Evaluating neighbourhood justice : measuring and attributing outcomes for a community justice program / Stuart Ross.

Canberra : Australian Institute of Criminology, 2015.

87166

Neighbourhood justice centres -- Victoria.

Restorative justice.

Community justice programs such as the Red Hook Court in New York and the Neighbourhood Justice Centre in the City of Yarra in Melbourne represent an innovative approach to a range of crime and safety issues by engaging the community in identifying problems and generating solutions. However, as with many small-scale or specialist court programs, community courts have found it difficult to provide robust outcome evaluation data to demonstrate their effectiveness. These barriers include establishing cause and effect relationships between community court interventions and programs and large-scale social outcomes, controlling for the variations in offender characteristics (particularly risk) that arise as a by-product of the community court model, and detecting differences in outcomes when sample sizes are relatively small. In this article, three criminal justice outcomes relevant to community courts are considered-- crime rates, community order completion rates and recidivism rates, and the methodological challenges involved in using them in evaluation studies. Clear benefits arising for the community justice model are reported; however, the importance of considering a wider range of outcomes when assessing a program's worth, such as victim satisfaction and community engagement is noted.

Title from title caption of PDF document (viewed on July 19, 2016).

"November 2015".

Includes bibliographical references.

1836-2206

1 online resource.