Community Justice in Rural America: Four Examples and Four Futures.

摘要

To find answers to these questions, the Bureau of Justice Assistance funded a project by the Center for Effective Public Policy to study rural communities in which community justice is thriving. This monograph reports what the center found. The communities selected for this study--Boise County, Idaho; Jefferson County, Oregon; Monroe County, Wisconsin; and Burlington, Vermont--have different cultures, crime and quality-of-life concerns, and assets. But each shares a desire to look beyond remedies traditionally offered by the justice system for solutions to seemingly intractable problems. Each community highlighted in this monograph provides an example of how community justice grows in response to the unique needs it serves. In Boise County, for example, the catalyst for community justice was the lack of adequate dispositions available to the juvenile court. In Monroe County, the spark came from the former chair of the county board, who questioned the desirability of building a new jail in response to overcrowding in the local corrections system.