Community Engagement Strategies to Advance Justice Reform. Implementation Lessons from Buncombe County, North Carolina, Cook County, Illinois, and New Orleans

By Travis Reginal, Rod Martinez, Natalie Lima, and Janeen Buck WIllison

Strategies that both engage community residents and criminal legal system stakeholders and build relationships between those groups are essential to advancing practical and impactful justice reform. The MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) initiative to reduce the use of jails prioritized authentic engagement with community members across its grantees to build trust, enhance problem solving, and promote mutual accountability for justice reform. This report explores the concepts of community and community engagement and examines the community engagement strategies of three SJC sites and those strategies’ impacts (as perceived by stakeholders) on the sites’ efforts to engage community members, reduce jail use, and advance other system reforms. We also discuss common themes in the sites’ experiences implementing those strategies and recommendations for other communities. Communities across the nation are wrestling with how to identify and implement effective reforms that reduce structural inequities in the criminal legal system, promote community safety, and right-size operations of the criminal legal system to achieve more equitable outcomes and increased safety. Research suggests the most inspired solutions to such intractable problems come from collaborative partnerships between policymakers, criminal legal system leaders, and community members (Viswanathan et al. 2004, as cited in NIH 2011). Defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as “the process of working collaboratively with and through groups of people affiliated by geographic proximity, special interest, or similar situations to address issues affecting the well-being of those people” (1997, 9), community engagement offers the transformative potential to “change the way problems are solved and resources invested” because policy and practice recommendations are informed by the experiences and perspectives of impacted communities (Nexus Community Partners 2015, 1). How community engagement occurs varies by place and issue. In addition, what constitutes “community” is context specific. Likewise, “engagement” exists on a continuum characterized by increasing levels of communication, trust, and power sharing: outreach, which is more consultative in nature, anchors one end of the continuum while collaborative partnerships and shared leadership in which the “community” has final or coequal decisionmaking responsibility, caps the other end (CDC 2011). Many SJC sites have struggled with community engagement because of the strained relationships between the criminal legal system and communities that have historically been criminalized by that system or alienated by civic leaders. Yet some sites have made marked progress. This report, which is part of a series of case studies (box 1) highlighting the work of the SJC initiative, examines the community engagement strategies developed and implemented by three SJC communities: Buncombe County, North Carolina; Cook County, Illinois; and New Orleans. It documents how these sites navigated the types of challenges mentioned above and advanced tangible reform efforts; it also explores perceived impacts of these strategies on the sites’ efforts to engage community members, reduce local jail use, and implement system reforms that advance equity. We begin the report with a brief overview of community engagement, its potential for meaningful reform efforts, and its role in the SJC. We then describe the three SJC communities and their community engagement strategies, including their structures and objectives. Then, we explore the sites’ successes and challenges and common themes in the implementation of their strategies. We conclude by reflecting on the perceived impacts of the strategies and offering recommendations for other communities interested in pursuing authentic community engagement.

Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2023. 41p.