Operationalizing the Community Variable in Offender Reintegration:

• Author: Carsten Erbe,Gordon Bazemore
• DOI: 10.1177/1541204003001003002
• Published date: 01 July 2003
• Date: 01 July 2003
• Subject Matter: Journal Article

10.1177/1541204003254825ARTICLEYouth Violence and Juvenile JusticeBazemore, Erbe / INTERVENTION SOCIAL CAPITAL

OPERATIONALIZING THE COMMUNITY

VARIABLE IN OFFENDER REINTEGRATION:

Theory and Practice for Developing

Intervention Social Capital

Gordon Bazemore

Carsten Erbe

Florida Atlantic University

Despite the new emphasis on reintegration as a broader way of thinking about parole

and aftercare, practice and policy remain narrowly focused on managing offender risks

and, in some cases, providing services. The authors argue that the community role in

reentry has not been clearly articulated and suggest the need for a less individualized,

more naturalistic intervention theory. Core principles and practices associated with a

restorative community justice model provide tools for strengthening neighborhood

informal social control and social support as vital forms of social capital in

communities, which is necessary to increase the likelihood of reintegration. Based on

emerging empirical research that clarifies the importance of the community role, the

authors conceptualize the community role in building relationships of support and

control around the offender as a key neglected independent variable in reentry and as a

dependent variable for intervention strategies based on community building.

Keywords: restorative justice; juvenile justice; community and juveniles; juvenile

justice policy; reintegration

The problem of crime cannot be simplified to the problem of the offender.

—Leslie T. Wilkins (1991, p. 3)

The past 5 years have witnessed a flurry of activity aimed at funding policy and

program development around offender reentry (Serious and Violent Reentry Initiative,

2003; Travis, Sullivan, & Waul, 2001). The popularity of the current rush to support reentry

has been met with justifiable skepticism, if not cynicism, about the motives for such interest

in the wake of a two-decade incarceration binge, the effects of which have been exacerbated

by the elimination of parole in some states (Austin, 2001). Juvenile justice, although less

affected by the extended lengths of determinate and mandatory minimum sentences, has

246

Authors’ Note: Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Gordon Bazemore, Department of

Criminology and Criminal Justice and Director, Community Justice Institute, Florida Atlantic University,

Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 111 East Las Olas, Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301; phone: 954-762-

5663; fax: 954-762-5626; e-mail: bazemor@fau.edu.

Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, Vol. 1 No. X, July 2003 246-275

DOI: 10.1177/1541204003254825

© 2003 Sage Publications

nonetheless been affected by similar legislative mandates restricting the courts’ discretion

over disposition and, in turn, increasing incarceration rates (Butts & Mears, 2001; Feld,

1990). More generally, the juvenile court has felt the brunt of punitive policies in the decade

of the 1990s, first through transferring jurisdiction over unprecedented numbers of young

people to the criminal justice system (Torbet et al., 1996) and, second, in many states by

increasing use of residential placements for first-time or nonchronic offenders charged with

less serious offenses (Fader, Harris, Jones, & Poulin, 2001).

Despite such concerns, optimistically, this new policy lens suggested by the use of the

term reintegration offers an opportunity to give strategic consideration both to the

community role in offender transition from residential settings and to the impact of

returning offenders on communities. The new popularity of this concept also implies a

symbolic recognition that the issue of reentry raises larger issues than those associated with

offender punishment: surveillance and service. But whereas few would deny that

communities, not juvenile justice programs, are the “destination” of the reentry journey,

traditional parole and aftercare practice remain focused on a highly professionalized risk

management and service needs agenda that for the most part remains devoid of broader

policy visions. Specifically, current policy and practice lacks a theory that (a) places the

returning offender in the context of neighborhood organizations, local socializing

institutions, and individual citizens and (b) articulates a role for these community entities in

the reintegration process. With few exceptions, the policy debate is often limited to

consideration of the relative value of alternative means of applying varying amounts of

system intervention with little articulation of the community role in reintegration. If it can

be reasonably argued that reentry policy and practice has been underfunded, it must also be

said that it has been underconceptualized. And if one were to develop an equation for

predicting the success of reentry based on current parole and aftercare practice, it would

more than likely be badly underspecified.

The purpose of this article is to suggest core components of a theoretical model for

reentry that articulates a primary role for communities in the reintegration process. Such a

model should guide practice and offer testable propositions for research that would examine

the impact of community members and groups on offenders, the impact of returning

offenders on communities, and the impact of justice systems on both offenders and the

community. Grounded in the principles of restorative justice (Van Ness & Strong, 2002;

Zehr, 1990), this proposed framework is based on new ways of thinking about crime that

give emphasis to the harm caused by offenses and the need to repair this harm. A restorative

community justice model (Bazemore & Schiff, 2001), therefore, explicitly considers crime

as a collective problem whose solution requires engaging communities, victims, and

offenders in the solution (Clear & Karp, 1999). Because restorative practices have primarily

been implemented at disposition or as part of diversion agreements, restorative justice

principles have, with few exceptions (Bazemore, 1998; Herman & Wasserman, 2001;

Maruna, 2001), not been linked to reentry practice in literature or policy.1We suggest that

application of the restorative justice framework to reentry provides an opportunity to move

beyond the individualizing tendencies of traditional offender-focused treatment,

surveillance, and punishment paradigms (Bazemore, Nissen, & Dooley, 2000) by opening

doors to what Sampson and Wilson (1995) referred to as “a community-level

perspective . . . [that] lead[s] away from a simple ‘kinds of people’ analysis to a focus on

social characteristics of collectivities that foster violence (and crime)” (p. 54). To take

advantage of this opportunity, we propose an effective linkage between restorative justice

practices and broader theoretical constructs in the criminological literature that place the

Bazemore, Erbe / INTERVENTION SOCIAL CAPITAL 247