On Wednesday, June 30th, 2021 the Social Law Library hosted Community Corrections Centers are now Community Justice Support Centers CLE program.

For more than 20 years the Commonwealth’s network of Community Corrections Centers has served exclusively as a community-based alternative in cases where a sentence to the house of correction is not necessary or appropriate. Even in their earliest iteration in the late 1990s, the centers were intended as part of a community justice approach that would provide additional capacity to resolve criminal justice cases without resorting to more incarceration and institutional expansion. Just like community policing, community prosecution, community courts and other community focused polices, community corrections were an attempt to bring the best rehabilitative practices in corrections into the community to help resolve the underlying disconnections that contributed to recidivism.

Today, the centers are recognized as a place that coordinates evidence-based interventions like cognitive behavioral treatment, education, and career counseling, with coordinate community based supports at almost every intercept in the criminal justice process. Whether pretrial or re-entry, the centers can support clients so that they can live healthy, productive lives in the community where they belong.

This program describes how the centers have refined their service delivery, expanded pathways for access through criminal justice reform, and selected a new name to more accurately reflect how they support better outcomes in criminal justice.