Communities, Crime Prevention and the Politics of Articulation: A Reply to Kit Carson
| Author | Gordon Hughes |
| DOI | 10.1375/acri.37.3.431 |
| Published date | 01 December 2004 |
| Date | 01 December 2004 |
431
THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
VOLUME 37 NUMBER 3 2004 PP.431–442
Address for correspondence: Dr Gordon Hughes, Senior Lecturer in Social Policy, Faculty of
Social Sciences, Walton Hall, The Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK. Email:
g.h.hughes@open.ac.uk
Communities, Crime Prevention
and the Politics of Articulation:
A Reply to Kit Carson
Gordon Hughes
The Open University, United Kingdom
This article is a rejoinder to Kit Carson’s seminal two-part essay, Is
communalism dead? Reflections on the present and future practice of
crime prevention. It aims to foster further debate on “the communal” in
the field of crime prevention specifically, and in criminology more gener-
ally.In the first par t of the article, an argument is made for a progressive
discourse on communities built around the theory and practice of radical
communitarianism. In the second part of the article, a debate is opened
up on the continuing salience of appeals to communities in the contem-
porary governance of crime, disorder and safety. In particular, two
questions — or provocations — are briefly explored in terms of “the
instabilities of community governance” and what we may term the
problem of “the stranger in community safety”. Finally, the article argues
for the rethinking of the relationship of the communal and the critical
criminological imaginary.
This paper aims to make a small contribution to the debate on community and crime
prevention in critical criminology raised by Kit Carson in his seminal two-part essay,
Is communalism dead? Reflections on the present and future practice of crime prevention
(2004a; 2004b).In the course of this response, the focus is on the areas of contention
and dissension between attempts to promote a progressive discourse around radical
communitarianism and appeals to communities in the field of crime prevention and
community safety (including this author) and Carson’s powerful critique of most, if
not all, things “communitarian”. Accordingly, the common ground which Kit Carson
and I share with regard to the all-too-real and pressing dangers of moralising accounts
of community, and our struggle to articulate a progressive “replacement discourse” on
community safety and prevention will only be noted in passing. This article will
argue, contra Carson, for the continuing salience of appeals to communities in any
progressive politics of crime prevention and public safety.
In a previous paper (Hughes, 2004), I argued that appeals to “community” are
increasingly clamorous and incessant in contemporary political and policy
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