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Home | Pretrial Justice Essentials | Pretrial Justice Issue: Meaningful Community Engagement

Pretrial Justice

Meaningful Community Engagement

Sustainable, equitable pretrial improvement requires genuine collaboration between public leaders and community members. 

Pretrial Justice Essentials Advancing Pretrial Justice

Meaningful Collaboration 

Those most impacted by the criminal legal system — including people with lived experience, victims, family members, and community organizations — bring critical expertise and perspective to policymaking.

Community engagement involves creating new norms around who gets to consider, decide on, and implement policy improvements. Meaningful community engagement equates to true collaboration. It also requires a shift in historically understood power dynamics. Community members are not “invited into” the conversation. Instead, stakeholders in public institutions and community members agree that they share an equal interest, and come together to solve problems and improve services and systems.

Inclusion and Equity

Inclusion and equity are key to community engagement. Inclusion fosters a culture that welcomes diverse voices, especially those of groups that have historically been marginalized. Equity ensures that justice system processes are fair and accessible to everyone.

Why Community Engagement Matters

Better Policies — People working together in a well-structured process results in policies and plans that are smarter, more broadly supported, and more reflective of what communities want.

Stronger Civic Life — People’s opinions develop as they learn more about issues, and they are more likely to vote, volunteer, and take other actions to strengthen their community.

Stronger Communities — Genuine community engagement builds stronger communities through:

  • True collaboration. Authentic connections between people, organizations, and public leaders increase opportunities to solve problems together.
  • Greater equity. Structural racism, socioeconomic disparity, unequal opportunity, and other factors shape our communities and nation. Community engagement is a path to mitigating those factors. Engaging a diversity of people and perspectives provides opportunities to learn and work together. The outcomes are more equitable and more responsive to community needs.
  • Stronger social networks. Strong community engagement can yield better economic health, healthier residents, increased resiliency, and a better capacity to confront natural disasters and other crises. Jurisdictions with local, community-based organizations aimed at reducing poverty and violence may also have lower rates of violent crime.

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