“Chickens Coming Home to Roost”: The Politics of Community Engagement and a Call for Street <scp>PAR</scp>

ABSTRACT This essay grapples with the problematic legacy that sociology and criminology have with supporting community engaged research with street‐identified populations (e.g., gang members, justice‐involved). While universities have increasingly called for community engagement, very few tier‐1 institutions actually provide poor communities with substantive intellectual and material resources. In fact, the community engaged relationship is mostly transactional and one‐sided, with researchers being mostly interested in extracting data as opposed to enacting social‐structural change. Consequently, a growing number of local residents have become angry at this parasitic relationship; thus, the “chickens are coming home to roost,” or these residents are demanding clearer explanations about this exploitive dynamic. Furthermore, while most research institutions have not delivered on well‐resourced community engaged initiatives, this essay still makes the argument that viable opportunities exist for doing this work inside low‐income urban environments. Also, several examples of promising participatory projects and programs with a focus on the criminal legal system are provided, including: Participatory Research in Prisons at the Urban Institute in Baltimore, Maryland; Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School; or the participatory work led by grassroots non‐profits like the Center for Structural Equity in Wilmington, Delaware.