Urban Communitarianism, Crime politics and State Restructuring

Maria 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

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

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

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 see
1

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.

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 in
2

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.

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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

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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

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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

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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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