Restorative and community justice are becoming increasingly popular. Although both are conceptually ambiguous and overlapping, they have distinctive core elements and are separate movements. Restorative justice is based on values that promote repairing harm, healing, and rebuilding relations among victims, the offenders, and the communities. Community justice views crime as a social problem that affects life in communities and suggests that prevention is an essential part of all criminal justice agencies' work. Both share goals of community participation, empowerment, and development. It is unclear whether restorative justice and community justice initiatives will work and with what effects. The theoretical promise of community justice has not yet achieved practical success. Although most participants are satisfied with restorative justice practices, there is little evidence that intensive emotional experiences have reduced crime, prevented victimization, or built communities. However, limited results ref...

Restorative and community justice in the United States

The Changing Role of the American Prosecutor

Delay reduction in courts of justice – possibilities and challenges of process improvement in professional public organizations

This Bulletin is part of OJJDP’s Juvenile Accountability Incentive Block Grants (JAIBG) Best Practices Series. The basic premise underlying the JAIBG program, initially funded in fiscal year 1998, is that young people who violate the law need to be held accountable for their offenses if society is to improve the quality of life in the Nation’s communities. Holding a juvenile offender “accountable” in the juvenile justice system means that once the juvenile is determined to have committed law-violating behavior, by admission or adjudication, he or she is held responsible for the act through consequences or sanctions, imposed pursuant to law, that are proportionate to the offense. Consequences or sanctions that are applied swiftly, surely, and consistently, and are graduated to provide appropriate and effective responses to varying levels of offense seriousness and offender chronicity, work best in preventing, controlling, and reducing further law violations.

Enhancing Prosecutors' Ability to Combat and Prevent Juvenile Crime in Their Jurisdictions

In 1997, inspired by the French 'maisons de justice' and the American community justice programme, a project was launched in the Netherlands under the title 'lustitie in de buurt', with the dual meaning 'neighbourhood justice' and 'justice nearby'. The idea was to open offices where the prosecutor and other judicial institutions could operate in a problem-oriented way, near to the public and near to other official bodies, like the police, local administration, welfare organizations and so on. This article will report on the development of the project. First, it will explain how this new idea was implemented by the Ministry of Justice. In addition, the pilot projects will be described and some preliminary results will be given. Finally the project is positioned in relation to the development of the welfare state. A liberal state and a plural society are more and more dependent on law and the judiciary.

Right to the community : Neighborhood justice in the Netherlands

Community prosecution in the United States

The benefit of applying modern management approaches to court operations to ensuring access to justice, timely and transparent dispositions, and increased public trust in courts is recognized in many countries In the USA, the art of applying modern management techniques to court operations has evolved over the past 30 years into a now solidly established profession Since the underlying principles and techniques of modern court management, such as case flow management, goal-oriented performance measures, workload assessments, customer surveys, etc, are derived from general management concepts they are not tied to a particular legal system or framework and can be successfully applied in non-US systems if they are properly adjusted Interested in the positive results of court management in the USA, researchers and practitioners in several European countries have been looking at the applicability of the approaches used in the USA to improve their own ability to manage court processes more efficiently Since court management has become a main staple of reforming court operations in the USA, it is not surprising that US-funded development assistance in the Balkan states and other countries often involves transferring court management US-style into the newly evolving democracies as part of rule of law or commercial sector development assistance These projects frequently introduce, among others, case flow management techniques that sometimes seem to be in conflict with underlying legal principles or procedural laws, and often defy the local legal culture The US-funded assistance programs are often introduced parallel to efforts funded by European and other donors, which may take and suggest different approaches to the host country As a result, confusion and insecurity about which approaches are appropriate for a particular country can arise and impede much needed reforms or lead to legislative and regulatory changes that do not mesh well or even conflict with other parts of the legal framework This article reviews the role of US-based court management approaches in recent court reform efforts under way in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia and, in light of lessons learned there and in other countries, assesses the reform processes applied and their status It also outlines how these court management approaches fit into non-US court systems, how they can be adjusted according to individual country needs and what the main obstacles are that such reform efforts generally face

Heike Gramckow

Papers

Community prosecution in the United States

Can us-type court management approaches work in civil law systems? experiences from the balkans and beyond

Community prosecution in the United States and its relevance for Europe