Community justice centres mainstreamed? Making the impossible possible

ABSTRACT

Community Justice Centres (CJC) are a burgeoning justice phenomenon which focus on local justice solutions and which house a court with wrap-around community supports to address the underlying causes of offending. Drawing on case studies of CJCs in the USA and New Zealand, this article explores what justice systems can draw from this innovative court model by trying to mainstream its benefits. It argues that mainstreaming CJC initiatives holds real promise provided that investment is made in planning model design and leadership and in forging meaningful and sustainable partnerships with the community and key stakeholders. While there are risks that too much of the model will get lost in seeking to centralise it, it can also open up access to place-based solution-focused approaches to more citizens. It argues that the key is retaining the importance of ‘the local’ as the heartbeat of the CJC paradigm.

KEYWORDS:

• Community justice centres
• mainstreaming
• solution-focused
• court innovations

Introduction

Legal diffusion (Twining, 2004, 2005), often expressed as legal transplantation (Goldbach, 2019) or, in relation to constitutional ideas, migration (Choudhry, 2006b), is a well-accepted and studied phenomenon. This is evident in many areas of law and across and between multiple jurisdictions, including in relation to problem-oriented or solution-focused courts (Nolan, 2001, 2009, 2011, 2020). Similarly, the mainstreaming of solution-focused court innovations is not a new idea. With the rise of solution-focused courts, we have increasingly seen interest in taking learnings from drug courts, family violence courts and mental health courts into mainstream courts through the inclusion of more therapeutic practices or processes (Bartels, 2009; Hueston & Burke, 2016; M. D. Jones, 2012; E. Jones & Kawalek, 2019; King, 2007, 2009; Spencer, 2012, 2014; Waterworth, 2021; Wexler, 2014). However, there is limited scholarship on the potential for mainstreaming the innovations of Community Justice Centres (CJC): a place-based model that partners with the local community and which co-locates a court with wraparound services to address the root causes of offending. Likewise, with some exceptions (Doornbos, 2023; Nolan, 2009, 2012), there is scant scholarship on the migration of CJCs and/or mainstreaming practices as such.

This article looks at CJCs, and what justice systems more broadly can harness from these place-based community-focused models and the ultimate benefits and challenges presented by such borrowing. Drawing on case studies of the mainstreaming of CJC practices in New Zealand and the USA, it argues that mainstreaming CJC initiatives holds real promise provided that they are well thought-out and bring the community and stakeholders along for the ride. Bringing CJCs into the mainstream requires a distinct appraisal of what is being compromised in broadening access to the centre and whether there are ways to get the benefits of doing justice at the local level while at a degree of distance.

Community justice centres and postcode justice

CJCs are a burgeoning justice phenomenon (Murray, 2022). The model is based on the idea of a grassroots centre which co-locates a court with a single judge alongside a host of community supports and services such as family violence assistance, financial counselling, drug rehabilitation, mental health services, housing and employment assistance. People appearing before the court can be linked into these wrap-around services by the judicial officer who can, after a guilty plea is entered, defer sentencing while bespoke support is obtained. Neighbourhoods are also able to access these supports and services in one place like they would a local library.

The fundamental idea behind the CJC model is to address the underlying cause of offending while also working with the local community to prevent crime before it occurs (Murray, 2022). It therefore has three distinctive aspects: local crime prevention, community connection and problem-solving solutions which align with a ‘repair, rehabilitate, prevent’ focus (Neighbourhood Justice Centre (n.d.). This combination has proved a crucial part of the success of the model, and the community benefits it has been shown to bring (Atherton, 2022; Fanning, 2018; Lang, 2011; Murray, 2022).

Crime prevention is facilitated by deep local knowledge, and observing patterns of offending and the areas in which they are occurring. The Neighbourhood Justice Centre, a CJC in Victoria, Australia, has a Strategy & Innovation team for this purpose who have a prophylactic and community engagement focus which ensures that the Centre can be responsive to emerging problems in the local area and co-design solutions with stakeholders through established working relationships (Neighbourhood Justice Centre, 2019, p. 8).

Community connection is one of the prime distinctive features of CJCs, when compared with other solution-focused models. This connection derives from strong relationships with locals and partnerships with nearby organisations and agencies. By ‘keeping it local’ CJCs can draw on their neighbourhood expertise to embed themselves into the fabric of everyday life and look to improve community wellbeing by doing so. For the Red Hook Community Justice Center in Brooklyn, USA, the genesis of this was the prefatory work of the Public Safety Corps, who made micro connections with residents and began the conversation about what justice could look like through the Center (Calabrese, 2002). Judge Calabrese, who presided over the Center’s court from its opening in 2000 until his retirement in October 2022, spoke of the benefit of knowing the environs and its people whether that be the community garden, the library or the school and their staff but also the less salubrious aspects: ‘I know that residents call an apartment building plagued by drug dealing “The Pharmacy”’ (Calabrese, 2002, p. 9). For the judicial officer this means that responses can be more targeted but also carry more respect and legitimacy.

Problem-solving is facilitated by embedding the services within the CJC to allow for an integrated approach to working with community members and locals who appear before the Centre’s courthouse. The model is based on the approaches of restorative justice and therapeutic jurisprudence (Murray, 2009, pp. 78–82). Restorative approaches work to repair and restore relationships after criminal harm (Braithwaite, 2002 pp. 10−12; see also, pp. 10−12; see also Fagan & Malkin, 2003; Atherton, 2022). Therapeutic jurisprudence (or ‘TJ’) is best conceived as a therapeutic ‘lens’ through which to look at a legal problem (Wexler, 1995, p. 221). For TJ, the focus is on endeavouring to address underlying issues and improve wellbeing while addressing the problem at hand, at least where this can be done consistently with legal values (Wexler, 1990; Yamada, 2021). The CJC model draws on these approaches and thereby uses the legal hook to motivate and equip them to do things differently. As one caseworker at the Neighbourhood Justice Centre explained:

I have a young client with multiple, complex needs. He had a range of charges in various courts, but these were transferred to the NJC … The magistrate deferred his sentence. This deferral allowed us to prioritise his needs. In other courts, inevitably he would have been processed and imprisoned. At this time my client didn’t engage well with services. He was resistant. He was willing to talk but not to follow through. During his deferral he had a problem solving meeting. The experience of having so many people around the table, all trying to help him and work with him, rather than telling him what to do, had a real impact. This was profound for him. He realised that maybe there was something he could do to change his situation. From memory he said, ‘I’ve never had so many people put so much into me.’

(Neighbourhood Justice Centre, 2012, p. 47)

The problem-solving approach adopted by CJCs also embraces procedural justice processes. Procedural justice prioritises the defendant being granted dignity and having their story heard with an empathetic ear using court methods which keep the person at the centre (King, 2006, p. 121; Tyler, 1988). Social science scholarship has consistently shown that such procedural justice approaches are more likely to be seen as fair and legitimate by participants, regardless of the outcome of a hearing (Thibaut & Walker, 1975; Tyler, 1990). As Wexler (Spencer, 2012, p. 88) has described:

The plain-talking judge who takes a personal interest in the offender and what he or she has to say, who elicits suggestions from the offender, is accepting of the offender, treats the offender respectfully, and so forth, will probably engender compliance compared to the judge who is distant, cuts off the offender, criticizes, blames, moralizes, uses legal jargon, and does not explain the order he or she is making.

This is also facilitated by the CJC method of having a single judicial officer who is known by the community and gets to know each and every defendant through consistent judicial monitoring and follow-up.

It is the combination of these three aspects: local crime prevention, community connection and problem-solving solutions which, although taking different forms from one CJC to another, set the model apart from other solution-focused approaches and which can be the subject of mainstreaming.

How to mainstream the local?

Migration and mainstreaming

Studies of the movement of problem-solving court initiatives, including CJCs, from the USA to other nations (Doornbos, 2023; Miller et al., 2020; Nolan, 2001, 2009, 2012, 2020), have couched the flow of innovations as a legal transplant (with law as ‘living’ or ‘organic’ and hence alterable) in line with comparative legal studies (Goldbach, 2019, p. 584). This comparative work has not, however, focused on the mainstreaming of therapeutic jurisprudence practices and innovations, which remains the subject of an equally rich scholarship across a number of jurisdictions (see e.g. Bartels, 2009; Hueston & Burke, 2016; M. D. Jones, 2012; E. Jones & Kawalek, 2019; King, 2007, 2009; Spencer, 2012, 2014; Trood et al., 2022; Waterworth, 2021; Weller, 2018; Wexler, 2014).

In exploring the promise and challenges of mainstreaming CJCs, drawing on the experiences of the mainstreaming of CJCs in the USA and New Zealand, the work of comparative constitutional scholars is particularly helpful. In relation to the movement of constitutional ideas across borders, comparative constitutional scholars have argued for the use of the metaphor of ‘migration’ (Choudhry, 2006a) instead of legal ‘transplants’ or, as is more pervasive in the comparative constitutional context, ‘borrowing’. As Walker (2006, pp. 320–321) has explained:

[M]igration … . presumes nothing about the attitudes of the giver or recipient, or about the properties or fate of the legal objects transferred … it refers to all movements across systems, overt or covert, episodic or incremental, planned or evolved, initiated by giver or receiver, accepted or rejected, adopted or adapted, concerned with substantive doctrine or with institutional design or some more abstract or intangible constitutional sensibility or ethos.

In this sense, the metaphor of migration captures both the reception of CJCs and solution-focused models within and across jurisdictions and the consequent attempts at mainstreaming such innovations. Inevitably, the key becomes determining what aspects can be drawn from the original model and what aspects must be transformed to suit the new transposed setting (see, e.g., Doornbos, 2023, p. 3). As was commented by the director who established the Harlem Community Court (in Wolf, 1999, p. 1):

Our assumption when we started planning a community court in Harlem was that we’d adopt the model of the Midtown Community Court … but the more we talked to people the more we discovered folks weren’t really talking about graffiti, public urination, turnstile-jumping the way they were in Midtown… They were interested in the impact drugs were having on young people, and housing issues, like landlord-tenant problems and the lack of affordable housing.

Solution-focused reforms, whether in the mainstream or not, need to be bespoke: based on community co-design and local resources and need.

Scaling the local

The mainstreaming of community justice raises a particular challenge in how the community connection so vital to the CJC can be scaled to the mainstream. With the place-based focus so crucial to all aspects of the CJCs operations, there is a risk that developing a CJC in a central city courthouse, can make it harder to define and connect with the community it serves.

If justice is about ‘the local’ what happens when you zoom out from close-knit community ties? While central courthouses inevitably service a much broader network of suburbs, with a wide population net, that does not mean that more community-focused ideas cannot germinate. As King has argued:

Mainstream courts are already developing better community connections … [t]he ultimate step in this process would be for a court to operate like a community court or neighbourhood justice centre where the court is not simply reactive but is actively engaging with the community in identifying and resolving justice-related problems.

(King, 2007, p. 94)

The key is to design mainstream courts that can integrate workable service provision and community links alongside a busy court list. As the NJC Community Engagement Coordinator describes:

Our activities have focused on community in Yarra, service delivery, local engagement, and interagency organisational change and there has been a little bit of transferring practice locally in terms of the work we do with other service providers. But our job now is to transfer practice in a conscious way within the broader justice system.

(Neighbourhood Justice Centre, 2012, p. 26)

Revolving court doors and rising rates of imprisonment saw the UK Ministry of Justice outline in 2009 that lessons could be learned from the North Liverpool Community Justice Centre:

Magistrates and the communities from which they are drawn are frustrated by seeing the same people appearing in court again and again. Many magistrates want to be able to do more to help offenders focus on their underlying problems, to reduce the same patterns of offending, and minimise further harm to communities … We want as many communities as possible to benefit from problem-solving approaches and want them to be applied to cases where it is most effective. It appears to be particularly effective for low-level offending following a guilty plea from the offender and works best where no custodial sentence would be applied. We propose to develop and expand the core elements of the problem-solving approach to magistrates’ courts across England and Wales, building on our existing problem-solving courts, such as the Community Justice courts and Dedicated Drug Courts, and also international research from problem-solving courts abroad.

(UK Ministry of Justice, 2009, p. 26)

While there are impediments to mainstreaming a CJC, these are not necessarily insurmountable, and there are clear benefits at looking at ways different jurisdictions might be able to achieve it.

Getting it done: case-studies of CJC mainstreaming

The mainstreaming of CJC practices can take a variety of different forms. A central courthouse can draw on locally based support services with mainstreamed referral coordination. Alternatively, the judicial officer can be in the ‘mainstream’ while working closely with a satellite community centre approach which keeps partners and stakeholders at the local level. The central provision of court and support services is also an alternative approach (Spencer, 2012, 2014); but, depending on the degree to which local community referrals and coordination are retained, it can become more of a mainstreamed solution-focused court than of a mainstreamed CJC as such.

The Washington D.C. experiment

Washington D.C. has provided a clear example of how the benefits of community justice can be realised in a metropolitan court rather than just a community-focused one. The idea was that by expanding the model, the benefits could be city-wide in relation to misdemeanor offences rather than confined to a particular locality.

To achieve this, Washington D.C. drew on the experience of the East of the River Community Court and embarked on an extensive process of community consultation and workshops with key stakeholders. The model took the ‘keeping it local’ idea by allocating each judge in the central D.C. court a particular Washington police district, for the purposes of misdemeanor offences (Schweig, 2014 p. 2−3; see also, p. 2−3; see also Lang, 2011). This was achieved without extra budget or without a big impact on court listing loads (Schweig, 2014, p. 3).

Each judge sought to keep a place-based focus with defendants referred to services in their local community and their district being the source of any assigned community service work (Schweig, 2014, p. 3). Each judge also attended local meetings in that district. As Judge Russell Canan explained, ‘[t]his is especially important since all the community courts are housed in the central courthouse and not embedded in the community’ (Schweig, 2014, p. 4).

One of the most innovative aspects of the Washington approach was building on the single CJC judicial officer model but scaling it up by a broadscale jurisdictional allocation. Ultimately, the project was designed around the development of local knowledge by a centrally located satellite-style judge (Schweig, 2014, pp. 3–4). While it required each judicial officer to establish and retain district connections with stakeholders, support services and community service providers, it limited the centralisation to the court, enabling the participant to keep close ties with their community.

This approach also raises the possibility of hearings being held at the local level, whether by a district circuit calendar or via video-link (as discussed below). This positioning of the hearing is a common issue raised in the context of mainstreaming and what aspects need to be brought into the central court and what can be achieved by the defendant remaining locally. Discussions often focus on whether, with the benefits of technology, the defendant can attend a drop-in centre or community space with a support worker rather than face what can be a daunting experience of commuting and appearing in a central courthouse.

The New Zealand District Court model – Te Ao Mārama

The New Zealand District Court has embarked upon a solution-focused ‘transformative’ reform called Te Ao Mārama meaning ‘enhanced justice for all’. It is based on mainstreaming integrated service provision with judicial training and wrap-around court supports while also working with communities ensuring that reforms are culturally appropriate, coordinated, responsive and needs-based. As Chief District Court Judge Heemi Taumaunu notes:

It is a natural extension of the solution-focused judging approach to incorporate it in all District Court proceedings, when and where applicable and to the extent practicable. ‘Mainstreaming’ in this context is intended as a response to the calls for transformative change and as an attempt to address the postcode justice concern that attaches to some specialist courts.

(Taumaunu, 2022, p. 6)

Delivering the Norris Ward McKinnon Annual Lecture in 2020, His Honour explained:

Specialist courts have their place as centres for excellence for best practice. They will continue to be supported and, where appropriate, they will continue to be developed and extended. However, it has become increasingly clear that the way ahead is to look to build the Te Ao Mārama model on the foundation provided by specialist courts. This will allow us to integrate, comprehensively throughout the District Court, the lessons and skills specialist courts have taught us. I see it as a common-sense next step and indeed a natural extension of the work that has already been developed by the specialist courts of the District Court.

However, the Te Ao Mārama model will be unique. It will be designed in partnership with iwi and other local communities. This partnership framework will allow each court to design the model that suits their specific location. It will also seek to invite local iwi and local communities to share in the design of the model to ensure that it best reflects the needs and special characteristics of each community.

(Taumaunu, 2020, pp. 23–24)

The reform has been designed to allow different approaches for different Courts depending on community needs, with community coordinators keeping close ties between the court and the local area (Taumaunu, 2020, p. 31). Te Ao Mārama is an innovation seeking to change what justice looks like at the District Court level from where the judge sits in the room to the languages used for hearings and how defendants are involved in the process. His Honour wants ‘[c]ourthouses and courtrooms … re-imagined as central hubs, as places for service providers to be located to provide access to wrap-around services and opportunities for healing’ and which celebrate community through ‘local art and carvings’ (Taumaunu, 2020, pp. 31–32).

The New Zealand reforms build on the Neighbourhood Justice Centre approach of making the Centre a place that belongs to the community and which has a court within it rather than the court defining it. During centralising processes, the model tries to stay connected to the local through its operations and its relationships.

New Jersey

Newark Community Solutions adopts an integrated service approach based on the idea of moving away from ‘disconnect[ion] by ‘locat[ing] the community court in the centralized municipal courthouse … to accept case referrals from the entire city’ for non-violent matters, servicing nearly 300,000 residents (Schweig, 2014, p. 5). The Mayor justified the reform on the basis that:

Just arresting and piling more people into our courts doesn’t change much … What this is doing so … powerfully plugging our judges, our lawyers, our clients – the people coming through our courts – into a bevy of resources to help them empower their lives, so it not only meets the mandates of justice but it meets them in a deeper and richer and more robust way.

(Schweig, 2014, p. 4)

As with the Washington D.C. approach, Newark Community Solutions is district-led. It was based on extensive initial planning and consultations and retaining strong community relationships and partnerships with police, schools, libraries and governmental and non-governmental providers. It provides centrally located judges with a toolbox of options beyond imprisonment to use in dealing with an offender, including judicial supervision, community service or rehabilitation programs (Center for Court Innovation, n.d. Newark).

Community bonds are also developed by CJC-like service provision for all residents even if they do not have a current matter before the court. The goal of this is to facilitate the whole community benefitting with support workers being able to assist individuals who are struggling or who may be at risk of entering the justice system (Schweig, 2014, p. 6).

Hartford, connecticut

Hartford Community Court has been operating since 1998 and has over 17 areas within its misdemeanor jurisdiction, hearing cases from as far away as Canton and Farmington. It is based on a solution-focused approach and coordinates a network of locally based committees to ensure community-court liaison and the appropriate provision of programs and services (Lang, 2011, p. 10; Center for Court Innovation, n.d.a. Hartford).

It seeks to divert offenders into community service where possible. The aim is for this community service to be served in the relevant community whether that be keeping the area tidy, working in a community garden or assisting in preparing food bundles (Center for Justice Innovation, n.d.b Hartford, p. 2). The Court supervises the completion of the community service by the participants and, by 2015, had provided more than 500,000 hours of community service (Connecticut Judicial Branch, n.d.).

Community engagement is facilitated by regular meetings with key stakeholders such as schools and local businesses. The Court also seeks to encourage residents to get involved in the life of the court and promotes an ‘open door policy’ and regular feedback and initiatives (Center for Court Innovation, n.d.a. Hartford, p. 1).

Similarly to the Red Hook Community Justice Center or Neighbourhood Justice Centre approach, the Court co-locates a range of service providers, including mental health, drug rehabilitation and medical assistance providers who can work with participants to address underlying issues in their life.

Challenges and benefits of mainstreaming the local

The Pros and Cons of distance – distance without detachment?

As identified, mainstreaming CJC practice can avoid the costs of multiple bespoke CJC premises but can come at the risk of losing the place-based CJC benefits and the concomitant legitimacy which derives from local knowledge and relationships. The Washington D.C. approach sought to address this with the judges based in the central court but assigned a district to which they were connected by regular meetings and court partnerships. The obvious challenge this presents is ensuring that the judicial officer is able to retain close community ties and links with local services when they are not walking the streets of the community on a daily basis. While there can be established community linkages in place, there is the risk that these can become highly formalised and lose some of the trust and legitimacy that the CJC model seeks to strengthen.

Community crime prevention is also something that can fall away when CJCs are operating more remotely from the community they serve. While concerted planning, community safety committees and locally based prevention projects can be utilised, these initiatives will require more thoughtful design and re-invigoration the more that the court is removed from the focus neighbourhood.

There are, however, clear arguments in favour of separating the community from the court as has occurred in some of the mainstreamed CJC models discussed above. It is evident that, for some communities, the experiences with the justice system are such that engagement can be heightened where there is some court distancing (Murray, 2022, p. 40). Added to this is the ability of a central model to provide aspects of the CJC model to a wider number of community members. The neighbourhood aspect of a CJC can present clear access issues when residents outside of the catchment can be excluded from the services and court processes it provides. For this reason, mainstreaming sacrifices closeness for breadth, equity as well as cost savings.

Communities do not necessarily neatly match onto geographical areas or catchments. Scholars, like Malkin (2009, p. 143), have highlighted the risk that traditional CJCs can unwittingly seek to construct an ‘imagined’ ‘community’ where it in fact might exist in a different or unserviceable form. Mainstreaming community justice has the potential to address problems such as these by bringing together a wider network of people than a traditional CJC can service. While this is not to say that mainstreamed centres cannot experience issues with connection and meaningful collaboration, for some communities, established advisory groups and community liaison networks can help to bridge the gaps that emerge.

The experience of the COVID pandemic also suggests that the tribulations of distance can be averted to an extent by the use of video hook-ups. While the difficulties that COVID presented meant that it was not the time to explore best practice remote hearings, it did highlight that they were possible. Further research is necessary in this regard, and while not appropriate for some participants (UK Magistrates’ Association, 2022, p. 31), for others it proved a preferable way of engaging with the court process (Kunkel & Bryant, 2022, p. 3). Certainly, for remote and regional communities for whom solution-focused approaches and CJCs are typically a pipedream, online avenues may present a way of broadening access. Alternatively, the judge going on a form of local hearing ‘circuit’ is another possibility. It also becomes a question of how the court works with linked services. As Schaefer and Beriman observe:

Given that problem-solving courts rely on case collaboration between courts and treatment providers, it is logical that these courts be concentrated in areas where such services are available. Unfortunately, however, this means that problem-solving courts are often restricted to large urban areas that are resource rich.

(Schaefer & Beriman, 2019, p. 351)

Centralising CJC models while decentralising access presents one mechanism for addressing such difficulties and provided that services can still be connected and appropriately targeted to individual need. It could be that for some communities a ‘mobile’ CJC model could become a curial-service roadshow of sorts that comes on a regular schedule (Murray et al., 2017). Again, it becomes about finding ways to maintain connection and legitimacy when the centre is not a continuous presence in the community.

Finding & coordinating help

As well as opening up access to CJC services to a wider array of citizens, mainstreaming also has the benefit of moving beyond the solution-focused court limitation of specific eligibility criteria. Typically, entry to solution-focused courts, even if not locally confined, is defined by particular issues, whether they be drug offending, family violence, homelessness or mental illness (Schaefer & Beriman, 2019 pp. 350–1; pp. 350; Lucas, 2021; Pratt & Turanovic, 2019, 2021). By centralising access to CJC-like services, participants can access help without needing to meet a singular entry pathway. The wrap-around supports available in a CJC can be diverse or even combined and are frequently available to citizens who are not appearing before the court. This widens the scope of assistance as well as the potential impact on the individual and the society more generally.

Of course, with centralist expansion comes the risk that providing help at scale becomes harder to achieve successfully. As Halsey and de Vel-Palumbo (2018) comment, ‘[t]he issue of how to maintain model integrity in light of expanding court user and client caseloads is of fundamental import to the ongoing success of community justice centres’ (p. 198). There needs to be a focus on sustainable workloads and service availability so that warm referrals are not given without the service being deliverable. As Spencer (2012, p. 21) has recognised there can also sometimes be a need for ‘brokerage funding’ in the mainstream and a focus on services being ‘culturally appropriate’ and sufficiently targeted for the relevant participants.

Mainstreaming also needs to be resourced with an eye on training: for court staff, service providers and judicial officers, as well as community advisory groups. To come together effectively in mainstream mode, there needs to be a constant focus on what will work for the district and regular community feedback loops. Central courthouses are only going to be equipped to do things differently with careful planning, community co-design and proper implementation and there is not going to be a one-size-fits-all model for this, when it is community-driven and community-monitored.

The burden of inertia

It is hard to bring about systemic change. It is even harder when ways of doing things are very established. Mainstreaming requires the leadership, patience and willingness to embark on the slow-burning task of planning, collaborating and designing a new court model (Spencer, 2012, p. 16). Mainstreaming CJC requires widespread court, community, government and stakeholder buy-in, and this takes time, something that is often in short supply in busy central law courts. With innovations like that introduced in Washington D.C. it was only feasible because of motivation and commitment of the court’s leadership and bench when it required a ‘one in, all in’ approach. Developments such as the introduction of a solution-focused bench book (King, 2009) in Australia have been particularly useful in educating the legal community about more therapeutic and restorative approaches and mainstreamed courts will likely require bespoke ‘how to’ guides to navigate how community engagement and liaison is to work in tandem with more solution-focused judging.

While there are numerous CJC exemplars, and an established network of mentor courts (Center for Court Innovation, n.d.-b. Mentor) internationally, any new initiative, particularly an embracing mainstreamed one, is going to need to be fit for purpose for that city, district or neighbourhood. In a mainstreamed CJC model there are also crucial questions of how the court is to ‘service’ the relevant community. Will it be a one-judge model or, like, the Washington D.C. initiative, will it draw on a multiplicity of judges? How are the judges going to establish and retain their ties with the community? What mechanisms will be put in place to respond to community crime prevention or a local crime flashpoint? These are just some of the design questions that will need to be worked through by the court planning team. As Spencer (2012, p. 20) also acknowledges, model design is also not a once and for all process and needs to be re-appraised and adjusted as the community changes. Model design also needs to be reflective: ensuring the Court can respond to evaluation feedback with the ongoing collection of data and community feedback vital to ensure the responsiveness of the model.

However, the time invested in community collaboration and partnerships is a long-term investment in the longevity of the mainstreaming reform and trust in the relationships that support it. Relations can also be strengthened by planning for staffing and budgetary changes as well as a clear allocation of responsibilities and Spencer (2012, p. 16) recommends the drafting of memorandums of understanding for this purpose. This is essential in any CJC model with a co-location of agency and service staff with different reporting lines and can also provide a way forward if things go awry. It is important that all partners appreciate that the road to mainstreaming is a long one so that they are not discouraged if there are bureaucratic or other delays.

Conclusion

CJCs are one of the most successful exports of the American solution-focused court movement, with established CJCs in the UK, Australia, Canada and Israel (see Gal & Dancig-Rosenberg, 2020; Murray, 2022; Nolan, 2012 −156; p. 155–156; Wolf, 2006). CJCs have always been conceived as sites for innovation and experimentation (Lang, 2011, p. 7), strengthened by their community-tailored nature. Bringing CJCs to the mainstream is the next frontier of innovation for the court model, bringing cost savings and efficiencies of scale with it. It is also an opportunity to think about how (and in what form) solution-focused court innovations migrate between and within jurisdictions, and what can be learnt from mainstreaming efforts in comparable nations.

However, as identified, mainstreaming CJC models is not without real challenges. It requires meticulous planning, genuine stakeholder liaison and community engagement, as well as the leadership and tenacity to see the reform through. Extensive evaluation of reform initiatives is also key to ensure that the model is responsive to community concerns and that the model is not being sapped of its legitimacy by trying to do too much for too many.

In opening up access to community focused-solutions and problem-oriented approaches to more citizens, centralised CJC models may hold great potential for some jurisdictions. The key would seem to be not losing sight of the importance of ‘the local’ as the heartbeat of the CJC paradigm.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).