Mediation for Misdemeanor Assault

Background and Purpose: Severe violence, such as murder, rape, and robbery command much more research, policy, and practice attention, yet assault without a weapon, or not resulting in serious injury, is far more prevalent. Of the 6.62 million violent victimizations reported in NCVS, 3.86 million, or 58%, were simple assault (Thompson & Tapp, 2023). Although both minor and severe community violence continue to damage community and family life, crime reduction victories over the past 30 years have come with the cost of expanding criminalization of more and more minor crimes, especially in communities of color (Alexander, 2012; Kohler-Hausmann, 2018; Natapoff, 2018). Solutions that reduce both violence and over-criminalization are urgently needed. Community mediation centers help people in conflict talk things out face to face, and are defined by use of volunteer mediators who reflect the community’s diversity, are free or use sliding scale services, make referrals from diverse sources at any stage of conflict, and provide mediation in the neighborhood where the dispute occurs (Harmon‐Darrow et al., 2020; Hedeen, 2004; Jeghelian et al., 2014; Mawn, 2019). Community mediation for diversion of second degree assault cases has been practiced around the country since the 1970s (Wahrhaftig, 2005), but little is known about its ability to prevent further violence between participants or reduce assault recidivism.

Methods: Secondary analysis was conducted with assault cases (n = 162) within a Maryland Judiciary dataset from a quasi-experimental longitudinal comparison group study of criminal court mediation recidivism. Bivariate analyses and logistic regression with inverse proportion of treatment weighting were conducted in Stata and SPSS to measure the association of community-based mediation services with court recidivism, versus prosecution or usual case treatment.

Results: Community-based mediation of misdemeanor assault had a small and statistically non-significant association with lower return to court at six months, versus usual court processes. Cases that did return to court following mediation nearly all contained indications of intimate partner violence. Had assaults between couples been excluded, recidivism for mediation cases would have been one third of those treated as usual.

Conclusions and Implications: Mediators, community mediation centers, and local prosecutors’ offices could improve screening for intimate partner violence and work together to divert more mediatable cases earlier in the process via police officers and court commissioners. Future studies of mediation recidivism should consider comparison groups of people who chose to use the service but their fellow participant declined, and mediation evaluations with a dependent variable of self-reported violence would be best suited to understanding community mediation’s ability to meet its founding mission of community-created peace.