The processes of rapid social and economic change which characterize most contemporary Western societies have promoted ever greater mobility, wrested social relations from localized contexts, weakened family and communal ties and, in so doing, eroded 'traditional' forms of social cohesion. Social order is increasingly thought of as something which cannot merely be protected and maintained but which must, rather, be actively constructed and managed if the social and psychological costs of insecurity are to be minimized. Yet in British debates about social ordering practices, an appeal to the idea of community has gained a particular salience over the past thirty years, Community has furnished a discursive framework within which social policies have been conceived, designed, implemented, and legitimated.(1) Nowhere has this been more prominently so than within the realm of criminal justice.(2) It is the apparent disjuncture between the demise of community and the growth of its rhetorical appeal which forms our starting point. Ideas of community have been invoked explicitly or evoked implicitly in a number of different guises. Notably, they have been invoked for both 'diagnostic' and 'therapeutic' purposes: as explanations for, and as means of curing, social disorder, 'The community' has been accorded a central 'therapeutic' role in preventing crime through Neighbourhood Watch schemes and personal strategies of risk-reduction, co-operation with the police, and the encouragement of 'private' responsibilities such as parental control of delinquent children. Dealing with the consequences of crime has also been promoted as a community responsibility, for example, through mediation between victims and offenders, volunteer involvement in community service orders, and in the work of Victim Support. All these institutional initiatives have sought to incorporate the community in combating crime, in order to encourage self-help and active co-operation or even partnership with the formal agencies of crime control.(3) In so doing, they also seek to dispel the idea that crime is the problem of government, to be dealt with away from the community's gaze. The aim of this paper is to address two puzzles about the frequency and power of appeals to community as a feature of the structuring and legitimating discourse of contemporary criminal justice. First, what explains the apparent power of the idea of community to render policies attractive given that it is the very breakdown of community to which many crime problems are attributed? To the extent that we no longer live in traditional communities, the power of their appeal seems paradoxical. Secondly, why is it that the rhetorical figure of community is so regularly invoked notwithstanding criticism of its conceptual and political vagueness? We shall approach a resolution of these puzzles in three stages. First, we consider the conceptual contours of the idea of community. Secondly, we sketch two historical accounts of the role of ideas of community in the development of British criminal justice policy over the last thirty years. Finally, we set our a theoretical framework within which the British example may be considered from a comparative point of view. The specific comparison which we develop is one between Britain and Germany; a country in which apparently institutionally similar developments have been realized in significantly different ways. Each of these stages of analysis, we argue, is needed if we are to reach an adequate understanding of the power of appeals to community.
