Abstract
The last 30 years or so have seen great experimentation within American criminal courts. New “problem-solving” courts have gained traction as ways to address not crime itself but the perceived underlying causes of crime, from drug addiction and mental health to homelessness and victimization (Berman and Feinblatt 2001). Such courts invoke a diversity of motivating logics—some old (such as rehabilitation) and some new (like restorative justice)—that run counter to the prevailing punitive rhetoric of U.S. penal politics. How do such courts establish themselves in this environment, and what challenges do they face to their persistence and growth?
In Courting the Community: Legitimacy and Punishment in a Community Court, Christine Zozula provides a detailed and thoughtful examination of one such experiment. Over an 11-month period, Zozula ethnographically tracked the proceedings of the community court in the pseudonymous small city of Greenville. In addition to watching the court proceedings, she sat in on staff meetings and followed judges and behind-the-scenes administrators out into the community as they toured treatment centers and engaged community groups. The result is a grounded analysis of how court actors navigate and give meaning to competing goals to treat and to punish while striving to establish their court’s legitimacy to do both.
Compared to other problem-solving courts (such as drug courts or mental health courts), Greenville’s community court has two distinct features. First is the broad array of constituencies that the court serves, from neighborhood groups to business owners to homeless shelters. Second is the vast range of “quality-of-life” crimes that fall under the court’s purview, from criminal mischief to prostitution to vending violations. The court seeks to deal with low-level non-violent crimes in a way that reforms the criminal and repairs the community. By pleading guilty, defendants before the court can opt for community service or treatment with the promise of a clean record if they successfully complete their sentence. Zozula shows that they have practically no choice but to accept the offer.
In line with other work on problem-solving courts (Tiger 2012; Burns and Peyrot 2003) and processing of low-level offenses more generally (Phelps 2016; Kohler-Hausmann 2018), Zozula documents how the community court can be both net-widening and net-deepening, simultaneously steering more people under criminal justice supervision and allowing the court to reach ever more intimately into people’s lives. Instead of a night in jail, defendants now face a night in jail and months of surveillance, backed by the threat of more jail time. By the internal logic of the court, when defendants complete their sentence of community service or treatment, the court is successful: the defendant is on their way to being reformed, the community is made better, and jail is avoided. Yet when someone fails to complete their sentence and ends up in jail, the court is also successful: punishment is secured for recalcitrant defendants who revealed their (moral) failure to achieve rehabilitation. This means that who ends up in jail is often unrelated to the nature of the underlying crime. Instead, defendants are punished for their unwillingness to embrace the court’s self-justifying opportunities for self-betterment.
Who thinks all of this is a good idea? The last part of the book seeks to solve this central mystery. As a community court, it exists only through the buy-in of diverse “community” stakeholders—stakeholders who often hold competing visions of the aims of justice. Zozula argues that the court strategically mobilizes ideological vessels such as “community,” “punishment,” and “treatment,” which allow different stakeholders to see what they want in the court’s mission and routine practices. This “ambivalence,” as Zozula terms it (pp. 141–43), is a defining feature of the court. Court actors toggle between retributive and rehabilitative logics to explain their goals, depending on the audience and circumstance—for example, emphasizing punishment for neighborhood associations and treatment for social services providers. In the process, the court delineates the community it purports to serve. This community is almost entirely local power-players such as homeowners, business owners, and nonprofits, excluding defendants and their families and friends.
Unfortunately, Zozula could not gain access to talk with defendants, nor does she include interviews with or observations of stakeholders outside their interactions with the court. Perhaps this is why her analysis of the consequences of the court are circumspect and speculative—for example, the court’s sentences may lead to disparate outcomes for different groups of defendants (pp. 68–70), the court’s reliance on guilty pleas “might result in a lack of due process” (p. 99, italics added), and/or the court “may indeed be competing with the social-service organizations” for resources (p. 161, italics added). She also suggests possible positive outcomes, such as more people trusting the judicial process and feeling part of the community. But without these additional voices, we do not get the same vivid sense of the court’s impacts beyond the courtroom as we do of the court in action. Zozula also acknowledges that she shies away from a systematic analysis of the racial and gender dynamics of the courtroom, though her discussion of cultural capital suggests some of the power inequalities at play.
Whereas Zozula interrogates one community court’s success in establishing its legitimacy, we might also ask why community courts writ large have failed to gain traction. As Zozula details, the first bona fide community court was established in Manhattan in 1993, created to deal with the torrent of quality-of-life cases brought into the judicial system through the city’s now-infamous broken windows policing strategy. But when compared to the fervent spread of quality-of-life policing to hundreds of cities across the United States and abroad, the quite limited reach of community courts is striking. At the time of writing, she notes, there are only 37 community courts operating in the United States. If community courts are so successful at balancing competing aims and constituencies, what explains their rather limited impact on reshaping the American criminal justice system? In other words, what curtails the court’s legitimacy? Understanding in greater clarity the limits of Greenville Community Court’s quest to build community support would give us a better sense of this, perhaps drawing out a different set of contingencies in the recent history of American penal politics and providing a stronger sense of what alternatives to the current system are possible.
Still, Courting the Community provides an invaluable window into the inner workings of a new approach to justice striving to justify its existence and effectiveness. As Zozula argues in the introduction, and as others have argued (e.g., Goodman 2012), this is not so much a full-scale resuscitation of rehabilitation as it is a new, hybrid form of punishment attempting to establish itself within the current bounds of accepted practice. Amid many different experiments in criminal justice reform, Zozula adds an important study of the promises and drawbacks of institutional innovation within existing criminal justice frameworks.