Urban Communitarianism, Crime politics and State
RestructuringMaria Markantonatou Chapter of the Book: Urban
Governance in Europe, Eckhardt F., Elander I. (eds.), Berliner
Wissenschaftsverlag, 2009 Introduction We see little hope for
important reductions in crime through modification of the criminal
justice system. We see considerable hope in policies that would
reduce the role of the state and return responsibility for crime
control to ordinary citizens. (Gottfredson and Hirschi, A General
Theory of Crime, 1990:4) The above quotation by Gottfredson and
Hirschi reflects one of the major problems of both modern
criminology and state theory. Answers and approaches here are
everything but concurrent and ambivalence about the question of
crime reduction seems to be increasing through the parallel
processes of denationalization and decentralization. How much state
intervention and of what kind do crime politics actually
necessitate? Who is responsible for crime prevention, the social
construction of safety and the establishment of order? What are the
limits of the criminal justice system in governance regimes? How
successful is the state in coordinating it and what is the role of
civil society, cities and communities in the maintenance of social
order? These classical questions, thoroughly dominating the
theoretical agenda of social science, are updated in the frame of a
series of socioeconomic and political changes related to the state
restructuring over the last decades. The success of the criminal
justice system in reducing crime, or, formulated in the state
theorys terminology, the effectiveness of the state monopoly of
violence, has been over the last decades seriously questioned. A
series of sociological disciplines like urban sociology and
criminology are increasingly focusing on government failure to
reduce crime and emphasizing on processes of community crime
prevention. The idea that social control should be empowered by
informal controls has been a point of contention for criminologists
and political scientists studying public and urban safety. At the
same 1
time, crime politics has recently undergone a series of radical
changes, both at the level of public rhetoric and at the level of
urban policy-making. Several cities in Western Europe and North
America are increasingly adopting policies of community crime
prevention, adjusting them to their respective national contexts
and political directives. The community justice movement (Clear and
Cadora 2001:48), manifested together with an ideology of
techno-environmental hazards (Sparks 2000: 129), is part of the
discourse for the modernisation of the criminal justice system and
of a new penology of risk management (Sparks 2000: 130). This new
penology expresses a trend to more punitive crime politics or to a
new focus on crime, like it is expressed in mottos like Tony Blairs
We should be tough on Crime, tough on the causes of crime.
Gottfredson and Hirschi pose the theoretical dilemma state or civil
society? and then they prioritize civil society. With regard to
both urban governance and community crime prevention, state and
civil society are now called to play new roles in the exercise of
social control, but whether this dilemma actually exists in this
context, should be questioned. In their view, crime politics is
considered as a set of strategies that will somehow neutrally pass
from state to civil society. How, by whom and for whom
responsibility is defined, towards whom is community crime
prevention directed and what kind of state would permit and promote
such policies of urban governance, are issues that remain
unanswered by statements such as Gottfredson and Hirschis. The fact
that in their General Theory of Crime, they elaborate a theory of
self-control(1990) as antipode to theories of social control which
they consider as deficient in understanding modern criminality, is
not coincidental, rather it expresses a shift from a social
theory-orientated criminology, to a managerial one. This paper will
discuss new paradigms of social reaction to crime and will focus on
the theoretical agenda about the transition from social control to
self-control, from state to civil society, from national to local,
intralocal or urban regulation, and from formal to informal crime
prevention. Models of multilevel governance of crime, the
increasing salience of crime, crime politics and public rhetoric on
crime (Stenson 2001) are issues that will be further examined.
Also, this paper will discuss aspects of community crime prevention
and will attempt to relate them to broader transformations of the
state and to issues of urban governance that are defining
policy-making during the last decades. It will be argued
2
that community crime prevention is neither oppositional nor
complementary to the state policy form, but it rather reflects a
new strategy in building crime and urban policies. 1. Community
Crime Prevention Since the 1970s sociologists, criminologists and
political scientists have focused exhaustively on the concept of
community and its power to resolve social conflict or to reproduce
social exclusion. Although the scholar interest, the approaches to
community and the ideologies built upon it varied, since the 1970s,
the concept of community has remained crucial for setting the
agenda of crime prevention and urban politics. The latest
understanding of community combines two interrelated concepts:
community participation and community safety. The notion of
community participation is central to numerous cost-effective
strategies of urban renewal, urban voluntarism and community-based
self-help (Craig/Mayo 1995). At the same time, community is related
to the requirement for community safety and a communityoriented
crime prevention policy, which is or should be based on a network
of different institutions, social agents and urban actors (urban
governance of crime). The participation of community actors to
issues of urban order, their responsibilisation (Garland 2000)
regarding crime prevention as well as the reduction of fear of
crime, are some fundamental elements of the communalization of
crime prevention. During the last decades, the history and
implementation of community crime prevention (hereafter CCP) and
its position in the official crime prevention system in different
countries and cities of Europe have been extensively examined (for
example, Rosenbaum 1986, Heidensohn/Farrell 1991, Body-Gendrot
2000, Walklate 2000). Critical approaches to CCP have brought to
light important processes of governmentality and the enforcement of
new rationalities of social control (Garland 2000: 349). Critics
have also focused on social exclusion of social groups and
individuals in urban areas and the politically selective use of
community (Hope/Shaw 1988), while others have connoted it with the
economic restructuring caused by globalization and
neoliberalization (Crawford 1998). Criminologists seeking for
effective models of crime reduction consider CCP as part of an
integrated prevention policy (Pavarini in Bergalli/Sumner 1997: 94)
and correlate it with new
3
chances for a non-bureaucratic, democratic legitimation of the
governance of safety (Pavarini in Bergalli/Sumner 1997). Applied
more intensively in North America and UK than in continental
Europe, CCP is not a unified, concrete or homogeneous project. It
rather consists of a mix of different overlapping urban policies,
like situational crime prevention, community policing,
neighborhood-watch, citizen patrols, police-community councils,
communal security surveys, crime-mapping and citizen crime
reporting projects (for an overview of CCP-policies Rosenbau 1986,
Clear and Cadora 2001). Amongst most large-scale policies of crime
prevention like the privatization of security services or the
expanding digitalization of surveillance through CCTV, such
policies of community control are being localized in cities and
urban areas, forming new patterns of confronting with criminality
and fear of crime. The differentiations in the implementation of
CCP between different countries, but also between different cities
and urban areas in both continents, depend on a variety of factors.
Some general factors to be named here are the relationship between
central government and city or local governance, the degree of
state intervention in urban management, the differences in the
national welfare provision, the political status of the nation
state (whether social-democratic or liberal) and its capacity of
creating trust networks as well as the power relations constructed
inside the administrative system of local actors. Also, fundamental
in this context are both the patterns, on which state restructuring
is realized at the national level, and the interconnectedness
between national crime politics and international actors of formal
social control. Nevertheless, despite the efforts for a
homogenization of European legal systems (Huber 2000) or treaties
like that of Schengen, and despite the fact that recorded crime
rates are more or less similar in most European countries, there
are several differences amongst the European countries both in the
implementation of crime policy and in the public expenditure for
crime prevention (Dijk in Heidensohn/Farrell 1991: 30). For
instance, while more organized CCP-policies and neighborhood
schemes are expanding in USA, in England and Wales, in Germany
informal crime prevention is based mostly on urban anticrime design
(womens park places, city warding, information campaigns etc.), on
private security or on projects of urban regeneration and much less
on neighborhood policies (Dijk in Heidensohn/Farrell 1991: 33). At
the same time, Germany appears to spend more than other countries
on official policing and much less on informal crime prevention,
while for instance UK keeps on increasing 4
budgets for CCP over the last years (Dijk in Heidensohn/Farrell
1991: 35). Common element between Germany, France, Netherlands and
Sweden are that policies like CCP are less implemented than in the
USA, which have a longer communitarian tradition based on federal
decentralization processes. In Europe, CCP is still an experimental
form of crime prevention and the idea that crime reduction can be
achieved through communities, and through an effective cooperation
between local actors and central government, appears to be less
established than in American crime politics. Although the trend of
decentralization of crime prevention is prominent across Europe and
that historically a more or less common understanding of the crime
question has been developed, these differences in the praxis of CCP
show that CCP is heterogeneously implemented, not only in a
comparison between countries, but also between cities, communities
and localities. However, the important empirical differences on the
local and national level conceal equally important political
homologies with regard to the implementation of CCP. Following the
neostructuralist premise of regulation through urban networking, it
becomes clear that on the macropolitical level, these homologies
reveal a series of overlapping policies for the restructuring of
the postkeynesian state and reflect common changes in the
relationship between economy, civil society and the state. Thus,
while a long list of differences between nation states, cities und
localities reveals a number of different regulation arrangements
and institutional settings, the common tendency towards networking,
partnership, community participation and safety is related to
macrostructural processes of state restructuring. For instance,
according to Stenson, there are common links between policies
implemented by Bill Clintons New Democrats, Tony Blairs New Labour,
Lionel Jospins Parti Socialiste and Gerhard Schroeders Neue Mitte,
policies including three clusters of crime control: a) punitive
sovereignty, b) target hardening linked with actuarial justice, c)
community security technologies (Stenson 2001: 69-72). Before
discussing these clusters of crime control, some remarks about the
socio-political framework in which they are initiated are
necessary.
2. The end of the states crisis
5
Thirty years ago, Richard Quinney (1977) amongst other critical
criminologists, underlined that a theory of crime and of social
response to crime presupposes and results into a theory of the
state. This happens not only because the state (still) holds the
power of structuring social and individual behaviors and according
to its criteria punishes, tolerates or rewards them, or because the
criminal justice system functions as the ultimate means of the
state for the enforcement of law, but also for a number of
practical and symbolical reasons related to the reproduction of its
own power. This kind of thematic agenda seems to be marginalized in
front of processes of denationalization of the state or through
power relations-free schematizations from government to governance.
Attempting to follow the assumption of Quinney and adjust it to the
study of CCP, it is important to link CCP with broader changes in
the state. Given that the study of different kinds of social policy
crime policy included presupposes an understanding of the state
that regulates them, the study of CCP requires also a
state-theoretical conceptualization, especially because the
processes designating CCP are similar to the processes effecting on
the restructuring of the state. Processes like globalization,
glocalization and (neo)liberalization take place on international,
national and regional scale, not with the effect, like it is often
concluded, of a demise of the state, but rather of its
restructuring under new socioeconomic terms. In the 1980s and
1990s, the state as research subject has been radically superseded.
Following the political trend, the states crisis argument was
expressed in minarchistic conceptualizations, namely in
conceptualizations about a minimal state. Under the influence of
the Austrian School of economics, the need for a minimal,
neoliberal state was variously emphasized through a wide discussion
about the state as constraint to economic development and
representative of anti-modern values that were unable to coordinate
with the needs of a market economy. Despite this trend and despite
the euphoria caused by a rush assumption that globalization, as a
deliberate extension of the capitalist economy, would also liberate
society from the coercive mechanisms of the nation state, the state
politics of the last decades across Europe has shown that social
and crime policy is, just like before, dependent on the state and
the governance policies that it introduced. Therefore, as Hirsch
has noted, the transformation of the state and the state system in
the actual globalization process requires what modern political
science () thought could be abandoned: a state theory (Hirsch
2000:24). The state acts in the frame of a multiplicity of
functions, strategies and overlapping scales, and additionally
6
as an ensemble of socially embedded, socially regularised and
strategically selective institutions, organizations, social forces
and activities organised around (or at least involved in) making
collectively binding decisions for an imagined political community
(Jessop 2002: 6). Because of the multifunctionality of the state,
different approaches have analyzed several of its not always
homogenous qualities and not always conflictless policy levels.
Some of the most important approaches for the study of CCP are
those of the managerial state (Clarke and Newman 1997), the
activating state (aktivierender Staat) (Butterwegge 2005) and of
the Schumpeterian Workfare Postnational Regimes (Jessop 2002). CCP,
as a form of urban governance mediated through social control, is
neither isolated from processes of neoliberalization,
managerialization and social activation, nor can it be understood
separately from the socioeconomic conditions that necessitated it
(Hubbard/Hall in Hubbard/Hall 1998). 3. Managerialism and
Neoliberalism The managerial state (Clarke and Newman 1997) is
related to a state guided deregulation of welfarist institutions,
including public administration and social services as well as the
institutions of criminal justice. Within an inflation of termini
and definitions in the managerial agenda1, there is a series of
ongoing debates about whether a transformation from an Old to a New
Public Management is as crucial as managerial discourses imply and
whether it presents a radical change in paradigms about public
administration and bureaucracy (Markantonatou 2004). Despite such
debates and despite the differences on the national and local
scale, it can be argued that the increasing salience of
managerialism in social policy reflects a shift in state politics,
which is expressed ideal-typically as a shift from Public
Management to New Public Management. Public Management is related
to the welfare state and to the centrality of the state as provider
of social services and social policy as well as auditor of the
public administration. Theoretical basis of the Public Management
is Max Webers perspective on bureaucracy. Public administration is
subjected to government and has limited power over decision and
rule making processes (on Public Management see1
For instance Ferlie a.o. (1996: 10-15) differentiate between
four models of New Public Management: Efficiency Drive NPM-Model,
Downsizing and Decentralization NPM Model,In Search of Excellence
NPM Model and Public Service Orientation Model.
7
Lynn 2001). In the crime control agenda of Public Management
formal control dominates and policies are directed to costs for
police officers, welfarist institutions, constitutionalism and
legal powers. The state is the central agent of social control and
the one explicitly responsible for crime prevention, mainly by
establishing sufficient penal systems and after-care,
offender-orientated rehabilitation policies. In the frame of the
New Public Management, responsibility is transferred to
institutional agencies and is shared with communities and
partnerships. A language of risk analysis and some new economic
principles became influential during the 1990s, like the three Es
(economy, efficiency, effectiveness) and the three Ms (markets,
managers, mixed economies) (Clarke and Newman 1997). The
requirement for a post-bureaucratic, modernised public
administration has been introduced together with an emphasis on
flexibility and on achieving results rather than on administrating
processes as well as on demands for more institutional autonomy
from the state (Friedrichsmeier 2000). The focus lies on measures
for improving services and on clearly defining targets, on more
economy and less formality or hierarchy. An implementation of New
Public Management in crime prevention is the setting of S.M.A.R.T.
targets and projects, where S.M.A.R.T. means that they have to be
specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-tabled
(McLaughlin, Muncie and Hughes 2001:311). S.M.A.R.T., as a policy
of target hardening and target removal, can be better conducted
through CCP than through official crime politics, for it appeals to
more achievable reduction targets like vehicle crime or burglary
than to categories like the racist crime, state crime or corporate
crime. Both the programmatic goals of the institutions of crime
prevention and their results in everyday life should now be
evidence-based and What Works is not examined in the long run, but
it is rather subjected to micropolitcal planning. What is thought
to be uneconomic, unpragmatic or scarcely realizable in practice,
is criticized by the supporters of New Public Management as
parochial and subject to change. Just like public administration,
crime policy is all the more influenced by market reasoning.
Programs of effectiveness, the statistical elaboration of crime
data as basis for prevention, the economic rationalisation of penal
institutions, budgetorientation and a general business-ideology in
crime policy, realise through New Public Management and CCP visions
of Entrepreneurial Government. Osborne and Gaebler, as supporters
of the separation of the administration from the state, of
competition 8
between service providers, managerialism and citizen
empowerment, have described it as following:Entrepreneurial
governments promote competition between service providers. They
empower citizens by pushing control out of the bureaucracy, into
the community. They prevent problems before they emerge, rather
than simply offering services afterward. They measure the
performance of their agencies, focusing not on inputs but in
outcomes. () They put their energies into earning money, not just
spending them. They decentralize authority, embracing participatory
management. They prefer market mechanisms to bureaucratic
mechanisms (1992: 19).
In accordance with political entrepreneurialism, the interests
of criminology have shifted to more managerial and technical
questions. New definitions of crime arise, like for instance the
one of Philip Cook, who argues that crime is a tax on our standard
living, imposing both tangible and intangible costs (Cook in Welsh,
Farrington, Sherman 2001: 1). New Public Management can be seen as
the scientification and political justification of a broader Urban
Governance, of which the public-private mix of crime prevention,
namely CCP, is an integral part. This urban governance includes the
responsibilization of a number of different social actors in the
administration of crime policy and the de-responsibilisation of
official and professional cultures for the achievement of a
modernization through managerialisation (McLaughlin, Muncie and
Hughes 2001: 301). Apart from managerialism, neoliberalism is also
related to CCP. The decline of the post-war Keynesian model of
economic regulation in the 1970s, the abandonment of the Bretton
Woods monetary system and the changed role of its institutions like
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade
Organization, the proto-neoliberal (Peck and Tickell 2002:41)
deregulation politics of Thatcher (19791990) in England and of
Reagan (1981-1989) in the USA as well as the increasing
privatization of public property are few aspects that signalised
the emergence of the neoliberal era, also characterised as actually
existing neoliberalism (Brenner and Theodore 2002). Keynesian
regulation of the welfare state has been gradually replaced by the
conceptualisations of the market economy by Friedrich August von
Hayek and Milton Friedman. Whilst Keynesianisms priority lied in
manipulating the business cycle through the management of
consumption and effective demand by means of public expenditure,
the basic task of postkeynesian governments has been the regulation
of the supply side through facilitation of enterprises to achieve
free competition and free movement of capital in the cheapest way
for them and in order not only to maximize profits and efficiency,
but also to obtain economic status through the 9
extension to new international markets (for an overview of the
welfare states problematic see the different approaches of Offe
1984, Luhmann 1990, Hobsbawm 1995, Wallerstein 1999, Aglietta 2000,
Deppe 2001, Hirsch 2001, Altvater/Mahnkopf 2002, Jessop 2002). The
processes of economic internationalization and the corresponding
denationalization of the state as well as the need for adjustment
and disciplination of societies to the new economic and political
setting brought forth the necessity for more concrete and solid
social entities that function as stable reference points and are
now called to counterbalance the chaotic conditions of globalism
and competition economy. Such concrete entities are cities, urban
spaces and localities, which are indeed increasingly being viewed
as the only remaining institutional arenas in which a negotiated
form of capitalist regulation might be forged (Brenner and Theodore
2002: 1). Cities, as institutional arenas for a wide range of
policy experiments and political strategies (Brenner and Theodore
2002: 1), are turning into central actors of the new economy. CCP
and similar forms of urban governance based on communitarianism are
integral parts of this project of state restructuring and rescaling
of regulation, a project resulting into a revival of the local
(Brenner and Theodore 2002: 1). Cities and localities, as centres
of entrepreneurial activity and diffusion of economic values, have
always played a paramount role in the production and reproduction
of capitalism in different historical phases. Nevertheless, the
novelty of the renewed interest in cities as central actors of
social reproduction and economic reallocation in postnational,
postwelfarist states lies in the need for such an organization of
social affairs that will assimilate globalizations processes
through localization. Although a thematization of the relation
between global and local, or the global and the urban would be
crucial for the examination of CCP, it is for reasons of space
beyond the scope of this paper (see Lipietz 1993, Jessop 2002,
Scott 2002, Steel 2004). It is known that globalization, as a
heterogeneous, ongoing process (and not a fixed project from above
or outside), consists of various, differentiated processes on the
national and international level, on global and local scale, with
societal and communitarian consequences. Cities are intermediating
between these dualisms and are at the same time intermediated by
them, and function as socializing actors of the new, postkeynesian
economy. At the same time, demands for forms of governance that
ensure interurban and intraurban competition are becoming
increasingly influential (Peck and Tickell 2005: 10
35). Although such competition policies are guided by the state,
globalisation and neoliberalism are phenomena that are promoted not
as results of deregulation policies or of government failure, but
as external phenomena and inevitable pressures that are imposed on
cities because of the as such promoted lack of other political
options. This exogenized thinking (Peck and Tickell 2005: 35)
defines also CCP. Even if it conceals a deeper and much more
complicated project of state restructuring, CCP is promoted simply
as a pragmatic way out of the states incapability to exercise
effective social control and guarantee public safety. The processes
of deregulation are occurring in, through and for the cities, with
the result, as Jones and Ward note, that under neoliberalism cities
are being presented as both the sites of, and the solutions to,
various forms of crisis (Jones and Ward 2005: 128). Indeed, various
forms of crisis are being urbanized: from the localization of
postkeynesian entrepreneurialism, to the decrease of welfare
provision (in the case of crime politics the abandonment of the
rehabilitation ideal) and so forth. Most importantly for the
purposes of this paper, the urbanization of various forms of crisis
applies to: a) the construction of criminality as an urban and
communal problem that cannot be resolved merely by the state, b)
the construction of community as a project of homogenizing values,
behaviors and norms in an increasingly fragmented and segregated
space, c) the construction of CCP as the solution of the crime
problem in a process of redefinition of public and private urban
spaces, as well as public and private provision of security. A
multilevel form of governance, based on networking and cooperative
politics is required, in order to diffuse social responsibility for
the management of formerly state tasks. In his typology of
strategies to promote or adjust to global neoliberalism, Jessop
(2002: 262) classifies four ideal-types of state restructuring.
This distinction is important here, for it does not reduce all
forms of politics to an omnipresent neoliberalism, but still it
does stress the importance of economic restructuring for the
corresponding social and political one. These ideal-types are:
neoliberalism, neocorporatism, neostatism and neocommunitarianism
(2002: 262). Theorizing CCP, as a form of crime prevention that
applies both to neocommunitarianism and to neocorporatism, explains
how the economic structures of a broader, global and heterogeneous
neoliberalism and their political regulation by the state
necessitate social 11
policies such as CCP. According to Jessop, some of the features
of neocorporatism are a decentralized regulation of self-regulation
and an expand role of public-private partnerships (2002: 262) that
results into a greater flexibilization of policy implementation. In
his analysis of the Schumpeterian Workfare Postnational Regime
(SWPR), Jessop (2002) describes neocommunitarianism as a form of
SWPR that emphasizes the link between economic and community
development, notably in empowering citizens and community groups ()
and the role of decentralized partnerships that embrace not only
the state and business interests but also diverse community
organizations and other local stakeholders (Jessop 2002: 116). In
this frame, the demise of Keynesian crime politics, the overloading
of the therapeutic state in relation to issues of social control,
and the need to reduce government budgets devoted to social policy
and crime reduction urged the foundation of different arrangements
(Craig/Mayo 1995). Within the post-welfarist arrangement, two
important results can be observed. These two processes describe how
the processes of neocorporatism and neocommunitarianism are set in
motion on the level of crime policy: a) An increasing
informalization of crime prevention through activation policies for
the participation of communities, private groups of economic
interest, partnerships and civil actors to crime prevention. This
kind of informalization does not imply the decrease of the power of
formal actors, rather it means that formal actors of social control
are called to re-manage the cooperation with informal ones for the
achievement of a joint system of prevention and social control.
Neocommunitarian demands for self-help and self-regulation apply to
state and police needs for more flexibilization and drive to the
diffusion of the neoliberal logic of a seemingly antistatist
activation. b) A process of parallel economization and
politicization of safety through community. From the one hand,
safety becomes an economic good, for instance through the roaring
privatization of security services. From the other hand, safety is
politicized through community and partnerships are actively
encouraged as never before (Oc and Tiesdell 1997:117). The
political trend for safety and the increasing political salience of
crime and crime prevention set a new agenda of social control order
(Pavarini in Bergalli/Sumner 1997). From the electoral promises for
safety to the requirement of citizens and communities for more
safety, from the socialization of 12
fear of crime, safety is turning into a new political category,
a category of political thought and action, both at the level of
the community and that of the state. 4. The new Urban Governance of
Crime: Activation and Participation Neocorporatism and
neocommunitarianism as well as the structuring of cooperation
networks through CCP, as antidotes to the debilitation of welfarist
institutions, increase the dependence of the effectiveness of crime
prevention on the participatory action of communities, what Peck
and Tickell (2002: 33) call active individualism. Non-state
agencies and preventive partnerships under the coordination of the
state are establishing a new rationality of crime control and an
extended crime-consciousness (Garland 2000: 349). The role of such
preventive partnerships in the construction of safer cities has
become crucial. Communal projects like City Pride, Crime Concern,
Crime Stoppers, or Shop Watch and Street Watch have managed through
cooperation with the police and local entrepreneurial actors to
exercise social control over groups that are considered to cause
criminality, like in case of Street Watch in Balsall Heath in
Birmingham and the communal surveillance of prostitutes (Oc and
Tiesdell 1997: 116). Already from early CCP-programs that took
place in different cities of the United States from 1973 until
19842 it became clear that independent policies of CCP, like
changes in the urban design and planning, the deployment of police
officers and the neighborhood watch, were unlikely to succeed when
implemented without the active participation of citizens and the
collaboration with the police (Rosenbaum 1986). Anticrime
neocorporatism and neocommunitarianism includes a series of
actions, strategies and policies for the creation of urban and
communal safety: spatial redesign of city areas, police assistance,
community education with regard to crime prevention, community
meetings, distribution of community newsletters in target
neighborhoods, block watch, security inspections, street
lightening, foot patrols by citizens, security surveys undertaken
by business proprietors, usage of information about criminal
activity in target city zones and promotion of crime-related topics
in2
The programs took place in Hartford/Connecticut, Evaston and
Chicago/Illinois, Houston/Texas, Newark/New Jersey,
Portland/Oregon, Seattle/Washington, Denver/Colorado, Long
Beach/California, St.Luis/Missouri and Flint/Michigan. The
incidence of crime in the evaluation was measured both by
victimization surveys and crime incidents reported to the police
(Rosenbaum 1986).
13
local mass media and in pamphlets (Yin in Rosenbaum 1986). As
the authors note, crime reduction did not occur where programs were
not implemented in a joint policeresidents system, although fear of
crime was reduced. Reduction of forms of criminality like burglary
occurred in most of the programs, for joint social control was more
intensive and targeted. As the most important factor for the
success of CCP the authors name the citizens involvement and their
collaboration with the police (Yin 1986: 307, see also Oc and
Tiesdell 1997, Clear and Cadora 2001). Criminality is less
understood as a broader, structural social problem requiring the
improvement of social institutions, schooling, welfare and
employment system, like it was theorized in the 1970s (Cohen 1985,
Dijk in Heidensohn/Farrell 1991). Over the last decades crime is
seen as an urban, spatial or community problem to be resolved by
urban and communal actors in a joint system for the achievement of
safety. Criminological schools of the 1960s and the 1970s (Marxist,
deconstructivist, critical, feminist) that focused on the need for
broader social reform and provision of welfare for the reduction of
crime lost gradually their credibility. In their position,
environmental criminology, the broken windows theory, the routine
activity theory, rational choice approaches and monetary/managerial
criminology became influential. Despite the different methodologies
and modes of understanding crime or explaining criminal behavior,
these approaches underline a priority for situational crime
prevention. They offer a probational contextualization of crime and
a formulaic approach to crime reduction. The notion of opportunity
is substantial for CCP: crime is the taken opportunity to commit it
and it is more likely to occur by motivated offenders in
communities with more spatial criminal opportunities and less
spatial crime prevention. Therefore, crime prevention should be
based on a series of techniques of situational crime prevention.
For instance, in a long list of twelve techniques of situational
crime prevention Clarke (1992:13), that later became sixteen
(Clarke and Homel 1997) and recently twenty-five (Clarke and
Cornish 2003) several strategies are mentioned. Indicative of the
twelve techniques are: target hardening (steering locks, bandit
screens etc.), access control (locked gates, fenced yards, PIN
numbers, ID badges etc.), entry/exit screens (border searches
etc.), natural surveillance (neighborhood watch, street lighting,
pruning hedges etc.), formal surveillance (police patrols, security
guards, informant hotlines etc.), deflecting offenders (bus stop
placement, street closures etc.), controlling facilitators (credit
card photo, caller-ID etc.), surveillance by employees (CCTV,
concierges etc.), target removal (cash 14
reduction, removable car radio etc.), identifying property
(property marking etc.), removing inducements (graffiti cleaning,
rapid repair etc.), rule setting (drug-free school zone, public
park regulations etc.) (Clarke 1997: 13). Cities, urban areas,
communities and neighborhoods become the new spaces of crime (Smith
1986, Oc and Tiesdell 1997). Crime is localized, measurable and
statistically provable, indicating a shift from a welfarist
rhetoric of class egalitarianism, equation of social conditions and
social justice to a more pragmatist and managerial actuarial
justice (Feeley and Simon 1992). The need for an urban geography of
crime and for an environmental criminology examining spatial
aspects of criminality, CCP and measurements implemented on
localities is increasingly conceptualized. Society as the natural
crimes space of older, social theory-orientated criminological
approaches is being replaced by unities that are considered to be
more visible, like the cities and the urban communities.
Architects, planners, urban designers, and other environmental
managers and designers are the new professionals of crime
prevention (Oc and Tiesdell 1997). The reduction of social
inequality that was thought to cause crime is being replaced by
issues of urban safety, and reduction of fear of crime through the
creation of defensible places, spatial restructuring, environmental
redesign and the reduction of opportunities for criminal actions.
Approaches of Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED)
(see Oc and Tiesdell 1997: 51-59) become structural parts of CCP.
The former criminological realm of states social control is being
replaced, as Sumner notes, by the more modest and much more
desperate dystopia of management of trouble-spots (Sumner in
Bergalli/Sumner 1997: 133), for according to him, former visions of
social control are now being replaced by the spreadsheet of
managerialism (Sumner in Bergalli/Sumner 1997: 133). At the same
time, victimology and the emphasis on the victim and on the (mostly
material) damage caused by crime are replacing offender-orientated
approaches to crime. Anti-crime slogans like that of Tony Blairs
Tough on Crime, tough on the causes of crime (1992, Labour Party
Conference) became fashionable and new public-private mix- policies
of crime prevention were introduced. The need for a cooperative,
joint model of crime prevention between government, cities, local
administrations and communities has gained criminological consensus
(Smith 1986, Dijk in Heidensohn/Farrell 1991, Lige in
Heidensohn/Farrell 1991).
15
Through the establishment of intergovernmental relations and the
interinstitutional allocation of policy implementation, if not of
decision-making processes, a series of actors, agents, communities
and partnerships are activated in the policy making, while central
government is being partly deactivated or considered as a vis-vis
part of a greater, abstract defined network based on a common
understanding of social problems and on equalization of economic
and social interests. This continuous process of
activation/deactivation results, as Jones and Ward argue, into a
blurring of policy responsibility. The responsibility for the
success or not of an implemented policy is no more attributed to
the state:There are problems of accountability and a blurring of
policy responsibility, difficulties of coordination exist both
within and across different spatial spaces, due to an emerging
system of intergovernmental relations associated with multilevel
governance, conflicting time horizons are present between those
formulating and those implementing policy initiatives, and policy
failure is frequently blamed on the developed institutional
structures and their state managers, and not on central government
(Jones and Ward in Brenner/Theodor 2005: 134).
This
blurring
of
responsibility
through
an
emerging
multilevel,
intergovernmental management of crime prevention caused by the
decentralization of crime politics can also be observed with regard
to CCP. Moreover, if entrepreneurialism implies a market-orientated
promotion of a product, undertaken by private agents for the
achievement and maximization of a given economic profit, this kind
of entrepreneurialism cannot easily be applied to states crime
prevention politics. Although safety as the dialectical opposite of
crime is being marketised and security partially privatised, both
are to a large extent statedefined and it still cannot be argued
that lawmaking and crime prevention are directly subjected to
processes of entrepreneurialism, even if the state, for reasons of
entrepreneurialism, promotes its own rolling back. Crime prevention
and the related state-defined enforcement of law as well as the
achievement of social cohesion through crime prevention, have
historically been within state jurisdiction, most justifiably thus.
Both in liberal and neoliberal views about the states tasks in
social regulation, or even where freedom of markets and
entrepreneurial activity are celebrated, the creation of a socially
reliable investing atmosphere and social cohesion are considered to
be factors of economic stability, and therefore crime prevention is
considered as a fundamental task of the state, also for the
protection of economic safety for those who can benefit by its
politics.
16
Although CCP is often conceptualised as a method of
destatization of crime politics or as a response to the welfare
state crisis that is somehow occurring separately from an anywise
weak state, there is little evidence that this kind of
informalization of social control promoted by CCP is not subjected
to state regulation. On the contrary, CCP is a decentralization
policy for the governance of urban governance. As Sumner critically
remarks, CCP as the politically most pivotal form of informal
social control (), will follow a long-run tendency towards constant
absorption into, or domination by, the imperatives of the central
state (Sumner in Bergalli/Sumner 1997: 140).
Criminality
Welfarism Crime defined as a social problem, Causes of crime:
Social structure, inequality caused by inadequate welfare Space of
crime: Society, institutions, social spaces
Neoliberalism Crime defined as an urban or neighborhood problem
Causes of crime: individual delinquency criminal opportunities
Space of crime: Cities, Urban Areas, Neighborhoods, Communities
pathologies, rationalization of
17
Criminology
Marxist, Abolitionist, Deconstructivist, Critical, Feminist
Environmental, Broken Windows Theory, Rational Choice Theory,
Monetary/managerial criminology
Emphasis on the offender and on rehabilitation Crime Reduction
Social Justice for crime reduction, Rehabilitation Treatment
through welfarist institutions, penal bureaucracy Urban
Government
Emphasis on the victim and the on the damage caused by crime
Actuarial Justice Risk Management, Target hardening/removal Joint
systems of crime prevention, CCPpolicies, participation,
partnerships, cooperation with the police Urban Governance
Responsibility of government institutions and Public Rhetoric of
Crime Prevention the legislature Public expenditure, formal social
control Public Management Welfarist Class Egalitarianism
Responsibilisation of cities and communities, blurring
neocommunitarianism Neocorporatism Interinstitutional policies,
informal social control New Public Management Urban Safety based on
networking, communities and partnerships
Conclusion: Back to the theory of the three elements? A
classical politological theory that has designated the
understanding of the state in modernity is Georg Jellineks theory
of the three elements(Drei-ElementeLehre, 1900). According to
Jellinek, a state is constituted on the basis of an authority that
holds the means to exercise legitimate violence (Staatsgewalt), of
a sum of citizens defined as nation subjected to this state
authority (Staatsvolk) and of a given territory belonging to the
state (Staatsgebiet). Although neither does this theory explain,
nor analyze the kind of the relation between the three elements,
rather it examines the state a posteriori in its fixed, external
form, it has operated as a pattern on which the state
18
has been perceived. In other words, the structures of the state
power and its monopoly of violence, the nation, and its territory
have defined the understanding and conceptualization of the modern
state. Nevertheless, this theory appears to be no more valid in
todays terms. The denationalization of the state through
Europeanization and internationalization processes, the sharing of
the state monopoly of violence with international and supranational
agents, the privatization or communalization of crime prevention,
the geographical mobility of people and the de- territorialization
of economy through the extension of world capitalism outside the
national terrain are all aspects that erode state sovereignty, at
least in the sense of the classical three elements theory (for a
critique on the three element theory see also Krger 1966, Saladin
1995). To conclude that the state loses its sovereignty because the
three elements have changed in their form and in their
consequences, would underestimate the abilities of the state to
re-invent itself in different historical phases and in the frame of
different socioeconomic conditions. This remark on the theory of
the three elements neither intends to designate a new crisis of the
state, nor focuses on its critics. The question that is interesting
here for policies like CCP is a different one. Within the
restructuring of the state and the analogous rescaling of power
relations, can it be argued that the three elements theory tends to
appeal to the urban scale? Can it namely be argued that
Staatsgewalt, the legitimate authority of the state is turning into
a Stadtgewalt, namely to an increasingly legitimate authority of
the city, of local, regional and municipal status actors?
Similarly, does Staatsvolk, the citizens of the state defined by
the imagined national identity become Stadtvolk, namely the
citizens of the city defined by the imagined local identity? Also,
to which degree Staatsgebiet the nation states territory turns into
a more and more organized Stadtgebiet? Starting from the last
ideal-typical shift, namely from the Staatsgebiet to Stadtgebiet,
it can be observed through CCP that whereas nation states are
through Europeanization and globalization subjected to processes of
de-territorialization imposed by global economy, a parallel
territorialization occurs at the local level. It seems that CCP
cannot be successful without a meaning of territoriality and
vice-versa CCP produces more needs for territorial politics. Thus,
CCP can be understood as urban politics towards the strengthening
of identities related to the territory and the spatial
19
organization of social regulation. Community functions as a
territory for crime prevention and crime prevention becomes the
reason to organize a community. The shift from Staatsvolk to
Stadtvolk represents a series of new identities based on the local
or on a sense of community between the localitys members. This
construction of the local or communal identity does not imply a
demise of the dynamics of the national or even of the nationalistic
agenda, but rather it represents an innovative mixture between
national and local levels of actions and a rescaling of power
relations and ideological mechanisms of social and political
cohesion. This mixture is realized on policies like CCP. CCP is
directed to communities by the nation state for the reduction of
criminality inside and outside of localities and communities,
namely it operates inside a state that is communally understood,
but remains a nation state. Through crime prevention citizens
constitute entities based on communal identities, while for the
achievement of safety the urban scale becomes as important as the
national one. A transformation from Staatsgewalt, as the state
monopoly of violence and its institutions of formal social control
to a Stadtgewalt, illustrates the increased participation potential
of citizens, communities and partnerships to exercise social
control and contribute to crime prevention. Such a process on the
making, as argued through this paper, implies the empowered
interfering role of cities, communities and localities in issues of
crime control. This results into their politicization and to
increased power of communal and city elites to exercise power and
social control on groups that have limited or no access to
decision-making processes. Although the Weberian aspect of the
state is changing in form, it does not change in its structure: the
states monopoly of violence seems to still hold the ultima ratio of
defining legality. However, new dynamics, mechanisms and facets of
the monopoly of violence operate through CCP. CCP realizes the
decentralization of the monopoly of violence and the diffusion of
power in order to effectively exercise crime control and to achieve
a multilevel and relatively autonomous governance of urban social
order. Even if this schematic transmission of the three elements
describes the dynamics and the increasing salience of cities and
urban governance regimes in regulation processes, for the question
of the relation between formal and informal actors of crime
prevention, that run through this paper, and in order to return to
Gottfredson and Hirschis assumption that a successful crime policy
would reduce the role of the state and return responsibility for
crime control to ordinary citizens, an older approach should be
here retrospected: Gramsis approach of the state. Within his
conception of 20
hegemony Gramsci had argued that the non-state sphere, the civil
society and its actors, does not operate contrary to the state, its
values, aims and projects, but rather in accordance with it. Even
if this approach does not apply to all parts of civil society or
even if it does not apply to all levels of social action in any
spatio-temporal fix, it does apply to CCP, where an ideological
identification between communities and the state for the reduction
of crime appears to broaden state projects. In a well known
formulation, Gramsci suggested that: State=Political Society +
Civil Society (Gramsci 1971). With this argument, Gramsci
underlined that the state bases its power not only on
institutionalized force and legal mechanisms, but most importantly
on the social content of the civil society. The ideologisation of
CCP as a participative, more deliberated from the state, more
autonomous or more democratic form of social control, has the
effect that through CCP civil society is subjected to statization
processes that, however, conceal themselves as such. This does not
mean that the role of the citizens exercising CCP to policy
implementation is minor, or that CCP is ineffective in reducing
crime. These are empirical questions that need to be examined with
the instruments of comparative urban sociology and criminology.
Gramscis argument on CCP applies to Gottfredson and Hirschis
dilemma, state or civil society. This dichotomy objectifies both
state and civil society, imagines a state that somehow absents from
the design of social order and, from the other hand, considers
civil society as an entity that a priori acts in the name of a
state defined legality, neglecting by this way that civil society
can also break the norms of this legality and operate beyond them.
In general, CCP as a mode of urban governance implied for crime
reduction and urban safety, is part of a broader state matrix,
where private and public actors and state and non-state
institutions, are directed to the achievement of similar goals,
even if conflicts are included. Therefore, CCP is an example of
policy implementation that cannot operate by dualisms like state or
civil society. Within the necessities of the new urban governance
(not only of crime), CCP operates through a dialectical coalition
of state and civil society, just as Gramsci suggested.
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