Edmonton Drug Treatment & Community Restoration Court

For too long, something has been missing from the criminal justice system. While courts, police and prosecutors have become increasingly modernized in recent years, they have often failed to meet the needs of the criminal justice system’s primary consumers — the neighbourhoods that experience crime and its consequences on a daily basis.

This problem was first recognized by advocates of community policing, who argued that police officers could address neighbourhood crime and disorder more effectively if they established closer relationships with community residents and neighbourhood groups.

From this starting point, the idea of “community justice” has now spread to other branches of the criminal justice system, including probation departments, prosecutors, correction offices and now courts.

What is community justice? It can take many forms, but at its core, community justice is about partnership and problem-solving. It’s about creating new relationships, both within the justice system and with outside stakeholders like social service agencies, NGOs, hospitals and clinics, residents, merchants, churches and schools. And it’s about testing new approaches to public safety.

The Edmonton DTC is a mechanism to promote community justice through a restorative drug treatment court program. The program applies 12 key drug treatment court principles together with12 success factors for success as identified by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime.