997). Detailed behavioral
observations allowed researchers to target the specific, problematic
locations. The park was used by addicts to gather, buy, sell, and use drugs.
A park redesign, combined with more patrols by narcotics officers and
regular officers, resulted in increased legitimate use of the park, improved
resident perceptions of the locale, and more satisfaction among nearby
business owners. The nontraditional portion of the program--the park
redesign, which facilitated "natural surveillance" by legitimate users--
"prolonged the effort of the intervention . . . [and] discouraged offenders
from returning" (Knutsson, 1997, p. 138). 

Multiagency response in Oakland. In Oakland, California, a coordinated
multiagency team sought to improve physical conditions at drug nuisance
properties and remove tenants causing problems. The methods used at the
experimental sites were complex. Police accompanied housing inspectors,
helping them gain entry. Inspectors cited owners for violations, and court
action was taken against property owners failing to comply with civil law
citations. Police arrested dealers and patrolled more intensively at the
sites. Trained raters then judged photographs of the sites before and after
the intervention.

Comparison of preintervention to postintervention scores showed a
dramatic impact on physical disorder and a more modest impact on crime.
For example, the number of blighted properties dropped from 134 to 15.
However, drug problem calls declined only 4 percent from the pretest
period. Commercial and owner-occupied properties showed the greatest
drops in narcotics activity (Green, 1996). In part because business owners
were more likely than residential owners or occupants to cooperate with
police efforts, the greatest impact was found at highly visible commercial
establishments (Green, 1996). Another study of the same intervention
examined such behavioral outcomes as drug selling and found that the
program itself had an impact on block activity. So too did prior block
differences in local informal social control (Mazerolle et al., 1997).
Formal and informal controls apparently can work side by side to
influence drug-selling activity at specific problem locations.

Police contribute in several ways to these multi-agency interventions
(Green, 1996). Not only are they carrying out traditional arrests and
making contacts with suspects in the field, but they are also bolstering
citizen confidence with their presence and empowering personnel from
other agencies by accompanying them onsite. When police team up with
housing inspectors, for instance, it legitimizes the inspectors' visits and
helps them gain access.

In addition to modest crime reductions at the targeted sites, the adjoining
two-block buffer zone around each site also benefited (Green, 1995). The
diffusion of crime-reduction benefits slightly outweighed the amount of
crime displaced out of the target sites.[4]

Two other studies of code enforcement are somewhat similar in spirit to
the Oakland initiative. In Cook County, Illinois, researchers studied
residents' views of drug activity, comparing those of people living on
blocks where a drug property had been targeted for civil abatement with
those of people living on blocks not targeted (control blocks) (Lurigio et
al., 1998). The study generally found little positive impact of the
abatement procedures. In a randomized experiment in San Diego,
California, rental addresses targeted for drug enforcement in the previous
6-month period received either no treatment, a letter, or a meeting with the
landlord, a police officer, and a code officer to develop remediation
strategies (Eck and Wartell, 1998). Researchers found significantly
reduced drug activity in the followup period for the addresses in the
"meeting" group. The authors concluded that code enforcement can work
effectively at rental properties used for drug activities. At the same time
the study details the many reasons landlords do little to address these
problems.

Minneapolis crime and disorder hot spots. In an experiment using random
assignment in Minneapolis, Minnesota, hot spots received the normal
amount of patrolling or increased police presence (Sherman and Weisburd,
1995). (The procedure used to define hot spots is described above.) A
typical hot spot was a group of attached two- and three-story buildings
clustered around an epicenter, usually a street corner. These intersections
often consisted of a mix of commercial services, usually including food
and drink and open until late at night. Exceptions to this pattern included
low-rise multifamily housing developments and convenience stores. Bus
stops, pay telephones, and intensive street lighting were common features
of hot spots (Sherman and Weisburd, 1995).

During the first 6 months of the program, experimental sites received two
to six times as much police patrol time as did the control sites. As in
Oakland, crime decreased only slightly in the experimental site. Although
the percentage reduction in calls for service was substantial, it translated
into one crime call fewer per month in the experimental location than in
the control locations.[5]

When measured in percentages, disorder reductions were sizable. For the
period when the experiment maintained the best treatment integrity, "half
as much disorder was observed in the experimental group as in the control
[group]," according to the researchers (Sherman and Weisburd, 1995, p.
643). They concluded that "substantial increases in police patrol presence
can indeed cause modest reductions in crime and more impressive
reductions in disorder within high-crime locations" (Sherman and
Weisburd, 1995, abstract). But in absolute terms, these differences were
not substantial, in part because of the extremely low rate of social disorder
observed. Observers saw about 2 disorderly minutes per 100 minutes in
the experimental sites and about 4 disorderly minutes per 100 minutes in
the control sites. Since observers were stationed in the most stable high-
crime sites in the city and observed from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m., this seems an
extremely low rate of disorder. Other onsite researchers have noted similar
low rates (Giacomazzi et al., n.d.). If such low rates of social disorder
apply to most other areas, we can wonder about the practicality of
initiatives geared to reducing those conditions.

A review of calls received after the patrols left the area showed that a
police stop of 11-15 minutes was most useful because it represents the
shortest time that created the most residual deterrence (Koper, 1995). This
latter investigation of the timing of the police stops addressed the question
of the most effective "dosage" at a hot spot.

Kansas City crackhouse blocks. In another experiment, researchers
examined the impact of police raids on blocks with crackhouses in Kansas
City, Missouri (Sherman and Rogan, 1995). The criteria for including the
blocks in the study were receiving a large volume of calls for service,
being the site of a successful undercover buy, and receiving at least five
calls for service in the month before the undercover buy. Eligible blocks
were randomly assigned either to be raided or not to be raided. 

The raids showed a marginally significant impact on all calls for service,
with calls decreasing 18 percent on the raid blocks and 10 percent on the
nonraid blocks. The raids had no significant impact on the number of calls
for violent or property offenses. Furthermore, the benefits of the raids
evaporated quickly--in about 12 days. The benefits also depended on the
season; effects on disorder "found in the winter disappeared in the spring"
(Sherman and Rogan, 1995, p. 776). The authors concluded, "Raids seem
to provide afflicted blocks with nothing more than a brief respite from
crackhouses" (Sherman and Rogan, 1995, p. 777).

Jersey City drug markets. In this study a complex web of policing
services--including increased surveillance, crackdowns of varying scope
and intensity, and a maintenance observation period--were directed at a
randomly assigned set of drug hot spots (Sherman and Weisburd, 1995).
Problem-oriented policing strategies helped officers develop detailed
information about the problem profiles at each site (Braga et al., 1997).

Using calls to police to construct outcome measures, researchers compared
call volumes 7 months preceding and 7 months following the intervention.
They found no effects on calls for violent crime or property crime and no
reliable effects on narcotics calls. But some categories of disorder calls--
suspicious persons, public morals, and police assistance--did show
impacts.

Researchers commented, with some surprise, that drug activity did not
appear to be affected by the intervention, but some types of disorder calls
were affected. They suggested that drug activity and other activities
around disorder were more independent of one another than previously
suspected. They also noted that the bulk of the treatment effects were
"evident primarily in very large changes in a few of the most active hot
spots included in the study" (Sherman and Weisburd, 1995, p. 727). In
other words, some features of the hot spots themselves, or of the
surrounding context, made the treatment more effective in some places
than others.

Reducing repeat burglary in U.K. public housing developments. In the
Kirkholt (United Kingdom) burglary reduction project, a targeted police
response to disadvantaged households victimized by burglary produced a
75-percent drop in this crime. Through similar programs in Huddersfield,
victims received increasingly comprehensive assistance from the police
immediately after the burglary; those with more burglaries received more
assistance.[6] Those burgled more than twice received sensor-triggered
alarms connected to the police station. The Huddersfield program design
produced another benefit: It did not encourage offenders to increase their
search space and move beyond the area covered by the program (Anderson
and Pease, 1997). Neither study was a true experiment, however, and other
initiatives at the Kirkholt site may have contributed to program success
(Hope, 1995). 

Conclusions from examples. The foregoing represent some of the most
carefully designed experiments and quasi-experiments available on the
impact of place-based, microscale interventions. The small number of
studies examined suggests that we draw general conclusions cautiously.

Place-based interventions have effects on crime and disorder. The impacts
on crime calls are more modest and less enduring over time than had been
expected. All else being equal, high-crime addresses or clusters of
addresses are most likely located in areas with generally higher crime
rates. As Lawrence Sherman and David Weisburd have stated,
"Substantial increases in police patrol presence can typically cause modest
reductions in crime and more impressive reductions in disorder within
high-crime locations" (Sherman and Weisburd, 1995, p. 104).

Many hot spots are probably surrounded by and nested within hardened
criminal subcultures. Many offenders, as well as previous offenders
returned from supervision to the community, are likely to live in or near
such locations. The resistance of criminal activity to crime control efforts
is not surprising given such surroundings. If we look only at the impact of
such interventions on crime, questions arise about their cost-effectiveness.

The substantial impact observed on disorder suggests that we know more
about reducing disorder than about reducing crime. Interventions like the
Specialized Multi Agency Response Team (SMART) program in Oakland
show that police can substantially reduce physical disorder by working
closely with other regulatory agencies such as those responsible for
housing, zoning, and public works. Creating and maintaining a productive
partnership with other agencies appear key to an effective intervention, but
"perhaps the greatest challenge for SMART-like interventions rests in the
ability of the police to develop good working relationships with other city
agencies" (Green, 1995, p. 99).

The relative independence of changes in crime and changes in disorder in
several studies raises questions (Giacomazzi et al., n.d.; Popkin et al.,
1997; Taylor, 1996). How do interventions that succeed in reducing
disorder more than crime fit into the broken-window thesis (Kelling and
Coles, 1996)? What factors contribute to the relative independence of
crime and disorder shifts? We know how to reduce disorder in small
locations. Other short- and long-term studies also suggest that shifts in
crime and disorder are relatively independent of one another (Giacomazzi
et al., n.d.; Popkin et al., 1997; Taylor, 1996). Rousting panhandlers, citing
landlords for nuisance tenants or substandard conditions, or using other
strategies can change local conditions. Perhaps we know less about
preventing crime on the microscale. Are the two processes linked more
loosely than anticipated, especially on the small scale of the units targeted
here--addresses, address clusters, intersections, and blocks? Do researchers
expect a strong linkage between crime and disorder in small units only
because that linkage exists in large units (Hannan, 1971)? Might the two
processes link with considerable strength, but fail to shift over time with
comparable speed? Each may cause the other, but one may shift more
rapidly than the other.

Finally, presuming the prevention effects attributed to the Kirkholt
burglary prevention programs have not been overstated, are place-based
interventions most effective when either the victim (of burglary) or the
victim and offender (in the case of domestic violence) is fixed in place?
When neither is fixed in place, are prevention impacts more modest?

Issues ahead

Studies have clearly demonstrated that context-focused crime control is
useful. The gains have not been as substantial as initially promised, but
they have been noticeable. To make more progress in this area, we need to
pay attention to a number of issues.

How we think about places

Thus far the development of concepts about crime and small places has
been guided by the hot-spot idea or analogies based on individual offender
dynamics. Neither line of thinking may be the most helpful one to pursue.

The hot-spot analogy with geology suggests one underlying cause
"bubbling up" to create disorder. But several factors may be responsible.
Features of the site itself and the surrounding area jointly contribute to the
high crime rate. In the case of large, open-air drug markets, adjacency to
high-volume traffic arteries and vacant housing is important (Rengert,
1996). In the case of tavern crime in the north side of Chicago, tavern
density and proximity to mass-transit stops played roles in creating hot
spots (Block and Block, 1995). The number of contributing factors may be
so great that the emergence of the hot spot is "overdetermined"; removing
some of the factors may have little or no effect.

Several authors, following up on the theory that neighborhoods can have
"criminal careers" (Reiss, 1986), have suggested this might be true for
specific places as well (Weisburd, 1997). Places, however, may be too
fundamentally different from people to warrant pursuing this notion. The
career theory is grounded in offender-centered criminological theory.
Although some dimensions of career theory may have some relevance to
places, it remains unproven and its relevance is likely to be far weaker
than the relevance of place-centered theories. Place-centered theories will
be applied as appropriate to particular levels of analysis (Brantingham et
al., 1976). To apply place-centered theories, person-centered
criminologists need either to learn these theories or to collaborate with
those who know them. 

Behavior settings theory

It may prove more profitable to rely on empirically validated constructs
found within an extensive volume of available research on places (Felson,
1995). Ecological psychologists have been trying to understand how
places work since the late 1940s (Barker, 1968; Wicker, 1979).

According to ecological psychology (Barker et al., 1943; Fox, 1983; Fox,
1984a; Fox, 1984b; Wicker, 1972; Wicker, 1979; Wicker, 1987), behavior
settings are freestanding, natural units of the everyday environment with a
recurring pattern of behaviors and a surrounding and supporting physical
milieu. These units organize community life. As Allan Wicker has noted,
"Roger Barker [the psychologist who originated ecological psychology]
views behavior settings as small-scale social systems whose components
include people and inanimate objects. . . . The various components interact
in an orderly, established fashion to carry out the setting's essential
functions" (Wicker, 1987, p. 614).

Analyzing all behavior settings in a small Midwestern town for a year,
Roger Barker and his colleagues found different types of behavior settings,
such as billiard parlors, taverns, bus stops, parking lots, parks and
playgrounds, street fairs, variety stores, and welfare offices (Barker, 1968).
In some urban areas, some of these behavior setting types can be high-
crime locations. 

"Streetblocks"--the two sides of a street between two cross streets--qualify
as behavior settings for the following reasons (Taylor, 1997): 

o People get to know others as they pass by and observe their routines. At
certain times or on certain days, they know what others are going to do.
They consequently develop positive or negative sentiments toward others. 

o Associated role obligations such as neighborliness go along with being a
group member (Mann, 1954). Role differentiation also occurs, with some
residents playing more central roles, such as the block organizer or block
busybody, and others being more peripheral in the ongoing life of the
block. 

o Unless there is extremely high turnover or heterogeneity, norms about
acceptable and unacceptable behavior are generally shared. People
generally agree about what is and is not acceptable at various times. The
specific points of agreement--and their clarity--vary as a function of
location, structure, and social psychological factors. So too, norms,
ranging from clear to diffuse, may be more or less widely shared. 

o Blocks exhibit regularly recurring rhythms of activity (Jacobs, 1961;
Jacobs, 1968). In ecological psychology these are called standing patterns
of behavior. People go to work and come home, children go to school and
come home, mail carriers and paper carriers make their rounds certain
times of the day, people engage in weekly activities (like car washing) and
seasonal activities (like leaf raking or lawn mowing or gardening). Each
block has a regular standing pattern of behavior composed of overlapping
cycles, although the pattern may evolve noticeably over a substantial
period or, in changing neighborhoods, over a short period. 

o The surrounding physical milieu supports and contains the behavior
program. A streetblock is physically bounded by the fronts of houses or
the alleys or fences behind the houses and the cross streets. What happens
one block over or behind the streetblock has much less impact on the
block than activities occurring within it. This is particularly evident when
a fire or large snowstorm occurs. The block is a major container,
partitioning residents from what is happening elsewhere. The behavior
setting can no longer exist if the physical container is removed (e.g., urban
renewal). 

o Behavior settings and streetblocks evolve over time. "Settings are
continually constructed and reconstructed as new personnel and equipment
are added or exchanged for exiting components" (Wicker, 1987, p. 616).
Similarly, on streetblocks families move in and out and houses may be
converted to apartments or stores or abandoned and torn down. Small
stores may come and go or be converted back to apartments. As the
streetblock changes physically over time or its population shifts, so too
may the standing patterns of behavior change.

The daily and weekly rhythms on a streetblock depend not only on the
residents of the block and its layout but also on conditions on the
surrounding blocks and in the broader neighborhood--and how that block
and surrounding blocks may shift over time. For example, a block with a
corner store will have different numbers and types of people on the
sidewalk at different times of day compared with a block that has no store
(Baum et al., 1978). Who comes to the store depends on the makeup of the
broader neighborhood as well as the block, and the arriving foot traffic
will shift as the neighborhood shifts.

What will we gain by drawing on ideas about behavior settings? If we
understand how specific types of settings work and what their standing
patterns of behavior are, we should be able to identify which critical pieces
are missing when such a site becomes a high-crime location.

An isolated bar may become a high-crime location. A pizza parlor at an
intersection with several other stores may likewise become a trouble spot.
But the route by which each site became a high-crime site may be quite
different. What is needed to lower crime also may be quite different. 

The evaluation of Oakland's SMART intervention hints that different
remedies are needed for commercial and residential sites (Green, 1996, p.
68). Police helped initiate multiagency civil remedies at problem addresses
in both types of sites. The tactics most effectively reduced drug activity at
the commercial sites, "where business owners risk more than residential
tenants do by not cooperating with police."

Location-specific remedies are required. Understanding how the setting
went awry helps gauge what remediation tactics are most effective.
Routine activity theory is beginning to incorporate behavior setting ideas.
Marcus Felson (see appendix A) has suggested differentiating guardians of
specific targets in a setting--for example, differentiating site managers,
who are responsible for the overall functioning of a place, from those with
lesser responsibilities (Felson, 1995). This closely parallels Roger Barker's
(1968) observation that people participate in behavior settings at different
levels (see exhibit 2).

A particular type of behavior setting may become a high-crime location
because setting participants needed to maintain the standing pattern of
behavior are missing from some parts of that setting. Alternatively,
involved personnel may lack the experience needed to maintain the
standing pattern of behavior. 

To solve the crime problems in a location, we need to "unpack" the
dynamics of the site. Detectives or patrol officers can intervene most
effectively if they can discriminate between legitimate and illegitimate
participants in the setting (Green, 1996; Rosenbaum and Lavrakas, 1995;
Weisburd and Green, 1996). Although behavior setting theory provides an
extremely efficient lens for focusing on the most relevant dynamics, the
process may prove awkward and unfamiliar to detectives and uniformed
patrol officers (Braga, 1997; Braga et al., 1997).

A final advantage of behavior setting theory is its explicit recognition that
the standing pattern of behavior is timebound. Several of the interventions
mentioned earlier point to timebound effects. For example, residual
deterrence from crackdowns may be seasonally dependent (Sherman and
Rogan, 1995). Understanding how block behavior settings vary by season
would help to interpret this dependency.

What police personnel do in these locations

How do police decide what to do after arriving at a high-crime location?
The most effective and minimally intrusive response is for officers to
disrupt the illegal activities and avoid disrupting legal activities (Green,
1996). An understanding of setting dynamics would provide guidance on
achieving such a goal. Lacking this understanding, the officers may simply
want to aggressively police the entire setting (Braga et al., 1997).

What information sources are needed

To intervene effectively in high-crime sites, detailed knowledge of the
setting is needed. Beat officers have such detailed knowledge. The
challenge is to systematically elicit, share, and archive that information.
Sometimes locations become high-crime sites because of surrounding
conditions, including movement patterns of potential offenders and
victims (Maltz et al., 1991). Detailed information about these conditions
can help to make these connections (Mazerolle and Terrill, 1997). 

Crime mapping tools become even more powerful if crimes are combined
with other geocoded community information. When certain rules are
followed for the contextual information, it becomes a "GeoArchive"
(Block, 1996): 

A GeoArchive is a particular kind of geographic information system [GIS]
database. . . . Like all GIS, a GeoArchive is especially organized for
spatial data, and contains a digitized map and data geocoded to that map. It
can be seen as a large set of map transparencies that can be overlaid on
each other. But a GeoArchive has several characteristics that distinguish it
from other GIS databases. . . . A GeoArchive links (1) address-based local-
level data from (2) a variety of law enforcement and community sources,
and (3) is organized so that it can be updated, maintained, mapped,
analyzed, and used by those who are developing and implementing
strategies of crime reduction in the local community.

Such a system includes information on housing code violations and
locations of facilities like bus and subway stops. The geographic display
of local features and data on crime and calls for service quickly links local
features to various crime problems. For example, proximity to mass-transit
stops was an important factor in tavern crime in the north side of Chicago
(Block and Block, 1995). Effectively reducing crime in high-crime
locations requires knowing much more about the site than the crime
profile.

Deciding how much the site needs to be fixed 

Crime varies from place to place and over time, and numerous factors
affect those variations. Random influences and temporal patterns, for
example, can contribute to a high crime rate at a site. Deciding how much
of that crime profile emerges from factors police can address is a challenge
for those allocating police resources. Some analytic techniques can answer
such questions (Spelman, 1995a). For example, differences in high school
crime rates may arise from random sources, changes over time, and
persistent differences between the sites. Persistent differences may arise
from the demographics of students attending the various schools, the
administrations running the schools, and the surrounding neighborhoods.
Changes over time may arise from seasonal variation or long-term regional
or national trends. But it is only the persistent site differences that are an
appropriate target of police interventions. Consequently, in planning an
intervention and deciding what the criterion for success is, police planners
might profitably isolate those persistent site differences so they know how
much of a reduction they seek.

Therefore, the intervention goal is tied to the analysis of the crime
variation or the calls for service variation. Otherwise, agencies risk
"overmedicating" a hot spot that is only "warm," or "under-medicating" a
"red-hot" hot spot.

Picking sites for intervention

The process of identifying high-crime locations for intervention is still in a
rudimentary stage, especially compared with the work in spatial
epidemiology of disease (Giggs, 1990; Thomas, 1990a; Thomas, 1990b;
Thomas, 1992; Wartenberg and Greenberg, 1990). Whereas we look for
crime clusters in space, they look for disease clusters in space and time.
Whereas we look for clusters compared to a background of random
variation, they look for clusters compared to a theoretically meaningful
indicator of background intensity. Spatial epidemiologists can readily
determine where and when there is more disease than there should be,
given a range of factors. For criminologists, the theoretical tools, 

understanding of etiology, and data available rarely permit determining
where there is more crime than there should be.

Some would argue the above approach is inappropriate, stating that
wherever crime or calls for service are sizable, intervention is needed. On
the other hand, if we know how much site features, local population
features, and characteristics of adjoining locales--factors that cannot be
changed--contribute to the crime rate, we have a better idea of how
effective we can expect to be at these sites. 

Granted, spatial epidemiologists work with causal frameworks far
different from those used by criminologists. Given strong enough space-
time clustering, they can assume one disease agent is at work. Within our
field, pinning down causes seems much more arduous. Nevertheless,
despite these differences, spatial epidemiology's simultaneous attention to
time and place clustering and concern with finding the appropriate control
rate should be incorporated into spatial criminology.

Further expanding the concept

Policymakers and practitioners alike have lavished considerable attention
on connections between crime and small places in the past few years. They
have added issues of disorder and fear of crime to the mix as well. In the
middle to late 1990s, police operations have been most affected by the
small-scale focus. Nonetheless, it is easy to imagine expanding further
and, for example, using information about parolee or probationer residence
linked to a GeoArchive to help decide supervision levels (Buckley and
Kane, 1997; Van Dine, 1997). In short, the current focus may expand the
outcomes of interest and the type of place-based processes of interest,
proving relevant to criminal justice practitioners beyond the police.

Appendix: Overview of Theories Relevant to Crime-Place Links

Shifting from an offender-based to a place-based criminological theory--or
more accurately, developing the place-based theory as a complement to
the individual focus--requires thinking in new ways (Weisburd, 1997).
That conceptual retooling is now under way and is needed to effectively
support crime prevention and control initiatives. I have proposed that we
spur this development by relying on ecological psychology research.
Recent revisions to place-based routine activity theory are already moving
in that direction. This field helps us better understand how public places
go awry and become high-crime or high-fear sites. It also helps us focus
on what officers should do onsite. 

Quick historical tour

French and English researchers in the middle of the last century
investigated regional and within-county variations in offenders and crime
(Glade, 1856). Regional variations continue to inspire debate in the United
States, the debate on the Southern subculture of violence being one case in
point (Messner, 1983; Wolfgang and Ferracuti, 1967). For example, most
recently Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett suggested that the higher
homicide rates in the South emerged from a culture of honor linked to a
history of independent pig farmers in mountainous Southern regions
(Cohen and Nisbett, 1994; Nisbett, 1993).

Social workers in the latter part of the 19th century pointed to parts of
London where misery, drunkenness, and crime flourished and many
children were homeless. Some urban renewal plans around that time and
later were focused on breaking up those troublesome areas (Morris, 1957).

In the first half of this century, researchers who were later identified with
the Chicago School of Human Ecology documented within-city variations
in delinquency (Bursik and Grasmick, 1993; Shaw and McKay, 1969),
offender rates (White, 1932), mental illness (Faris, 1948), and other social
problems. These and other researchers have linked crime, offending, and
delinquency rates with features of community structure like economic
status, stability, and racial composition (Bursik and Grasmick, 1993;
Sampson and Lauritsen, 1994). Even more recently, with the availability
of the British Crime Survey (Sampson and Grove, 1989) and the Project
on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (Sampson et al.,
1997), researchers can document the contributions of informal social
control (Bursik, 1988), independent of community structure or mediating
community structural impacts. Recent quantitative and qualitative studies
help explain how offending patterns are linked to employment
opportunities, unemployment levels, street culture, and ethnic background
(Bourgois, 1989; Bourgois, 1996; Sullivan, 1989; Sullivan, 1993;
Williams, 1989; Wilson, 1987; Wilson, 1996) and how all these factors
contribute to long-term neighborhood deterioration. In short, after several
decades of theorizing we have begun to empirically document the
individual- and community-level connections and contextual effects that
link delinquency, offending, and crime rates to neighborhood features,
over time as well as at one point in time.

In the past 20 years or so, theorists like Jane Jacobs (Jacobs, 1968) and
Don Appleyard (Appleyard, 1981; Craik and Appleyard, 1980) have
devoted attention to how streetblocks "work." Researchers have either
focused on streetblocks themselves, on both sides of the blockface,
between two cross streets, or on census blocks (the four sides of a city
block as you walk around it). Streetblock researchers have confirmed the
contributions of land use (Baum et al., 1978; Taylor et al., 1995), block
design (Taylor et al., 1984), and social and organizational block
characteristics (Perkins et al., 1990; Perkins et al., 1992; Taylor et al.,
1981) to social withdrawal, crime, and disorder. Census block researchers
have linked crime to a range of block features, including high schools,
bars, and public housing (Roncek, 1981; Roncek and Bell, 1981; Roncek
et al., 1981; Roncek and Faggiani, 1985; Roncek and Maier, 1991; Roncek
and Pravatiner, 1989; Snyder, 1995).

Available theoretical tools

Both the tools for understanding crime-place links and the empirical
support for key theories about crime and place have dramatically
improved. The following theoretical models point toward features of the
social and physical environment below the neighborhood level.

Crime prevention through environmental design and territorial functioning
theory

Ideas about crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED)--
including defensible space and related ideas about territorial functioning
dating from the early 1970s--suggested that some places were safer than
others partly because of how they were built and, in turn, how people used
those spaces (Taylor, 1988). Some of these early views credited
architecture and site planning with too strong an influence on human
behavior (Taylor et al., 1980), but later works in this area have extensively
documented that site features contribute to safety in many instances
(Newman and Franck, 1982; Taylor et al., 1984), although not all (Merry,
1981). People in many different neighborhoods have put these ideas to
work. Residents in Asylum Hill in Hartford in the 1970s (Fowler and
Mangione, 1986), North Miami Shores in the early 1990s (Atlas and
LeBlanc, 1994), Five Oaks in Dayton in the mid-1990s, and Guilford in
Baltimore in the mid-1990s redesigned traffic circulation patterns through
their neighborhoods and closed entrances to reduce crime. Some of these
efforts received considerable attention from the news media, even though
success has been hard to document. Across the Nation, the increasing
construction of gated communities, once considered only for extremely
upscale developments, represents one widespread (albeit controversial)
application of these ideas.

Situational crime prevention theory

Situational crime prevention also focuses on specific features of settings
that might contribute to crime. A steady stream of studies over the past 15
years or so has documented how specific setting features and changes in
those features can deter offenders (Clarke, 1995). This model assumes that
offenders are rational, are motivated by potential benefits, are aware of
likely crime costs, and recognize opportunities for getting away with a
crime--whether that crime is vandalizing a telephone, putting slugs in the
subway, or stealing a car. Sometimes reducing opportunities means
making it harder for someone to commit a crime ("hardening a target"),
but other times it is more than that. A recent study of Washington, D.C.'s
Metro station designs and operations represents an example of situational
crime prevention that integrated a number of design, management, and
operational features (La Vigne, 1996).

Some are concerned that situational crime prevention strategies will
simply result in displaced crime (Barnes, 1995; Repetto, 1976)--displaced
spatially, temporally, or in other ways (Lab, 1992). Researchers have
documented that as a result of situational crime prevention initiatives less
than one crime is displaced (that is, occurs elsewhere) for each crime
prevented. In some instances, adjoining areas may experience a diffusion
of benefits (Clarke and Weisburd, 1994), enjoying enhanced safety only
because they are near a prevention site. The debate about the volume of
displacement, the quality of studies gauging such volume, and even the
definition of displacement continues (Barnes, 1995). Nevertheless, most of
the studies show that the effects of displacement do not nullify the benefits
of prevention--and the benefits of diffusion sometimes outweigh the
effects of displacement (Anderson and Pease, 1997; Green, 1995). If
practitioners look at outcomes like physical deterioration and fear of
crime, instead of at crime, displacement becomes a much less salient issue.
As interest has shifted to these noncrime outcomes and evidence has not
supported worst-case displacement scenarios, practitioners have become
more comfortable with crime prevention or suppression efforts focused on
small-scale locations.

Behavioral geography/crime pattern theory

According to this theory, offenders go to work, visit friends, come home,
do their shopping, and carry out other daily activities just like the rest of
us. During these activities, motivated offenders search for likely targets for
the type of crime they hope to commit. For example, suburban burglars
look for worthwhile houses to enter that are not too far off their route
between home and work (Rengert and Wasilchick, 1985). Urban, drug-
using burglars may choose sites near drug markets (Rengert, 1996). Crime
pattern theory integrates ideas about offenders' movements with the
geographic distribution of crime targets (Eck and Weisburd, 1995). It links
places with desirable targets and the context in which they are found by
offenders.

Geographic profiling inverts the usual behavioral geography questions
(Rossmo, 1995). Instead of asking, "If we know where the offender works
and lives, can we predict what targets he or she will select?" it asks, "If we
know the locations of a connected series of crimes, what can we say about
where the offender most likely resides or works?" D. Kim Rossmo (1995,
p. 217, and abstract) explains: 

The probable spatial behavior of the offender can thus be derived from
information contained in the known crime-site locations, their geographic
connections, and the characteristics and demography of the surrounding
areas. By determining the probability of the offender residing in various
areas and displaying those results through the use of isopleth or choropleth
maps, police efforts to apprehend criminals can be assisted. This
investigative approach is known as geographic profiling. 

The technique's creator believes it will assist police most substantially in
investigations of serial murder, serial rape, and serial arson. It also may
prove relevant to other serial crimes for which a set of spatially defined
clues is available. 

Routine activity theory

Routine activity theory and the affiliated lifestyle theory (Hindelang et al.,
1978; Hindelang et al., 1979; Titus, 1995) relate closely to behavioral
geography. In their earlier versions, these theories proposed that crimes
occur when three things come together in space and time: a motivated
offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a capable guardian (Felson,
1994).[7] The perspective helps us understand why certain crime rates are
higher around high schools and taverns, as Dennis Roncek and his
colleagues have demonstrated. It also helps explain long-term shifts in
some crime rates (Felson, 1986) and differences in victimization rates
among groups of people (Kennedy and Forde, 1990a; Kennedy and Forde,
1990b).

More recently, theorists have added three more pieces to the model
(Felson, 1995). Motivated offenders have "handlers": Relatives, friends, or
acquaintances who, without resorting to force, can discourage the
motivated offender from committing the crime. Furthermore, in addition to
guardians, who are focused on protecting a particular target, settings often
have "place managers" who discourage crime by controlling places. A
doorman on Fifth Avenue in front of an apartment building, a bus driver
on a bus, a private security guard looking out over a parking lot are all
looking after a particular place. Their spheres of concern are spatially
broader than those of the guardian. Place managers may be differentiated
based on the type of responsibility each has for the place in question. The
stronger the responsibility, the more likely the place manager will do
something about a crime about to happen or that has already taken place.
With the introduction of the place manager, routine activity theory
develops into a perspective clearly focused on small-scale locations. It
tells us about differences across sites, not across communities, over time
(Eck, 1995). According to John Eck, "Specific places should be a focus of
research . . . for small time increments" (Eck, 1995, pp. 795-796). The
theory itself has progressed down the cone of resolution.

Notes

1. The current focus on small-scale places may be a continuation of a
longer term trend. See the appendix for a brief historical analysis of
research on crime and its relationship to place.

2. Criminal geographers differ on the specific levels they might discuss
within this cone. Keith Harries (1974) includes the following levels:
regional, intermetropolitan, macro-intra urban, and micro-intra urban. Paul
and Patricia Brantingham (1981) discuss State, tract, census block group,
and census block levels, in accord with easily available census data.

3. These have come to be known as Compstat (computer comparison
statistics) meetings. But an exclusive focus on the crime maps overlooks
the broader command and control processes, as well as the strategizing,
that occur in the meetings.

4. This study did not examine the possibility that crime was displaced to a
remote location. For example, in the fall of 1997, residents of Kensington,
a neighborhood considerably north and east of downtown Philadelphia,
expressed concern about the dramatic rise in prostitution in their locale.
Many of those working the street had reportedly been displaced from the
downtown area as a result of Business Improvement District (BID)
activities.

5. To be selected, sites were required to have at least 20 hard- and 20 soft-
crime calls in the selection year. Hard- and soft-crime calls in the
experimental and treatment sites ranged from 56 to 628 (with a mean of
183).

6. The time period used for compiling the burglary history record is not
clear.

7. Questions of what makes a guardian capable (and in whose eyes)
remain to be explored.

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-------------------------------

Evaluating Community Youth Sanctioning Models: Neighborhood
Dimensions and Beyond

Gordon Bazemore, Ph.D., Florida Atlantic University

"Community justice" is taking hold throughout North America and
elsewhere in the world. Although the application of community
sanctioning models with adult offenders is increasing, nowhere has the
interest in these new approaches been greater than in the response to youth
crime.[1] (See exhibit 1 for descriptions of four community youth
sanctioning models.) While it is difficult to track each local application, at
least 10 States are experimenting with, or in some cases reviving,
community sanctioning programs for young offenders.

Viewed as a whole, the movement toward community-based youth
sanctioning and decisionmaking encompasses a wide array of processes,
goals, and practical and philosophical rationales. The enthusiasm for
community sanctioning as a new response to juvenile crime appears to be
a result of both crisis and opportunity in juvenile justice. Advocates of
these approaches view them as an opportunity to build support for a
juvenile justice system frequent-ly criticized as insular and out of touch
with community needs and expectations (Bazemore and Day, 1996).
Stated and implicit objectives for youth community sanctioning initiatives
include (but are not limited to) giving citizens a greater role in sanctioning,
increasing citizen involvement in juvenile justice, providing a more
meaningful and immediate response to delinquency, encouraging
alternative dispute resolution, reducing fear of youth crime, improving
monitoring of young offenders, and diverting more young offenders from
the court.

These more positive rationales are being joined with a practical and
realistic sense of urgency driven by the fear that the survival of the
juvenile justice system may be in jeopardy. In at least one State, it appears
that one political motivation behind neighborhood sanctioning is to create
a community response to misdemeanor and less serious offenses while
policymakers pursue abolition of the juvenile court and transfer of
jurisdiction over most felony offenses to criminal courts (Torbet, et al.,
1996). In other jurisdictions such approaches are viewed as a means of
strengthening community commitment and participation in what has
become a closed and one-dimensional response to youth crime.

While underlying philosophies in community youth sanctioning also run
the gamut from traditional prevention and diversion paradigms to those
emphasizing reparation and offender accountability (Umbreit, 1995;
Bazemore, 1997a), to various adaptations of shaming (Kahan, 1996; Karp,
1997) (including reintegrative shaming) (Braithwaite and Mugford, 1994;
Retzinger and Scheff, 1996), the four models described here (and
presented in exhibit 1) share several common characteristics. As part of a
growing but still emergent and loosely connected national and
international movement for restorative justice (Zehr, 1990; Mesmer and
Otto, 1992; Van Ness, 1993; Van Ness and Heetderks Strong, 1997;
Braithwaite and Mugford, 1994), or community restorative justice (Young,
1995; Bazemore and Schiff, 1996), these approaches stand as case studies
in an effort to give citizens, victims, and community groups an explicit
decisionmaking role in an informal youth sanctioning process. Although
an indepth description of important differences among the four models is 
beyond the scope of this paper, these models will be used here for the
specific purpose of illustrating different trends and themes within this
larger movement that have important implications for defining key
dimensions of this emerging community response to youth crime. Yet, like
many other initiatives in neighborhood or community justice (National
Institute of Justice, 1996; Barajas, 1995), perhaps the most important
shared characteristic of the new sanctioning models is the fact that
relatively little is known about their impact, their objectives, or the nature
of the process itself.

Research in community sanctioning. Although there is a long tradition of
evaluation research on community-based programs, research on
community sanctioning is in its infancy. Relevant recent studies for the
most part offer findings on specific applications of selected restorative
justice sanctions and processes. Primarily, this research has focused on one
model/process: victim-offender mediation (Umbreit and Coates, 1993;
Umbreit, 1994) and one sanction: restitution (Bazemore and Schneider,
1985; Schneider, 1986; Schneider, 1990; Butts and Snyder, 1991).[4]

Research describing and evaluating the new community sanctioning
approaches is critical for several reasons. On the positive side, these new
models represent some of the most promising approaches for changing the
nature of the sanctioning function in juvenile justice (Bazemore and
Umbreit, 1995). Although community sanctioning is but one component
of a wide range of restorative community justice interventions that
specifically addresses prevention, rehabilitation, victim services, and
public safety (Young, 1995), some have suggested that citizen
involvement in decisions about the disposition of juvenile offenders is an
important gateway to broader and deeper participation in all aspects of the
response to youth crime and greater support for juvenile justice
(Braithwaite and Mugford, 1994; Bazemore and Day, 1996). On the
negative side, the movement to devolve justice to the neighborhood level
is fraught with dangers ranging from concerns about "net-widening"
(broadening the reach of the system to take in more offenders) (Polk,
1994), to power imbalances for young offenders and adults in
conferencing settings (Umbreit and Stacy, 1995), to insensitivity to
victims (Braithwaite and Parker, 1998), to the "tyranny of community" in
cases where community dynamics have resulted in a variety of abuses
(Griffiths et al, 1995).

Need for an evaluation protocol. At this stage the primary obstacle to
meaningful evaluation of these approaches is neither technical nor
methodological.[5] Rather, a first step is to become clear about what the
new models are trying to accomplish and how they are trying to
accomplish it. An evaluation protocol is needed to define the intended
outcomes in community youth sanctioning, describe intervention inputs,
and provide theoretical rationales that link inputs, sanctioning processes,
and outputs.

Toward this end, this paper is limited to the "independent variable" in
community youth sanctioning; i.e., those inputs or interventions expected
to lead to the desired outcomes. Currently, there is little knowledge about
how the four models work in practice and the principles that guide the
informal decisionmaking processes employed. Although it is important to
also articulate the intended outcomes of these and other similar
approaches, the primary purpose of this paper is to suggest theoretical and
practical ways in which the sanctioning process may vary. These
variations can help to define the research questions and propositions most
helpful in assessing the integrity of community youth sanctioning
interventions.

This, however, departs somewhat from the primary theme of this
symposium: the role of the neighborhood as specific locus or place for
justice processes to take place. In keeping with the theme, the
neighborhood concept is used to define one broader dimension of
accessibility in community youth sanctioning. However, although the
community youth sanctioning models share a commitment to making
justice processes more accessible to those most affected by crime, even
cursory observation of these processes will confirm that much more is
going on than the fact that they are occurring in neighborhoods rather than
in courts. Therefore, I will describe two additional categories that help to 
define theoretical dimensions in community youth sanctioning--
community justice and restorative justice.[6]

Defining dimensions of variation

Neighborhood sanctioning boards or community panels are nothing new
and, in some ways, are not unique. Indeed, such programs have a long
history in the United States and the rest of North America.[7] Clearly, the
four models in the case examples presented here share with both current
and earlier community-based criminal justice approaches an emphasis on
bringing a more accessible and "user-friendly" justice process to the
neighborhood (National Institute of Justice, 1996). What distinguishes this
new crop of community sanctioning models from most current efforts to
decentralize courts and court functions--as well as from traditional
sanctioning and neighborhood dispute resolution initiatives (McGillis and
Mullen, 1977; Garafalo and Connelly, 1980)--are several important themes
and a primary unifying focus. This focus moves beyond the concern with
neighborhood alone and suggests that this dimension of influence may, in
fact, be far less relevant in some parts of the country than others. 

But while "neighborhood" may not be relevant to young offenders, crime
victims, and other citizens participating in community sanctioning
processes, "community" in one form or another and relationships will be.
These concepts suggest a range of focal concerns related to restorative
justice and community justice, including an effort to identify and engage
those most affected by crime in problem-oriented and preventive
solutions; changing the role of justice agencies to one of strengthening
community capacity against crime; a commitment to repairing harm to
victims and victimized communities; and actively involving victims, other
citizens, and offenders in an informal, nonadversarial dispositional or
decisionmaking process aimed in part at holding offenders personally
accountable (Bazemore, 1997b; Stuart, 1995a). 

The integrity of interventions 

At this early stage in the development and evaluation of community youth
sanctioning models, it is critical to establish theoretical and value-based
criteria for answering the question, how do we know it when we see it?
That is, how do evaluators know that a process referred to as a family
group conference, for example, has been carried out in a way consistent
with the principles of restorative justice or reintegrative shaming that
inform it? Can evaluators know--when an offender recidivates 2 months
after participating in such a conference or when the victim feels
dissatisfied--that the theory of intervention underlying this approach was
incorrect or inappropriate? Or was this apparent failure due to the fact that
the conference was inadequately implemented?

The first concern with determining whether an intervention has actually
occurred is a construct validity issue of the utmost importance in
evaluating any new initiative. The possibility of multiple interpretations of
terms like "mediation," "shaming," and even "involvement" leaves new
processes open to the phenomenon in which the name of very traditional
practices is simply changed to fit new trends (e.g., community policing,
restorative justice), with little or no actual change in content. To avoid
situations in which relabeled traditional practices are evaluated as
restorative justice or community justice programs, it is important to
establish definitions and criteria for determining whether and to what
extent an intervention has occurred.

More commonly, because consistency with underlying principles in
processes such as mediation often varies along a continuum (Umbreit,
n.d.), it is important in evaluation to have access to common criteria that
allow for valid and reliable assessment of intervention integrity. Such
criteria would reflect one or more dimensions of practical and theoretical
importance to practitioners and participants in implementing a youth
sanctioning model, and they could be used to compare different
implementations of the same or contrasting models.

Ideally, multiple dimensions could be grouped into theoretically
meaningful categories based on underlying propositions about why each
dimension is important. Such a classification also makes possible the
development of independent variable categories associated with specific
theories of intervention or logical propositions. These theories as
propositions would be based on assumptions about the importance of such
characteristics as where the intervention occurs, who is involved,
participant roles, the nature of the process, and the importance attached to
crime victim needs and reparation. Ultimately, such variable sets might
allow for comparisons between, for example, the relative importance of a
neighborhood location and active citizen involvement in sanctioning
processes, or between an emphasis on victim input and a focus on
participation of other stakeholders.

For purposes of this discussion, what could be a wide range of dimensions
for classifying the inputs of community justice decisionmaking is divided
into three conceptual categories. First, several dimensions of variation that
view the neighborhood as the locus of decisionmaking and reflect
concerns related to place, proximity, and availability of justice services are
classified here under the larger conceptual category of accessibility.
Second, several characteristics referred to as community justice
dimensions (Barajas, 1995) relate primarily to the role of the community
as both the object of and coparticipant in intervention. Finally, the
category of restorative justice refers to dimensions focused on reparation
of harm, victim involvement and victim needs, and a process that defines
an active role for victim, community, and offender.[8]

Although overlap between these categories in practice makes clear
division of specific community sanctioning interventions into these
categories impossible, each category adds theoretically and practically
important evaluation criteria that can be used in defining the inputs or
independent variables in community sanctioning. In describing these
dimensions, family group conferencing, community boards, circle
sentencing, and victim-offender mediation are used as ideal types to
illustrate the general range of variation in community sanctioning inputs.

As the case examples (see exhibit 2) imply, there is substantial variation
among the four youth sanctioning models in how the decisionmaking
process is organized, the primary goals of participants, how and to what
extent they prioritize efforts to involve citizens and build community
ownership, and the role assigned to victims, community members, and
offenders. Making sense of these differences as "inputs" into the
sanctioning process can help evaluators assess the consistency and
comprehensiveness of the implementation of various approaches. Beyond
their relevance in these evolving models, such dimensions should prove
useful in comparing other community sanctioning processes.

Accessibility dimensions: Neighborhood location, flexibility, and
informality

Historically, the most common and predominant concept in the discussion
and practice of community justice has been accessibility to justice
services. In this regard, the new youth sanctioning models can be
compared on the basis of three primary dimensions that address the extent
to which justice processes and services are easily available and likely to be
used by neighborhood residents who represent target users. These
dimensions are labeled location/proximity, flexibility, and informality.

Location/proximity. The assumption underlying concern with location--
distance as a primary barrier to participation in and satisfaction with
justice services--has at various periods in recent history prompted a
movement to physically decentralize justice services--often with a special
focus on inner-city neighborhoods thought to need them most. Initially a
primary motivator for community-based corrections, team and
neighborhood policing, neighborhood dispute resolution, and foot patrol,
this theme is also heard in the community sanctioning movement. 

Assessing variation in proximity as an independent variable involves
measuring to what extent distance varies for individuals involved in a
community sanctioning process and to what extent this affects overall
satisfaction and other long- and short-term outcomes. Researchers should
also examine whether residents are indeed more likely to participate in
sanctioning processes in their own neighborhood and the extent to which
lack of transportation may be an obstacle. At the program level, evaluators
may wish to compare outcomes (such as client satisfaction) of programs
held in neighborhoods with those held in more centralized settings. They
may also wish to examine the extent to which neighborhood sanctioning
programs vary in the average distance participants must travel to access
justice services and processes.

Turning to the four youth sanctioning models, it is clear that each takes
place in neighborhood locations such as community centers, schools,
churches, and other informal settings (see exhibit 3). Actual proximity to
most users is unknown and has not been a topic of discussion or
investigation in existing evaluations; it appears that in practice some
models like victim-offender mediation (VOM) seem less concerned with
neighborhood location than others. Mediation sessions may even be held
in centralized locations (near courthouses, for example) to attract more
clients or users, or in the victim's home if the offender agrees. While
advocates of all models prefer holding youth sanctioning events close to
participants, it is only in community boards that neighborhood setting
appears to be a key concern. 

Flexibility. The flexibility dimension refers to efforts to adapt working
hours, staffing, and services to the needs of neighborhood residents
(Rottman, 1996; Stone, 1996). Decentralization may also be a component
of this dimension (Clear, 1996), since an objective of such efforts may be
(but is not necessarily) to allow and encourage managers to reorganize
agencies to avoid multiple units, narrow specializations, and
compartmentalization. Because these features add to citizens' difficulties
in understanding (and thus accessing) the justice process and also limit the
capacity of professionals to respond to the diverse needs of communities,
this aspect frequently has been mentioned by advocates of community
sanctioning (Stuart, 1995b; McElrae, 1993), as well as by more
mainstream advocates of juvenile court reform (Edwards, 1996). One of
the most theoretically interesting aspects of this dimension is the ability of
justice professionals to adapt their professional roles to various and often
diverse community needs outside their job description. Community
policing initially was the prototype for this "role stretch" or "role blurring"
as law enforcement officers became community police officers and found
themselves with a new rationale for accepting an assignment that included
service provision, prevention, capacity building, and problem solving
(Stephens and Moore, 1988).

The degree of flexibility in community youth sanctioning processes could
be assessed by examining the roles of professional and paraprofessional
staff and using client surveys and interviews. The latter would seek to
determine if users perceive the process as rigid and narrow or if staff are
viewed as willing to meet diverse local needs, rather than be bound by job
descriptions and departmental protocols. Variation in flexibility among the
four models seems again relatively minimal. But while practitioners of
each model attempt to adapt the process somewhat to local needs, role
stretch or role blurring is apparent primarily in circle sentencing, where
police officers, judges, and prosecutors play the role of citizen participant
in the circle process after fulfilling their legal responsibility (e.g., reading
the charges) (Bazemore, 1997b). In two models, VOM and CB
(community boards), justice system professionals are involved in only the
most distant sense, usually as sources of referral. In family group
conferencing (FGC) programs that use the Australian (or Wagga Wagga)
model, a police officer is a facilitator of a sanctioning process. This role
may vary depending on the extent to which the officer views his or her
function as a coordinator and facilitator or as administering sanctions and
leading a shaming process (Alder and Wundersitz, 1994; Umbreit and
Stacy, 1995). The role of the coordinator as key staff person varies from
the multifaceted one in circle sentencing to the very minor one on most
community boards to the more focused role of the mediator in victim-
offender mediation (see exhibit 3).

Informality. Informality may also increase access by limiting formal
legalistic barriers and procedures, which alienate many citizens from
courts and other justice agencies. Getting away from rules and procedures,
providing an array of nonlegal or paralegal services not typically provided
by courts (e.g. counseling, victim support), and offering informal
mediation and problem-solving options that allow citizens to speak and
enhance the human and humanistic qualities of the process are all features
of the informality dimension (National Institute of Justice, 1996; Zehr,
1990). The level of informality can be measured in part by the number and
range of nonadversarial processes, but also by observation of how services
are provided and the extent to which the process itself is rule- and
procedure-driven or informal.

Comparison of the formality of the four models (except most CBs, which
tend to deliberate cases) reveals that decisionmaking is more or less
achieved by consensus of participants (including victim and offender). In
no case is there anything resembling an adversarial process. While all
models are informal, process and protocol vary substantially, from ancient
rituals involving passing the feather or talking stick, to the "script" of
FGC, to the nondirective and facilitative approach now taught to many, if
not most, mediators in VOM programs (Umbreit, 1994). The amount of
time allowed for decisionmaking is also an indicator of the extent to which
the process is driven by court case processing or caseload requirements
(see exhibit 3). A central critique of the formal court process among VOM
advocates, for example, has been the primary emphasis on speed and
efficiency. Mediation practitioners insist on ensuring that time in VOM is
based primarily on the needs of what are for them the primary clients of
justice processes--victim and offender.

Limits to improving access. The relative influence of having a justice
decisionmaking or sanctioning process in one's neighborhood, the
flexibility of process, and whether it is adaptable, user-friendly, and
comfortable are empirical questions. For many, the various dimensions of
accessibility are no doubt central, because citizens cannot easily
experience justice from a distance and are unlikely to participate if the
process is overly complex, unfriendly, or formal.

All accessibility distinctions, however, appear to take as a given a constant
flow of otherwise willing participants who are simply limited from
involvement by logistical and "user-unfriendly" barriers. As the
experience with community corrections indicates, however, simply
locating courts and other agencies in neighborhoods, in the absence of
involvement of community groups and residents, often results in isolated
programs that may be said to be in but not of the community (Byrne,
1989; Clear, 1996). 

Breaking down formal barriers and increasing flexibility may increase
citizen willingness to seek and receive assistance. But improving access
does not change the primary role of citizens from service recipient to
decisionmaker or partner in a justice process that provides a feeling of
ownership over what services are provided and how they are delivered. It
is in part this intentional effort to increase community involvement and
ownership that distinguishes the accessibility dimensions from the next
major category--community justice.

Community justice dimensions: Role of the community

Community justice has been defined as:

. . . all variants of crime prevention and justice activities that explicitly
include the community in their processes. Community justice is rooted in
the actions that citizens, community organizations, and the criminal justice
system can take to control crime and social disorder. Its central focus is
community-level outcomes, shifting the emphasis from individual
incidents to systemic patterns, from individual conscience to social mores,
and from individual good to the common good (Karp, 1997, p. 3).

Like the neighborhood dimensions, the new practice and emerging theory
of community justice suggest a preference for neighborhood-based, more
accessible, and less formal justice services (National Institute of Justice,
1996) that to the greatest extent possible move the locus of the justice
response closest to those affected by crime.

Community justice uniquely changes the role of the community in the
justice process. While accessibility may reinforce the strength of
community justice efforts and may even make them possible,
professionals and community groups may begin to move forward with this
role change even in the absence of a neighborhood location. The change in
the role of the community has four important dimensions: how the
community is defined for purposes of intervention; the extent to which
community change, or community-building, is a focus of intervention; the
extent to which citizens and community groups are active participants; and
the scope of discretion granted to citizens and community groups as
collaborators in decisionmaking.

1. What is the "community" in community sanctioning? The first
dimension, the definition of community, has been conceptually
problematic in all neighborhood- or community-based interventions.
Community is often an amorphous concept that more often confuses than
clarifies issues of citizen involvement in government-sponsored processes.
It is possible, however, to break the community into component parts for
purposes of discussing citizen involvement in public life and government
intervention with citizens and community groups. Community may be
defined, for example, as a school, church, workplace, city block, extended
family, tribe, or support group (Gardner, 1990). 

How community is operationalized for purposes of community justice
sanctioning--who is at the table--will have tremendous importance for all
other key dimensions of community justice (Bazemore, 1997b). Assessing
the scope of the community definition in a community youth sanctioning
process will involve contrasting both the intent of the process and the
reality of participation. The latter can be measured only by observing who
is present, noting the role of the participants, and interviewing citizen
participants to determine their perceptions of the experience and their
influence on the process. Intent is in part determined by the structure of
various models and the importance attached to citizen involvement in each
(see exhibit 4).

While the community may be defined de facto as anyone who attends a
community sanctioning meeting, the specific definition of community in
each model runs the gamut from the most restricted focus on only victim
and offender in traditional VOM, to the widest definition in circle
sentencing, to the rather "hand-picked" community of appointed board
members present at community board hearings. In comparing VOM and
FGC, for example, one may examine outcomes to determine the impact of
parties on mediation (e.g., family members, friends) who are essential
participants in the FGC or CS process. Or one may compare mediation,
FGC, or CS sessions in which the victim was not present.

2. Community as object of intervention. As James Byrne (1989, p. 10) has
noted, "offender-based control strategies are incomplete, since they take a
closed system view of correctional interventions: change the offender and
not the community." The second dimension of community justice is best
described as the extent to which the object of intervention changes from
the offender to the community and community groups. In community
policing, for example, the emphasis changed from arresting individuals to
working with and through community members in problem solving and
capacity building (Sparrow, Moore, and Kennedy, 1990). The latter were
aimed at supporting citizens in attempting to change institutions and
community groups rather than seeking to apprehend, or alter the behavior
of, individual offenders.

Such interventions, like those now becoming more common in corrections
(Dooley, 1995) and other fields, seek to strengthen the capacity of the
community, community groups, and socializing institutions to control and
prevent crime (Barajas, 1995; Bazemore and Schiff, 1996). In contrast to
both accessibility and restorative justice dimensions, a primary aspect of
this work with the community as client is preventive. Efforts based on this
perspective focus less on remedial and ameliorative services and more on
proactive attempts to change conditions in neighborhoods and institutions
believed to be criminogenic; less on targeting individual delinquents and
at-risk youths and more on institutional change to promote youth
development and personal growth (Polk and Kobrin, 1972; Lofquist, 1983;
Pittman and Fleming, 1991).

Much more information is needed on what interventions focusing on
community rather than individual change actually look like in practice.
However, in assessing variation on this dimension it is possible to
distinguish commitment to the idea of community as the target of
intervention in part by how community sanctioning staff view and
operationalize their role. A primary measure might be the amount of time
devoted to individual casework compared to organizing sanctioning
panels, developing victim support groups, job development, community
training, and other such tasks. In addition, researchers should examine the
extent to which time is devoted to preventive efforts that seek to change
educational or employment practices, increase citizen and community
group skills in conflict resolution, provide services to victims, and support
mentoring young offenders.

The extent to which the community is targeted for intervention, at least in
intent, differs substantially among the four youth sanctioning models (see
exhibit 4). The content of the intervention directed at community change
varies from simply attempting to increase the number of citizens
participating in CBs to involving residents in a reintegrative shaming
process in FGC (Braithwaite and Mugford, 1994). Intervention may also
differ in scope. This is shown in the contrast between CS participants'
holistic efforts to promote community healing, peacemaking, and capacity
building for increased involvement (Stuart, 1995a; Bazemore, 1997b) on
the one hand, and the micro-level and incidental efforts of VOM staff to
involve the community by recruiting additional volunteer mediators on the
other. What differences in outcomes for victim, offender, and community
would be expected, for example, as a result of the CS focus compared with
that of VOM, which is concerned first with victim outcomes, second with
offender outcomes, and only very indirectly with the community?

3. Community as participant. While the second community justice
dimension can be interpreted as changing the intervention target from
individuals to communities and community groups, the third dimension--
involvement--is concerned with the extent to which the community is
granted and assumes an active role as participant in justice processes
(Pranis, 1997a; Griffiths and Hamilton, 1996). This role is alternatively
labeled "coparticipant," "stakeholder," "partner," and other terms such as
"customer." Such designations suggest meaningful input into, as well as
significant responsibility for, the response to crime (Stuart, 1995b;
Barajas, 1995; Bazemore and Day, 1996). Another way of expressing the
difference between this dimension and the second community justice
dimension is through the distinction between the community as a recipient
of service and the community as an entity with both needs and
responsibilities in the justice process. Such community needs and
responsibilities are largely interdependent and, as some proponents argue,
cannot be met without active, sustained citizen participation (Pranis,
1997b; Bazemore, 1997b).

One of the most important tasks for empirical research concerned with the
collaboration/involvement dimension will be to examine the extent to
which citizens wish to participate. Systematic surveys conducted before
establishing reparative boards in the Vermont Department of Corrections
resulted in affirmative answers to their question (Dooley, 1995). There are
other initial concerns, however, which might include the extent to which a
community sanctioning process really invites participation, how
volunteers are recruited, and the clarity of expectations for citizen
participants. Observational techniques and written attendance records, if
they exist, can be used to determine the mix of potential participants at the
table over time in community sanctioning processes, how they
participated, and what difference it made in the process and initial
outcomes (e.g., the number of sanctioning agreements reached, initial
victim satisfaction). Indeed, in practice, there are subtle differences along
this continuum of involvement that may be driven both by the nature of
the specific sanctioning intervention and by the willingness of juvenile
justice professionals to assume the role of collaborator and facilitator,
rather than primary provider of services (McElrae, 1993; Bazemore,
1997a). Community sanctioning approaches may therefore be ranked
along other continua that attempt to assess intensity and type of
participation. 

The four models suggest that participation may well vary depending in
part on which citizens are targeted for participation, how they are
recruited, and the commitment to ensuring attendance. Community boards
are the only intervention that tends to formalize participation, generally by
appointing a group of semipermanent board members who typically
deliberate in sanctioning sessions scheduled for specific days. The other
models rely more or less on word of mouth and hope to sustain enough
interest to attract interested participants. Some Australian FGC programs
have suffered from an apparent lack of commitment to ensuring citizen
(especially crime victim) participation (Alder and Wundersitz, 1994),
while New Zealand conferences appear to have devoted resources to
ensuring that "communities of concern" are present (Maxwell and Morris,
1993). Circles rely heavily on word of mouth with apparent success, at
least in aboriginal communities (Stuart, 1995a; Griffiths and Hamilton,
1996), although it is possible that community justice committee members
themselves are often the core participants. Mediation programs typically
make strong efforts to involve victims and offenders and may allow
(though not usually recruit) family and other community members to
participate.

4. Community as collaborator and "driver." Dan Van Ness has written that
"government is responsible for preserving order, but the community is
responsible for establishing peace" (Van Ness et al., 1989). The fourth
community justice dimension is concerned with the extent to which
community groups are granted discretion by the justice system to work
toward this goal and with the nature and scope of discretion granted.
While related to involvement, the collaboration dimension is centered
more on concepts such as power sharing, community empowerment,
active collaboration, the devolution of justice decisionmaking (Griffiths
and Hamilton, 1996), and citizen ownership of a process that is to some
degree outside the absolute control of the formal justice system. One
practitioner, Kaye Pranis (1997a), has described this dimension as an
evolving relationship between justice systems and communities in which
the community role slowly changes in relation to changes in the
government role. This change from "expert" crisis manager with no need
for community input to partner with the community occurs as citizens
assume more responsibility and provide more input in an emerging
collaborative process. Stages along the way may reflect intermediate steps
in which the justice system attempts to become more information-driven
(Clear, 1996) and community-focused.

At the highest level of collaboration, justice intervention may be referred
to as community-driven (see exhibit 5). The basis for partnership at this
level is a normative commitment to the community's role as moral
authority, as the first line of reaction and decisionmaking in the response
to crime (Pranis 1997a, p. 4). The government, in the form of the justice
system, acts as legal authority, assuming a role of broad oversight and
support as well as guardian of individual rights (Braithwaite and Parker,
1998).

For practical purposes, especially in the context of community youth
sanctioning models, this dimension is best assessed by first examining the
structural relationship of the community-based process to the formal
process. One specific component of this relationship is the extent to which
the sanctioning intervention or program depends on courts or other
government agencies for referrals. While some relationship with the
formal system is almost always necessary, what is at issue here is the
extent to which the process is driven by system needs--for example, to
reduce court dockets or divert offenders--or by the needs of citizens,
victims, and offenders (Van Ness, 1993).

The issue of discretion and gatekeeping also raises questions about the
degree of power sharing in decisionmaking and the role of the formal
system in the process. What degree of collaboration and authority is
granted to the community by the system? At two extremes, the system's
relationship to the community may be one of facilitator/collaborator or
agent of co-optation and control. A second component is whether both
paid and unpaid staff view their primary "client" as the probation
department, the judges, or the prosecutor--or the victims, offenders, and
citizens involved (see exhibit 4). Unintended consequences of
collaboration with formal agencies include co-optation of the community
justice process (Griffiths and Hamilton, 1996; Bazemore and Griffiths,
1997), while extreme independence, on the other hand, leads to irrelevance
and marginalization.

The four youth sanctioning models vary significantly on the gatekeeping
and discretion dimension, as well as on the relationship of each process to
the formal system. Regarding relationships to the formal system,
discretion is played out in control over admission to the process, indicated
in part by differences in the range of offenders eligible. Notably, eligible
offenders range from rather minor first offenders to violent, chronic
offenders (in the case of circle sentencing). While each model seems
capable of claiming some discretion for citizens, only circle sentencing
allows citizens control over admission. New Zealand FGC law requires
that local sanctioning conferences dispose of cases for adjudicated
delinquents or those admitting guilt for all offenses except homicide, rape,
and aggravated assault. Hence, the New Zealand conferences are the only
other approach that frequently admits delinquents who commit more
serious offenses. New Zealand FGC also allows citizens input in decisions
about the need for custody and because of their broad legislative mandate
have the only truly significant impact on court caseloads. In VOM the
victim is in one sense the primary gatekeeper because victim participation
is totally voluntary, but most programs depend on court, probation, and
diversion programs for referrals. Their relative independence and
commitment to victims and offenders as clients, however, may be driven
in part by whether VOM programs operate as a unit of courts or probation
or function as somewhat independent community agencies (Belgrave,
1995).

Of the four models, circle sentencing provides perhaps the best case study
in power sharing. Interestingly, this emerged as an issue when Northern
Canadian community justice committees in the gatekeeper role expressed
a desire to hear some of the most, rather than least, serious cases in the
circle process (Griffiths and Hamilton, 1996). In contrast to community
sanctioning programs, which function essentially as diversion programs
and in which judge and prosecutor presence is rare, in sentencing circles
key system decisionmakers are often present (and must be present in
felony/indictable cases). As the case example suggests, however, during
circle discussions, the role of the justice professional quickly becomes one
of citizen, supporting other participants in the process to the greatest
extent possible.

Does collaboration with formal justice agencies lead inevitably to co-
optation? Does independence from the formal system lead to irrelevance?
While these may seem like unusual questions for emerging and somewhat
marginal programs, the concern with them has been part of the tradition of
community and neighborhood justice for three decades (Harrington and
Merry, 1988). The more basic issue in some of the most extreme rhetoric
of community justice is the extent to which courts and the formal system
are indeed perceived as part of the community--or as enemies of
community and community justice. For most proponents of youth
sanctioning models, however, this issue is one of simply wanting to give
citizens some control over decision-making. This desire is based on the
practical rationale that control will increase the likelihood of their
sustained participation and the belief that when granted discretion in
sanctioning, citizens will make wise decisions (Stuart, 1995b; Bazemore,
1997a).

While the community justice dimensions raise important questions, one
criticism is that the rationales and goals of these interventions are often not
specific about what the community groups and justice system staff are
trying to accomplish in the proposed collaborative process. By engaging
citizens in the justice process, community justice sets the context for a
different kind of nonadversarial sanctioning intervention but often says
little about content and objectives in the response to the crime. 

Although community justice is often said to be process driven (Karp,
1997), the nature of that process is addressed only briefly. In addition,
even though the process focuses on community-level outcomes, they are
generally not specified, and the nature of changes expected in citizen,
victim, and offender participants is not addressed. 

Restorative justice dimensions: coparticipants in repairing harm

In the absence of a set of underlying values or principles that give priority
to certain outcomes and specificity to the roles of participants, it can be
argued that, at one extreme, the lines between community justice processes
and a lynch mob are not clearly drawn. More typically, it is difficult to
locate common principles that can bring together diverse groups in an
informal community sanctioning process that operates with respect and
regard for individual rights.

Restorative justice can be distinguished from community justice in that it
is not simply community focused and process driven but also explicitly
value driven. Restorative justice therefore begins with value statements
about the primary goal of intervention and the process itself. Specifically,
because crime is viewed first as harm to victims and victimized
communities, the justice intervention must focus on repairing this harm, or
"healing the wound" crime causes (Zehr, 1990; Van Ness et al., 1989). The
process necessarily elevates the role of the victim and focuses on victim
needs, while allowing for victim, offender, and community input and
involvement in a process that seeks to find common ground and attend to
the mutual needs of each coparticipant.

As the case studies illustrate, the extent of focus on harm; the prominence
given to victim needs; and the specific, active roles of victim, offender,
and community members are also variable features of the four models. In
addition, there may be a substantial relative difference in emphasis in each
application of each specific model.

Restorative justice therefore has three unique dimensions of variation in
community youth sanctioning: the general focus on repair, the central and
elevated role of the victim, and the emphasis on a process that seeks
mutual involvement and support for three coparticipants and is explicitly
attuned to the role of each in producing justice outcomes.

Repairing harm. Currently, when a crime is committed, two primary
questions are asked: Who did it? and What should be done to the offender?
The latter question is generally followed with another question about the
most appropriate punishment and, when the crime is committed by a
juvenile, the most appropriate treatment or service. Viewed through the
restorative "lens," however, crime is understood in a broader context than
that suggested by the questions of guilt and what should be done to the
offender. Howard Zehr (1990) argues that in restorative justice three very
different questions receive primary emphasis. First, what is the nature of
the harm resulting from the crime? Second, what needs to be done to make
it right or repair the harm? Third, who is responsible for making it right or
repairing the harm?

The restorative justice response to crime is best described as a three-
dimensional collaborative process involving victim, offender, and
community. The restorative justice vision for juvenile justice reform is
best understood by examining what this response might look like for these
three coparticipants (see exhibit 6).

For the victim, restorative justice offers the hope of restitution or other
forms of reparation, information about the case, the opportunity to be
heard, and input in the case, as well as expanded opportunities for
involvement and influence. For the community, there is the promise of
reduced fear and safer neighborhoods, a more accessible justice process,
and accountability, as well as the obligation for involvement in
sanctioning crime, restoring victims' sense of well-being, reintegrating
offenders, and crime prevention and control. For the offender, restorative
justice requires accountability in the form of obligations to repair the harm
to individual victims and victimized communities and the opportunity to
develop new competencies and social skills and the capacity to avoid
future crime.

Zehr's first two questions require that the first dimension of assessment in
restorative justice is the extent to which harm is effectively identified and
that a plan is crafted to repair the harm. This cannot be done in a vacuum,
and these questions are best answered with input from victims and
victimized communities. The extent to which the process concentrates on
answering these questions is then a key variable in assessing the reparative
dimension of restorative justice. Based on key principles of restorative
justice, the focus on reparation can also be assessed by variation in the
extent to which: participants define crime as an act against another person
and the community rather than the state; the offender is accountable first to
the victim and community, while the state is responsible for ensuring that
these obligations are met; accountability is defined as taking responsibility
for the offense and acting to repair the harm; and the community plays a
role in setting the terms of accountability, assisting offenders in repaying
the debt, supporting victims, and reintegrating offenders (Braithwaite and
Mugford, 1994; Pranis, 1997b).

Answering Zehr's third question, which concerns responsibility for
repairing harm, requires that the process is geared to the future in ensuring
that these obligations are met. While formal restitution programs have
devoted extensive effort to documenting harm and developing clear and
workable payment schedules (Schneider, 1985; Schneider, 1990), much
more observation of the various community sanctioning processes is
needed to determine the extent to which obligations and actions are
identified and followup occurs. Community sanctioning processes are well
situated to engage citizens in monitoring, and each seeks this desirable
goal of having citizens assume responsibility for enforcing obligations.
Little is known about the ability of most of these processes to ensure that
reparative agreements are carried out, however.

In comparing the four models on the reparative dimension of restorative
justice (see exhibit 7), the relative concern with reparation to victim and
victimized communities is assessed in part by the attention to detail in
enforcement and followup and to a lesser extent in preparation. Repair is
by no means limited to financial reparation, and the concern with followup
is a major dimension that applies also to ensuring that emotional and other
needs are addressed. Victim-offender mediation staff often take on this
responsibility or work with court or probation systems to do so (Umbreit
and Coates, 1993). Circle sentencing appears to go furthest toward actively
assigning responsibilities to victim and offender support groups, and
community justice committees generally require some demonstration of
initial reparation before admission to the circle (Stuart, 1995b; Bazemore,
1997b). Less information is available on the other models, although in the
most extensive evaluation of family group conferencing to date in New
Zealand, reparative agreements often were found to be unfulfilled
(Maxwell and Morris, 1993). In any case, this critical enforcement
variable should be a key focus in examining variation on the reparative
dimension.

Because the emphasis on repair is almost never an "either/or" concern in
community sanctioning, several continua are now available that include
indicators of the extent to which this dimension has been addressed (Zehr,
1990; Umbreit, n.d.; Claussen, 1996). Zehr, for example, includes the
following assessment questions in his restorative justice "yardstick": "Do
victims receive needed compensation or restitution? Do victims receive
adequate support from others? Do victims' families receive adequate
assistance and support? Are other needs--material, psychological, and
spiritual--being addressed? Is there a need for symbolic restitution for the
community? Are there provisions for monitoring and verifying outcomes
and for problem solving?" (Zehr, 1990, Appendix).

Role of the victim. Although not the only dimension of restorative justice
(Van Ness, 1993; Bazemore, 1996; Bazemore and Maloney, 1994), the
victim's central, essential, and elevated role perhaps most distinguishes
restorative justice interventions from those that may be labeled
"neighborhood or community justice." Assessing this dimension could
involve a range of observations, interviews, and victim impact surveys to
measure how much the process attends to victim needs and concerns,
provides for victim safety, allows victims to express their feelings, meets
victim needs for information, and makes the victim feel that these things
have occurred. In this regard, Mark Umbreit (n.d.), for example, has
developed restorative justice continua that center on the victim experience
in various justice processes, with a special emphasis on victim-offender
dialogue.

While these factors can vary substantially within each implementation of a
specific community sanctioning model, some of the possible variation in
these dimensions can be attributed to structural and procedural differences
among the four models (exhibit 7). The victim's role, the emphasis on
preparation, and the nature of the process indicate primary concern with
this dimension in the VOM protocol. While in VOM victims speak first
and extensive preparation aims to ensure their concerns are addressed,
CBs and some implementations of FGC, for example, appear less
structured to do so. Circle sentencing, on the other hand, provides at least
equally extensive pre- and post-session work directed at victim concerns
and is the only approach that provides for a victim support group (Stuart,
1995a). It is possible, however, that the broader concerns of CS and FGC
(which include offender healing, and offender shaming and reintegration,
respectively) may overwhelm the process when offender needs appear to
be extensive. These are all empirical questions, however, which should be
addressed by comparing how these processes achieve victim, offender, and
community satisfaction and other outcomes.

Role of three coparticipants and the restorative process. Despite the
prominent and elevated role restorative justice assigns to the victim, the
concept cannot be reduced to a victim rights agenda, and interventions are
certainly not limited to victim services or addressing victim impact alone.
From a restorative justice perspective, the emphasis on victim healing and
reparation itself implies a critical, though at times indirect, role for
offender and community. If there is a theory underlying restorative justice,
it is that neither offenders nor victims are well served when the needs of
one or the other and the community are neglected. Justice is best served
when the needs of each are addressed and each is involved in crafting the
response to crime (Zehr, 1990; Van Ness, 1993). When justice is viewed
as repairing harm and rebuilding damaged relationships, the response to
crime must attend to all those damaged by crime.

In addition to the prominent role restorative justice assigns to the victim, it
can also be distinguished from community justice by its specification of a
critical role in the justice process for the other parties most affected by the
crime: victim, offender, and those closest to both (Braithwaite and Parker,
1998; Bazemore, 1997b). From a restorative justice perspective,
community responses to crime would be judged by the extent to which the
process is sensitive to the needs of each party. Regarding assessment of
this dimension, Zehr's third question about responsibility is again relevant.
Specifically, assessment would measure whether the coparticipants are
assigned meaningful and active roles in the justice process.

The following questions may be asked in developing indicators of how
much common ground was found in a community youth sanctioning
process that meets the mutual needs of the three coparticipants suggested
by Zehr (1990, Appendix): "Is the victim-offender relationship addressed?
Can victims and offenders meet, if appropriate? Can victims and offenders
exchange information about the event and about one another? Are
community concerns taken into account? Is the process and the outcome
sufficiently public? Is community protection addressed? Does the
community need restitution and/or symbolic reparation? Is the community
represented in the legal process?" 

In examining the experience of the three clients in community sanctioning
and determining the impact on immediate outcomes, evaluators will look
closely at the impact of the sanction itself (Schiff, n.d.). But equally if not
more important than the actual sanction of restitution, victim service, or
community service assigned to offenders is the process by which these
sanctions are meted out. So vital is the nature of the decisionmaking
process that some proponents of restorative justice argue that process and
outcome are not easily separated. Few sanctioning processes have been
rigorously evaluated and there has been little attempt to separate the
influence of process and sanction completion. However, the various
theories and perspectives underlying the "reintegrative shaming" process
in family group conferencing (Tomkins, 1992; Retzinger and Scheff,
1996; Moore and O'Connell, 1994) should provide further impetus for
expanding an evaluation aimed at a closer examination of process in
community youth sanctioning (Hudson et al., 1996; Maxwell and Morris,
1993). 

An assumption of restorative justice now more frequently discussed is that
sanctioning processes are more likely to enhance rehabilitation and
reintegration when they directly involve family, victims, and key members
of the offender's community (Braithwaite and Mugford, 1994; Stuart,
1995a). Some have also gone further to suggest that strict adherence to a
balance of power between victim and offender supporters may critically
influence the dynamic of this process (Braithwaite and Parker, 1998). If
held frequently, restorative justice community conferences, which bring
citizens and victims together accomplish much more than sanctioning the
offender. The conferencing process contains some basic elements of true
offender and victim support groups (Stuart, 1995b). However, if not
carried out with a thorough grounding in restorative goals and values,
FGC and other processes may exacerbate the reintegration problem (Polk,
1994; Umbreit and Stacy, 1995). Empirical questions can be asked to
determine if a specific sanctioning approach or process is likely to be
helpful or harmful. John Braithwaite and Stephen Mugford's (1994)
distinction between "conditions of successful reintegration ceremonies"
that differentiate condemnation of the act from condemnation of the actor-
-and processes that promote "status degradation" (Garfinkel, 1956) is a
useful criterion in this assessment.

Summary

In outlining three types of dimensions that may influence outcomes in
these processes, the goal has been to suggest a systematic way of
classifying independent variable influences that have empirical and
theoretical coherence. Because community justice dimensions are likely to
also encompass a concern with neighborhood dimensions, and because
restorative community justice is likely to be sensitive to both, there is an
implicit bias in favor of the latter. However, because certain restorative
justice interventions occur in places other than neighborhoods and provide
only a symbolic role for the community (an example is community service
in a jail or other secure facility), the categories are in fact independent.[9] 

For community and restorative justice to be effective, justice must first be
accessible--justice agencies may have to locate in neighborhoods and
otherwise make themselves more user friendly. But this first step does not
guarantee a change in the community's role or a commitment to serve and
to make whole the victim, the offender, and the community. While this
restorative challenge of getting the process right for each participant is
significant, the community justice challenge of power sharing and
community ownership seems to be even more difficult. 

Discussion: Determining "what works" in community sanctioning 

A shortcoming of this paper's singular focus on dimensions for defining
independent variables in community youth sanctioning has been a failure
to discuss impact measures. Although the importance of clear outcome
measures for community justice processes cannot be disputed (Bazemore,
1997a), it is also important to determine what citizens and professionals
are doing (and what they believe that they are doing) in community youth
sanctioning before jumping into impact evaluation. Specifically, before
evaluators impose outcomes and impact designs on interventions not fully
understood, they should think carefully about whether they can describe
inputs, processes, and intended outputs. The next step before moving to
impact evaluation is to develop a clear conceptualization of how these are
linked in intervention theories or logic models (Horowitz, 1991).

Impact evaluation designs for community youth sanctioning present some
interesting, if not completely unique, challenges. The questions does it
work or how well does it work must be addressed by first asking another
question: work for whom? As Judge Barry Stuart insisted:

. . . Communities should not measure the success of any [community-
based initiative] based upon what happens to the offenders. The impact of
community-based initiatives on victims, the self-esteem of others working
[in the community justice process], strengthening families, building
connections within the community, enforcing community values, and
mobilizing community action to reduce factors causing crime ultimately
make the community safer. While not readily visible, these impacts are in
the long run significantly more important than the immediate impact on an
offender's habits (Stuart, 1995b, p. 6).

Recidivism and other traditional offender-focused measures will remain
important in evaluating community and restorative justice sanctioning
interventions. The commitment to three clients rather than one, however,
means that offender impact measures alone are insufficient. While
traditional evaluation designs should eventually measure victim and
community impact, measuring the extent of community building, cultural
revitalization, healing, community wellness, and empowerment will prove
more challenging.

A key concern in community youth sanctioning implied throughout this
paper is the need to observe and assess the informal, nonadversarial
processes central to most of these approaches. For purposes of discussing
outcomes, what is most important about these processes is not just their
ability to develop meaningful sanctioning agreements. Rather, what is
most critical (and most difficult for traditional evaluation) is that the
intervention itself is often concerned as much or more with means as ends
and may make little distinction between the two.

The reason for this blurring of process and outcome is that when the
underlying element in crime is viewed as conflict between individuals and
groups (Van Ness et al. 1989; Stuart, 1995a and b), the simple act of
embracing conflict and connecting the parties may be all that needs to
happen. (And it is, in fact, what almost never happens in the formal,
isolating context of the court process, which focuses on minimizing
conflict.)

It is also possible, however, to speak of independent outcomes that occur
when the process has integrity. For example, the development of mutual
respect and a sense of connection between community members is often
cited as an outcome in community sanctioning. Perhaps most significant in
terms of a community macro-level impact is a potential community
learning effect. As Judge Barry Stuart has written:

When citizens fail to assume responsibility for decisions affecting the
community, community life will be characterized by the absence of a
collective sense of caring, a lack of respect for diverse values, and
ultimately a lack of any sense of belonging. Conflict, if resolved through a
process that constructively engages the parties involved, can be a
fundamental building ingredient in any relationship (Stuart, 1995a, p. 8).--

While measuring community learning may seem complex in one sense, in
another, such impacts are gauged by the extent to which processes are
repeated successfully and by the extent to which community sanctioning
programs address more serious problems and accept more serious
offenders. In essence, each successful community sanctioning ceremony
can also be viewed as a demonstration that builds confidence elsewhere in
the community that citizens are capable of resolving conflict.

Rather than question the terms and premises of evaluation in community
justice (which appear to involve developmental if not incremental
outcomes) or the terminology of that evaluation (e.g., healing, capacity
building), evaluators might choose to reexamine the limits of traditional
impact evaluation designs and measurement protocols. These designs and
the research paradigms they reflect are often abstract and attempt to force
a complex reality into impact "templates." As such, they may increase
research efficiency and improve measurement reliability but blind
researchers to the validity that often underlies community justice
processes. Indeed, an emerging criticism of traditional evaluation locates
the problem as much with the designs themselves as with the emergent
and developmental nature of interventions in the real world. As Steven
Bennett (1995) notes, for example, what are often viewed as "stronger
evaluation designs" may identify fewer successes because they fail to take
account of community and organizational impacts and may even impose
research constraints on interventions that hinder the effectiveness of
community groups in achieving their goals (Karp, 1997). While none of
these problems is insurmountable, solving them requires that evaluators be
willing to learn from community sanctioning processes rather than trying
to reshape them to fit the needs of mechanistic evaluation protocols (Karp,
1997).[10]

Community sanctioning and all community justice processes need to be
rigorously evaluated, if for no other reason than the fact that negative,
unintended effects on multiple participants are among the possible
outcomes. Victims, for example, may feel disempowered or abused by a
sanctioning process in which the offender is unwilling to accept
responsibility or in which they feel that most participants favor the
offender. Community members may feel disempowered if expected
power-sharing arrangements with courts and other agencies of the formal
system do not result in shared decision-making or give due consideration
to their recommendations or if they feel that one person or group was
allowed to dominate the process (Griffiths and Corrado, 1998). Carol
LaPrairie (1994) observed competing or conflicting goals in current
community sanctioning experiments in Canada as follows:

On the one hand, community justice is about autonomy, empowerment,
and control. On the other hand, community justice is about tradition and,
in contemporary terms, about "healing" and the transformation of
communities into healthier states of being. The reality, however, is that the
primary goal of community justice is the exercise of social control, the use
of surveillance, and the dispensing of "justice," which may or may not
involve punishment. . . the potential for the community justice to divide
rather than unite people, particularly where communities are small in size
and geographically isolated, is great.

What is important at this stage is that community justice processes be
fairly evaluated. In other words, they should not be held to a standard
higher than the current system. As a Canadian First Nations community
justice coordinator working with circle sentencing put it:

So we make mistakes. Can you say you [in the current system] don't make
mistakes? . . . If you don't think you do, walk through our community;
every family will have something to teach you. . . . By getting involved,
by all of us taking responsibility, it is not that we won't make mistakes . . .
but we would be doing it together, as a community instead of having it
done to us. We need to find peace within our lives . . . in our communities.
We need to make real differences in the way people act and the way we
treat others. . . . Only if we empower them and support them can they
break out of this trap. (Rose Couch, Community Justice Coordinator,
Kwalin Dun First Nations, Yukon, Canada. Quoted in Stuart, 1995b.) 

Notes

1. Indeed, all but one of the above approaches has been used in one form
or another with adult offenders, and some of the most interesting and
successful efforts to implement these approaches have occurred in adult
corrections or as alternatives to adult courts (Dooley, 1995; Stuart, 1995a
and b). 

2. Differences between approaches to family group conferencing based
upon the police role, as well as the exclusion of more serious offenders,
have led some to discuss the New Zealand and Australian Wagga Wagga
models as distinct approaches (Alder and Wundersitz, 1994; Umbreit and
Stacy, 1995). A Pennsylvania project based primarily on the Wagga
Wagga model is now being evaluated with funding from the National
Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice.

3. Experiments with circle sentencing are currently being carried out in the
United States in small towns and on Indian reservations in rural
Minnesota. The parallels between circle sentencing and the widely
discussed Navajo peacemaker court models are also obvious (Yazzie,
1993; Melton, 1995). The decision to focus on circle sentencing is based
on its more frequent implementation, growing popularity among
indigenous and nonaboriginal peoples, and links in Canada to a larger
devolution movement (Stuart 1995b; Griffiths and Hamilton, 1996).

4. Findings on both are encouraging, but many unanswered questions
remain, and little is known about other emerging neighborhood-focused
models such as community boards and circle sentencing. While discussion
of existing research findings is beyond the scope of this paper (see Schiff,
n.d.; Umbreit, 1995; Belgrave, 1995 for summaries), what is known about
community sanctioning pales in comparison to what is not known. Family
group conferencing has been the topic of some recent evaluations that
have shown mixed results (Maxwell and Morris, 1993; Hudson and
Galaway, 1996). This model is currently the focus of a comprehensive
study in the United States, and an Australian evaluation is underway.

5. Indeed, many of the key tasks at this stage involve simple observation
and description to determine, for example, whether victims and other
citizens are actually participating in these processes and to characterize the
nature of this participation.

6. Although I believe the dimensions and categories suggested here have
broader applicability, I make no claim beyond the specific focus on youth
sanctioning models. The field is unsettled about what should be included
under the restorative and community justice "tent." Interest in both
concepts is developing at what appears to be a unique period of
convergence between emerging justice philosophies and political, social,
and cultural movements. These movements and philosophies include but
are not limited to: indigenous community justice and the political
movement to "devolve" justice (Griffiths and Hamilton, 1996; Melton,
1995), new developments in and an expanded role for the victims
movement (Young, 1995), the spread of communitarianism and its
application in a justice context (Etzioni, 1993; Moore and O'Connell,
1994), the community and the problem-oriented policing philosophy and
movement (Sparrow, Moore, and Kennedy, 1990), the women's movement
feminist critique of patriarchal justice (Harris, 1990), and the growing
theoretical critique of both just desserts and rights-based, adversarial
perspectives, as well as social welfare models, in criminal and juvenile
justice (Braithwaite and Petit, 1992; Bazemore and Umbreit, 1995;
Walgrave, 1993).

7. For example, the first citizen sanctioning panels in juvenile court
apparently began in New Jersey in 1948 as the result of State legislation.
Neighborhood dispute resolution centers differed from the new
decisionmaking models in that they generally dealt with a more narrow
range of cases, focusing primarily on domestic and neighborhood disputes
rather than crimes per se and also appear to have been motivated primarily
by an attempt to relieve overcrowded court dockets (Garafalo and
Connelly, 1980). As an anonymous reviewer pointed out in commenting
on the currency of community sanctioning, New Jersey has had a
statutorily mandated system of Juvenile Conference Committees since
1948.

8. A great deal of the current writing in community justice at this time is
wrestling with criteria and dimensions. In thinking about dimensions or
the independent variables that are important in evaluating youth
sanctioning models, I have been influenced by several recent efforts to
define key dimensions of community justice (Pranis, 1997a; Clear, 1996;
Karp, 1997), as well as the efforts to define criteria or yardsticks based on
principles of restorative justice (Zehr, 1990; Van Ness et al., 1989;
Umbreit, n.d.; Claussen, 1996). Important themes in both restorative and
community justice also are clearly grounded in applications in aboriginal
and Native American settings (Melton, 1995; Stuart, 1995a and b), from
which have emerged concepts such as healing, atonement, and
reconciliation.

9. Given these concerns, restorative justice interventions thus may or may
not give priority to a neighborhood location or setting but certainly would
place great importance on accessibility and informality. In one sense the
latter is even more important from a restorative justice perspective because
of its emphasis on open expression of feelings and emotions (Zehr, 1990;
Umbreit, 1994). As the sanctioning models described above suggest,
restorative justice interventions also vary in the extent to which the
community is empowered, involved, and targeted for intervention and in
the role assumed by the formal system in the process. But both
neighborhood and community justice dimensions are incorporated in much
restorative justice not simply because of a commitment to accessibility or
the community role in the abstract, but because of the role of these factors
in helping to meet the goal of repairing harm to victims and victimized
communities.

10. Moreover, new evaluation models that take account of developmental,
capacity building impacts (Cohen and Kibel, 1993; Horowitz, 1991) make
it possible to think more creatively about what outcomes can tell us about
whether a neighborhood sanctioning process is helpful, making little
difference, or harmful.

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-------------------------------

The Manhattan Experiment: Community Prosecution

Barbara Boland, Visiting Fellow, National Institute of Justice

Community prosecution is a local political response to the public safety
demands of neighborhoods as expressed in highly concrete terms by
citizens who live in them. Citizens have immediate, specific crime
problems they want addressed that the incident-based 911-driven system
of justice is ill suited to handle. They are aggressively pressing local
authorities to respond to their complaints. Many neighborhood crime
problems involve quality-of-life and disorder issues. In high-crime
neighborhoods, disorder is now overlaid with drugs, gangs, and guns, and
too often the offending behavior is violent and dangerous. Violent
behavior in these neighborhoods is inextricably intertwined with less
serious disorders and conventional street crime. To deal effectively with
any one of these issues requires dealing with the linkages among them. 

The nature of neighborhood crime problems and the responses that are
emerging to address them differ fundamentally from conventional notions
about crime and crimefighting. Current efforts to address citizens' concrete
complaints are altering existing organizational arrangements among
district attorneys, citizens, and police and the actions they take to control
crime. 

What follows chronicles the genesis, activities, and evolution of the
community prosecution experiment in the Manhattan District Attorney's
office that now addresses both quality-of-life crime and serious crime.
These efforts have resulted in the emergence of an organizational capacity
to respond to neighborhood crime problems that are not readily
ameliorated by the traditional case-by-case arrest-convict process. What
began as the assignment of one individual to work with citizens on drugs
and crime has evolved into a varied set of initiatives within the office that
in essence connects the legal expertise of the district attorney's (DA's)
office to citizens in neighborhoods and precinct police. When this
happens, official attention focuses on the specific circumstances and
intricacies of neighborhood crime, and citizens get a response they do not
get "downtown." 

Early work: Citizens, drugs, and traditional prosecution 

In October 1985, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau tapped
Connie Cucchiara, then director of legal staff hiring, to do community
outreach. Morgenthau knew from his contacts with citizens that a lot of
information about crime in neighborhoods was not making its way into his
office. Block associations and community groups sprang up spontaneously
to combat the street drug dealing that hit New York City that year when
the crack-cocaine business took root in northern Manhattan's Washington
Heights. These citizen groups had nowhere to go to get help on a
consistent basis. 

Morgenthau appointed Cucchiara head and sole staff member of a new
Community Affairs unit. She joined the executive staff and set up an
office in a conference room down the hall from Morgenthau, reporting to
the first assistant or directly to Morgenthau. Relocating her office and
shifting her place on the organizational chart was intentional and
important. It sent the message to more than 600 attorneys in the office that
her assignment was important. Cucchiara was not an attorney, but she
could get what she needed from the legal staff. Her directives from the
district attorney were modest: work with citizen groups on drugs and
crime, identify what the office can do for youth (a longstanding concern of
the district attorney), and "don't raise expectations you can't meet." 

Cucchiara, who had worked in the district attorney's office for 9 years, had
no experience in community outreach. She was, however, involved in
activities that shaped the organization's mission, especially as director of
legal staff hiring. She understood what made a good prosecutor, what the
executive staff looked for, the importance of personal integrity, and the
nonpolitical traditions of the office. Despite these traditions, some
attorneys feared that Community Affairs might become a political arm
through which particular communities would seek to influence the
outcome of individual cases for reasons unrelated to legal merit. 

Cucchiara was, and remains, sensitive to this concern, although the
problem has not materialized. She saw her greatest challenge as providing
real service--something of substantive value--to citizens. In 1985, no one
in the office knew what the district attorney could do for the community.
Citizen contact in the performance of the prosecutor's traditional pursuit of
convictions is largely limited to victims and witnesses in individual cases,
most often for serious crimes. Cucchiara's first tasks were to let people
know the office was available to help them and ask them what they need.
She began by reaching out to established institutions and attending
community meetings, bringing along executive legal staff on an as-needed
basis. In January 1986 she and Richard Girgenti, administrative assistant
district attorney, launched the office outreach effort at a community
meeting in Harlem. 

The crack era in New York City. In 1986, drug dealing in neighborhoods
dwarfed all other crime and quality-of-life concerns in New York City.
With the arrival of crack it was "the problem about which people of the
city were most intensely concerned" (McElroy et al., 1993, 6). New York
City (with Los Angeles and Miami) had long been a major distribution
point for Colombian powder cocaine destined for a relatively small
number of traditional hardcore addicts and well-heeled recreational users.
In the early 1980s, a cataclysmic shift to crack production emerged in the
U.S. urban drug market. New York City and Los Angeles were hit first.
Investigative reporter Michael Massing chronicled the events in New York
City.[1] 

According to Massing's account, by the mid-1980s cocaine was arriving in
New York City by the ton. Street dealers had figured out how to make
crack from cocaine. The simultaneous drop in the wholesale price of
powder cocaine, the infusion of a new entrepreneurial class of local
distributors, and the invention of crack (one ounce of cocaine combined
with baking soda produced 1,000 "rocks" of crack cocaine) opened up the
previously exclusive, lucrative cocaine market to unprecedented numbers
of new street dealers and users. For a time, anybody with an investment of
$1,000 could set up an independent retail crack operation. Manhattan
dealers quickly built up thriving street markets in neighborhoods such as
Washington Heights, strategically located near quick entry and exit routes
to serve users and dealers from other parts of the city, New York State,
New Jersey, and Connecticut. Sleepy neighborhoods seemingly overnight
turned into teeming drug locations (Massing, 1989). 

Enforcement difficulties. The enforcement response to this early cottage-
industry phase of the crack epidemic was swift and dramatic. Police
increased arrests, prosecutors increased convictions, and judges increased
sentences to prison. In New York City, felony drug arrests increased from
18,000 to 88,000 between 1980 and 1988 (Fagan and Chin, 1989).
Imprisonments rose even faster. In Manhattan the number of defendants
sent to State prison on drug charges rose three times faster than arrests.
The chances an arrested drug dealer would end up in prison roughly
doubled between 1982 and 1987 (Boland, 1989; Boland, 1990). Street-
level drug dealing abated but, as elsewhere, dealers adapted. In New York
City, the drug trade moved indoors. 

Retail-level dealers learned, largely by trial and error, that they could
thwart traditional street enforcement tactics by dealing out of apartments
or, if selling operations remained on the street, by keeping "felony weight"
stash locations inside. Selling only "misdemeanor weight" quantities on
the street shields dealers from felony prosecution in case of arrest and
shields drug supplies from confiscation. Such operations considerably
complicate the task of law enforcement. Police officers cannot pursue
dealers indoors without court-issued search warrants, commonly obtained
through indoor undercover buys or testimony from reliable informants
who have observed dealing firsthand. Resident complaints about "what
everybody knows is going on" rarely provide the detailed evidence
required in court. 

Enforcement difficulties in New York City were compounded by police
department policies. In the aftermath of the police corruption scandals
investigated by the Knapp Commission in the early 1970s, official fear of
police corruption led to a series of policies centralizing narcotics
enforcement to the point that precinct patrol officers were largely removed
from the task of drug enforcement. Fearing the "temptations of the drug
trade would be too great for uniformed personnel," police administrators
strongly discouraged precinct patrol officers from making drug arrests.
Street drug dealing and drug locations observed on patrol were instead to
be reported for investigation to centralized narcotics units. Similarly, 911
complaints about drug dealing in buildings were referred not to a precinct
patrol car for immediate response but to boroughwide Organized Crime
Control Bureau units for future investigation. The only precinct-based
drug units assigned to undercover street surveillance, Street Narcotics
Enforcement units, had to work in uniform (New York City Police
Department, 1994, pp. 13-14; McElroy et al., 1993). Citizens, observing
officers dutifully ignoring blatant drug dealing, were understandably
frustrated and angry, but not defeated. New Yorkers, in response to the
drug crisis, mobilized. 

Citizens mobilize a response. It did not take citizen activists fighting drugs
long to hook up with Cucchiara and come up with a role for the DA's
office. The Citizens Committee for New York, founded in 1975 to support
citizen grassroots efforts, by the mid-1980s was heavily involved in
helping neighborhood groups fight drugs. Committee staff understood the
nature of neighborhood drug crime and the kind of action required to
effectively address it. They knew experts' prescriptions focusing on either-
or solutions (enforcement vs. prevention, for example) were not helpful in
thinking through neighborhood crime problems. Effective action against
specific concrete problems required multiple tactics and cooperative
efforts (Kirby et al., 1995). 

The committee staff had learned from their work with hundreds of groups
all over New York City that when a crime problem is continuing, when it
can be narrowed to a specific location or target, and when everybody in
the neighborhood knows about it, then it is very effective to get citizens
and law enforcement together to devise anticrime strategies. Some aspects
of the problem require citizen initiative and others, law enforcement;
success requires both. 

Committee staff also understood that strained police-citizen relations
created barriers to effective action. The process requires a neutral
facilitator to bring the parties together, shepherd the discussion, and
translate concerns into an action plan. Committee staff saw in Cucchiara a
highly effective facilitator. They also recognized that she brought a new
tool to the table they had not considered. She could feed the results of
citizen problem-solving activities into effective prosecutions. She brought
access to the district attorney's office. On the other hand, the committee
taught her how to work with groups, the principles of community
mobilization, and the philosophy of problem solving, and they gave her
her first case (Kirby et al., 1995). 

Community outreach begins. At a committee training session, Cucchiara
met a tenant organizer who was trying to oust a paraplegic drug dealer
from her Lower East Side apartment building. Armed with a gun hidden
under a blanket in his wheelchair, the dealer had taken control of the
subsidized housing complex and was "brazenly selling [crack and
marijuana] from his apartment and terrorizing residents" (Kirby et al.,
1995, p. 15). Working with community policing officers and committee
staff, the tenant group had generated arrests, but the charges, low-level
drug offenses, went nowhere in court. In court the dealer did not look
dangerous sitting in his wheelchair; he looked pathetic. The tenant
organizer asked Cucchiara to help. 

Cucchiara coordinated with an assistant district attorney (ADA) who was
already working on a minor case against the dealer. Staff from the Citizens
Committee and community policing officers trained tenants in how to
observe and report the specific, detailed information law enforcement
needs to build a strong case. Community policing officers worked with
other precinct officers to be more responsive to problems in the complex.
Eventually, coordination paid off. One day tenants, hearing gunshots from
inside the dealer's apartment, immediately summoned police, who
immediately contacted the ADA, who immediately drafted a search
warrant. The search yielded the evidence needed to launch an aggressive
prosecution. The dealer was convicted and ultimately served 5 years in
prison. His removal energized the tenant group members. With their
community policing partners, they helped other tenant groups evict
resident dealers, closed down a storefront brothel (again with help from
the DA's office), and collaborated with youth service organizations to
neutralize a local "youth posse" (Kirby et al., 1995). 

Goals are set. Facilitating access to traditional prosecution for citizen
groups fighting neighborhood drug crime characterized much of the early
work of the Community Affairs unit. In addition to actively working with
citizen groups, these activities include flagging arrests that should receive
special attention, providing feedback to citizens on cases in court, training
citizens in how to watch and report drug activities, and above all setting up
channels of communication between the DA's office and citizens so people
knew that the office is a place they can go for help. Now, more than 10
years later, the Community Affairs unit has expanded to a staff of 10 with
their own offices down the hall from the executive suite. Cucchiara is still
the director, and six permanent Community Affairs associates work with
citizens and community groups in designated geographic areas that
coincide with Manhattan's 22 police precincts, covering all Manhattan. 

As director, Cucchiara has set three formal goals for Community Affairs.
One: inform the community that the DA's office has resources citizens can
use in dealing with drugs and crime. This is not as labor intensive as at
first, but nonetheless requires constant maintenance. Two: educate the
public in how the legal system works, with a special emphasis on youth. In
response to citizen requests, Community Affairs has developed formal
citizen training and youth education programs. Three: reach out to the
community and work with citizens on neighborhood crime. In
accomplishing this task, Community Affairs associates do many things,
but their most critical role is bringing information about crime problems
from citizens into the DA's office so the office can do its part. It is this
direct engagement of the office with citizens that connects the office's
legal expertise to neighborhood crime and in turn leads to new ways to
respond. 

Connecting the district attorney's office to neighborhood crime 

In essence, the Community Affairs unit has created for the Manhattan
DA's office a vast network of contacts that reaches out to neighborhoods
and offers citizens access to the office. Community Affairs is a consistent
point of entry for complaints that do not fit the traditional incident-based,
911-driven response to street crime. It is a place where citizen complaints
about neighborhood crime problems can get an official response. The
response may be simply information on how the system works, feedback
on specific cases, or a nontraditional route to traditional prosecution. But if
information, feedback, or traditional prosecution is not appropriate or
enough, Community Affairs associates facilitate alternative solutions by
bringing to bear the appropriate legal expertise. 

Alternative solutions fall into two broad categories. One involves
development of new legal tools for use within the office and by the police.
The second involves coordination of legal responses that, via the political
authority of the district attorney, mobilize external resources (Federal law
enforcement agencies, for example). In developing alternative solutions,
direct daily involvement of the executive legal staff is routine. Solutions
evolve from attorneys' day-to-day application of the law to specific,
concrete crime problems that come to the attention of the office via the
Community Affairs network. 

Building a network. The network created in neighborhoods by Community
Affairs builds on existing structures of New York City government with
institutionalized vehicles through which citizens in neighborhoods can
channel complaints to agencies of local government. The boundaries of the
city's 59 Community Board Districts intentionally coincide with police
precincts. Each of the 12 Community Board Districts in Manhattan
includes one to three police precincts. All Community Boards and police
precincts hold open monthly citizen meetings. Each also conducts closed
monthly management meetings attended by the staff of elected political
representatives and city agencies. A similar arrangement operates
independently in public housing projects through tenant associations and
housing police councils. The importance of these institutions to the work
of Community Affairs is obvious in hindsight. In the beginning, Cucchiara
had to figure out where to go for help. 

Community Board and police precinct citizen meetings are not necessarily
conducive to coordinated action. Several interviewees described open
meetings in one police precinct as raucous free-for-alls (obviously an
extreme case). They are, however, generally recognized as a forum to
connect with legitimate citizen activists and organized groups. The smaller
management meetings allow specific problems of many people to receive
official attention. 

Although Cucchiara did not try to systematically attend all of these
community meetings when she first started outreach, she and her staff now
do. Community Board, police precinct, housing police council, and public
housing tenant association meetings are a central component of their
outreach strategy. All are attended by Community Affairs associates on a
regular rotating basis. From these sessions associates meet citizens
involved with smaller action-oriented block associations, tenant groups in
private buildings, church groups, business improvement districts, and
other public and private organizations seeking help with crime problems.
At all public meetings, Community Affairs staff flood the neighborhood
with personal business cards, resource lists with names and phone
numbers, as well as written information on what the district attorney's
office does and can do to help citizens working on crime. Written
materials are an important part of the strategy of being accessible. 

Linking with the police. The second critical component of the Community
Affairs network in the community is direct linkage with precinct police. In
an early stage of outreach, a precinct commander advised Cucchiara to
contact precinct commanders and work with them. Precinct commanders
confront daily the kinds of problems the DA's office was starting to hear
about from citizens. The police are always in the community, and they too
were engaged in new efforts to work with citizens on neighborhood crime.
About the time Morgenthau dispatched Cucchiara to do community
outreach, the New York (City) Police Department (NYPD) launched its
first community policing initiative.[2] 

Community policing beat officers and Manhattan Community Affairs
associates were natural allies. Community Affairs contact with police is
not limited to these officers (narcotics officers have also been natural
collaborators), but they have played a key role in the unit's work and vice
versa. Community policing officers possess an enormous amount of street
knowledge, but early in the program neither they nor their precinct
commanders had the organizational authority required to redirect police
resources to launch a sustained attack on the crime problems they
uncovered (Julien, 1994; McElroy et al., 1993). Community Affairs
associates were allies in helping Manhattan beat officers obtain the
resources they needed to address neighborhood crime problems. In turn,
beat officers opened up their vast store of street intelligence and extensive
contacts with citizens. Executive attorneys in the DA's office now see
being connected to precinct police as part of what the office needs to do to
be responsive to citizens' concerns. 

Office executives recognize that opening up the DA's office to the needs of
police is an important part of what changes the way the office responds to
neighborhood crime. In Cucchiara's words, "The office is pushed by police
who are trying to help citizens and get frustrated that the rest of the system
won't help." Morgenthau and Cucchiara both recall that they did not see
this in advance--that police, like citizens, also needed a conduit into the
office other than the traditional arrest-convict track. Sergeant Brian
Murphy bears witness to what can happen when a frustrated officer trying
to help citizens gets a responsive ear. His complaint and Cucchiara's
response, "Please come downtown," laid the foundation for one of the
office's most commonly used legal tools to confront Manhattan's number
one quality-of-life problem, indoor drug selling. 

A new legal tool: Sergeant Murphy and the DA 

In fall 1991, Reverend John L. Scott of St. John's Baptist Church and
Commander Peter Buccino of Manhattan's 30th Precinct called a meeting
of West Harlem's St. Nicholas Place neighborhood residents. Though the
public flier announcing the meeting said nothing about drugs or crime,
citizens knew the issue. Narcotics enforcement in Washington Heights was
pushing the crack business south into Harlem. Residents wanted to know
what they and police could do. At this meeting Deborah Carter and
Patricia Johnson,[3] members of a small group working with Reverend
Scott to organize the neighborhood antidrug campaign, met Sergeant
Murphy of the Manhattan North Narcotics District. Carter and Johnson
had come to look for police help with the drug dealers in their building. 

Need for innovation. The dealing operation Carter and Johnson described
to Sergeant Murphy was low level (for New York) but sophisticated.
Dealers in their building stayed in apartments and out of public view,
while active trading took place in the lobby and corridors. Murphy knew
there was not much he could do using traditional police approaches. These
dealers had figured out how to defeat conventional narcotics enforcement
tactics. 

"Buy and bust" arrests of low-level minions likely would not get at the real
dealers in apartments. Arrested minions were more afraid of their
employer-dealers than of the police and rarely talked unless facing serious
felony charges with significant prison time. Arrested buyers--even if
willing to turn informant--could not identify dealers' apartments or provide
the eyewitness accounts of inside dealing operations police needed to get
search warrants. Police undercover buys directly from apartment drug
locations did not work because dealers opened doors only to known
minions. Citizens knew which apartments were the problem and despite
personal threats were willing to provide police with intelligence. Though
helpful, this information alone is difficult to convert into the evidence
required for court search warrants. 

Sergeant Murphy thought he could at least improve conditions for
legitimate residents in the short term by arresting the "drug loiterers" in
the lobbies and corridors for trespass. When the system downtown threw
out his arrests for lack of probable cause, he was furious. He called
Cucchiara, he recalls, primarily to vent. She listened and asked him to
come downtown. 

Cucchiara had been working with the St. Nicholas Place group. She knew
traditional law enforcement responses were not having an impact. She
wanted Sergeant Murphy to meet with Paul Shectman, the deputy district
attorney in charge of Criminal Court. Prosecution of quality-of-life crime
fell under Shectman's jurisdiction as head of Criminal Court (the
misdemeanor court in New York City). Shectman was one of several legal
executives Community Affairs routinely turned to for legal input when
traditional approaches did not work. 

In pursuit of trespassers. After listening to Murphy, Shectman decided it
was a good idea for officers to be in drug-infested buildings arresting
trespassers, but additional legal justification was required for arrests to
show probable cause. Legally, police officers needed to be able to show
that before arrest they had information that allowed them to distinguish
people who have a legitimate right to be in the privately owned building
from those who were trespassers. Anonymous tenant complaints were not
sufficient. 

Alternatively, Shectman reasoned that if police had ready access to
accurate, up-to-date tenant lists with written landlord affidavits and asked
the right questions of loiterers (Do you live here? What is your name?
Whom are you visiting?) the drug loiterers would themselves provide the
information needed for probable cause.[4] Trespassers would not be able
to identify legitimate tenants, and if they lied officers could verify the
claim by checking the lists. Shectman recalls that officers liked his
standing up for them at community meetings and explaining why officers
cannot do the things citizens often think they ought to be able to do. They
were really thrilled when he came up with alternative ideas. 

Working together, Shectman, Community Affairs, and Murphy tried out
the idea. Shectman instructed Murphy in how to proceed and briefed
ADAs downtown in how to handle Murphy's trespass arrests. Using
Shectman's revised procedures, the arrests held up in court and they had
the effect Sergeant Murphy had intended. Arresting loiterers for trespass
did not immediately result in removal of dealers from apartments, but it
did improve the level of order in the public spaces of the building. The
idea spread to other officers and buildings. Ultimately, Community Affairs
set up the Trespass Affidavit Program that has grown to include more than
2,000 buildings. 

The Trespass Affidavit Program. Community Affairs now routinely works
with community policing officers and landlords to enroll problem
buildings in the program. To enroll, landlords must agree to take security
measures recommended by police, post prominently throughout their
buildings signs that read "Tenants and Their Guests ONLY," provide the
precinct police with keys, and sign an affidavit that includes an up-to-date
tenant list. To ensure that affidavits and lists are always up to date (a major
issue for the court in determining legality of arrests), Community Affairs
faxes fresh affidavits to landlords for renewed signature every 3 months.
Landlords return the affidavits with current tenant lists attached. Local
precincts then schedule "vertical patrols" by community policing officers
to target buildings experiencing drug problems. Teams of officers walk
through each floor of a building, using the landlord's affidavit to question
loiterers, and when the facts warrant, arrest them for trespass (Morgenthau,
1993). 

The program is most popular with landlords and tenants in the high drug-
crime areas of northern Manhattan. It is also popular with precinct police.
By giving officers a legitimate reason to be in residential buildings and a
legal tool for minor arrest--trespass--the number of participants in the drug
trade who are subject to police contact, arrest, legal search, and debriefing
is increased. 

Sergeant Murphy's story is a particularly lucid illustration of how the legal
expertise in the DA's office, when allied with the situational perspective of
police officers in the street joined by the goal of responding to citizen-
identified problems, results in new legal tools and a new response. It is
not, though, an isolated incident. It characterizes the second phase in the
evolution of community prosecution in Manhattan. The first phase
provided citizens and precinct police access to the DA's office off the
conventional arrest-convict track. The second, founded on the access of
the first, generated alternative legal tools, the most prominent of which are
now institutionalized as stand-alone programs aimed at indoor drug
dealing. 

In addition to the Trespass Affidavit Program run by Community Affairs,
a separate Narcotics Eviction Program operates out of the attorney-staffed
Special Projects Bureau. Like the trespass affidavit idea, Narcotics
Eviction evolved out of individual problem-solving efforts to oust drug
dealers from residential buildings. Senior trial attorneys who worked with
Cucchiara thought they could use the State law that authorizes ousting
tenants operating a "bawdy house" or any illegal trade, business, or
manufacture in a rented apartment (Finn, 1995) to streamline evictions.
Under the Narcotics Eviction Program, the DA rarely initiates eviction
proceedings, but prepares the paperwork and hands it over to landlords,
who must proceed or face a possible fine and/or court-ordered cost
reimbursement. Most landlords are relieved to have the DA's help. 

Tackling larger problems: The Kenmore Hotel 

The Trespass Affidavit and Narcotics Eviction Programs now handle a
large volume of cases independent of specialized problem-solving
activities but are also used by Community Affairs, attorneys, and police to
build strategies to attack bigger problems. The third drugs-in-housing
initiative, the Landlord Responsibility Program, kicks in when these lesser
remedies fail. A critical issue is whether the drug dealing is confined to
certain apartments or infects an entire building. The ultimate consequence
is Federal seizure through the U.S. Attorney's Office. One highly
publicized seizure at the Kenmore Hotel in the Gramercy Park area of
lower Manhattan required all three legal tactics plus the coordinated
efforts of police, the DA's office, and Federal law enforcement. 

The problem builds. When the Kenmore Hotel changed ownership in
1985, Scott Kimmons, a community policing officer in the 13th Precinct,
observed physical conditions in the once-respected single-room-occupancy
(SRO) residence steadily deteriorate. The predictable invasion of addicts,
prostitutes, and drug dealers followed and, in an effort to stave off serious
criminal activity, Kimmons teamed up with Detective Kenneth Farrell of
Manhattan South Narcotics to set up undercover drug arrests. In June 1992
they contacted Community Affairs associate Fredericka Jacks for help
from the DA's office. Jacks, Kimmons, and Manhattan South Narcotics
detectives began by working with ADAs handling arrests at the Kenmore.
Jacks brought in Shectman to help with legal strategy. In the end, the
group effort brought together the law enforcement and legal expertise of
the DA's Asset Forfeiture unit, Central Narcotics units of the New York
City Police Department, the New York City Special Narcotics Prosecutor,
the FBI, U.S. marshals, and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of
New York--culminating in seizure of the Kenmore by the Federal
Government. 

For years city officials had tried to force Kenmore owner Tran Dinh
Truong to improve conditions in his buildings. The City Department of
Housing Preservation and Development took him to court over conditions
at the Kenmore four times, on one occasion levying a fine of $10,000 and
on another imposing a (never-served) sentence of 20 days in jail.
Independently the New York City Environmental Control Board fined him
$35,000 for failure to remedy health-code violations. City lawyers
considered him a slum landlord and clever at working the system. He fixed
just enough violations to get by and then turned around and generated a
host of new ones (Faison, 1994b). 

Conditions inside the Kenmore eventually spilled onto the street of the
otherwise stable Gramercy Park neighborhood, causing several long-time
business establishments to move. Area businesses and residents saw the
problem as loitering addicts housed at the Kenmore, who supported their
habits through panhandling and petty thefts. For Kenmore tenants, the real
problem started when "drug dealers discovered [that] the absence of a
working security system allowed them to deal crack from inside hotel
rooms" (Faison, 1994b). 

To deal with the Kenmore's drug dealers effectively, Jacks and Kimmons
had to get Truong to work with them on building security. Shectman
advised that they bring in Anne Rudman, the DA's Asset Forfeiture
attorney and director of the Landlord Responsibility Program. The
program presumes that most owners of seriously drug-infested buildings
want to cooperate with law enforcement. Nonetheless program procedures
are "legalistic," in the sense that they are designed to lay the groundwork
for formal legal action if informal efforts fail. 

Landlord responsibility in action. The mechanics of the program are
straightforward. Once a problem building is identified by Community
Affairs, police, or citizens, the DA's office (that is, ADA Rudman) sends a
letter advising owners of the drug activity in their building and invites
landlords to her office for a conference. At the conference, Rudman,
Community Affairs, and precinct police familiar with the building advise
the landlord of the nature and extent of the building's drug problem and
suggest reasonable measures to solve it. 

Once Rudman advises landlords, the problem property is monitored by the
DA's office and police. The DA's case-tracking system automatically
notifies ADAs and Community Affairs if an arrest occurs on the property.
The owner is also informed of every drug-related arrest. Police compile a
monthly drug activity report. If trafficking does not abate, the landlord is
called in for subsequent conferences. At every conference Rudman
reminds owners that it is their responsibility as landlords to secure their
buildings. Failure to cooperate could result in legal action to forfeit. 

For the DA to initiate forfeiture under State or Federal statute, attorneys
must address two legal issues. First, they must prove by a "preponderance
of the evidence" that drug trafficking occurs on the property and the owner
knows it occurs--a relatively easy task under State or Federal statute.
Second, they must demonstrate in court that the offending landlord
willingly consents to the drug dealing. Under New York State law,
proving consent is extremely difficult. Consent issues under Federal law,
while difficult, are not insuperable, especially in cases of egregious
neglect. 

With the Trespass Affidavit, Narcotics Eviction, and Landlord
Responsibility Programs, the DA's office has the legal tools to accumulate
the evidence needed in Federal court to demonstrate "consent" on the part
of grossly negligent landlords like Truong. At first Truong tried to deal
with the DA's office the same way he had dealt with other city lawyers:
evade, delay, make promises, but do nothing. It did not work. 

Rudman meticulously documented Truong's repeated failure to take
reasonable remedial steps. Jacks, Kimmons, and narcotics detectives
painstakingly kept records of the numerous drug arrests that continued in
the Kenmore, though Truong never filed a complaint of drug activity or
tried to evict a dealer. NYPD undercover officers found informants willing
to testify that Kenmore security guards were selling drugs and extorting
bribes from buyers to enter the building. The FBI was brought in to
conduct a financial analysis of Kenmore rent receipts. Prosecutors and
other city lawyers suspected that Truong was operating a cash cow,
obtaining rent payments from a number of tenants via city and public
assistance agencies. They anticipated Truong might claim to be losing
money on hotel operations to justify lax security. 

Finally, in 1994, almost 2 years after Farrell and Kimmons had contacted
Jacks, Federal agents seized the building. NYPD narcotics officers, in
conjunction with New York City's special narcotics prosecutor, executed
search warrants and made 18 arrests. Federal marshals then moved in and
took control of the building. 

Truong's abuses were so egregious that official action at some point
seemed inevitable even without community prosecution. It is not obvious,
though, how such a case could proceed without the involvement of
prosecutors whose distinctive role rests on the official authority to initiate
legal action. The response was clearly built on the DA's drugs-in-housing
tactics and Community Affairs' ability to take the lead in pulling the small
pieces of a big problem together so its seriousness could trigger significant
legal action--in this instance, action beyond the capacity of either the
police or the DA's office working alone. In the Kenmore case, the work of
the DA's office was behind the scenes. Public accounts focused on the
dramatic events surrounding the Federal seizure. 

Community prosecution and serious crime 

Policing strategies implemented by William Bratton, chief of the New
York Transit Police from 1990 to 1992 and commissioner of the New
York City Police Department from 1994 to 1996, rely heavily on "broken-
windows" ideas. (See "'Broken Windows' in New York City.") They also
fundamentally push these ideas a step beyond the original broken-
windows conceptualization that disorder is a precursor to serious crime.
The NYPD and the Transit Police crime strategies reflect the common-
sense police insight that disorder and serious crime are both part of a
complex web of interrelated criminal behaviors that includes conventional
street crimes, disorderly behavior, interpersonal conflicts and disputes, and
criminal enterprise activities (Bratton, 1995). In implementing the NYPD
reforms, Bratton consistently argued that the key to restoring order and
driving down crime is to exploit persistently and strategically, in all police
activities and contacts, criminal affiliations and crime and disorder
linkages. The organizational reforms underlying the implementation of
these strategies riveted the attention of the entire police organization on
neighborhood crime. 

The NYPD's new strategies noticeably dovetailed with the evolution of
community prosecution in the DA's office. To be "riveted on
neighborhood crime," one could argue, is a traditional police function that
police should have been doing all along. In truth, one of Bratton's most
fundamental insights was recognition of how far police organizations had
drifted from this mission. For felony trial attorneys in the DA's office to be
riveted on neighborhood crime and the intricate, concrete circumstances
that give rise to specific criminal acts, though, is a new phenomenon. 

In Manhattan, the Community Affairs unit has been highly successful in
bringing crime problems from neighborhoods into the DA's office. At
some point, however, line attorneys independently began to see that
success in their traditional task of convicting the guilty required that they
too get connected to what was going on in the streets. At the minimum,
this was a recognition that the traditional task of convicting people who
commit serious crime required a strategic, intelligence-driven approach
capable of exploiting interrelationships among criminal offenders and
criminal events. This line of thinking emerged from office attorneys
considerably before Bratton's strategic redirection of the NYPD, initially
in response to new patterns of drug crime. Once the NYPD reforms and
strategies had been adopted, the police and prosecutor initiatives began to
work together. 

New drug crime patterns emerge. About the time the New York drug trade
moved indoors in the late 1980s and early 1990s, felony trial attorneys in
the Manhattan DA's office began to notice new patterns of criminal
activity emerging from the high drug-crime areas of northern Manhattan
and the long-established drug markets of the Lower East Side. Retail-level
cocaine dealing was moving out of its cottage-industry phase, where
anyone could get in on the dealing, and in the most active markets was
becoming increasingly dominated by low-level indoor drug gangs. The
gangs, typically composed of four or five people headed by a very small-
time kingpin, operated from indoor locations but controlled street-level
dealing on specific street corners or whole blocks. The violence of these
gangs resulted in homicides the police had great difficulty in solving.
Witnesses had little interest in seeking the protection or interference of law
enforcement and significant interest in intimidating those who did. As
drug-related homicides escalated, police arrest clearance rates plummeted,
and even if perpetrators were arrested, prosecutors often could not proceed
for lack of credible witness testimony.[5] 

At the same time, in handling more routine cases, trial attorneys were
discovering inadvertently (and to their horror) that they were making
important case decisions without knowing the true nature of a defendant's
criminal activity. Although beat officers and citizens had informal
knowledge of defendants' criminal activity, the more sophisticated
participants in the local drug trade had figured out how to shield
themselves from arrest and prosecution for serious crimes. When by
chance they did show up in court, it was often for minor offenses, and
many did not have prior records. 

Traditional prosecution assumes a defensive posture in dealing with street
crime. Attorneys respond to police arrests one by one and for the most part
have to work with the evidence the police deliver. To respond effectively
to emerging patterns of crime, this approach was not sufficient. Two of the
DA office's six trial bureau chiefs voluntarily took on the task of trying
new ideas. Initial efforts focused on getting designated felony trial
attorneys connected to citizens and police in high drug-crime and violence
neighborhoods via Community Affairs associates and community policing
officers. Warren Murray, chief of Trial Bureau 50, initiated the first
project, Project Focus, in the 34th Precinct, which includes Washington
Heights, where violence erupted with the crack epidemic. Ann Prunty,
deputy chief of Trial Bureau 70, volunteered to take on a second project,
Project Octopus, in the Ninth Precinct on the Lower East Side, where drug
violence has a long history. 

Project Octopus. In summer 1993 when Prunty and Trial Division
executives began planning Project Octopus, they saw it as an experimental
effort that would both tap nontraditional sources of information to get
better case dispositions and introduce regular trial assistants to
sophisticated prosecution techniques. Instead of having to "try what gets
delivered," the approach they envisioned would give attorneys an
opportunity to gather information and intelligence, think about what the
office ought to do about various categories of crime, and then structure
case evidence and trial arguments before a defendant is ever arrested. 

Prunty set two goals for the first phase of Project Octopus. First, she
wanted her assistants to understand the crime situation in the Ninth
Precinct and come up with an intelligent view of the problem. Second, she
wanted to get the community, the police, and the DA's office talking and
sharing information. She began by establishing a relationship with Ninth
Precinct police. She met with the precinct commander, special operations
lieutenants, the supervising sergeants of the street narcotics and
community policing units, and the head of the precinct detective squad.
She also reached out to the commanding officer of the local area housing
police. Within the DA's office she brought in Community Affairs
associates to do the community contact work and the management
information systems (MIS) division to help track intelligence. Finally, she
instructed her assistants to form relationships with Ninth Precinct beat
officers so they would tell them about people and crime problems in their
beats. 

Input from beat officers. Police, she recalls, initially were skeptical but
open, and they did provide information. They readily came up with a huge
chunk of intelligence. Strategic direction for Project Octopus emerged in a
couple of months. With hindsight Prunty does not think this would have
been possible without beat officers' intimate knowledge of crime patterns
and street intelligence. 

From officers, Prunty and her assistants learned a lot about the precinct
crime targets that office attorneys had suspected required special attention.
The targets, typically small-time criminal organizations, most often
involved low-level cocaine and heroin drug-dealing, but included a variety
of other criminal enterprise activities like fencing operations, fairly
organized and violent marijuana trafficking, and murder-for-hire
operations. Citizens and beat officers were generating an enormous
amount of information about these criminal activities, but there was no
coordinated use of the information. 

Enter prosecution. Specialized units in the NYPD and the DA's office
know how to disrupt criminal enterprise operations, but these small-time,
precinct-based crime groups did not warrant special unit attention. Routine
police and prosecutor operating units, on the other hand, lacked the
coordination required to translate informal street intelligence into
prosecutable cases aimed at disrupting criminal enterprises. Conventional
arrest-convict tactics picked up only the lowest level participants, "dixie
cups" (disposables) in the terms of New York City's drug trade. Prunty, an
experienced homicide attorney, wanted to apply investigative prosecution
techniques to street crime. She knew the tactics and what she wanted to
do; putting the operational task force together was the problem. 

To disrupt criminal enterprise organizations, prosecutors need evidence
that connects top operatives to criminal acts. This requires surveillance
and undercover work. Prosecutors cannot do this alone--they need to work
with the police. To take down a typical indoor drug operation, for
example, police first conduct surveillance to identify the kingpin, his top
lieutenants, and low-level sellers. Undercover officers then move in and
buy drugs as many times as possible from low-level sellers, make arrests,
and try to work a deal for information on higher-ups. The ideal outcome is
to serve a search warrant on an indoor drug location when key lieutenants
and the kingpin are present with drugs. In the short term, officers have to
forgo arrests, and attorneys, convictable cases in favor of the long-term
goal of taking down the drug organization. 

Linking attorneys and police. The problem Prunty faced was how to get
regular precinct officers who operated under organizational pressure to
make arrests and quickly move on to the next arrest or call for service, to
work with them in a sustained, coordinated fashion to develop the
evidence they needed to disrupt criminal enterprises. Phase two of Project
Octopus, she decided, would focus on forging a new organizational
arrangement between attorneys and police capable of accomplishing this
task. 

Rather than assign an ADA to learn everything about specific beats,
Octopus attorneys decided to rely on citizens and police to generate beat-
by-beat intelligence and identify criminal targets. Prunty then assigned
ADAs to work on targets without geographic restriction, following
criminal linkages between beats and even outside the Ninth Precinct if
necessary. By early 1994 Dan Connolly, a felony trial attorney who
volunteered for the project, was tracking a Lower East Side heroin ring
controlled by an individual well known on the block as "Franco." 

Octopus in action. Franco, with two lieutenants and a revolving group of
minions, controlled from an indoor apartment building location all heroin
and powder cocaine dealing in his block and the intersection around the
corner. Undercover buys were difficult because drugs were sold deep
inside the apartment building lobby. Police supervisors do not want
undercover officers going into places where they cannot be watched.
Routine undercover operations require a "ghost" trail, stationed at a safe
distance, who can radio for help if trouble erupts. 

By the time Connolly started work with the Octopus unit, much of the
surveillance work was complete, but to make a prosecutable case,
Connolly needed undercover work. Specifically, he needed arrests of low-
level minions who might turn informant and provide insider details so
police could catch Franco and his lieutenants "in the act." An elite
investigative unit would simply assign a team of DA investigators or
dedicated police officers to come up with undercover arrests. Although the
police were willing to help, at this point they viewed Octopus as a
prosecutor, not a police, project. Connolly improvised. He started to track
all arrests coming into the DA's office from the street near Franco's East
Second Street building. With the help of the DA's computer, every
morning the district attorney's MIS Division delivered to him a computer
printout of the previous day's arrests in the target block, which he
reviewed for potential informants.[6] 

A false start. One day, a midlevel manager in Franco's organization
showed up on the MIS arrest printout charged with an indictable drug
offense. Facing a potential sentence of 18 years, he came up with a lot of
information on the East Second Street organization. Connolly had what he
needed to obtain a search warrant to raid the indoor location, but Ninth
Precinct officers were not yet operating in a coordination mode. One
evening, in hot pursuit of a defendant, officers entered and secured the
building, got a search warrant for Franco's apartment, and came up empty-
handed. They found guns galore but no drugs and no Franco. Connolly
was furious. They could have, should have, checked to make sure Franco
was present or at least consulted Connolly. The "new coordinated working
world" Octopus attorneys were trying to create would take time. 

Still, though Franco got away, his organization on East Second Street
crumbled as a result of Octopus. Franco's number two lieutenant, "Mikie,"
tried to set up an operation in a neighboring building. Unfortunately (for
him), his girlfriend, who was arrested in the East Second Street police raid,
informed on his apartment location, which happened to be next door to a
reformed drug addict who worked with the DA's office to get a narcotics
eviction. Forced out on the street, Mikie was arrested by street narcotics
officers. Connolly again caught the case on the MIS printout and moved
forward with an indictment. The original problem building was sold and
Community Affairs worked with the new landlord to adopt a maintenance
strategy. Citizen informants and beat officers reported that Franco was still
in the neighborhood. 

Connolly was obviously disappointed. In Prunty's mind the experience
taught them how they could in the future coordinate--among citizens,
Community Affairs, beat officers, Ninth Precinct detectives, and
Manhattan South Narcotics officers. There is no question that in the early
stages these efforts were frustrating. From the ADA's perspective, they
were trying to take small stuff and work it up to get at a larger problem
and could not get the police to go along. (But recall Sergeant Murphy was
also trying to work with small stuff to help alleviate a larger problem and
the system downtown would not help.) 

Cooperation takes off. By the end of 1994, cooperative working
relationships (not perfect but decidedly constructive) began to emerge.
Octopus attorneys had built up indepth knowledge of precinct crime
conditions and began to understand what the police see and what the
police needed from them. The police, in turn, began to view Prunty and
her assistants as people they could go to for help. She knew what they
knew and would listen. Prunty was tenacious in working through a
continuous stream of barriers to cooperation arising out of divergent
organizational goals,[7] and Bratton's reforms were taking hold in the
NYPD. The immediate impact for Octopus attorneys? They and Ninth
Precinct police now had a common goal: Everybody was thinking about
how to reduce precinct crime. Connolly's next target started, by traditional
standards, with a "nothing" arrest and worked into a big case. 

Tackling fencing in a joint effort. In the summer of 1994, Prunty assigned
Connolly to work on understanding the Ninth Precinct fencing business.
By the fall he had learned a lot, but neither he nor Prunty knew exactly
what to do. From an attorney's perspective, fencing cases are time-
consuming and difficult to prove.[8] Plus, sentences are not heavy. Ninth
Precinct officers, though, quickly tapped Connolly's newly acquired
expertise. Ultimately, Connolly's knowledge, coupled with NYPD's new
direction, generated a year-long enterprise corruption investigation of
three Lower East Side legitimate businesses engaged in fencing operations
that received thousands of dollars' worth of stolen property a week. The
trigger event: the arrest of a young heroin addict from New Jersey for
possession of a hypodermic needle, who also happened to have transported
himself to New York City in a stolen car. 

On the afternoon the young addict was downtown going through the
arrest-booking system on the possession charge, two officers were cruising
Ninth Precinct streets punching license numbers into their cruiser's
computer. They found a stolen car and waited for the "owner" to return.
When the young addict got out of the system, he went back to get "his"
car, and was collared. This time he was facing a more serious charge; his
response to the NYPD's new debriefing routine was more informative: He
knew about a fence. Officers immediately called Connolly to participate in
the debriefing. The word was apparently out in the young addict's
hometown that "Second Avenue Health and Beauty Aides is the place to
go to fence." On Saturdays young New Jersey drug users shoplifted in
malls in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and even as far away as Delaware. In
the evening they came to the Lower East Side to cash in the goods, get
their complimentary clean needles, and then go out to buy heroin and
shoot up. 

On Connolly's advice, detectives wired the young addict and sent him
back into the Second Avenue store with goods for sale. The wire
corroborated his story; he even came back with clean needles. The DA's
office approved an investigation. This time Connolly did not have to
improvise. The office assigned investigators and put up buy money for
merchandise, and the police did not view this investigation as a
prosecution project. It was a joint effort. The Ninth Precinct assigned a
detective "off the chart" (an unprecedented step) and overnight approved
buy money (unheard of until then). Officers were as amazed as the ADAs,
but now precinct commanders were calling the shots. Under Bratton's
reforms, tactical decisions did not have to go to headquarters for approval. 

Eventually the investigation expanded to two other health and beauty aids
shops. When Connolly left the office for a job in the mayor's office, the
case was picked up by ADA Susan Hoffinger. Under her guidance, the DA
and Ninth Precinct detectives worked to build an enterprise corruption
case, a class B felony. In the end, the evidence was insufficient to prove all
elements of the enterprise case, but the investigative team was able to
build criminal possession of stolen property to felony-level dollar
amounts. In the process it became apparent that these "criminal
facilitators" were not just in the business of servicing the needs of young
addicts; they also had a thriving business in a wide variety of stolen goods.
Hoffinger obtained felony convictions on two proprietors plus substantial
cash forfeitures. As a result of the investigation, the stores went out of
business. The criminal sentences were to probation, but stringent
conditions barred the proprietors from opening similar businesses in New
York City for 5 years. 

The new, "coordinated working world." After almost two years Prunty
finally began to feel that routine cooperation between Octopus ADAs and
Ninth Precinct police was occurring without her having to constantly push
for it. She herself finally brought to closure a marijuana conspiracy murder
that she had been working on for a year and a half--involving East Indian
marijuana gangs, several separate hit men, and a connection to Miami drug
dealers. She best illustrated the emergence of a new, "coordinated working
world" in recounting how Octopus, Community Affairs, Ninth Precinct
police, Manhattan South Narcotics, and local political leaders responded to
a community crisis by rapidly arresting and indicting a violent drug dealer
who citizens knew was responsible for a neighborhood murder. 

Over a period of several weeks, calls about a building on Eleventh Street
between Avenues A and B had come into the office from a variety of
sources. In a very short time the building had been overrun by a drug-
dealing operation. When a homicide occurred on the building's roof, the
community reached out to police officials, the mayor, and city council
representative Antonio Pagan, a well-known community activist. 

At the same time, the commander of the Manhattan South Narcotics
District called Prunty to talk about building a case. Police, via citizen
informants, knew the identity of the killer. The commander wanted to send
in "buy and bust" undercover officers to target the suspect. If they caught
him, immediate help would be needed from the DA to build a case that
would get the killer off the streets. The undercover officers made the arrest
and immediately beeped Prunty to help with the debriefing. In this case the
dealer/killer had an extensive criminal record and Prunty was able to go
forward with an indictment on a drug charge in 72 hours. The suspect
informed on his codefendant, who was also indicted. Prunty then assigned
an Octopus ADA to launch a long-term investigation to take out the whole
drug organization. All this took place before the meeting Pagan had called
with community residents, city officials, and law enforcement to discuss
what to do. At the meeting, Pagan reported that the killers were off the
street. Other dealers in the building were under investigation. The
Manhattan DA's office and the New York City Police Department were
conducting a joint investigation. 

The essence of emerging reform 

The ideas and practices of community prosecution are still evolving;
nonetheless, the Manhattan experience suggests several key themes on
what this reform is, what it is not, and what it needs to take root. 

A process not a program. First, as I trust the forgoing has made clear,
community prosecution is not a program--guided by clearcut procedural
rules, prescribed-in-advance interventions, uniformly applied across
neighborhoods or similar situations, and administered in a stable
administrative environment. Nor is it a mere collection of tactics and
strategies that, once proved, are routinized (although community
prosecution can generate this--the Trespass Affidavit Program, for
example). Rather, in the course of their day-to-day work on neighborhood
crime problems, the district attorney, office legal executives, Community
Affairs associates, and assistant district attorneys have built a highly
flexible new organizational arrangement that is not wedded to specific
solutions or responses but to the task of generating them. This is
accomplished in the first instance by providing citizens and precinct police
with daily access to the legal expertise of the DA's office beyond the
traditional arrest-convict track, and assigning line operatives the task of
responding to their complaints. 

To get started, this new arrangement for dealing with crime and order
requires stouthearted executives willing to delegate a lot of authority to
line operatives who work in the field out of their sight--but in public view-
-and giving them latitude to figure out for themselves how to fashion
responses to the crime and order problems in particular neighborhoods. A
serious effort necessitates a closer, day-to-day working relationship with
precinct officers than is now common practice. Loss of independent
judgment is a risk. This is unfamiliar territory. Quick results are not
certain. 

Fundamental legal traditions. Second, in dealing with low-level street
disorders, the legal tactics attorneys devise as often as not involve
alternatives to the conventional prosecutorial focus on litigation. Yet this
work is solidly grounded in fundamental traditions of the legal profession.
Attorneys are applying what Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand Professor
of Law at Harvard University, describes as the traditional order-promoting
skills of lawyers to an area of crime control--order maintenance--that has
caused the police much grief for more than a century.[9] In A Nation
Under Lawyers, in which M.A. Glendon (1994) takes the legal profession
in general to task for its exaltation over the last 30 years of "litigation,
money making, and efforts to achieve social transformation through law"
at the expense of what she argues are the more common order-affirming,
peacemaking skills of the profession, she elegantly articulates the unique
qualities lawyers bring to this task. Others share many of these qualities.

Glendon argues that it is the ensemble of skills lawyers possess that is
unique: the ability to narrow conflicts and find common ground, to think
through hypothetical cases so trouble is avoided down the road, to
understand others' perspectives with detachment and respect, and to
minimize arbitrariness through reasoned argument. But above all, the
quality lawyers bring to peacekeeping is mastery of the legal apparatus
and its constitutional framework. In devising solutions to problems, what
lawyers alone bring to the table is "a vast fund of inherited experience . . .
a written record of the trials and errors of others in a huge range of variants
on recurring human problems. Faced with a new variant, a lawyer
typically invents little but adds, adapts, and rearranges much" (Glendon,
1994, pp. 102-107). This set of skills comes naturally to attorneys engaged
in community prosecution. They easily shift roles as the situation requires,
from problem solver, to mediator, to consensus builder, to legal strategist.
Their innovative use of the law is mostly a reworking of long-established
legal principles--the communities' right to civilly sanction a public
nuisance, to regulate commerce, or to document new fact patterns that
justify a police search. 

Grassroots demand. Third, community prosecution is a reform effort from
the bottom up. After nearly three decades in which public discourse about
what to do about crime has been dominated by scholars, commentators,
national commissions, and other distant experts, citizens are reclaiming
their right to define the crime issue in terms of concrete situations that
affect their daily lives. Finally, they are succeeding, city by city and
neighborhood by neighborhood, in forcing a response that only their
locally elected representatives can deliver. Experts have much to offer, but
it is their forte to abstract, to frame issues in dichotomous terms, and to
suggest either-or solutions that easily shift attention from the concrete
facts of particular situations to ideologically intractable positions. 

In the community justice movement, the seeds of reclaiming a voice in
defining the crime issue for local institutions, where focus is on the
concrete and consensus and balance are possible, are perhaps its most
spectacular innovation. Community justice is a politics of the doable.
Lacking in elegant theory, it compensates by delivering in the real world.

Notes 

1. Massing's account was published in the New York Times Magazine in
October 1989. His account is consistent with subsequent research studies
(Johnson et al., 1990; Fagan and Chin, 1989) and project interviews with
New York City Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents, New
York (City) Police Department (NYPD) narcotics officers, and special
narcotics prosecutors. 

2. New York City's first community policing initiative was launched with
an experiment in Brooklyn's 72nd Precinct in 1984. Commissioner
Benjamin Ward assigned 10 officers to foot-patrol beats, relieved them of
responding to 911, and instructed them to work with residents on crime
problems and street conditions in their beats. Between 1985 and 1989, the
experiment was expanded to all New York City precincts as a special
program, the Community Policing Officer Program (known as CPOP in
New York), within the department's Patrol Services Bureau (see McElroy
et al., 1993). 

3. The names of citizens have been changed. 

4. Police are entitled to engage anyone in conversation, and citizens are
entitled not to respond. In fact, though, most people (including
lawbreakers) do respond. 

5. Walter Arsenault, head of the DA's homicide gang unit, which was
formed to prosecute the most notorious gangs, recalls that during this
period clearance rates for Jamaican posse homicides stayed at about 40
percent despite intensified efforts and that mounting successful
prosecutions was extremely difficult. Police reported that homicide
clearance rates in the 34th Precinct dropped to 37 percent. Homicide
clearance rates in large cities are typically between 60 and 70 percent. 

6. The DA's case-tracking system starts with the transfer of all information
entered into the NYPD's arrest-booking system. Thus the DA has
immediate access to complete arrest information for all Manhattan
defendants arrested on misdemeanor or felony charges. 

7. For example, "burning" (exposing the identity of) a confidential
informant, shopping for search warrants, and being on call 7 days a week,
24 hours a day. 

8. New York State does not have a receiving-stolen-property statute. 

9. Police problems in dealing with the order-maintenance function and
their retreat from performing it are documented in Wilson, 1968; Wilson,
1969; Moore et al., 1983; Skogan, 1990, Chapter 55. 

10. The broken windows thesis has its roots in research, most prominently
the work of George Kelling and Wesley Skogan, which proposes that
disorder and serious crime are interrelated. One of the earliest and still
most widely referenced works on the thesis is the article by Kelling and
James Q. Wilson (Wilson and Kelling, 1982).

References 

Belinko, S., Fagan, J., and Chin, K. 1991. "Criminal Justice Responses to
Crack." Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 28(1): 55-74. 

Boland, B. 1989. "Prosecutors and Drug Caseloads." Memorandum
prepared for Stephan Goldsmith, Prosecuting Attorney of Marion County,
Indiana. Washington, D.C.: Abt Associates Inc. 

Boland, B. 1990. The Prosecution of Felony Arrests, 1987. Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. 

Bragg, R. 1994. "Kenmore Hotel: The Place at the End of the Line." New
York Times, June 10, A1. 

Bratton, W. 1995. "Great Expectations: How Higher Expectations for
Police Departments Can Lead to a Decrease in Crime." Paper prepared for
the National Institute of Justice "Measuring What Matters" Workshop,
November, Washington, D.C. 

Carlson, K., and Enos, T. 1992. "Bulletin: Recent Effects of Increased
Drug Offense Sanctions on State Prison Populations." Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Abt Associates Inc. 

Fagan, J., and Chin, K. 1989. "Initiation into Crack and Cocaine: A Tale
of Two Epidemics." Contemporary Drug Problems (Winter): 579-617. 

Faison, S. 1994a. "In Largest Drug-Law Takeover, US Seizes New York
City Hotel." New York Times, June 9, A1. 

Faison, S. 1994b. "Empire of Hotels Riddled with Crime and Drugs." New
York Times, July 6, B1. 

Finn, P. 1995. "The Manhattan District Attorney's Narcotics Eviction
Program." Program Focus. National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department
of Justice: Washington, D.C. 

Glendon, M.A. 1994. A Nation Under Lawyers. New York, New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 

Johnson, B., Williams, T., Dei, K., and Sanabria, H. 1990. "Drug Abuse
and the Inner City: Impacts of Hard Drug Use and Sales on Low Income
Communities." In Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research, vol.
13: Drugs and Crime, ed. M. Tonry and J. Wilson. Chicago, Illinois:
University of Chicago Press. 

Julien, M. 1994. Personal interview with author, Chief of Personnel, New
York City Police Department, May, New York, New York. 

Kelling, G. 1981. The Newark Foot Patrol Experiment. Washington, D.C.:
The Police Foundation. 

Kelling, G. 1995. "How to Run a Police Department." The City Journal
5(4). 

Kelling, G., and Coles, C. 1996. Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order
and Reducing Crime in Our Communities. New York, New York: The
Free Press.

Kirby, F., Kopelman, A., and Clark, M. 1995. Drugs: Fighting Back! How
to Organize Neighborhood Anti-Drug Efforts. New York, New York:
Citizens Committee for New York. 

Krauss, C. 1995. "A Safer, if Not Safe City: Crime Falls in New York."
New York Times, January 1, A1. 

Massing, M. 1989. "Crack's Destructive Sprint Across America." New
York Times Magazine, October 9.

McDonald, P. 1996. Personal interview with author. January. (From 1992
to 1995, McDonald was command executive of the New York Transit
Police.) 

McDonald, P. 1998. "The New York City Crime Control Model."
Unpublished paper. Washington, D.C. 

McElroy, J., Cosgrove, C., and Sadd, S. 1993. Community Policing: The
CPOP in New York. Newberry Park, California: Sage Publications. 

Miner, C. 1994. "Fear Walks the Hallways in Hotel Hell." New York Post,
May 30.

Moore, M., and Kelling, G. 1983. "To Serve and Protect: Learning from
Police History." The Public Interest (Winter).

 Morgenthau, R. 1993. A Guide to Building Effective Partnerships Among
Community, Police, and Prosecutors. New York, New York: New York
County District Attorney's Office. 

New York City Police Department. 1994. Police Strategies Nos.1-5: No.1.
"Getting the Guns off the Streets of New York"; No.2. "Curbing Youth
Violence in the Schools and on the Streets"; No. 3. "Driving Drug Dealers
out of New York"; No. 4. "Breaking the Cycle of Domestic Violence"; No.
5. "Reclaiming the Public Spaces of New York." New York, New York:
New York City Police Department. 

New York City Police Department. 1995. Police Strategies Nos. 6 and 7:
No. 6. "Reducing Auto-Related Crime in New York"; No. 7. "Rooting out
Corruption: Building Organizational Integrity in the New York City Police
Department." New York, New York: New York City Police Department. 

New York Transit Police. 1992. Patrol Strategies Catalogue. New York,
New York: New York City Police Department. 

Rudman, A. 1993. "The Landlord Responsibility Program." Internal office
document. New York, New York: New York County District Attorney's
Office. 

Sayer, W., and Kaufman, H. 1960. Governing New York City: Politics in
the Metropolis. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. 

Skogan, W. 1990. Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of Decay in
American Neighborhoods. Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of
California Press. 

Will, G. 1994. "Squeegee Clean in New York City." Washington Post,
December 1, A23. 

Wilson, J.Q. 1968. Varieties of Police Behavior. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Wilson, J.Q. 1969. "What Makes a Better Policeman." Atlantic Monthly
(March).

Wilson, J., and Kelling, G. 1982. "Broken Windows." Atlantic Monthly
(March): 29-38.

-------------------------------

The Community Corrections of Place 

Todd R. Clear, Ph.D., Florida State University, and Ronald P. Corbett, Jr.,
Ed.D.*, University of Massachusetts-Lowell

*presenter at conference

This paper describes a vision for community corrections that gives a
deeper meaning to the term "community." We envision a community
corrections strategy that not only is connected to individuals and groups at
the community level, but that also defines its functions by their relevance
to local community life. This orientation to "place" presumes an
understanding of crime rooted in a local environment that can encourage
or restrain criminal behavior. 

Community corrections agencies have always claimed a closer alignment
to community life than have other justice agencies, but this claim rests on
the fact that offenders under community supervision live in the
community. Little in traditional community supervision activities depends
on community life.

Community supervision is now undertaken against a backdrop of
paperwork: assessments, reporting schedules, urine tests, and progress
reports. Supervision systems have placed a premium on "contacts" at the
cost of actual involvement. Some critics (Feeley and Simon, 1992) decry
the loss of old-style social work in today's risk-oriented world of
supervision, but the primary consequence of this change has been
alienation from the community. One could refer to the prevailing model as
"fortress probation"--a system operating in isolation from and almost in
defensive reaction to the community. 

Community corrections administrators know this. They are the targets of
citizen disdain. People distrust community corrections (Flanagan, 1996)--
they think of community corrections agencies as placing and keeping
offenders in their midst, not protecting them from those offenders. Or they
think of community corrections as an imposition on their lives or the lives
of family members who are on probation or parole. 

Otherwise negative polling data suggest that citizens are not opposed to
the use of community sentences, provided they are logically constructed,
well run, and responsive to community concerns (Flanagan, 1996).
However, a strong empirical case cannot be made that community
corrections works. The studies by Joan Petersilia (Petersilia, Turner, and
Peterson, 1985) have questioned the effectiveness of traditional probation
and its most stringent form--intensive supervision. Community
supervision today has few supporters, a limited sense of mission to
citizens, and a shattered technical base. 

The situation facing community corrections is not altogether unique.
Caught between the public's view of policing as primarily responding to
911 calls and a series of failed methods, the police faced a similar crisis of
confidence. The success of community-oriented policing and its cousin,
problem-oriented policing, has led to a new approach to police work that
has redefined policing. 

The lesson of community-oriented policing can be understood in many
ways, but the simplest is to say that the police rediscovered the
community. They recognized that the people who live in the houses and
work in the businesses that they walk among are neither enemies to be
controlled nor nuisances to be avoided. They are the customers, the clients
of policing. When the police began to work more closely with the
community, they reconnected to values rooted in citizens' everyday lives.
They went from lonely crimefighters to community agents. 

Community corrections is on the brink of a similar metamorphosis.
Stripped of its technical base and with no justification other than a weak
claim to save money for a financially strapped system, community
supervision needs a new vision and a new role. We believe that a renewed
commitment to "place" is the basis of a new approach to community
corrections. 

The emerging importance of "place" 

Place is becoming important to criminology and justice for several
reasons. They boil down to a simple proposition: The quality of life is
closely tied to the qualities of the places where people live. It is
fashionable, in these days of the World Wide Web and the international
workplace, to talk of the global village. Although technology has changed
our perceptions of space and time and residential life has changed
radically in this century, the local residential area is still relevant to the
quality of life. 

This is particularly true for high-crime neighborhoods. Residents of poorer
neighborhoods are less mobile, have less access to resources outside the
immediate area, and are exposed to more street-level disorder, including
youth gangs. An upper middle class family may easily travel to obtain
services or gain experiences outside the vicinity in which they live, but
less affluent citizens experience difficulty in doing so. In those areas with
the lowest quality of life, people tend to be most affected by local
dynamics. Consequently, they have the most to gain from a community
corrections strategy that emphasizes community-building and -restoration. 

Researchers have rediscovered the importance of place for understanding
crime. A long tradition of community-level crime studies, often referred to
as The Chicago School (Shaw and McKay, 1948), has recently gained
renewed interest among researchers who seek to explain crime by studying
the behavior of individuals in neighborhood contexts (Grasmick and
Bursick, 1990). The resuscitation of community-level analyses in
criminology has helped produce new and important insights about the link
between crime and local community life. 

Crime prevention theory has also moved away from the person to the
situation (Clarke, 1992). Using insights from routine activities theory
(Cohen and Felson, 1979), notable progress has been made in reducing
crime in particular locations. A new discipline of place-oriented
prevention theory has developed its own international professional
organization. 

Justice practitioners also have shown increasing interest in community-
level organization and initiative. The prototypes of this movement are the
various (and now standard) forms of community policing (Kelling and
Coles, 1996). To many observers, community policing has been successful
in improving public confidence in the police, strengthening police morale,
and even reducing crime. But the success of community policing has not
been replicated by prosecutors and corrections officials. 

Taken together, these developments help explain the resurgence of interest
in communities and neighborhoods. From science to politics, from public
services to social policy, the community as a unit of analysis has become
increasingly useful. The implications of this trend for corrections practices
are immense. 

The neighborhood meaning of justice 

We are used to thinking about one function of justice as separating
offenders from society, and of community safety as contingent upon that
separation. Formal justice processes remove offenders from everyday life
by indictment, conviction, and imprisonment. The idea that communities
are made safe by eliminating unsafe residents is ingrained in American
traditions. 

These views stem from the operation of an external, centralized state
justice system. Although the goal is a better community, separating
offenders from their communities does not necessarily achieve that goal.
This is true for a number of reasons, two of which are most important.
First, offenders are resources to their communities--they are parents,
children, spouses, and partners; they earn money, provide financial and
emotional support to their families, and play roles in community life. To
the extent their relationships are not criminal and destructive, removing
the offender removes the resources as well. Second, the distinction
between offenders and nonoffenders is to some extent artificial. Research
found that one-third or more of inner-city males are arrested before middle
age (Wolfgang, Figlio, and Sellin, 1972), and other studies found very
high rates of admitted law violation among adults sampled. If everyone
who offended was forcibly removed from the community because of the
offense, almost everyone would have to move sometime, and "justice"
would be the main cause of mobility. 

We think that a view of community justice that does not regard separation
of offenders as its main function more closely approaches the ideal of
justice. It treats offenders, victims, and their neighbors as dependent on
one another in their pursuit of a good life. Crime is a powerful attack on
the quality of life, so responding to crime in a way that helps the
community recover and strengthens community life is the most profound
task of justice. To do so without unnecessarily wrenching offending
citizens from their communities, but instead rededicating their behavior to
a safer community, is the goal of community justice. 

Crime: The "shattering" of community 

In practical terms, a crime is a violation of written penal law. But another
way of viewing a crime is to see the social and moral relationships of the
various parties. 

When an offender violates the law, the act represents his claim that he has
no obligation to observe fairness in his social relations. The offender
claims, instead, the right to use others' observance of the law to unfair
advantage. He asserts that others exist for his own personal pleasures--he
may use their property and persons as he wishes, and he may disregard
their desires for the use of their possessions. He puts himself above the
rules and says that others live in the community with him at their peril. 

The victim suffers losses that are both real and abstract. The real losses
involve damage to property or self that results from crime. The abstract
loss is no less painful: a loss of status as a community member who may
expect to be protected by commonly applicable law. Having been badly
used by their offenders, victims may feel devalued by society: Are they
worth the same consideration as other community members, or do they
deserve less protection of their rights? 

The "onlooker" is the citizen who, neither criminal nor victim in this
instance, faces the crime as a moral challenge. An associate--a fellow
citizen--has claimed the "right" to injure anyone else of his choosing. Shall
this claim by one fellow citizen to exploit another fellow citizen be
allowed to stand? Often the actions of the onlooking community member
(for example, vigilante-type actions) illustrate the need for the fairness
upon which the law is based. The onlooker must not only respect the rights
of the accused and victim alike, he must also understand the impact of the
crime and punishment from both the accused and victim points of view. 

Seen in this light, the criminal act is a denial of community. It breaks the
bond of trust between citizens and forces community members to
determine how to contradict the message of the crime--that the offender is
above the law and the victim beneath its reach. 

This view of crime exposes the way crime challenges not merely the
community's safety, but the very essence of community life. A crime
shatters the foundation of community life--a shared sense of fairness and
interdependence that provides that all members may expect to live under
stated, accepted behavioral limits. Yet the response to crime is also a
challenge to community life. If a crime serves to make us question the
rules under which social interaction progresses, what the community does
about that crime defines the relationship between the community and its
members, including potential offenders, and instructs members in how to
choose future action. 

There are several links between the onlooker's interests and those of the
victim and the offender in a criminal dispute. The most basic is that the
onlooker might someday be an offender or victim in a crime. The onlooker
also may be obliged to live with the victim and (ordinarily) the offender
after the dispute is resolved. The viewpoint that defines criminal dispute
resolutions also colors social interdependence in nondisputed interactions-
-the moral citizen is as the moral citizen does. 

Contemporary criminal law leaves no room for the community to respond
to the crime. The adversarial model posits an official, state-regulated
contest between law enforcement and offenders that shifts but slightly
when the victim comes into the picture, becoming a contest between the
accused and the accuser. The community is left to assume that its values
and interests will be reflected in the resolution of the contest between the
parties allowed to participate. If public opinion about crime is any
indicator, the public has its doubts. 

This analysis suggests that, however important, proving guilt or innocence
is but an interim goal for community justice. The larger goal is to restore
the social and moral foundations for interpersonal conduct. The crime has
shattered the community's confidence; justice occurs when steps are taken
to recover that confidence. 

Recovering community 

One aim of justice is for the community to recover from the damage of
crime. This aim includes recovery for everyone affected by the crime.
Recovery begins with a recognition that, while it tears at the fabric of
community, the criminal act also must be seen as a product of community
and as an impediment to be overcome if community is to be reclaimed. 

Crime is a product of community for reasons that are obvious, but too
often forgotten. Criminal behavior is deeply rooted in social processes at
the local level. First, crime is correlated with inequalities in neighborhood
stability, wealth, and opportunity. Second, crime is a product of an
individual's social experiences. Children who are raised abusively, who
struggle in school and family circles, who suffer from psychosocial
limitations--these children will more frequently grow up to be offenders
(Widom, 1989). Communities that produce higher rates of these events
will experience more offending behavior among residents; communities
that work to relieve the harm done to children who have these experiences
will reduce the incidence of crime. To the extent that criminality results
from wrong moral choices, communities in which moral lessons are taught
and moral living succeeds will experience less crime. 

How can communities successfully overcome crime? The answer lies in
the recognition that the community justice ideal is far more than the
blaming and sanctioning process suggested by an adversarial model.
Instead, a justice model in which community is restored envisions a
problem-solving process in which the parties to the criminal dispute have
certain tasks derived from their relationship to the crime and its claims
upon the disputants. 

Community justice tasks of parties to crime disputes 

A focus on "tasks" is extremely different from a focus on "rights" (Wolfe,
1989). Focusing on tasks emphasizes cooperation to solve problems rather
than a contest between the victim (or the state) and the offender. We have
described crime as a challenge to (and a breaking of) the cohesion of
community life. Responding to that challenge (repairing the break) is a
responsibility of all parties to the criminal dispute. Understanding their
roles in resolving the dispute is the first step in defining community
justice. 

We begin by redefining the criminal justice process as one built not
primarily around blame and punishment, but instead around factfinding,
problem solving, and sanctioning. Each of the parties to a crime has
specific responsibilities in establishing facts and determining sanctions. 

Tasks of the offender. The offender's conduct has been a moral and social
offense against the community. The behavior raises questions about the
offender's willingness to live by the community's prescribed rules of
conduct, and the offender's claim that he may use others in the community
unfairly to his benefit places the offender at odds with the community. The
offender's task is to overcome this deficit. This involves three steps. 

First, the offender must take responsibility for the offense. This occurs
when the offender admits that he committed an offense and that it was
wrong to have done so. 

Second, the offender must take responsibility for the effects of the offense
on the victim and on the community. The effects on the victim include
tangible costs that may be reimbursed through labor or financial
restitution. There are also less tangible victim effects that can be addressed
only through acts of restitution such as community service (Adler, 1991).
These same acts are a means to redress the community, which has lost
confidence in the offender's citizenship. 

Third, because the community has little reason to think the offender may
be relied upon to act responsibly toward others, he or she owes both the
victim and the community affirmative acts that give them a reason to have
confidence in a claim to commit no further crimes. These acts range from
involvement in intervention programs such as residential drug treatment,
to maintaining limits on behavior such as curfews, to reparative tasks such
as making full restitution to the victim(s). 

The aim of this assurance process is for the offender to recognize the break
between citizen and community that occurs in a crime and to perform the
tasks needed to reestablish connection and membership. The processes of
"shaming" have many of these same qualities (Braithwaite, 1989). At a
practical level, the dual legal functions of sanctioning and risk
management are enhanced by the offender's actions of remorse, repair, and
reform. 

This may seem like a "Pollyanna" view of what an offender must do to
make the amends necessary to restore community. Many people looking at
this list would wonder what type of offenders we might be thinking about
in describing these tasks. Yet when the Vermont Department of
Corrections commissioned a series of focus groups to obtain a better
understanding of what citizens want from offenders, they heard the
following list of priorities for the offender to accomplish: 

o Take responsibility for the crime.

o Make restitution to the victim.

o Contribute something to the community as a symbol of remorse.

o Take steps to ensure that he or she will not commit the crime again.

o Learn something from the experience (Perry and Gorczyk, 1996).

Although this approach has, we believe, great promise for a range of
typical community corrections offenders, it cannot encompass them all.
Some offenders, by virtue of the crime(s) they have committed or their
rejection of the program offered them, will appropriately be subject to
incarceration, deferring the task of managing their reintegration into the
community. Inappropriate selection of offenders for involvement in a
refurbished community corrections effort would ignore the realistic safety
concerns of citizens, trifle with the real hurt and fears of crime victims,
and ultimately threaten the program, robbing communities of its many
potential advantages. 

Tasks of the victim. A major goal of the sanctioning process is to restore
the victim's full capacity to function as a member of the community. Full
functioning can be impeded in several ways. The victim may be disabled
physically, emotionally, or both. The victim may feel guilty or may
wonder what, if anything, he did to warrant being victimized. The victim
may harbor malice toward the offender because of the crime and its
effects. All of these are common and understandable responses to
victimization. 

To overcome these obstacles, victims first must be able to state the scope
of losses, tangible and intangible, that have resulted from the crime. Then
victims must determine the types of resources, financial and otherwise,
that would be necessary to restore, as much as is possible, the losses they
have suffered. Finally, victims must lay out the conditions under which
they would forgo resentment of the offenders, allowing that, for many
victims of violent crime, reconciliation will be neither invited nor
appropriate.

These are, for most victims, enormously difficult objectives. The victim is
not required to achieve these goals, but to participate in a process in which
these goals are addressed. Whether that process is successful depends not
just upon the strengths of the victim, but also upon both offender and
community responses to the process. 

Tasks of the community. The community's laws have been violated;
community life has been disturbed. Thus, in the face of criminality in its
midst, the community must play a role in recovery of community life--a
role often neglected or misunderstood. Community activity in responding
to crime is central not only because the victim who hopes to be restored is
a member of the community, but likewise because the offender came from
the community. 

The community has a responsibility to the victim to recognize the
importance of losses resulting from victimization and to provide the
support necessary for the victim to recover. This responsibility may
include the willingness not only to provide financial supports that help
restore the victim, but also to accept as normal the anger, frustration,
withdrawal, and alienation that often accompany victimization. 

The community also has a responsibility to the offender. This
responsibility includes providing two opportunities: one for the offender to
make reparations to the victim and the community and to meet other "just
desert" sanctions, and the other for the offender to obtain the assistance
and support--including treatment intervention programs--necessary to live
in the community without committing additional crimes. The first
responsibility allows the offender to make amends; the second allows the
offender, the victim, and the community to have confidence that the risk
posed by the offender is controlled. 

The community is obligated to support victims through their restorative
process and to assist offenders with their reparative tasks, so that both may
resume a place as community members. 

Tasks of justice officials. The tasks of victims, offenders, and communities
are reciprocal (see exhibit). In each case, the responsibilities of one party
are matched by the duties of the others, so that the parties have obligations
and mutual tasks. The figure illustrates why an adversarial model fails to
achieve the goal of improved community life: it pits as contestants actors
who are in fact interdependent. 

The tasks of victims and offenders are complicated and formidable; they
will not be able to carry out those tasks without assistance. It is the
responsibility of the state--the justice profession--to assist these parties in
performing their tasks. From this perspective, the state is not the proprietor
of the criminal justice system, rather it is a consultant to and manager of
the community, which is addressing crimes through sanctions. System
officials are responsible for designing and managing a process that makes
the accomplishment of these tasks possible. 

The responsibility of the state requires sensitivity to the diversity of
offenders and victims and the needs of their communities. Similar criminal
events may need to be handled differently; the emphasis will be on
communication and problem solving, working out options and exploring
them. Thus, the state will need to accept flexible and evolving models and
must develop a degree of patience to allow the parties to mature within the
reclamation process. 

Organizing at the neighborhood level 

The current structural features of community corrections agencies do not
necessarily preclude greater presence in and involvement with the
community. Some State and county systems are already reasonably
decentralized, with offices spread throughout jurisdictions. In other
instances, central or regional offices work against close ties with the
communities they serve, and those systems will first have to decentralize,
with workplaces closer to the affected neighborhoods. 

Working in the community does not guarantee working with and for the
community. The philosophical shift toward community partnership will
need to be reflected in structural arrangements more aligned with the new
approach. For example, probation and parole officers universally can be
assigned cases by address, a system already adopted in some agencies. All
cases can be geocoded and all officers can receive a "beat" or "turf" for
which they will handle all active cases. Rather than deal with a series of
officers, which militates against any familiarity or collaboration, each
neighborhood will have its own officer or team of officers whose
assignments will be local and whose office will be neighborhood based. 

In high-crime areas, one or two officers may work a comparatively small
district, but even the most decentralized system will not easily be able to
provide highly localized offices. The most progressive systems have found
solutions to the problem. In Washington State, under a "neighborhood-
based supervision" concept, probation and parole agents work out of
police substations, sharing space (and a sense of mission) with community
policing officers. In Wisconsin, probation officers are located in
community centers and apartment complexes and are assigned
responsibility for small, manageable neighborhoods (Clear, 1996). 

Community-based corrections strategies 

Three types of program initiatives may be operated as "place oriented"
justice under the management of community corrections agencies. 

Situational crime prevention strategies have been widely discussed in
recent criminological literature (Clarke, 1992). This approach is designed
to respond to specific crime problems through a problem-
identification/problem-solving sequence that gathers information about
precise problem areas--usually defined in terms of their location in time
and space--and builds solutions to reduce the opportunities for them to
occur. Although much of the data used to analyze crime situations comes
from local police, residents living near those problem areas can help
develop intelligence about crimes as well as strategies for eliminating the
problem areas. Situational crime prevention proceeds from expert
leadership and is usually implemented by those same experts. The role of
residents in these efforts is generally quite limited. Neighborhood Watch
groups have been more promising examples of citizen involvement in
crime prevention. 

Neighborhood reclamation projects rebuild neighborhood structures that
have deteriorated, restoring dilapidated or abandoned buildings and
repairing disintegrating road surfaces. This type of work can be useful for
preventing crime. Unoccupied buildings become havens for illicit
activities and drivers avoid potholed streets, leaving them empty and
inviting illegal behavior. Most high-crime neighborhoods have neglected
and decaying infrastructures. Often, however, the political payoff for
rehabilitating these structures is limited. Thus, in many of these areas,
crumbling structures are left to stand until they eventually fall. It often
requires purposeful investments of time and political capital for these
problems to be overcome. 

Local effort can be an important part of reclaiming neighborhood
structures because manual labor is usually required. Volunteer labor by
offenders is heavily used by numerous rebuilding groups, such as Habitat
for Humanity, because the full costs of the labor would be prohibitive. In
high-crime neighborhoods, offenders are an untapped supply of potentially
"free" labor that might be used to address these problems. Community
justice agencies could employ this unused labor source to revitalize
structures in their local areas and offenders could thus repay communities
for their offenses. 

Citizen support services help at-risk citizens feel safer and have a better
quality of life. At-risk groups include children (especially the children of
offenders), the elderly, and the disabled. Children can be supported
through afterschool programs, tutoring, mentoring, and recreational
programs. The elderly need various services, from transportation to and
from medical and social services, to medical supervision--and even social
visits for conversation. Disabled residents need access to places in the
community, including transportation and wheelchair assistance. 

Unlike crime prevention and reclamation projects, support services do not
have an immediate crime-control payoff. Strengthening communities
through investing in the quality of life of their members is a long-range
strategy. It seeks to fight crime by fighting the alienation and despair of
the least vigorous and most vulnerable citizens. 

Taken together, these three strategies--prevention, reclamation, and
services--define community targets for crime reduction. What role, if any,
do offenders have in this strategy? As laborers and residents, offenders can
fill some of the voids that no others are willing to fill. But is this realistic? 

Some offenders plainly will not fit this agenda. Those who only seek to
victimize their neighbors and see them as opportunities for self-
advancement--and there are many like this, not only criminal offenders--
will not take advantage of the chance to reinvest in community life. That is
not the case for every offender, of course, so applicants for a community
justice initiative will need to be screened. But the idea of offenders
responding to their conviction, not by complying with a prison regime, but
by working to resurrect the community their crimes harmed, is both
attractive and economical. 

In a forthcoming paper (Clear and Karp), one of the authors speculates on
the kinds of programs a community justice correctional (CJC) organization
in a mythical neighborhood, Jefferson Heights, might operate. To illustrate
the above, we offer the following list. 

Crimestop. Working with the local police, the CJC organization convenes
meetings of local residents to discuss crime problems in their areas. They
then lead a crime-prevention analysis of these problems and develop
mechanisms for reducing the incidence of targeted crimes. 

Victim awareness. Local residents who are victims of crime are brought
together to talk about how victimization has affected their lives. The
nature and extent of crime in Jefferson Heights are discussed, as well as
the existing programs to reduce crime. Victim-offender mediation is
offered. Methods for preventing repeat victimization are described, and
individuals are assisted in taking steps to secure their environments from
crime. The victim awareness sessions help the CJC organization refer
victims to a range of social and counseling services the CJC organization
may purchase for or assign to clients. 

Too Legit to Quit (TLQ). This is a recreational club that meets 2 nights a
week and on Sunday afternoons in the local school. It is open to teenage
boys whose fathers are incarcerated: An adult offender under a community
justice sentence attends voluntarily with one (or more) of his sons; they
are teamed with another man who is a mentor for the boy whose father is
in prison. (If an adult offender has more than one son in the program, the
brothers are teamed together with their father and a mentor.) The TLQ
team attends workshops on father-son relationships and engages in
organized, supervised recreation with other teams. The structure is
designed to strengthen ties between offenders and their sons and to
establish supports between offenders and other neighborhood men. 

Operation Night Light. Probation and parole officers and police jointly pay
evening visits to the homes of high-risk offenders who are placed on
curfew. The purpose of the visit is to meet with the offender and his or her
parents (if the offender is a juvenile) or other family members who may be
assisting in the offender's adjustment. The visits are intended to be
constructive and permit time for discussion and problem solving. If
criminal activity is discovered, the officers respond to it on the scene.
These joint operations between police and community corrections officers
are enhanced by routine sharing of information about offenders received
from other officers or citizens. In this way, the conventional "firewall" that
exists between these two components of the criminal justice system is
removed. 

Jefferson Heights Habitat for Humanity. Squads of offenders under
community justice sentences rehabilitate local buildings, which are used
by the homeless or are made available for small businesses at
advantageous rates. Habitat workgroups employ local residents, who are
paid wages at or near prevailing rates, as well as offenders, who receive
the minimum wage. Private contractors for renovation must agree to
employ local residents and be willing to supervise offenders as part of the
crew. Offenders are required to abide by the same regulations as full-pay
employees. 

Seniorcare. Offenders are paired with elderly residents who are otherwise
without services. Each offender pays weekly social visits to eldercare
partners and keeps them company, but deeper relationships are
encouraged, including having the offender accompany the senior citizen to
health appointments and community social clubs. In some cases, TLQ
teams also spend regular time in visits with senior citizens. 

These projects are all made possible through partnerships with existing
organizations and citizen volunteers. The local probation department has
assigned a unit to a special team caseload involving the approximately
1,000 probationers living in Jefferson Heights. The State parole
department assigns two parole officers to the area; they are housed in an
office adjacent to the CJC organization. They both work in close
partnership with the CJC organization regarding clients they have in
common. "Partnership" is meant not only as cooperation and sharing
information, but also mutual goals involving community safety and
offender adjustment. The CJC organization shares the official agency
goals and interests and stays aware enough of client behavior to serve as
another check on client adjustment. Indications of alcohol or drug abuse
are immediately reported to the appropriate justice agencies. There is
continual attention to signals of new problems in an offender's
circumstances, which are immediately made known to authorities. The two
corrections agencies have come to rely on the expertise and sympathetic
involvement of the CJC organization in their clients' lives. 

State and local innovations in community corrections 

Citizens as policymakers 

Full community participation in the maintenance of justice at the local
level implies more than engaging volunteers to work with victims and at-
risk populations. What role is there for the average concerned citizen and
what assurance can citizens receive that their concerns and ideas are
welcome and important? There are some encouraging models that suggest
vehicles for "lay" involvement. 

In Oregon, State community corrections legislation called for the creation
of local advisory boards that help to direct local programs. Although the
community corrections advisory committees include a number of ex
officio slots, the majority of the members are not criminal justice
employees. This system has worked successfully for 20 years and has led
to citizens playing key roles in the strategic planning process (Harkaway,
1996). 

A more recent example of intensive citizen involvement comes from
Vermont, where, in 1994 the State probation system established reparative
probation boards composed of citizens who develop and oversee
community-based sentences for low-risk offenders. Each board is asked to
design appropriate sanctions, which may include victim restitution,
community service, or reeducation courses. If an offender successfully
fulfills these conditions, the board is authorized to terminate probation.
Noncompliance by the offender can result in a return to the court system
(Dooley, 1996). 

Clearly, the key to the success of these or any citizen advisory strategies is
the desire to involve citizens in the policymaking and service delivery
systems, not as window dressing or adjuncts but as full partners, as
coproducers of justice. Traditional systems have either avoided or made a
sham of citizen involvement in too many cases; this has only exacerbated
the community's sense of estrangement. It is only when the public agency
sees itself as in service to and responsive to the community that lasting
involvement will ensue. 

Managing the serious offender in the community 

Nothing could compromise the future of renewed community corrections
more than the perception that new strategies could lead to undue leniency
or heightened risk with respect to serious offenders. Recent analyses of the
profiles of probationers, for example, make it obvious that, despite the
growing use of incarceration, a hardcore group of felony offenders who
are at high risk of reoffending remains on probation throughout the
country (Petersilia, 1995). 

High-risk offenders may well be inappropriate for many of the programs
featured above. However, new tools have been developed that show early
promise of redirecting offenders and are compatible with a community
corrections of place. Boston's Operation Night Light has brought enhanced
credibility to the supervision of violence-prone probationers by joint
probation and police surveillance of the evening activities of these
offenders, home visits to enforce curfews, and area inspections to observe
activity that can lead to trouble. This strategy, now in its fifth year, has
contributed to significant drops in youth violence in the participating areas
(Corbett, Fitzgerald, and Jordan, 1996). 

Coupled with Operation Night Light has been Operation Cease Fire, which
targets "hot spots," neighborhoods where gun-related violence is high, for
a team intervention by several components of the justice system.
Offenders identified as "players" in the neighborhood are invited to a town
meeting, where they are met by representatives of probation, parole, State
and Federal prosecutors, police, and youth service agencies. The justice
team explains to a group of perhaps 20 players its concern for the
neighborhood and its intention to saturate the area with personnel to halt
the shootings. The help of the offender group is invited to quell the
violence; they are told that continued violence will result in their arrest,
conviction, and imprisonment. 

After only 2 years, Operation Cease Fire has worked dramatically in the
targeted areas. In only one instance were the youths from the
neighborhood uncooperative, leading to multiple arrests. This deterrence-
oriented strategy affords offenders a chance to redirect themselves or bring
the full force of the law down on themselves. It draws on the concern the
offenders should have for their neighborhoods as well as themselves and
defines the issue squarely as one of restoring peace to the streets. It
appeals to the healthy, prosocial side of these offenders with encouraging
results (Kennedy, 1997). 

What future for a community corrections of place? 

Good ideas are not enough. For any new strategy to take hold, a variety of
conditions must be favorable. There is reason to be encouraged. First,
there is support for greater attention to citizens as customers, consumers,
and stakeholders of the public sector. The "reinventing government"
movement (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992), which has gained strength over
the past few years, has led a growing number of government agencies to
examine more closely the ways in which they serve the public and how
they can get more citizens involved in the business of governing. 

Second, a community corrections of place is a clear analog to the
community policing movement, and can benefit from the lessons derived
from the police experience of the past 10 to 15 years. Although
community policing is not yet a mature industry, it is clearly the reigning
model for the administration of contemporary law enforcement (Zhad and
Thurman, 1997). 

What lessons can be derived from the development and growth of
community policing? We believe its admittedly short history suggests that
the following are critical: 

o Theory building. In the early days of community policing, academics
and practitioners were brought together to jointly explore the assumptions
underlying the model. Prominent in this effort was Harvard University's
John F. Kennedy School of Government, which hosted a series of
executive sessions that were key in the development of the model and the
resulting prestige attached to it (Kennedy, 1997).

o Grant support. The Federal Government, through the U.S. Department of
Justice, became actively involved in supporting community policing
through grants to local law enforcement, particularly for hiring and
training new recruits who would be dedicated to community policing. A
landmark in this effort was the Violent Crime Control and Law
Enforcement Act of 1994, which authorized money to hire, in time,
100,000 new police officers to be deployed in community policing.

o Dissemination through conferences and publications. Once support for
the model grew strong enough, it became compulsory at police
conferences and in law enforcement publications. Fads are commonplace
in all fields, including criminal justice, and the ubiquitous discussion of
the model made it imperative for jurisdictions to develop their own
programs.

o Evaluation research. Many new programs in criminal justice are wildly
successful until the first wave of evaluations are in. (Intensive probation
supervision and boot camps are two recent examples from community
corrections.) Although it is still early in the research cycle of community
policing, there is compelling evidence that its implementation successfully
alters public opinion about crime and crimefighters.

Those who become convinced of the power of an orientation to place in
community corrections should recognize that the development of a
reinvigorated community corrections must track the same stages that were
critical in the early history of community policing.

References 

Adler, Jacob. 1991. The Urgings of Conscience. Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania: Temple University Press. 

Braithwaite, John. 1989. Crime, Shame and Reintegration. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press. 

Clarke, Ronald V. 1992. Situational Crime Prevention. New York, New
York: Harrow and Heston. 

Clear, Todd R. 1997. "Ten Unintended Consequences of Incarceration."
Corrections Management Quarterly 1(2) (Spring): 25-31. 

Clear, Todd R. 1996. "Toward a Corrections of 'Place': The Challenge of
'Community' in Corrections." National Institute of Justice Journal 231: 52-
56. 

Clear, Todd R., and David R. Karp. n.d. "Community Justice: An Essay."
Corrections Management Quarterly (forthcoming). 

Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus Felson. 1979. "Social Change and Crime
Rate Trends: A Routine Activities Approach." American Sociological
Review 44: 588-608. 

Corbett, Ronald P., Bernard L. Fitzgerald, and James Jordan. 1996.
"Operation Night Light: An Emerging Model for Police-Probation
Partnership." In An Invitation to Change: Better Government Competition
on Public Safety. Boston, Massachusetts: Pioneer Institute. 

Dooley, Michael J. 1996. "Reparative Probation Boards." In Restoring
Hope Through Community Partnerships: The Real Deal in Crime Control.
Lexington, Kentucky: American Probation and Parole Association. 

Feeley, Malcolm M., and Jonathan Simon. 1992. "The New Penology:
Notes on the Emerging Strategy of Corrections and Its Implications."
Criminology 30(4): 449-74. 

Flanagan, Timothy J. 1996. "Reform or Punish: Americans' Views of the
Correctional System." In Americans View Crime and Justice: A National
Public Opinion Survey, ed. Timothy J. Flanagan and Dennis Longmire.
Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications. 

Grasmick, Harold G., and Robert Bursick. 1990. "Conscience, Significant
Others and Rational Choice: Extending the Deterrence Model." Law and
Society Review 24: 837-62. 

Harkaway, Cary. 1996. "Community Corrections Advisory Committee."
In Restoring Hope Through Community Partnerships: The Real Deal in
Crime Control. Lexington, Kentucky: American Probation and Parole
Association. 

Kelling, George L., and Catherine M. Coles. 1996. Fixing Broken
Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities.
New York, New York: The Free Press. 

Kennedy, David. 1997. "Pulling Levers: Concentrations of Offending and
a Theory of Deterrence." Valparaiso University Law Review 31 (Spring):
449. 

Osborne, David, and Ted A. Gaebler. 1992. Reinventing Government.
Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing. 

Perry, John, and John Gorczyk. 1996. "Restructuring Corrections: Using
Market Research in Vermont." Corrections Management Quarterly 1(3):
26-35. 

Petersilia, Joan. 1995. "A Crime Control Rationale for Reinventing
Community Corrections." The Prison Journal 75(4): 479-96. 

Petersilia, Joan, Susan Turner, and Joyce Peterson. 1985. Granting Felons
Probation: Public Risks and Alternatives. Santa Monica, California:
RAND Corporation. 

Rose, Dina R., and Todd R. Clear. 1997. "A Thug in Jail Can't Shoot Your
Sister: Incarceration and Social Capital." Paper presented to the American
Sociological Association, New York, August 13. 

Shaw, Clifford, and Henry D. McKay. 1948. Juvenile Delinquency and
Urban Areas. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press. 

Widom, Cathy Spatz. 1989. "The Cycle of Violence." Science 244: 160-
66. 

Wolfe, Alan. 1989. Whose Keeper?: Social Change and Moral Obligation.
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press. 

Wolfgang, Marvin E., Robert Figlio, and Thorsten Sellin. 1972.
Delinquency in a Birth Cohort. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago
Press. 

Zhad, Jihong, and Quint C. Thurman. 1997. "Community Policing: Where
Are We Now?" Crime and Delinquency 43(3): 345-57.



-------------------------------

Neighborhood Justice at the Midtown Community Court



John Feinblatt,* Greg Berman, and Michele Sviridoff, Center for Court
Innovation 

*presenter at conference

In recent years, a disturbing gap has opened up between the criminal
justice system and the communities that experience crime and its
consequences. Many citizens have come to view the criminal justice
system as a collection of remote, inhospitable bureaucracies more
concerned with counting cases than making sure each case counts. Across
the country, new trends in the administration of justice are emerging to
respond to this crisis of faith. One of the most notable is the development
of community courts. 

Community courts are neighborhood-based courts that use the power of
the justice system to solve local problems. These courts seek to play an
active role in the life of their neighborhoods, galvanizing local resources
and creating new partnerships with community groups, government
agencies, and social service providers.

The potential implications of this new approach are far reaching.
Community courts welcome neighborhood residents into the justice
process in unprecedented ways, inviting them to sit on advisory boards
and participate in community impact panels that confront offenders with
the consequences of their behavior. Community courts ask judges to play
new roles, lessening their judicial detachment and actively engaging
defendants, victims, and community members. Community courts alter the
dynamics of the courtroom's adversarial process, encouraging judges,
attorneys, and outside service providers to work as a team to foster
common outcomes.

These are just a few of the ways that community courts represent a
significant departure from business as usual. Needless to say, each of these
issues bears careful scrutiny. Now, while the community court movement
is still in its infancy, is a particularly important time for reflection. By
mid-1999, more than a dozen community courts are expected to open
across the country: in Maryland, Minnesota, Connecticut, and Colorado. 

In many respects, this is a report from the trenches. It is not intended to be
the final word on the subject--community courts are too new and the
questions they raise are too profound for any publication to have all the
answers at this stage. Our thoughts about community courts have been
shaped by 4 years of experience operating a community court in New
York City known as the Midtown Community Court. This paper mines our
experiences in Midtown, using the court as a starting point for a broader
discussion about the potential impact of neighborhood-based courts on the
criminal justice system. After sketching the results of the Midtown
experiment, we address some of the major questions that community
courts have engendered to date. One of the most basic lessons of the
Midtown experiment is that changing the way that courts operate has
consequences. When courts engage in unfamiliar practices, they also raise
new concerns--about due process, the adversarial system, and the
independence of the judiciary.

Creating closer connections between courts and communities is a tricky
business. What follows are some observations--and some questions--from
one such experiment.

Origins of the Midtown Community Court

The Midtown Community Court opened in October 1993. Located on 54th
Street in Manhattan, it is the first neighborhood-based court in New York
City since the city's courts centralized in 1962. Before that date, New York
had a network of neighborhood courts that handled intake for the city's
criminal court system, arraigning defendants and disposing of low-level
cases. After 1962, arraignment duties shifted to centralized courthouses
serving each of the city's five boroughs. The change was intended to
increase efficiency and address problems of local corruption and
mismanagement. While centralization may have achieved certain
economies of scale and encouraged uniformity, it came with a price:
remoteness. Courts were removed from the communities they were
intended to serve. 

As caseloads increased in the centralized courts, felony cases began to
claim more and more attention. Fewer resources were devoted to quality-
of-life misdemeanors like shoplifting, prostitution, and subway-fare
evasion. Judges felt tremendous pressure to dispose of such cases quickly.
All too often, defendants sentenced for low-level offenses received a fine
that might or might not be paid or community service that might or might
not be performed. More disturbingly, judges sentenced as many as one out
of four defendants to the "time served" in jail while awaiting their court
appearance. For these defendants, the process became the punishment.[1]

It is important not to overlook the historical context. Courts in the 1960s
and 1970s labored under a different understanding of crime and social
order. It has been only recently--James Q. Wilson and George Kelling
wrote their landmark essay, Broken Windows: The Police and
Neighborhood Safety in 1982--that we have begun to understand the
impact of low-level crime on the social fabric of communities. According
to Kelling and his supporters, low-level crime--if left unaddressed--erodes
communal order, leads to disinvestment and decay, and creates an
atmosphere where more serious crime can flourish.[2] With the benefit of
hindsight, it now seems clear that criminal justice agencies--courts, police,
prosecutors, and others--had become disconnected from the problems that
communities experienced on a day-to-day basis. In many respects, Broken
Windows put into theory what many community residents felt intuitively. 

Recognizing the importance of low-level offenses, the Midtown
Community Court was designed to re-create a neighborhood-based
arraignment court, with a number of modern updates. The hope was that
such a court could focus on those offenses that may be minor in terms of
legal complexity but have a major impact on the quality of life. 

The Midtown Community Court is located near Times Square on the West
Side of Manhattan, an area teeming with quality-of-life crime. The court
seeks to honor the idea of community by making justice restorative and
accountable to neighborhood stakeholders. Offenders are sentenced to pay
back the community through work projects such as caring for street trees,
removing graffiti, cleaning subway stations, and sorting cans and bottles
for recycling. At the same time, whenever possible, the court uses its legal
leverage to link offenders to drug treatment, health care, education, job
training, and other onsite social services to help them address their
problems. In these ways, the Midtown Community Court seeks to stem the
widespread crime and disorder that demoralize law-abiding residents.

The court building itself is an exercise in rethinking justice. The
courthouse is designed to be a physical expression of the court's goals and
values, communicating a fundamental respect for all who participate in the
legal process, including often overlooked stakeholders like defendants,
service providers, and community residents. For defendants, the
courthouse has clean, well-lit holding rooms where glass panels replace
iron bars--a pointed contrast to the squalid downtown holding pens. For
social service providers, who are often treated as an afterthought in other
court buildings, the courthouse includes a full floor of office space. An
innovative computer system allows the judge, attorneys, and social service
workers to keep in touch with each other and access a defendant's record at
the click of a mouse. This gives counselors, educators, and social workers
the tools they need to work with defendants referred by the judge and
implicitly acknowledges the importance of nonjudicial personnel to the
problem-solving mission of the court. For community residents, the
courthouse contains well-marked entryways, space for community
meetings, and overhead computer terminals that prominently display the
schedule of cases that will be heard in court that day.

Law-abiding citizens play a key role at the Midtown Community Court.
Local residents and merchants sit on a community advisory board that
serves as the court's eyes and ears, identifying neighborhood trouble spots
and proposing new community service projects. In addition, the court
keeps residents informed of its work through a community newsletter and
by employing an ombudsperson. These mechanisms have enabled the
court to establish a dialogue with local residents and to keep abreast of
neighborhood needs and problems.

Measuring successes

Judging a community court's success is complicated. Like other courts, a
community court must employ traditional benchmarks, measuring the
number and types of dispositions and how quickly they are reached. But
community courts must also answer other questions, such as: What impact
do sentences have on community conditions and defendant behavior?
What effect does the court have on local residents' perceptions of justice?
These and similar issues were investigated by the National Center for State
Courts in a recently completed independent evaluation of the Midtown
Community Court.[3]

Sentencing 

One of the topics the National Center for State Courts focused on was the
Midtown Community Court's ability to change the sentencing standards
for low-level offenses. In particular, the court created an array of
intermediate sanctions, including community restitution and social
services, that lie between short-term jail sentences and no sanction at all.
These sanctions are designed to fulfill the court's agenda of combining
punishment and help--an agenda that grew out of a dialogue between the
court's planners and the local community. During the court's planning
stages, local residents and merchants made it clear that they wanted the
harm caused them by misdemeanor crime to be acknowledged and
restoration made. At the same time, they felt that restitution in the form of
community service was not enough. Community members also
encouraged the court to have an impact on the lives of offenders, offering
them help that could curb their criminal behavior.

The National Center for State Courts' evaluation found that sentencing at
the Midtown Community Court produced significantly more intermediate
sanctions than at Manhattan's downtown court. Indeed, the Midtown
Community Court more than doubled the rate of community service
sentences. More important, the court reduced the percentage of convicted
offenders sentenced to time served. At the downtown court, 24 percent of
the cases received these sentences; at the Midtown Community Court, less
than 1 percent did.

Many early critics predicted that a community-based court would have no
effect on sentencing, that the status quo was too ingrained to allow for a
shift to alternative sanctions. Other critics argued that defendants who did
not like the sentences imposed at the Midtown Community Court would
adjourn their cases to Manhattan's downtown court with the hope of
receiving no punishment at all. In other words, they predicted that
defendants would shop for the forum of their liking. This has not been the
case. The National Center for State Courts' investigation found that the
rate of cases disposed at arraignment at the Midtown Community Court
was comparable to the rate downtown--there was no widespread forum-
shopping.

Defendant behavior

The evaluation found that changes in sentencing at the Midtown
Community Court had a substantial effect on defendant behavior. This was
most evident among local prostitutes, who tended to receive lengthy
community service sentences at Midtown. To avoid these sentences,
prostitutes began to change how they conducted business. Some altered
their work hours. Some moved indoors. Others took advantage of court-
based services to help them get out of the business. Over the court's first 2
years, neighborhood prostitution arrests dropped 63 percent. A similar
effect occurred with illegal vending arrests, which dropped 24 percent.

Perceptions of justice

Before the Midtown Community Court opened, local residents expressed
little confidence in the criminal justice system. Community members who
participated in a series of focus groups complained that the court system
did not pay enough attention to low-level crime. Their expectations of the
new court were muted--they had been disappointed many times before by
flashy new initiatives. Nor was the skepticism confined to residents. Court
staff, including attorneys, clerks, court officers, and pretrial interviewers,
were also dubious, particularly about the court's potential impact on their
roles. 

Over time, these initial reservations were replaced by enthusiasm.
Community residents' doubts about the new court ("Will it work?") soon
gave way to new questions about whether aspects of the court could be
replicated in other settings. Although some early critics argued that it
would be difficult for the court to engage community residents in its work,
the focus group participants expressed a desire to learn more about the
outcomes of cases and community service projects. Many urged the court
to publicize its efforts as broadly as possible.

The attitudes of local police officers changed even more dramatically.
Although upper management strongly supported the development of the
Midtown Community Court, many local precinct officers were skeptical.
By the end of the first year, however, local officers, impressed with the
court's impact on prostitution and other low-level offenses, had become
vocal supporters. Most important, officers began to see the court as a
resource. Some started to use the court's social service team to head off
potential problems on the street--even when no arrest had been made. For
example, one officer brought a mentally retarded woman who had been
robbed by con artists to the court for help. Others requested that the court's
community service crews, staffed by sentenced offenders, clean up a local
corner to make it less hospitable to neighborhood drug dealers. 

Neighborhood quality of life

A community's perception of its own well-being is difficult to quantify.
The National Center for State Courts attempted to measure the Midtown
Community Court's impact on community conditions through observations
of local trouble spots; interviews with offenders; analysis of arrest data;
focus group research; and interviews with local police, community leaders,
and residents. There were two areas in which community residents felt that
the court had a particularly strong impact: graffiti and prostitution. Graffiti
along the busy Ninth Avenue business corridor, once a symbol of
Midtown's problems, is now virtually nonexistent. Focus group
participants credited the court's community service work crews, which
each year contribute more than $175,000 worth of labor to the community.
A sign of the court's impact on prostitution appeared when Residents
Against Street Prostitution (RASP), a neighborhood group that for many
years led the fight against local prostitution, disbanded, declaring victory.
The court is only one protagonist in this success story; changes in law
enforcement, aggressive economic development, and public safety efforts
by government and local businesses played a major part. However, local
activists and merchants point to the court as being important and
acknowledge that communities that work together are communities that
work. 

Efficiency of adjudication

The National Center for State Courts found that the Midtown Community
Court operated quickly and effectively. By keeping defendants, police
officers, and paperwork in the neighborhood where the crime occurred, the
court cut arrest-to-arraignment times substantially, from an average of 31
to 18 hours. By emphasizing immediacy and using technology to enforce
accountability, the court improved community service compliance rates
(75 percent compared with 50 percent downtown). By improving
efficiency, the Midtown Community Court became one of the busiest
courtrooms in the city, handling an average of 65 cases per workday, for
an annual total of over 16,000.

Changing "business as usual"

These results did not come easily. To accomplish its goals, the Midtown
Community Court had to make significant changes in court operations.
These changes occurred in three areas in particular: philosophy,
partnerships, and personnel.

Philosophy

Community courts are problem-solving courts. This simple statement has
profound implications for the way community courts behave. Above all,
community courts must devote significant resources to learning about the
unique problems of a neighborhood. This takes time. It also takes research
and analysis--reviewing data about arrests and court filings; convening
focus groups with community members, offenders, and local police; and
interviewing community leaders. 

Solutions to neighborhood problems need to be created with community
stakeholders in mind--residents, businesses, victims, police, defendants,
and community groups. This is a departure from business as usual for two
reasons. First, it significantly increases the number of participants
involved in the court's work. Where once those participants were confined
to judges, clerks, attorneys, and court officers, a community court must
open its doors to local clergy, businesspeople, tenant leaders,
neighborhood activists, and others. These community members have
valuable roles to play in choosing the restitution projects and social
services that make sense for their neighborhood. 

Crafting solutions in conjunction with community stakeholders also
affects the philosophical foundations of the court. Under the traditional
model, there are only two interested parties in a criminal case: the
government and the accused. Building on the pioneering work of the
victims movement, community courts posit that there is another party with
an interest in the case, the local community. In crafting sentences,
community courts acknowledge that even so-called victimless crimes
inflict injury that should be repaired. Apartment buildings, blocks, and
neighborhoods all suffer from chronic low-level crime. They too should be
restored when a crime has been committed. By restoring the community
through service projects, the Midtown Community Court gives "standing"
to the community it serves. 

In developing new solutions, community courts must take care to monitor
their performance rigorously. Being a member of a community means
being accountable to that community. The Midtown community took a
bold step when it welcomed the court to the neighborhood: it agreed to
accept offenders back on its streets to perform community service.
Community courts cannot ask their neighbors to make this kind of
commitment unless they demonstrate that offenders are subject to rigorous
scrutiny. 

At the Midtown Community Court, a single judge, rather than a rotating
set of judges, presides over the courtroom. With the help of technology,
the judge has information about the history of each case at his disposal,
greatly limiting the ability of offenders to manipulate the system.
Community service work projects are classified as high, medium, or low
supervision, and offenders are matched to the appropriate level based on
their criminal history, background, and arrest offense. Offenders with
more extensive criminal histories and those considered less likely to
complete their sentences are assigned to projects in the courthouse, such as
building maintenance or a bulk-mailing operation. Offenders considered to
be lesser risks are assigned to more visible outdoor projects such as
removing graffiti and painting fire hydrants. Compliance is tracked by
computer, enabling the court to monitor offenders consistently and
efficiently.

It is not enough for community courts to develop internal mechanisms for
accountability. They must also provide regular feedback to their
constituents about the kinds of sentences that are being handed out, how
many defendants complete their sentences, and which court-based
programs work and which do not. In order to respond effectively to
community problems, they must evaluate their own performance and
change programs and procedures to adapt to shifting realities on the
ground. In sum, community courts have to be reflective courts.

For example, the Midtown Community Court recently expanded its menu
of services to include a formal job training program for ex-offenders who
successfully complete community service sentences. Although job training
was not part of the court's original design, research revealed that 75
percent of the defendants who appear before the court are unemployed. In
response, the court launched Times Square Ink, a job training program that
prepares ex-offenders for employment by having them staff a full-service
copy center.

Partnerships

Too often, courts hold themselves above the fray. Cases move from street
to court to cell and back again without anyone questioning the impact on
communities, victims, defendants, or the criminal justice system. A
community court can change this equation by coordinating the work of
police, probation officers, prosecutors, and corrections officials. Each of
these groups loses heart in fighting low-level crime when they lack
reliable ways to measure progress. By providing regular feedback on case
outcomes and street impacts, a community court can create a greater sense
of community among the diverse professionals who work in the criminal
justice system. For example, by providing police with real-time
information about court appearances and community service completion,
the Midtown Community Court encourages law enforcement efforts,
particularly the execution of low-level warrants.

Knitting together a fractured criminal justice system can have unexpected
benefits. At the Midtown Community Court, the improved relationship
with local police led to the creation of a joint program, Street Outreach
Services (SOS), which brings together caseworkers from the court with
community police officers to perform street outreach. The SOS teams
scour the streets of Midtown, reaching out to the homeless, prostitutes,
substance abusers, and others who have fallen between the cracks of
traditional law enforcement and social service networks. The goal is to
enroll these people in social services before they get in trouble with the
law. 

It is not enough, however, for community courts to work in conjunction
with criminal justice agencies. They must reach beyond the walls of the
justice system to involve new partners. Locating a court in a neighborhood
gives the community a sense of a stake in that court that would never exist
with an impersonal, centralized facility. Residents and merchants who feel
a connection to the court can make valuable contributions to the court's
efforts. Local organizations can donate community service supervision,
social service staff time, and supplies like paint and plants. When they see
demonstrable community justice at work, local businesses and foundations
may be willing to provide financial support for social services and other
programs originating in the courthouse. 

Personnel

Community courts require larger, more diverse staffs than traditional
courts. In addition to clerks and security officers, community courts may
need social workers, mediators, victim advocates, job developers,
managers for community service work projects, and additional research
and public information staff. At the Midtown Community Court,
managing the court's ongoing relationships with local merchants,
community groups, and elected officials requires a community
ombudsperson.

The Midtown Community Court asked the city's pretrial agency to expand
its assessment interviews with each defendant before he or she sees the
judge, a significant shift in the pretrial routine. In contrast to traditional
interviews that focus only on information pertinent to bail decisions, these
expanded assessments explore such issues as substance abuse,
homelessness, and mental health. This information is crucial to devising
individualized sanctions. The results are conveyed electronically to the
court, where they are reviewed by a new participant in the courtroom: a
resource coordinator. The resource coordinator functions as a link between
the court, attorneys, and social service providers, keeping track of
sentencing options and making sentencing recommendations to the judge
based on assessment results. 

Creating assessment interviews and hiring a resource coordinator seem
like simple steps, but implementation was difficult. Adding new
information and new voices to the mix altered traditional courtroom
dynamics of the judge-attorney relationship. The response was predictable.
Defense attorneys did not like the idea of the resource coordinator having
a direct line to the judge. Prosecutors worried that the resource coordinator
would make recommendations inconsistent with their office's sentencing
guidelines. The assessment team's prearraignment interview, meanwhile,
raised questions on both sides of the courtroom about confidentiality. How
would a defendant's admission of drug use--which is, afterall, a criminal
act--be used in the courtroom? Who would have access to this information
and for what purpose?

By developing protocols about the handling of information gathered from
prearraignment interviews and used at trial or subsequent hearings, the
Midtown Community Court gradually relieved defense and prosecution
concerns. Over time, the resource coordinator established relationships
with the attorneys in the courtroom, and many have come to see the
coordinator as a valuable asset. Indeed, defense attorneys frequently ask
the coordinator to find help for their clients. The assessment interview and
the work of the resource coordinator are critical to promoting the court's
problem-solving mission. 

Challenges and concerns

The Midtown Community Court experiment has demonstrated that by
playing a variety of unconventional roles, a neighborhood court can have a
visible impact on a community. With new roles, however, come new
questions. Community justice is not without its critics. Some are insiders
with deep attachment to (and professional investment in) the traditional
criminal justice system. Others are residents concerned about their safety
and the potential impact of any new initiative on their neighborhood.

Over the course of its planning and operation, the Midtown Community
Court has had to confront a number of issues about neighborhood-based
justice. Some are misconceptions that can easily be allayed. Others are
questions that are too fresh and too profound to be fully answered yet. At
this point, there are no definitive answers to these questions. The
observations in this paper are based on a single case study; other
community court experiments may yield different solutions--and raise new
questions. 

Nevertheless, we are convinced that if community courts hope to be more
that just a series of provocative but isolated demonstration projects and if
their true goal is broad-ranging institutional change, they must address the
following questions:

1. Do community courts "widen the net" of governmental control?

Concerns about net-widening are not unique to community courts. Indeed,
drug courts face them frequently. Before the Midtown Community Court
opened, the local defense bar was concerned that the court's emphasis on
paying back the community would lead to punishment for offenders who
otherwise might have been released with no sanction. 

Do community courts widen the net of social control? Yes. The more
provocative question is: Should they? That so many low-level offenders
walk away from criminal courts without any meaningful response is a
fundamental problem. With their overwhelming caseloads, these courts
find it difficult to hand out sentences that demonstrate that all crime has
consequences. When these courts allow offenders to walk, letting the
process become the punishment, they send the wrong message to
offenders, victims, police, and community residents. The message is that
nobody cares, that the justice system is little more than a revolving door. 

It is precisely this perception that the Midtown Community Court was
created to address. At Midtown, many defendants who might have escaped
sanctions in a traditional court find themselves ordered to paint over
graffiti or participate in drug treatment. Clearly there were holes in the net;
the Midtown Community Court simply sought to mend them. The
Midtown Community Court approached this issue with great care,
choosing to target a specific set of crimes that were going largely
unpunished. The court's approach emphasized proportionality--making the
punishment fit the crime. This meant creating short-term sentences for
low-level offenders--1 or 2 days of community service. It also meant that
the court did not attempt to send drug addicts with no prior record to 18
months of inpatient drug treatment.

2. Do community courts lead to vigilante justice?

Many fear that community courts will unleash an insatiable community
hunger for harsher, more punitive responses to low-level crime. In fact, the
Midtown Community Court experiment has shown that, when given
options, community residents will generally support constructive sanctions
like community restitution and social services.[4] For example, residents
were among the first to suggest that Midtown provide health services to
prostitutes. This suggestion did not necessarily grow out of altruism--
residents were justifiably concerned about public health implications. But
it does show that community residents have more on their minds than just
"throwing the book" at low-level offenders.

This is true even in neighborhoods plagued by drugs and guns. Our
experience planning a second community court in the Red Hook section of
Brooklyn confirmed this impression. Despite Red Hook's reputation for
drugs and armed violence, focus-group research and door-to-door
community surveys revealed that local residents want the community court
to provide low-level offenders with education, counseling, and help in
reintegrating into the community.

3. Do community courts expose judges to undue influence?

There is an important distinction to be made between judicial
independence and judicial isolation. While community courts encourage
judges to become more sensitive to community needs and concerns, they
must take pains not to compromise the independence of the judiciary. This
can be a delicate balancing act.

At the Midtown Community Court, it is clear that the judge's job is not to
manage community relations; instead the court has a community
ombudsperson and an administrative staff charged with this responsibility.
Nonetheless, the court's decision to create a community advisory board--
and have the sitting judge attend its meetings--made some local judges
uneasy. Would the advisory board seek to second-guess judicial decisions?
This has not been the case. The members of the advisory board, while
actively engaged in thinking about the court's programs and community
service projects, have never tried to lobby the judge about individual
cases. Rather, they have been a valuable resource for the judge, helping to
expand the array of community service options and create postdisposition
opportunities such as job training. 

At some point, however, being responsive to a community could militate
against important concepts of judicial independence. Freedom from
popular influence is a basic element of judicial independence. Judges in
community courts must therefore struggle to identify which forms of
interaction with community residents and leaders are acceptable and which
are not. They must also think hard about what types of information about
community problems or concerns should be taken into consideration in
deciding individual cases.

4. Are community courts soft on crime? 

It is difficult to characterize community courts as either "soft" or "tough"
on crime. The intermediate sanctions offered by the Midtown Community
Court are alternatives to the polar ends of the sentencing spectrum: no
sanctions and jail. The court thus sends a double message: All offenders
must be held accountable for their crime, no matter how small; and a court
can also use its coercive power to move offenders toward rehabilitation. In
short, the Midtown Community Court argues that punishment and help
can be combined.

Given the previous discussion about widening the net, it will come as no
surprise that, in the main, the Midtown Community Court is tougher on
crime than Manhattan's downtown court. According to the National Center
for State Courts' evaluation, "walks"--sentences that are attached to no
penalty whatsoever--are more than twice as common at the downtown
court as they are at the Midtown Community Court, where offenders by
and large receive community service and social service sentences. Jail
sentences are another side of the story. Interestingly, the National Center
for State Courts found that although the Midtown Community Court
issued fewer jail sentences in the aggregate, offenders received longer jail
sentences than those imposed downtown. Midtown increased the
percentage of misdemeanor jail sentences of more than 30 days by 57
percent. 

None of this has been lost on defendants. Interviews revealed that
defendants who have appeared before both courts believe that Midtown is
"tougher" than the downtown court. When asked which court they
preferred, however, defendants chose Midtown. Why? Because Midtown's
staff treat them with a measure of dignity and at Midtown they can get
help with their problems. This response is one clear sign that Midtown's
double message of punishment and help is working.

5. Do community courts stigmatize offenders?

Offenders at the Midtown Community Court receive a great deal of
attention. The court's computer system records the results of each
defendant's assessment interview as well as their compliance with
community service. For some, the court's collection of this information
evoked images of an impersonal "big brother" amassing data and
increasing the court's remoteness. Would this information be used to brand
people as offenders for life?

Ironically, the Midtown Community Court has instead used modern
technology to recreate the familiarity of a small town. Judges need to
understand who is standing in front of them. Without information, courts
can feel like assembly lines. With information, the process becomes more
personal. Both punishment and help can be tailored to fit the individual
needs of each defendant. 

Another element of the Midtown Community Court that raised similar
concerns was the visibility of the court's punishments. Offenders
sentenced to perform community service outdoors must wear vests that
announce they are from the Midtown Community Court. The court also
has experimented with victim-offender reconciliation panels that bring
offenders face-to-face with those they have harmed. Are these just
exercises in public shaming? Is the net effect to widen the gulf between
offenders and law-abiding citizens? For Midtown, the answer has been
"no." Instead, these initiatives, like the court's use of technology, have
helped put a human face on crime. No longer can residents, merchants,
and court personnel deal in abstractions or talk about offenders as a
separate class of people. This is important groundwork for the court's
problem-solving mission.

Still, the potential for abuse exists. What happens when a community court
becomes the domain of a judge with highly idiosyncratic views? How and
to whom should community courts be held accountable for their treatment
of defendants? These are issues that will become more important as
community courts continue to multiply.

6. Are community courts cost prohibitive?

Decentralization costs money. Initially, it is less expensive to run one large
courthouse with dozens of courtrooms than it is to run dozens of separate
small courthouses, each with its own staff and physical plant to maintain.
If that's all that community courts are--boutique versions of the status quo-
-they would not be worth creating. But they are much more than that. By
placing a variety of social services under one roof and providing
community restitution, community courts add a significant amount of
value to the court system. The questions are: How much? Is it enough to
offset the expense?

Community courts must analyze the costs and the benefits of their work.
Among the benefits that community courts must be prepared to articulate
are drops in crime rates, reductions in arrest-to-arraignment processing
times, improved community service compliance rates, and community
service labor contributed to the community. More difficult to measure are
a community court's effects on a neighborhood. For example, by
addressing neighborhood blight, improving public safety, and providing
social services, a community court can help spur neighborhood economic
development. After all, meaningful and lasting economic development
rarely takes place in areas where residents, merchants, and employees fear
for their safety. All of these arguments can be used to explain why a
community court is worth an initial outlay of funding and how, over time,
it might pay for itself. These arguments are particularly crucial in the
current political climate of government cutbacks and public cynicism
concerning government reform efforts. 

What will the community courts of tomorrow look like? How can we
ensure that they are cost-effective? Perhaps video technology could be
used to link litigants in communities with judges located in centralized
facilities. Perhaps selected housing cases could be filed, and even
resolved, via computers located in public housing developments and with
tenant advocacy groups. The Midtown Community Court model is just
that--one model among many possibilities. 

7. Do community courts erode the adversarial nature of the legal system?

In developing community courts, concerns about diminishing the
adversarial process go with the territory. A similar criticism has been
leveled at drug courts, which are often called "nonadversarial" because
they focus on supporting and sustaining defendants in treatment and
recovery rather than on determining criminal responsibility. Likewise, it
can be argued that procedural protections and advocacy often take a back
seat to other objectives of community courts. It is worth considering what
types of protections need to be built into community courts to guard
against the possibility of arbitrary decisionmaking.

There is no denying that the Midtown Community Court's focus on
problem solving led to some important structural changes in the
courtroom. The assessment interview and the resource coordinator provide
an unprecedented level of information directly to the judge that is not
filtered by attorneys. With more information and a broader array of
sentencing options at hand, the judge has taken greater control of
decisionmaking. For some, this has created the perception that the balance
of power in the courtroom has shifted too far in the direction of the judge,
that the court is more concerned with outcomes than with process.

The differences between a problem-solving model and a more
conventional adversarial system may not be as stark as some seem to
think. The Midtown Community Court has maintained the core
components of the traditional courtroom model. Visitors to the court are
sometimes surprised that the district attorney's office prosecutes each case
and that each defendant is represented by a defense attorney. 

In fact, most of the problem-solving tools--drug treatment, health care,
education, and others--located onsite at the Midtown Community Court
come into play only after a case has been decided. They are housed under
the same roof as the courtroom to improve the chances that defendants will
use them and to enhance the court's ability to monitor performance. 

In addition, the Midtown Community Court is the home of several
unconventional programs, such as community mediation, job training, and
homeless outreach, that bear little relation to the day-to-day work of
arraigning misdemeanor cases. These programs do not involve the judge
directly and do not emanate from the courtroom, but they do represent the
court's commitment to improving the quality of life in the community.
These programs take advantage of the court's presence, using its
institutional authority to lend them credibility. The Midtown Community
Court has thus demonstrated that the courtroom does not have to be the
only entry point into a courthouse--a court can serve as an institutional
base for a variety of programs that seek to tackle persistent neighborhood
problems. 

8. Do community courts create inequity?

Community courts raise concerns about equity. Some observers question
whether paying attention to community concerns means that justice will
vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. They ask whether the location
of an arrest should have any impact on sentence outcomes. 

This is a challenging issue, but it is not necessarily new. Consistency has
always posed a challenge for court administrators: sentences vary
dramatically from city to city, courtroom to courtroom, and judge to judge.
Community courts further complicate the mix, but the challenge they pose
is not unheard-of. Other observers have argued that neighborhoods should
benefit equally from the resources of the court system. Court
administrators are understandably sensitive about resource allocation. The
appearance that one neighborhood is receiving more than its fair share of
resources is a major issue for community court planners to confront. 

But it is also clear that some neighborhoods are disproportionately
burdened by specific problems that require unique solutions. In midtown
Manhattan, quality-of-life crime was the problem to be addressed. This
may not be what fuels community courts in other settings. In other
neighborhoods, the primary problem may be juvenile delinquency or
domestic violence or housing issues. In still other neighborhoods, the most
pressing problem to be addressed may be the gap between the community
and the criminal justice system itself. Each of these problems calls for
different resources and a unique set of partners. 

Community courts will always be intrinsically different from each other
because each must focus on the problems of a specific community. The
relevant question then is: Does this conflict with the notion of fair, equal,
and evenhanded justice?

Conclusion: The future of community courts

We know from the Midtown Community Court and other recent
experiments that courts can wear many hats: justice dispenser,
peacemaker, service provider, and, most important of all, problem solver.
In playing these roles, the new courts have challenged traditional notions
about the nature of the criminal justice system and tested the extent to
which courts can serve as catalysts for change in neighborhoods. 

Some questions remain: Where does all this lead? Will the new wave in
court reform result in systemic change or will it always be ancillary to
traditional case processing? What is the purpose of the community court
movement? Is it to create a mosaic of unique courtrooms narrowly
targeted to handle specific groups of cases? Or is it to bring a new
problem-solving focus to the work of courts in general?

The short answer is that it is still too soon to tell. Community courts are
still in their infancy. For the moment, two competing images of justice
operate side by side: one actively engaged with the noisy and messy
problems of neighborhoods and individuals; the other shielded from the
din, protective of its detachment. 

We envision the community courts or, perhaps, "community justice
centers" of tomorrow as multiservice facilities, offering help to offenders,
victims, and community residents alike. The new justice centers would
house the kinds of treatment and prevention programs typically found in
one-stop social service centers. They would mediate neighborhood
disputes and enlist residents in defining appropriate responses to crime and
delinquency. They would use community restitution to eliminate signs of
neighborhood disorder. They would cross jurisdictional boundaries,
hearing civil court and family court matters in addition to criminal cases in
order to address in a coordinated fashion the multiple problems that
confront so many individuals and families.

Everyone who enters the justice center of the future as a litigant would be
entitled to legal representation, but not everyone would reach the
courtroom. Several different tracks would be available: a mediation track,
a social service track, a courtroom track, and others. Where a matter ended
up would depend upon the case and the person. The interesting questions
would be: Who decides? Would litigants be allowed to opt for whatever
track they chose? Would counsel for each litigant determine which track
was appropriate in a traditional adversarial fashion? Or would court
personnel serve as gatekeepers, assessing each case and mandating tracks
accordingly? Would community members or victims have a say? What
would become of the judge? Perhaps the judge would function like an air-
traffic controller, presiding over the whole enterprise, making sure that the
justice center stayed on course.

Although the future of community justice remains unclear, experiments
like the Midtown Community Court already have made several valuable
contributions to the national conversation about courts, communities, and
criminal justice.

Community courts posit that some fundamental changes must be made in
the way that courts conduct their business. As a first step, courts must
acknowledge the damage that crime has done to both individuals and
communities. This will not be easy. To do this, courts must look beyond
the narrow issues presented in any given case to address the underlying
problems of individuals and communities. They also must recognize that
solving problems like community disorder, drug addiction, domestic
violence, and criminal recidivism requires new partnerships with social
service providers, victim organizations, businesses, schools, and block
associations. Finally, to perform all of this new work, courts must create
new structures, experiment with new technology, and hire new personnel.
In performing this work, community courts demonstrate that our system of
justice can help repair injured neighborhoods and that our courts warrant
public confidence and respect.

Notes

1. As noted by Malcolm Feeley in his landmark study of a court of limited
jurisdiction, urban courts typically impose few sanctions in response to
high-volume, low-level crime. See Feeley, M. 1979. The Process Is the
Punishment. New York, New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

2. Wilson, J.Q., and Kelling, G.L. 1982. "Broken Windows: The Police
and Neighborhood Safety," Atlantic Monthly, March, pp. 29-38. See also
Kelling, G.L., and Coles, C.M. 1996. Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring
Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities, New York, New York:
Free Press.

3. Sviridoff, M., Rottman, D., Ostrom, B., and Curtis, R. 1997. Dispensing
Justice Locally: The Implementation and Effects of the Midtown
Community Court. Alexandria, Virginia: State Justice Institute.

4. See Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. 1992. Americans Behind Bars.
New York, New York: Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.

-------------------------------

The Lessons of Neighborhood-Focused Public Defense 

Christopher Stone, Vera Institute of Justice

On May 30, 1996, an extraordinary event in the short history of
community justice occurred in New York City. A large crowd of residents
from Harlem--men, women, and children--appeared at City Hall to
demonstrate their support for a local service that was threatened with
elimination by the mayor's proposed budget. At stake was not a library, a
child care facility, a health clinic, or a senior citizens' center. The city
council was holding hearings that day on the city's budget for indigent
defense, and the service that these citizens wanted to preserve was the
Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem (N.D.S.)--their local public
defender. The effect on the city council members was electrifying; no one
had ever seen ordinary citizens turn out in such numbers for budget
hearings on this subject before. Within a few weeks, the city council and
the mayor had agreed to restore funding to N.D.S. 

Six years earlier, a small group at the Vera Institute of Justice was laying
the groundwork to begin this experiment in neighborhood-based defense.
Veteran defenders said it would never work. The head of the Legal Aid
Society's Criminal Defense Division, for example, noted that Legal Aid
had tried to operate a neighborhood office in the Bedford-Stuyvesant
section of Brooklyn in the 1970s. "People didn't come in," he explained to
a local newspaper. "It didn't work because the client population did not
walk into that office seeking representation."[1]

In the 6 years between those warnings and the city council hearings, we
learned a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of neighborhood defense
and about its implications for the criminal justice system as a whole. The
skeptics were proved correct about some things; for instance, the office did
not have the dramatic impact on bail decisions or disposition speed that
had been sought. But by virtually every other measure, the experiment
worked--the investigations have been more thorough, the representation
more comprehensive, the sentences more humane and less costly, and the
satisfaction among clients and their families far greater. Within a few
months of opening the doors, the waiting room at N.D.S. was almost
always full. People did walk into that office.

What we learned in those years holds at least five important lessons for
public defenders, other criminal justice practitioners, and all those
interested in justice in America. After a brief description of what happened
in Harlem, this paper discusses those lessons.

What happened in Harlem

In 1990, the Vera Institute of Justice, with funding from the city and State
of New York, developed the Neighborhood Defender Service to provide
high-quality, cost-effective legal defense services to defendants who live
in Harlem and cannot afford to hire private counsel. N.D.S. works
alongside New York City's institutional defender, the Legal Aid Society.
But unlike Legal Aid and other traditional defense agencies, N.D.S. is
based not at the courthouse but in a suite of offices on 125th Street in
Harlem, in the heart of the community it serves. The Manhattan
courthouses are 7 miles away. From the change of location flow a variety
of other reforms aimed at improving the quality of defense and addressing
issues that lead to crime and injustice. 

Many veteran defenders did not understand how a public defender could
be based so far from the courthouse. "If a person is arrested and brought
downtown," asked a 15-year veteran attorney when the office opened, "is
his lawyer going to come downtown for the arraignment and then go back
uptown? I don't understand the advantage."[2] 

Indeed, for lawyers accustomed to spending all their time in court the
location is less convenient, but it has proved to be an advantage at every
stage of proceedings. N.D.S. attorneys can quickly search crime scenes
and interview witnesses, even before defendants are booked. Clients,
relatives, and witnesses come by the office frequently as lawyers prepare
cases, facilitating the investigation. During court proceedings, attorneys
question witnesses and argue the facts with a thorough knowledge of the
neighborhood. After the case, clients and their families continue to visit
the office, allowing N.D.S. to help with problems before they lead to
further trouble with the law.

Instead of waiting for the court to appoint clients, N.D.S. encourages
Harlem residents to call the office anytime, in the same way more affluent
people call their attorneys. This relatively minor change in intake
procedures gives N.D.S. lawyers, on call 24 hours a day, a few more hours
to gather information. Moving up the point of contact between citizens and
criminal justice services is crucial. Just as police officers have exchanged
911 for neighborhood beats to increase their accessibility, N.D.S. attorneys
are immediately available to clients.

Perhaps most important, the location and accessibility of the lawyers have
helped N.D.S. win the trust of residents, many of whom previously saw
defense attorneys as just another part of an unfair system. As one lawyer
put it, "When I first meet my clients I give them my card. They don't know
me from Adam, but when they see the Harlem address, the whole
relationship changes." N.D.S. has hired a number of people who grew up
in Harlem, further strengthening its connection to the community. Clients
and their families have come to view N.D.S. as a neighborhood law office
and its attorneys as their own. N.D.S. attorney David Feige tells the story
of Kaleh, a young client whom he tried to help find a job and a home.
Unfortunately, despite those efforts, Kaleh was rearrested. The first thing
he said to the Legal Aid attorney the court provided was "David Feige is
my attorney," and then he gave her Feige's home phone and pager
numbers. Another client, asked if he would want N.D.S. to represent him
again, said, "I'm adjusted to the team now because I know how they
respond to you, and I don't know how someone else would respond. So I'd
rather get representation from them right here than anybody else. I like
their respect."

Each N.D.S. client is represented not by a single lawyer but by a team,
which includes attorneys, community workers, an administrative assistant,
and an intern. Each of the three teams is headed by a senior attorney and
carries a caseload of 180 to 200 cases. One attorney has principal
responsibility for each case, but every staff member on the team is familiar
with all of the team's cases. Specialized computer software enables team
members to quickly access or add information about cases or clients. The
team-based structure ensures continuity of representation; even if the lead
attorney leaves, the team can continue. When lawyers in traditional
defender offices go to trial, their other cases are placed on hold. At N.D.S.,
teams continue to work on a case even when its lead attorney is tied up in
court. The system also heightens accountability by making attorneys
answerable to other team members and creates an egalitarian atmosphere
by making substantive use of nonlawyers. Finally, the team-based
approach allows attorneys to co-counsel major cases that go to trial. 

Court-based defenders give highest priority to cases about to go to trial
and lowest to those just opened. By contrast, N.D.S. focuses on advocacy
for clients at the beginning of their cases. Teams are held accountable for
work they accomplish in the first 4 weeks. Although N.D.S. attorneys take
pride in their trial preparation and courtroom performance, they focus on
preventing cases from going to trial, relying on information gleaned from
early investigation. 

Lesson one: Early investigation matters

In terms of process, the capacity to acquire timely, accurate, and complete
information most distinguishes N.D.S. from traditional defenders. Usually,
public defenders do not receive a case until their client's first appearance in
court; they receive most of their information from prosecutors during
discovery and from the police, who may not be forthcoming. By contrast,
in about half its cases, N.D.S. begins the investigation process before
clients are arraigned.

The vast majority of calls to N.D.S. are from people seeking lawyers for
relatives who have been arrested or who are sought by the police and want
to surrender. They usually call out of concern for their relatives' safety as
they enter the criminal justice system. Some understand the value of an
attorney in protecting constitutional rights during the early stages of a
case, and others hope that N.D.S. can secure an early release from jail.
Whatever their reason for calling N.D.S., family members often become
important contacts who help obtain information, locate witnesses, and
ensure that clients appear in court. 

Too often, minor disputes end up in criminal courts because the parties
know of no other way to resolve them, such as the frightened boy who
wants the teenagers down the block to stop harassing him, the elderly
woman who is threatened by the kids loitering on the stoop, or the
teenager who is punched by a friend. These wrongs are real and often
traumatic, but the victims may exaggerate them to obtain help from the
criminal justice system. This type of case usually ends in a plea bargain to
a crime that even the complainant knows did not occur, but that neither the
prosecutor nor the defense attorney has time or resources to investigate.
Unable to ignore this reality, N.D.S. staff relies on early investigation and
knowledge of the community to mediate many disputes before they
become fictitious stories in court.

Even if offenses are not exaggerated, they need not always end up in court.
An N.D.S. attorney handled a case of a merchant who told the defense
investigator that the only reason he had called the police about a
neighborhood youth who stole from him was because he could not find the
boy's parents. It can be risky to make a deal that calls for sacrificing the
client's constitutional right to silence, especially without the involvement
of a prosecutor, and the ideal system of community justice--in which
police, prosecutors, and defenders work together to solve problems--is far
from a reality. Nevertheless, the N.D.S. attorney decided to arrange a
meeting between the family and the merchant, after which the merchant
persuaded the prosecutor to drop the charges. In this and other cases, the
defense attorney, as the only person in the criminal justice system
permitted to talk to the defendant, was uniquely positioned to find a
resolution. 

Of course, N.D.S.'s system of early entry does not only benefit clients
accused of minor crimes. Consider the case of Reuben, who called N.D.S.
as soon as he learned police were looking for him. A few days before, he
had gotten into a brawl with a neighbor, who lost consciousness during the
fight and died a few days later. After a witness claimed Reuben had hit the
man with a pipe, prosecutors charged him with murder. An N.D.S.
attorney negotiated his surrender and, with investigators, tracked down
other witnesses, who said that Reuben had not used a pipe. The N.D.S.
team also had a physician review hospital records, attend the autopsy, and
determine how the man, in poor health, could have died of natural causes.
The investigation helped the N.D.S. attorney secure Reuben's release from
jail while prosecutors reconsidered charges. 

In routine drug cases as well, early investigation can make all the
difference. For a young man arrested with a large sum of money in his
pockets on a street known for drug deals, early investigation proved
crucial. With arrests so frequent on this block, witnesses were able to
remember this particular one only because the investigator arrived quickly.
The combination of the client's credible explanation and the witnesses'
ability to dispute the rote account of the arrest provided by the police
months later allowed N.D.S. to mount a successful defense. In the hands
of many traditional offices, this case and others like it would end in plea
bargains or convictions at trial.

Traditional defenders cannot imagine how one can afford to investigate
every case, but investigating at the start of the case is far more efficient
than investigating on the eve of trial. The witness who is hard to find at
trial may be located in minutes early in the case. The most powerful
instrument available to defense attorneys is information. The first lesson of
neighborhood-based defense is that it provides access to crucial
information as a matter of routine. 

Lesson two: The criminal case is not always the highest priority

Unlike traditional public defender offices, which only work on criminal
cases, N.D.S. defends clients in all legal matters arising from criminal
accusations. In drug eviction cases, for example, an indigent defendant has
no right to free counsel and, without a lawyer, often fails to file proper
papers or presents a weak case in court. In child abuse cases, the court
appoints the parent a private lawyer at public expense, even though a
public defender is representing the same person for the same incident
across the street in criminal court. N.D.S.'s broadened focus therefore
makes sense for three reasons: First, N.D.S. can better protect the rights
and interests of clients if it represents them in every case in which the
criminal charge will be at issue. Second, it is more efficient economically
and practically to have one office represent clients when the facts of a
single case are litigated in more than one court. Third, many civil cases are
functional equivalents of criminal ones in which the defendant, faced by
police and prosecutors, needs a defense lawyer.

Through this practice, N.D.S. attorneys came to understand that criminal
concerns are often no more important to clients than civil ones, a
realization that changed the way N.D.S. approached some cases. An
arrested parent may risk losing custody of children. An immigrant may
risk deportation for committing a crime. A person may be maliciously
beaten by police during an arrest. In all these circumstances, the civil case
may be more important to the client than the criminal case. Traditional
defenders often do not see this or they do not have the tools to pursue
strategies that advance the client's real interests. Working at the
neighborhood level, lawyers become more sensitive to these concerns.

For example, shortly after its inception N.D.S. represented a woman
accused of abusing an infant foster child. Although medical evidence
eventually exonerated her, for more than a year she faced attempted
murder charges in criminal court and termination of her parental rights in
family court. N.D.S. represented her in both courts--itself a novelty. But
the most important novelty was the lawyers' acceptance of her view that
the family court case was more important than the criminal one. This led
the attorneys to reveal information to the family court that might otherwise
have been reserved for the criminal defense.

In 1991, N.D.S. formed a civil team of two attorneys and an administrative
assistant. The team took on a variety of housing, forfeiture, immigration,
and employment cases simultaneously with the criminal litigation. It also
filed police misconduct cases for clients who had been unable to retain
private attorneys. In one case, a boy who had filed suit for false arrest won
a meeting with the arresting police officer. Once again, this might not
seem the most desirable outcome from an attorney's perspective but, more
importantly, it was exactly what the client wanted.

Lesson three: Communities want good lawyers

Perhaps the most frequent warning that veteran attorneys gave us when we
planned this neighborhood-based defender service was that we would not
be welcomed in the community. Crime was high in New York City in
1990, and it was particularly high in the poorest communities. "The people
in Harlem will want your clients locked up," we were told repeatedly.
"They won't want you defending the robbers and drug dealers."

To challenge this prediction, N.D.S. organized a community network
shortly after opening and invited members of the network to annual
receptions in its offices. The network included staff members of local
social service organizations that often helped the same people N.D.S.
served. But we also invited a group of merchants who, considering their
role in the community, were precisely the type of people courthouse
attorneys predicted would be hostile to the idea of providing better
representation to criminal defendants. Dozens of storeowners attended and
enthusiastically pledged their support. Somewhat surprised, we asked
them why they came. They said that at some point in their lives, they had
been arrested or stopped by the police, in one case on the way to open the
store. Though the merchants had been victimized by some people who
would likely be clients of N.D.S., they could nonetheless identify with
other N.D.S. clients and could see the value to the community of improved
legal defense.

Early in the life of N.D.S., a woman who was head of her public housing
tenant patrol became very involved in the community network. She spent a
great deal of time and energy trying to make her building safe by having
lawbreakers arrested, but also worked to improve legal support for her
neighbors when they were arrested. When I asked her about the apparent
inconsistency, she replied, "You represent my son." As virtually anyone
would, she wanted to live in an environment free of crime and drugs, but
she also wanted to secure high-quality legal representation for her son and
neighbors. What she and others taught us is that people legitimately want
both safety and justice in their community. 

N.D.S. also extended itself as a service to the entire community. The staff
has distributed thousands of leaflets about N.D.S. and cards imprinted with
the agency's address and phone number, as well as a "Notice to Police
Officers and Prosecutors" that formalizes the bearer's request to speak with
an attorney and refusal to waive any constitutional rights. Eddie Ellis, who
heads the outreach effort, leads a series of well-attended workshops
entitled "Know Your Rights." N.D.S. developed a 10-session program to
train high school students in how to keep conflicts with police officers
from escalating into arrests and violence. The program's discussion and
role-playing exercises are drawn from cases involving teenagers N.D.S.
has defended. The agency organized a community conference on school
safety, which brought together residents, teachers, police officers, and city
officials. N.D.S. also runs mentoring and job training programs, for which
many Harlem residents--clergy members, business leaders, activists,
retirees--volunteer.

N.D.S. is part of an increasingly strong network of community-based
public services. Because its system of continuous representation fosters
lasting relationships with clients, N.D.S. provides a base of referrals and
information to addiction treatment centers, homeless shelters, hospitals,
alternative sentencing programs, employment training organizations,
schools, and houses of worship. N.D.S. employs a director of social work,
who assesses clients' physical and psychological needs and provides
treatment or makes referrals accordingly.

N.D.S. has also developed a relatively strong relationship with the police,
largely because of its practice of helping arrange voluntary surrenders,
often for people accused of violent crimes. (Police regard for the agency is
such that on one occasion, an officer charged with committing a crime
when he was off-duty sought to retain N.D.S.) In a typical week, N.D.S.
helps two or three people turn themselves in. Some are afraid that they
might be injured during a conventional arrest; others simply want to
cooperate. Either way, a surrender is good for the client, the police, and
the community. It spares the client and the police a potentially bloody
confrontation, serves the client's legal interests, and peaceably brings into
custody a person who might otherwise be violent. Of course, there are
inherent limitations on how closely criminal defense agencies can work
with the police; given their competing interests, no system of community
justice would eliminate contention. Nonetheless, a solid working
relationship is both possible and essential.

Lesson four: Good defense work is cost-effective

N.D.S. representation costs more than that of traditional public defenders.
For example, in 1995 N.D.S. handled about 2,500 cases on a $3.8 million
budget, for an average of approximately $1,520 per case. It costs the New
York Legal Aid Society an average of $1,339 for a felony case. To justify
this extra cost, neighborhood defenders need to produce more value for
their clients and for the criminal justice system. Perhaps the most
important lesson learned through N.D.S. is that this is possible. 

The hypothesis with which we began the N.D.S. experiment was that
neighborhood-based representation and the early investigation it permits
would allow defense attorneys to make stronger factual arguments sooner
after arrest, decreasing pretrial detention, jail, and prison time. By working
on cases earlier and knowing clients and the community better, community
defenders would bring more information into the process earlier, leading
judges and prosecutors to end cases more quickly with less severe
sentences. 

To test this hypothesis, researchers compared the outcomes of N.D.S.
cases with those handled by the traditional system during a 2-year period.
The cases were matched according to the number and severity of the
charges, as well as by the race, age, gender, and criminal record of the
defendants. The study found that N.D.S. clients received considerably
shorter sentences. But N.D.S. clients were not released at the first court
appearance in significantly greater numbers, nor were their cases
concluded significantly faster.

The failure of N.D.S. to significantly increase the percentage of people
released at initial bail hearings surprised and frustrated the staff. Good
investigation early in the case often led the lawyers to make arguments at
bail hearings that persuaded judges to release defendants. The lawyers
knew this was happening, so why was it not making a difference in the
research? Part of the answer lies in the fact that most defendants are
released at arraignment in New York City, regardless of how they are
represented. To make a statistically significant difference, a neighborhood-
based defender in New York would have to win the release of a very large
proportion of clients. Another part of the explanation lies in the limitations
on the data available for research. Data were not available about releases at
later stages when bail was reduced or eventually proved affordable.

The staff at N.D.S. were not surprised by their inability to substantially
speed up cases. Defenders, neighborhood-based or traditional, have less
influence on pretrial delay than the Vera planners initially believed. 

However, the savings from shorter sentences was considerable: 150,000
bed-days or about $10 million, more than twice the N.D.S. budget.
Whether the decreased sentences were the result of plea negotiations or
sentencing advocacy after trial, they are testament to the efficacy of
N.D.S.'s services: Early investigation and continuity of representation lead
to a deeper understanding of clients, and connection to the community
allows better presentation of sentencing options and greater ability and
authority to articulate residents' support for a less severe sentence.
Unfortunately, the savings realized in upstate prisons do not affect the city
budget, which provides the bulk of N.D.S.'s funding. But that is a problem
of politics, not design. N.D.S. has shown that a community defender,
although slightly more expensive than courthouse advocates, can save
taxpayers a substantial amount of money.

Lesson five: Community justice should include neighborhood defenders

The criminal justice system is beginning to evolve from an offender-
processing machine into a collection of community justice services. The
machine, still largely intact, was designed to respond to 911 calls, make
arrests, produce convictions, and punish offenders. Public defenders
generally regard themselves as outsiders to this reactive and punitive
system. However, forced to dispose of cases quickly and with little or no
investigation, they too often serve as cogs in the machine.

Community justice services aim at identifying and solving problems that
foster crime and injustice. Police departments, where the change is most
highly developed, have implemented an array of programs aimed at
preventing crime. Prosecutors, court administrators, and corrections
officials have similarly begun to de-emphasize convictions and
punishment in favor of prevention. 

With their obvious interest in solving problems that lead to crime and in
preventing incidents from becoming criminal justice concerns, why then is
it difficult for public defenders working in traditional agencies to do much
more than dispose of cases as the court assigns them? First, most public
defenders are based at courthouses, far from the communities whose
residents they represent, from the crime scenes around which cases
revolve, and from the witnesses who often determine the strength of the
defense. Typically, public defenders meet clients only a few minutes
before their first court appearance. Overburdened and underfunded, they
usually cannot perform sufficient investigation, so they get too little
information, and they get it too late, making it impossible to place their
cases in proper context. These factors have turned public defense into little
more than a stopgap in which lawyers, unable to fully examine the causes
or ramifications of their cases, are forced to plea bargain. A change of
location alone can make an enormous difference in the quality of service a
public defender provides.

Second, some public defenders are reluctant to engage in problem solving,
for fear of altering the traditional lawyer-client relationship and
compromising their legal strategy. Ideally, community-based defenders,
imbued with a deep knowledge of clients and cases, will have options
foreign to court-based defenders. The experiences of N.D.S. show that a
public defender service can broaden its focus in ways that help clients, the
community, the criminal justice system, and even the lawyers themselves.
Not only can a public defender agency solve problems that produce and
result from crime--in some cases it is the only part of the criminal justice
system that can.

Questions for the future

The transformation of much of the criminal justice system into
community-based services should inspire defense attorneys to dramatically
rethink their jobs and mission. But will it do so? Fundamental change is
difficult for all practitioners, even for public defenders, who are among the
most vocal critics of how criminal justice is currently administered.
Whether many public defenders even want to become community justice
providers is still very much in doubt. Do they want to move from their
(partially) convenient courthouse location? Do they want to face difficult
ethical dilemmas created by new relationships to clients and the
community? Do they want to see themselves not as lonely champions of
liberty isolated from the majority, but as service providers connected to
their community? Do they fear that the development of community-based
defenders will cause the system of criminal defense--already politically
vulnerable and beleaguered by funding cuts--to fragment further? 

These final questions about the eagerness of professionals to adopt a
neighborhood focus cut across the various branches of the criminal justice
system. For all the promotion of community justice, we know very little
about what the majority of judges, prosecutors, and defenders think about
it in terms of their own careers.

The N.D.S. experiment has shown that a community-based defense
organization benefits not only clients, the community, and the criminal
justice system, but also lawyers, for whom working to solve problems is
its own reward. N.D.S. attorneys are thrilled to have opportunities to help
clients in ways beyond working out plea bargains. They know it is
appropriate for a defense agency to represent the community of Harlem,
because people living there overwhelmingly believe that defendants, even
those ultimately found guilty, deserve good representation. They are glad
to provide legal support to Harlem residents, who--like many people living
in highly policed communities--look at the criminal justice system with
suspicion, if not fear.

Community justice services are probably not ideal for all criminal defense
lawyers, some of whom might, for example, want to focus solely on trial
work. A system of community-based defense services must complement,
not replace, the court-based system. Some communities do not experience
the numbers of arrests that would make an office viable, and some
defendants live outside the jurisdiction where the offense took place. Some
sort of court-based system is needed to represent the many defendants who
inevitably fall through the cracks of any community-based system. One
possible approach is a mixed system, with some public defenders located
in the community and others based at the courthouse.

Even if many public defenders decide to relocate to neighborhood offices,
it is unclear whether people working in other parts of the criminal justice
system will embrace them. If some criminal defenders view themselves as
outsiders to the system, then many police, prosecutors, judges, and
corrections officials surely will as well. This is problematic because
community-based defenders, or for that matter any community justice
service, will not be effective if they must work in isolation. As
practitioners in other parts of the criminal justice system implement
community-based programs, it is critical that they seek opportunities to
work with public defenders, who share their interest in eliminating
problems that produce crime. 

Notes

1. Pinsely, Elliot. 1990. "New City Program Challenges Legal Aid"
Manhattan Lawyer (June ): 1.

2. Ibid.

-------------------------------

About the National Institute of Justice

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ), a component of the Office of
Justice Programs, is the research agency of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Created by the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, as
amended, NIJ is authorized to support research, evaluation, and
demonstration programs, development of technology, and both national
and international information dissemination. Specific mandates of the Act
direct NIJ to:

o Sponsor special projects and research development programs that will
improve and strengthen the criminal justice system and reduce or prevent
crime.

o Conduct national demonstration projects that employ innovative or
promising approaches for improving criminal justice.

o Develop new technologies to fight crime and improve criminal justice.

o Evaluate the effectiveness of criminal justice programs and identify
programs that promise to be successful if continued or repeated.

o Recommend actions that can be taken by Federal, State, and local
governments as well as by private organizations to improve criminal
justice.

o Carry out research on criminal behavior.

o Develop new methods of crime prevention and reduction of crime and
delinquency.

In recent years, NIJ has greatly expanded its initiatives, the result of the
Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (the Crime
Act), partnerships with other Federal agencies and private foundations,
advances in technology, and a new international focus. Some examples of
these new initiatives:

o Exploring key issues in community policing, violence against women,
violence within the family, sentencing reforms, and specialized courts
such as drug courts.

o Developing dual-use technologies to support national defense and local
law enforcement needs.

o Establishing four regional National Law Enforcement and Corrections
Technology Centers and a Border Research and Technology Center.

o Strengthening NIJ's links with the international community through
participation in the United Nations network of criminological institutes,
the U.N. Criminal Justice Information Network, UNOJUST (United
Nations Online Justice Clearinghouse), and the NIJ International Center.

o Improving the online capability of NIJ's criminal justice information
clearinghouse.

o Establishing the ADAM (Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring)
program formerly the Drug Use Forecasting (DUF) program to increase
the number of drug-testing sites and study drug-related crime.

The Institute Director establishes the Institute's objectives, guided by the
priorities of the Office of Justice Programs, the Department of Justice, and
the needs of the criminal justice field. The Institute actively solicits the
views of criminal justice professionals and researchers in the continuing
search for answers that inform public policymaking in crime and justice

-------------------------------

To find out more information about the National Institute of Justice, please
contact:

National Criminal Justice Reference Service,
Box 6000
Rockville, MD 20849-6000
800-851-3420
e-mail: askncjrs@ncjrs.org