Community Prosecution Strategies, Monograph

• NCJ Number: 195062
• Author(s): John S. Goldkamp; Cheryl Irons-Guynn; Doris Weiland
• Date Published: August 2003
• Length: 143 pages
• Grant Number(s): 1999-DD-BX-K008
• Sponsoring Agency: Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA)
• Corporate Author: Crime and Justice Research Institute
• Sale Source: NCJRS Photocopy Services; Crime and Justice Research Institute
• Publication Format: Document
• Publication Type: Program/Project Description
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Downloaded September 4, 2003.

Annotation

Drawing on examples from 36 sites across the Nation, this monograph describes the emergence of community prosecution strategies, identifying some of their common elements in a working typology based on features of innovations that are operating in diverse settings.

Abstract

"Community prosecution" has been described as a "grassroots approach to law enforcement involving both traditional and nontraditional prosecutorial initiatives" (Weinstein, 1998). In several jurisdictions, community prosecution initiatives were sparked by the implementation of community policing. In jurisdictions without community policing programs, community prosecution strategies were developed to respond to community crime and public safety issues that the police were not addressing sufficiently. In many instances, community prosecution involves the deployment of prosecutors or nonlegal staff in the community to identify residents' concerns and invite their participation in the development of strategies for addressing the problems of crime and social disorder that are of greatest concern to residents. One of the chapters of this monograph profiles Chicago's Community Prosecutions Unit, which was an early community prosecution prototype. This is followed by a chapter that identifies and describes common elements of community prosecution strategies. Elements addressed are target problems, target area, role of the community, content of response to community problems, organizational adaptations in the prosecutor's office, case processing adaptations to community prosecution, and interagency and collaborative partnerships in community prosecution. The core of the monograph consists of descriptive overviews of the 36 sites that are using various types of community prosecution strategies. The concluding chapter provides a conceptual framework for evaluating the performance and impact of community prosecution strategies. It incorporates the multidimensional aspect of the goals and methods of the innovation. 72 references