[PDF] Communities And Courts eBook

Author : Christine Zozula
Publisher : Temple University Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 29,77 MB
Release : 2019-06-21
Category : Law
ISBN : 9781439917398

GET BOOK

Community Courts are designed to handle a city’s low-level offenses and quality-of-life crimes, such as littering, loitering, or public drunkenness. Court advocates maintain that these largely victimless crimes jeopardize the well-being of residents, businesses, and visitors. Whereas traditional courts might dismiss such cases or administer a small fine, community courts aim to meaningfully punish offenders to avoid disorder escalating to apocalyptic decline. Courting the Community is a fascinating ethnography that goes behind the scenes to explore how quality-of-life discourses are translated into court practices that marry therapeutic and rehabilitative ideas. Christine Zozula shows how residents and businesses participate in meting out justice—such as through community service, treatment, or other sanctions—making it more emotional, less detached, and more legitimate in the eyes of stakeholders. She also examines both “impact panels,” in which offenders, residents, and business owners meet to discuss how quality-of-life crimes negatively impact the neighborhood, as well as strategic neighborhood outreach efforts to update residents on cases and gauge their concerns. Zozula’s nuanced investigation of community courts can lead us to a deeper understanding of punishment and rehabilitation and, by extension, the current state of the American court system.

Author : Manisha Sethi
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 207 pages
File Size : 36,40 MB
Release : 2021-12-30
Category : History
ISBN : 1000537854

GET BOOK

The entanglement of law and religion is reiterated on a daily basis in India. Communities and groups turn to the courts to seek positive recognition of their religious identities or sentiments, as well as a validation of their practices. Equally, courts have become the most potent site of the play of conflicts and contradictions between religious groups. The judicial power thus not only arbiters conflicts but also defines what constitutes the ‘religious’, and demarcates its limits. This volume argues that the relationship between law and religion is not merely one of competing sovereignties – as rational law moulding religion in its reformist vision, and religion defending its turf against secular incursions– but needs to be understood within a wider social and political canvas. The essays here demonstrate how questions of religious pluralism, secularism, law and order, are all central to understanding how the religious and the legal remain imbricated within each other in modern India. It will be of interest to academics, researchers, and advanced students of Sociology, History, Political Science and Law. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

Author : Kerwin Kaye
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 525 pages
File Size : 36,83 MB
Release : 2019-12-17
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0231547099

GET BOOK

In 1989, the first drug-treatment court was established in Florida, inaugurating an era of state-supervised rehabilitation. Such courts have frequently been seen as a humane alternative to incarceration and the war on drugs. Enforcing Freedom offers an ethnographic account of drug courts and mandatory treatment centers as a system of coercion, demonstrating how the state uses notions of rehabilitation as a means of social regulation. Situating drug courts in a long line of state projects of race and class control, Kerwin Kaye details the ways in which the violence of the state is framed as beneficial for those subjected to it. He explores how courts decide whether to release or incarcerate participants using nominally colorblind criteria that draw on racialized imagery. Rehabilitation is defined as preparation for low-wage labor and the destruction of community ties with “bad influences,” a process that turns participants against one another. At the same time, Kaye points toward the complex ways in which participants negotiate state control in relation to other forms of constraint in their lives, sometimes embracing the state’s salutary violence as a means of countering their impoverishment. Simultaneously sensitive to ethnographic detail and theoretical implications, Enforcing Freedom offers a critical perspective on the punitive side of criminal-justice reform and points toward alternative paths forward.

Author : Bonnie Carol Dicus
Publisher :
Page : 181 pages
File Size : 48,88 MB
Release : 2010
Category : Courts
ISBN :

GET BOOK

This research examines what contextual elements shape a community court. In the past several decades, the court system has lost trust with the American public. Citizens thought the courts were too complex, expensive, didn't address the issues of crime, and were out of touch with their communities. A movement called community justice began to grow in the 1990s. As part of this movement the concept of problem solving courts grew. Community focused courts were part of this. Community courts are unique in that the courts reach out to the community to help solve problems identified by citizens, businesses, and others in that area. Various stakeholders are involved in the planning, implementation, and operation of these courts, working together to address issues that arise from those who commit a crime and come before the court. Four community courts were examined using the case study method, examining the literature and conducting interviews, and a model was developed based on these courts. Two additional courts were examined, having been established after judges from their respective communities had attended a national seminar on community focused courts. These two courts were then compared to the model. Based on the model, areas most likely to develop a community court were identified. Additionally, the model can be utilized to indicate how these courts can be successful or fail. Other issues that were examined were how community courts differ from traditional courts and how this could impact judicial impartiality and independence, and the traditional adversary system.

Author : James Eisenstein
Publisher : Addison-Wesley Longman
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 43,43 MB
Release : 1987-08
Category : Law
ISBN : 9780673397164

GET BOOK

This text describes the workings of criminal courts in nine middle-sized counties. The authors examine the technology used to schedule and assign work, local legal culture, and customary ways of disposing of cases.

Author : James Eisenstein
Publisher :
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 14,13 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Law
ISBN :

GET BOOK

The Contours of Justice provides a framework for describing and understanding criminal courts throughout the United States by depicting the functions of criminal courts in nine middle-sized counties in three states. It integrates concepts from each of the three traditional theoretical approaches to court analysis: the individual, organizational, and environmental approaches. The authors approach the courts as communities composed of judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys rather than as "legal institutions" applying formal law. They analyze the differences in culture, technology, physical setting, the customary ways of arriving at guilty pleas, as well as other aspects of the courts. The authors also incorporate information about the political and economic characteristics of the communities that the courts serve, along with the basic functions of scheduling cases and assigning personnel to cases. The portraits of the nine courts present the day-to-day activities of judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys that lead to the decisions about the fates of the defendants brought to the courts. This comparison not only provides a vivid picture of actual court function, but allows an assessment of the process that leads to ideas for reform.

Author : Jeffery T. Ulmer
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 27,56 MB
Release : 1997-07-31
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780791434987

GET BOOK

Combines quantitative and qualitative data in a careful investigation of sentencing processes and context under Pennsylvania's sentencing guidelines.

Author : Julius Lang
Publisher :
Page : 20 pages
File Size : 30,32 MB
Release : 2011-04-02
Category : Court administration
ISBN : 9781457845451

GET BOOK

The Midtown Community Court was created in 1993 to respond more effectively to street prostitution, vandalism, shoplifting, drug possession, and other quality-of-life offenses that had tarnished midtown Manhattan’s reputation as a capital of tourism and entertainment. Researchers subsequently documented that the Midtown Community Court’s approach — combining punishment and help by linking defendants to community restitution projects and on-site social services — made a difference, helping to reduce crime and improve public trust in justice. Since then, some three dozen community courts have opened in the U.S., and many others are operating abroad. Designed to address local concerns, these courts handle a wide range of issues — everything from quality-of-life crimes, truant youth, and landlord-tenant conflicts, to drug addiction, chronic homelessness, and sex trafficking. This pub. offers a short review of community courts in the U.S. The goal is to help innovators learn about community courts and decide whether the model might help them achieve the goal of a fair and effective justice system that enhances safety, supports victims, and protects our rights. This is a print on demand report.