South Africa: Community Peace Programme
As post-apartheid planners in South Africa turned their attention to criminal justice reform in the early 1990s they sought citizen involvement in policing, community dispute resolution and criminal trials. Much of the emphasis on participatory justice has fallen by the wayside since then. Although community policing is thriving in some areas it has not been universally adopted, as originally planned. Early legislation allowing lay participation in criminal trials is rarely used and a proposal for community courts has languished in the country’s Law Reform Commission for more than five years. There are, however, community safety forums that mix community crime prevention and public service delivery and involve community leaders; they receive modest funding from some provinces and victim-offender mediation is done in some townships. The parole system has recently been reformed to include community members and crime victims on the parole boards.
Perhaps most interesting is the Community Peace Programme (CPP), now affiliated with the University of Cape Town, which uses local resources in poor communities to resolve individual disputes—quarrels over money, insults and threats, property offenses—and mount projects that address collective needs—for children’s day care and recreation, community cleanup, health education. The program starts from the premise that people have skills and knowledge that they can use to manage their lives even in conditions of extreme poverty and inequality. Members of Peace Committees hold a “gathering” in an informal setting at which they help the disputants and other community members explore the causes of the problem, seek resolution, and adopt a plan of action intended to prevent further conflicts. The process is nonjudgmental, applies no force or other sanctions, focuses on the future, and involves no officials. Peace committee members are paid for each dispute, though some are now volunteering as funds from foreign governments and foundation grants are dwindling and the South African government has not picked up the slack. In theory, each dispute should generate money for a Peace Building Fund that goes toward the community development projects that the committee sponsors. It remains to be seen whether the development component of the program will survive the budget crunch.