Introduction

The notion of ‘community’ features significantly in criminal justice policy and practice. Underpinned by the principle of ‘active citizenship’, whereby individuals are encouraged to volunteer their services, to participate in and contribute to civil society, communities are viewed as an important resource for tackling crime and incivility, by working with local criminal justice organisations, as well as other statutory and voluntary sector organisations. Reflecting the importance that community involvement in helping to respond to crime and disorder is given by government, ‘community participation’, ‘community engagement’ and ‘community scrutiny of performance’ feature significantly in criminal justice policy and practice.

The emphasis placed upon community participation in criminal justice reflects broader developments in governance, whereby responsibility and accountability for crime is increasingly focused towards local levels, while at the same time centralised control in terms of resources and target setting is maintained. Also, formal responsibilities for policy implementation and service delivery are progressively being shared across statutory and voluntary agencies and community groups in the form of partnership work (Prior et al, 2006). These developments also constitute a form of institutional reflection (Lash, 1994), which, as highlighted in Chapter One, involves criminal justice institutions opening themselves up to the communities that they serve, with the lay public engaging with, as well as critiquing, rival forms of expertise. Individuals and the communities to which they belong are therefore being encouraged to identify and define the problems that they face and to put forward solutions to those problems, and to work with, and alongside, agencies of the criminal justice system.

However, the notion of ‘community’ is itself contentious and open to many different interpretations, particularly within the context of late modernity, where modern and postmodern processes combine and interact to create multiple forms of belongingness, including international diasporas spanning many different geographical locations, localised acts of self-identification based on ethnic or cultural allegiances, as well as local groupings that contain transnational characteristics. However, within government discourse the notion of community tends to be treated rather unproblematically, as both subject and object of policy making and intervention: as Prior et al (2006) state, ‘subject because many current policies require “the community” to be an active participant in the delivery of policy outcomes; and as object, because many current policies view “the community” as a key source of needs and problems and as a target for change in itself ‘.