Community Court: The Research Literature

The first community court opened in Midtown Manhattan in 1993. Focusing on quality-of-life offenses, such as drug possession, shoplifting, vandalism,and prostitution, the Midtown Community Court sought to combine punishment and help, sentencing low-level offenders to perform visible community restitution, receive on site social services, including drug treatment, counseling, and job training. There are currently more than 60 community court projects in operation worldwide. In the United States alone there are 33 while there are 17 in South Africa, 13 in England and Wales, and one each in Australia and Canada.Community courts seek to achieve a variety of goals, such as reduced crime, increased engagement between citizens and the courts, improved perceptions of neighborhood safety, greater accountability for low level,"quality-of-life" offenders, speedier and more meaningful case resolutions, and cost savings. In advancing these goals, community courts generally make greater use of community-based sanctions than traditional courts (Hakuta, Soroushian,and Kralstein, 2008; Katz, 2009; Sviridoff et al., 2000; Weidner and Davis, 2000). Among a sample of 25 community courts surveyed in 2007, 92 percent routinely use community service mandates, and 84 percent routinely use social services mandates (Karafin, 2008). This paper reviews the research literature to date about community courts. Community court studies have employed a number of different research methods, reflecting the variation in community court models

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The Impact of Adult Drug Courts on Crime and Incarceration: Findings from a Multi-site Quasi-experimental Design

Objectives: To test the impact of adult drug courts on future criminal behavior and sentence length on the precipitating criminal case; and to examine whether the magnitude of the drug court impact varies based on drug use or criminal history, social ties, mental health, or offender demographics. Methods: Self-reported criminal behavior up to 18 months, official re-arrests up to 24 months, and sentence length on the precipitating case were compared between 1,156 drug court participants from 23 sites and 625 comparison offenders from six sites. Slightly smaller sub-samples were retained for follow-up interviews. (Eighty-three percent were retained at the 18-month follow-up.) A “super weighting” strategy was employed to adjust for selection and attrition bias, and hierarchical modeling was employed to adjust for the clustering of outcomes within sites. Results: Drug courts reduced criminal behavior, including a reduction by more than half in the number of criminal acts over 18 months. The magnitude of this effect did not significantly vary across most of 17 offender subgroups. Drug courts did not reduce average sentence length on the precipitating case, whereas program graduates faced little or no incarceration, those failing received much longer sentences than the comparison group. Conclusion: Based on a multi-site design with relatively high external validity as compared with past studies, drug courts appear to reduce future criminal behavior, suggesting that it would be beneficial to expand their reach to more offenders. The discussion addresses key study limitations, including the use of quasi-experimental methods and a follow-up timeframe of less than two years