Community justice has become increasingly popular over the past few decades for several reasons. The first might be the failure of other methods to help rehabilitate people who commit nonviolent crimes and help to integrate them back into their communities. As jails are increasingly overcrowded and expensive to run, and they seem an ineffective way to prevent crime, communities are rethinking criminal justice priorities and methods.

Community justice seeks to tackle the root causes of crime rather than simply punish offenders. Prevention of crime and of re-offending is obviously much better than waiting for people to commit crimes, then trying to catch them and lock them up.

Prevention and rehabilitation, though, are not one-size-fits-all endeavors. Muslim communities, Hispanic communities, and Native American communities face different issues and require different support mechanisms, with strong local input. Often religious and community leaders need to work closely with criminal justice professionals to reintegrate people into communities and tackle root issues such as gangs, alcoholism, family issues, and lack of support mechanisms for criminals trying to get jobs and develop alternatives to a gang or criminal lifestyle.

The popularity of community justice is based on two things: effectiveness and humanitarian concerns. It has proven effective in helping nonviolent offenders and it seems far more humane than simply punishing young or nonviolent offenders who may be products of poverty and abuse. For these reasons, it is likely that it will continue to be popular.

The community justice is popular because it is meant to rehabilitate the offender and help him/her integrate back into society. It is also meant to prevent crime, and it places emphasis on helping the victims more than persecuting the offender.

One reason that the movement is popular is that the United States has a large prison population made up of mostly non-violent offenders. In many circumstances, these same non-violent offenders are from low socioeconomic backgrounds and stand a greater chance of reentering prison than other populations. People see the community justice movement as a way to decrease the prison population as well as provide a humane way to reduce crime.

The community justice movement places the police and local organizations into closer partnership with one another. It is meant to use mentors and intervention programs in order to try to stop crime before it happens. There is also a great deal of emphasis placed on restitution. While this is not feasible in the event of violent crime, it can be used in non-violent crime in order to encourage the offender to feel remorse for the crime and to take actions to make things right after the fact.

The community justice movement is popular now because it is seen as a way to prevent crime; this is especially true among juvenile offenders and people who commit non-violent crime. It will be popular if it shows a way to limit the country's growing prison population that seems to take in minorities and the poor more than any other group. If crime rates spike, the model will fall out of favor and people will be in favor of the traditional system which involves lengthy prison sentences.

I would argue that the community justice movement is popular because it seems like an approach that can actually reduce crime and other problems in ways that are not as harmful as our traditional criminal justice system is.  I would speculate that the movement will continue to be popular unless crime rates start to rise and people become frightened of crime and criminals as they were in past decades.

The community justice movement seems to promise a better system of criminal justice.  Our traditional system focuses on the offender.  It tries to determine how bad the offender’s actions have been and to punish him or her accordingly.  It is not concerned in any formal way with the impacts that its actions have on the community.  This makes it seem less helpful than the community justice model.

The community justice model focuses on helping communities.  Its major goal is to make communities safer and healthier, not to apprehend and punish individual offenders.  This makes it popular because it focuses on what people really want.  People tend to want to live in safe communities more than they want to catch and punish individuals.  They would rather prevent crime than allow it to happen and then punish offenders after the fact.  In addition, community justice programs allow members of the community to have input and agency, rather than simply forcing them to accept the actions of a criminal justice system over which they have no control.  For these reasons, this model has become popular.

I would speculate that this model will continue to be popular unless we experience an increase in crime rates.  When crime rates rise, voters tend to start worrying about this issue.  They tend to think that harsher sanctions, administered through the traditional criminal justice system, are needed.  These voters tend to be people who do not live in the most affected areas and simply want the criminals kept away from them.  If crime rates rise, these people will pressure the government to stop using community justice systems that are “soft” on crime.