Is Communalism Dead? Reflections on the Present and Future Practice of Crime Prevention: Part One
| Author | W.G. Carson |
| Published date | 01 April 2004 |
| Date | 01 April 2004 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1375/acri.37.1.1 |
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THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
VOLUME 37 NUMBER 1 2004 PP.1–21
Address for correspondence: W.G. (Kit) Carson, Department of Criminology, University of
Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia. Email: k.carson@dcsi.net.au
Is Communalism Dead? Reflections on the
Present and Future Practice of Crime
Prevention: Part One
W.G. Carson
University of Melbourne, Australia
This article takes up a strange paradox or dissonance that
characterises contemporary crime prevention, particularly in
Australia. On the one hand,there is an ample literature pointing out the
conceptual and practical drawbacks of “community” or more broadly of
“communalism” (incorporating social capital) in crime prevention; on the
other, policy and practice seem largely oblivious to these difficulties and
hence, by extension, to the need for more appropriate conceptual
formulations upon which to base collective approaches to crime
prevention.The article is in two parts. The first traces the allure and the
difficulties of communalism in general and in crime prevention in
particular. In traversing what may be in some respects well enough
known terrain, it underlines that until we recognise the innate difficulties
with this conceptual framework, crime prevention will not face up to the
challenge of developing new and more appropriate foundations for a
collectively based approach in this policy arena. An attempt to address
this challenge is taken up in the second part of the article.
Part One: Crime Prevention and the Crisis of Communal Faith
ARTICLES OF COMMUNAL FAITH
In the beginning was the word, and the word was — community. The concept may
be secular, but the attachment thereto is almost religious in its fervour. Like most
faiths, its fortunes wax and wane. It was promoted vigorously in Britain as a
unifying theme during the Second World War (Knight, 1999), and there as
elsewhere, it became a kind of low-church social revivalist theme of the 60s and
70s. Community obviously fared badly across the world of western policy during the
era characterised by Margaret Thatcher’s famous, if somewhat variably quoted
maxim to the effect that “there is no such thing as society, there is just you and
me”. As Martin Albrow (2001, p. 150) acknowledges, however, as the 1990s wore
on, society returned to become a favoured term in political discourse, community
in the guise of “civil society”, “third sector” or “social capital” again being
acknowledged by national leaders.
Thus, more recently, and garbed in much higher church trappings, community
has been enjoying an enormous come-back, at least in the Anglophone world.
Tony Blair, would-be sociological ayatollah and local warlord, proclaimed with
breathtaking social insight in 1998 that “it (community) defines the relationship
not only between us as individuals, but between people and the society in which
they live …” (as quoted in McLaughlin, 2002, p. 90). John Howard apparently used
the term no less than 11 times in his “Motion for Reconciliation” speech in 1999
(The Australian, August, 8, 2003). According to (but not necessarily endorsed by)
Robert Sampson, currently one of the best-known sociologists working in the field
of crime in the United States, community “now reigns as the modern elixir for
much of what allegedly ails American society”(2002, p. 213). Here in Victoria,
community and the building or rebuilding of its capacity is central to much of the
present government’s thinking, and a separate department has even been recently
established to that end.
Overlapping and arguably set to overtake the interest surrounding community in
contemporary social policy thinking is a new, or newly rediscovered belief in another
article of faith — social capital. This term is used by most of its proponents as
interchangeable with, complementary to, or constitutive of community (see e.g.,
Stone & Hughes, 2002). Social capital has become the ostensibly more sophisti-
cated theological version of “communalism”, a term I have appropriated to capture
these two powerful belief systems to which so much appeal is made in contemporary
public policy. The high priest or travelling evangelist (but certainly not the progeni-
tor) of this particular creed, Robert Putnam, has recently endorsed what he terms a
“lean and mean” definition of the term as “focused on social networks and the
associated norms of reciprocity and trust” (Grootaert & van Basteleer, 2002, p. ix).
If the claims made in the name of community are grand, those advanced on
behalf of social capital are truly grandiose. It has spawned an enormous array of
empirical studies claiming positive correlation with social benefits from child-
welfare to mental health, from literacy to lower crime rates, even to the prevention
of civil war and, less dramatically, though no less ambitiously, to good government,
itself (see e.g., Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2002). As Ben Fine observes, social
capital purports to reign over a domain of social analysis ranging from the affairs of
12th-century Italy to those of the 20th-century United States (2002, p. 1).
With such a catalogue of virtuous outcomes on offer, it is little surprise that
social capital, the complicit communal partner or constituent of community, should
have been seized upon with great enthusiasm. Thus, it features prominently in the
OECD’s not so unpresumptuously titled volume “The Well-being of Nations”
(2001), and has become one of the mantras of the World Bank (Bebbington et al.,
2002) which has famously described it as providing the “glue” that holds society’s
institutions together.
So too, on the less elevated plane of national jurisdictions, social capital has
been taken up with almost unseemly vigour. Again, Tony Blair is quoted as
proclaiming that “ the ‘third way’ will build its prosperity on human and social
capital” (Prabhakar, 2002, as cited in Fine, 2003). In Australia, Treasurer and
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W.G.CARSON
THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
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