Communities around national forest of Meru Betiri have a degree of dependence on forest products contained in the conservation area of living natural resources. Dependency effects in behavior that violates legislation. The aim of this paper is to explain the strategy of criminal policies against violations of law committed by the community and public response to criminal policies. The research method used qualitative research through interview as the instruments and document review. The research analysis used qualitative descriptive. Research finding shows that the strategy pursued is a policy of penal and non-penal policies. The penal policy is in the form of the application of criminal punishment, while the non-penal policy is in the form in-situ and ex-situ conservation strategies. Responsiveness of communities around the forest is 234 respondents. The result are 66 (28.3%) respondents stated that they are very realistic, followed by 105 (44.7%) respondents who stated that they are realistic. Furthermore, only 56 (24.1%) of the respondents stated that they are quite realistic, and 7 (3.0%) respondents who felt they are not realistic.