Correcting Community Service: From Work Crews to Community Work in a Juvenile Court

Abstract

In 2001, the Clark County Juvenile Court in Washington State implemented the use of “restorative community service” (RCS) as part of its larger adoption of a restorative justice framework. This paper explores the court’s implementation and use of RCS, including: (1) the types of institutional changes made by the court in its development of RCS, (2) the types and qualities of social interactions observed by the researcher through participant observation at several RCS sites, (3) the practical implications of these findings for proponents of restorative justice in the use of community service in youth settings, and (4) the theoretical implications of these findings for sociological and criminological research on community service.

Keywords:

• community service
• restorative community service
• restorative justice
• juvenile justice interventions

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to acknowledge the support of the Benedict S. Alper family for partial funding of this research, as well as the detailed comments of earlier versions of this draft by the anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. Caputo (2004, p. 11) defines intermediate sanctions as the “range of punishment options between probation and imprisonment. These programs are also referred to as intermediate penalties and intermediate punishments. The principal forms of intermediate sanctions include: intensive supervision programs (ISP); boot camps; day reporting centers; home confinement (with or without electronic monitoring); monetary penalties (fines and restitution); compulsory labor in the form of community service; and halfway houses.”

2. One anonymous reviewer of an earlier draft of this article rightly noted that, “There is no consensus in the restorative justice literature on whether community sentencing is indeed part of the restorative justice practices.”

3. In settings where confidential and/or sensitive information was likely to occur (i.e. VOMs and probation or diversion meetings), participants not employed by the court were informed of the purpose of the research and provided the opportunity to be excluded. No participants requested to be excluded. On several occasions, however, the researcher was excluded by court staff for reasons either not provided by the staff at their discretion, or for reasons later explained to the researcher. Court staff were informed of the purpose and provided the opportunity to be excluded. No court staff requested to be excluded. In settings where confidential and/or sensitive information was not likely to exceed a level beyond that of “daily life” (i.e. casual or public settings such as community meetings or RCS sites), participants were not required to be informed.

4. The appropriateness of qualitative methods in investigating these types of questions has been well established. Creswell (2003, p. 181) notes that qualitative research is “emergent rather than tightly prefigured,” and is thus appropriate for exploratory research where less is known about a social phenomena or the setting itself. Neuman (2000, p. 146) argues that qualitative methods are vital for research into lived settings insofar as they “emphasize the importance of social context for understanding the social world.” In allowing for the role of social context, qualitative research considers “what came before [the study] or what surrounds the focus of the study. It also implies that the same events or behaviors can have different meanings in different cultures or historical eras” (Neuman, 2000, p. 146). Finally, qualitative methods are necessary for interpretative studies of social action. Often, researchers want to understand not only what happens in relation to frequency or patterns of social action, but also the meanings attached to social action by actors themselves (Weber, 1975).

5. Some probation staff worked largely with youth sex offenders and/or youth with specific mental health needs. These youth were excluded from the study and interviews with court staff involved in working with these offenders was not undertaken.

6. This limitation was immediately clear to the researcher in the design of research, and attempts were made to mitigate this problem in two ways. Primarily, in the case of major problems such as fights or similar conflicts at sites not directly observed, such incidents were made known to the researcher by the RCS coordinator. Secondly, data from the experiences of youth at RCS sites not observed from the researcher was gathered from probation meetings with youth offenders who discussed their RCS work, and from other settings when possible. Also, RCS sites were chosen by the researcher, not the court. The court readily allowed access to any RCS site, and no attempt was made on the part of the court to influence the choice of these sites. Regardless, given the overall number of RCS sites and youth and volunteer participants at the CCJC, the findings here as they pertain to interactions, behaviors and expressed attitudes of youth offenders and volunteers must be limited to sites observed.

7. While the CCJC initially used VOMs in a limited number of cases, it eventually moved to the use of a “Victim Impact Program” that contacted all victims of juvenile crime and offered a range of significant services, including the option of VOMs.

8. For information on Washington State’s use of determinate sentencing, see Lieb and Brown (1999).

9. For further discussion of the CCJC administrator’s role in implementing restorative justice at the CCJC, see Rowe (2002).

10. On numerous occasions, youth did work for governmental agencies in a different capacity, as part of their restitution. In these cases, youth that had damaged public property were allowed to work directly for the agencies that had suffered these losses—schools, transit, etc. This work was however, not part of RCS, but was rather part of an agreement made (usually in a VOM) between the agency and the youth.

11. In 2004, the CCJC had 3,043 total cases referred for prosecution. Out of these, 1,088 resulted in adjudication to “local sanctions” and 990 resulted in diversion (with the rest being dismissed, remanded, or adjudicated to JRA), for a total of approximately 2,080 cases that could have potentially resulted in community service. However, the state’s data system tracks individual cases more easily than individual offenders. As the state’s report (Governor’s Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee, 2005, p. 176) notes, “A juvenile may be involved in more than one case within a year depending on the number of times the juvenile offends. A case may involve more than one charge/offense depending on the circumstances of the event and the decision of the prosecutor. Juveniles who commit minor/first offenses may be offered diversion instead of being taken to court. Juveniles who do not complete a diversion agreement, refuse diversion or are refused diversion are charged in juvenile court. Thus, the number of 2,080 is misleading in terms of the number of total referrals vs. the number of actual offenders. The CCJC’s data put the number of individual adjudicated or diverted offenders in 2004 at about 1,780. In these cases, approximately 70% of the total adjudicated or diverted offenders in 2004 performed some community service.

12. Maruna’s (2001, p. 163) research on ex-convicts who have “made good” supports Bazemore’s argument, particularly where ex-offenders are afforded opportunities to participate in meaningful processes of earned redemption that may serve to “take away a crucial neutralization (condemnation of the condemners) and … pull ex-offenders more deeply into mainstream society.”