Community and the Problem of Crime

Karen Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138886919, 9780415748551
• eBook ISBN: 9781317750857
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The relationship between crime and community has a long history in criminological thought, from the early notion of the criminogenic community developed by the Chicago sociologists through to various crime prevention models in research and policy. This book offers a useful theoretical overview of key approaches to the subject of crime and community and considers the ways in which these have been applied in more practical settings.Written by an expert in the field and drawing on a range of international case studies from Europe, North America, Australia and Asia, this book explores both why and how crime and community have been linked and the implications of their relationship within criminology and crime prevention policy. Topics covered in the book include:

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• the different crime prevention paradigms which have been utilised in the 'fight against crime',

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• the turn to community in crime prevention policy, which took place during the 1980s in the UK and US and its subsequent development,

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• the particular theoretical and ideological underpinnings to crime prevention work in and with different communities,

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• the significance and impact of fear of crime on crime prevention policy,

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• different institutional responses to working with community in crime prevention and community safety,

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• the ways in which the experience of the UK and US have been translated into the European context,

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• a comparison between traditional Western responses to the growing interest in restorative and community-based approaches in other regions.

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This book offers essential reading for students taking courses on crime and community, crime prevention and community safety, and community corrections.

1
THE MEANING AND USES OF COMMUNITY

Classic and premodern ‘community’

Aristotle in Book 1 of Politics claimed that ‘[a] social instinct is implanted in all men by nature’ and [...] human life cannot be conceived as existing outside of the social ... he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god’(Aristotle 2012). Humans are not solitary creatures but co-operate with one another to produce food and shelter and to reproduce future generations. They therefore live in close relationship to others, building codes, rules and laws which govern their social relations and make such close co-existence possible. In doing so, they are building a common way of living and being. These shared experiences lead to commonly held understandings and belief systems which become a shared culture as ways of being and thinking are passed down from one generation to the next. Social organisation is forged through a need to belong and to get along with others using common frames of reference and common understandings in inherently collective enterprises. Hence, the concept of commonality, of ‘community,’ is considered as ‘natural’ to humanity and is based on the co-operative relations necessary to ensure survival.

The types of social institutions which people build change as societies acquire new knowledge, systems of production and technological expertise. Hunter/gatherer societies developed social relationships which aided a transitory and unsettled existence. The technologies which they had to aid their survival were basic – weapons with which to hunt, tools to build shelter and pots to cook with. A shift to farming and cultivation around 20,000 years ago demanded a different set of social relationships to reflect a more settled way of life, but co-operation was still key to their survival. As pastoral and agrarian societies began to emerge in the Middle East and Europe, people developed more complex divisions of labour and role differentiation. These societies became less egalitarian (Engels [1884] famously referred to hunter/gatherer societies as ‘primitive communism’) and more hierarchical as the concept of private property emerged and became institutionalised in systems of law. The accumulation of property in private hands, Engels argued, allowed the generation of profound inequalities of material wealth and power and the development of a class-based system whereby those with shared power and interests collaborated to rule over others. Where power was passed down family lines and aristocratic and monarchical systems were established to aid this process, familial ties took on particular significance. These inequalities in power were deeply established by the time the classical civilisations of the Middle East and southern Europe were firmly established and private ownership was extended to the ownership of people as well as land and goods. Agricultural workers were tasked with feeding growing cities, and slave labour was put to work for the powerful to enable successful war-making and empire-building.

It was in the Classical period, Konig (1968) argues, that the Greek city-state first developed the concept and practice of building ‘community’ as a form of social organisation which was separated from ties of kinship. The city-state developed a form of rudimentary democracy which functioned only for the elite groups in society and which was deemed necessary for ‘modern’ political and social organisation to develop. It also required a collective defence to protect the city against attacks by outsiders. The term ‘community’ which we use today is derived from the Latin prefix com together with the verb munire, meaning “to fortify, strengthen, or defend.” Thus, from the start the idea of community was linked to a political purpose and to the exclusion of others, but in its formation it also bound otherwise unconnected people together in a powerful, affective bond through which those included were strengthened and protected.

Before the idea of nation brought people together under a common institutional and legal framework, the concept of community acted as a form of social glue at a local level. While the power of city-states in classical civilisation eventually diminished and new political and economic systems took their place, local allegiances remained paramount. However, as Sharpe has described, ‘Contrary to popular myth’ people did not live together in ‘idyllic village settlements’ (Sharpe 2001:134). Indeed, as he points out, class divisions were a truly salient feature of pre-industrial society. Sharpe writes of England that:

[t]he early modern small town or village was as likely to be riven by problems, albeit of a different nature, as any modern city. Legal records, criminal and civil alike, contain ample evidence of social tensions and interpersonal malice. Indeed by the eighteenth century, most English villages, although capable of showing community spirit on occasion, were often so socially stratified as to make it possible to speak of a number of ‘communities’ within their boundaries.’

(2001:134)

The most salient division within these settlements, Sharpe argues, was a division of class, between the rich – the ‘respectable’ middle-class landowners, clergy and tradesmen – and the poor who were surviving through subsistence lifestyles by farming or labouring without education or other resources to help them escape their fate. The ‘respectable’ elites, however, were very much involved in the policing and monitoring of the behaviour of the poor. The notion of community under these circumstances in reality ‘looks very shaky’(2001:134); however, different regions were still organised by local customs and values, and the penalties and sanctions brought to bear on the ‘unrespectable’ and ‘the offender’ were shaped by local tradition. Until industrialisation forced specialisation in production and manufacture of goods and necessitated the forging of economic connections between regions and towns, these local areas were organised to local rhythms of life, even in some cases, local time-zones, currencies and laws which differentiated one community from the next.

Prior to mass industrialisation, the world, as Hobsbawm describes it ‘was at once much smaller and much vaster than ours’ (1962:7). The global population, being so much smaller, was also much more sparsely distributed than today. The majority of people lived and died within an extremely small physical area perhaps only spanning one or two square miles. The English poet John Clare (1793–1864), the son of a farm-labourer who wrote eloquently of the disruptive effect of industrialisation on the English countryside, was said to be so unnerved by a move of three miles which uprooted him from everybody and everything familiar to him that this precipitated an episode of severe mental illness (Bate 2003). According to Hobsbawm, the costs and physical efforts associated with travel of more than a few miles overland meant that transport by water was the most common form of travel and port cities were more connected, even internationally, than town and country within national boundaries;

in a real sense London was closer to Plymouth or Leith than to villages in the breckland of Norfolk; Seville was more accessible from Veracruz than Valladolid, Hamburg from Bahia than the Pomeranian hinterland.

(Hobsbawm 1962:9–10)

Under these circumstances, locality and neighbourhood, together with their local customs and traditions, were particularly significant to the rural and disconnected poor. For those with the time and money to travel or for those involved in the business of trade, commerce or indeed war, which necessitated the cultivation of national and global connections, lives were much less connected to locality and place of birth. Hobsbawm (1962:9) estimates, as an example, that at the beginning of the nineteenth century 20 million letters passed through the British postal system with perhaps ten times more than this number by the middle of the century. Once again, then, the experience and salience of ‘community’ depended very much on a person’s class background.

All that is solid melts into air – community versus society

A fascination with the growing urbanisation of society and how this would affect social relationships of the future inspired social thinkers during the nineteenth century. Between them they published a number of significant texts which continue to influence subsequent work in the understanding of community and society. These writers came from a variety of different perspectives, but each was attempting to grapple with the impact of a whole-scale reorganisation of society away from traditional locally-based social systems which had developed over centuries and towards a more amorphous, seemingly disorganised, city-based life which began to attract people in the tens of thousands and to transform physical and social landscapes. New forms of social organisation found in the rapidly developing urban settlements were surprising, shocking to some and liberating to others, but whatever response these writers had to the cities exploding before their eyes, they recognised that they offered a challenge, not just to the established way of life but also to old ways of thinking and demanded that social life be theorised anew. The following section looks at the work of a number of key theorists who made significant contributions to this body of work. It cannot encompass all those who contributed, nor does it cover the total extent of any one thinker’s contributions, but it draws out salient points from a brief exploration of a number of participants in these discussions.

The industrialisation of society rips a people from the land and requires a large-scale shift to cities and an urban landscape. The organisation of social life in cities and around the different rhythms and patterns of life required by industrial rather than agricultural labour also requires different ways of living and thinking about social relationships. The whole-scale and fundamental change from agriculture-based economies and the ‘take-off’ to a system of production based on manufacturing which we now call the Industrial Revolution is generally located in the north of England in the 1780s but was much more widely felt outside of England in the 1830s and 1840s (Hobsbawm 1962:27). Historians have written of the shock of the developing industrial cities in the nineteenth century in particular, which necessitated radically different orderings of space and of the provision of food, water and transport. The ‘great cities of the Industrial Revolution’ grew from established places and communities, they ‘took root in the countryside’ and ‘grew up around it’ (Saunders 1981:23) but took on fundamentally different forms from those which preceded them. Harold Platt (2005) writes of the newly emerging ‘industrial ecologies’ which led to physically and socially divided cities; creating filthy, overcrowded and polluted slums as well as leafy suburbs located away from the noxious fumes and stench of industrialisation. Engels described and further analysed these spatial divisions in 1842 using Manchester, England – arguably the first industrial city – as his exemplar – and writing that ‘the working people’s quarters are sharply separated from the sections of the city reserved for the middle-class’ (Engels 1987:85). Such a degree of spatial segregation had not been a feature of previous cities or settlements but industrialisation brought about a deeply divided physical and social structure in which the economic and cultural interests of the different classes became further opposed and entrenched and took on particular forms. Despite their divisive nature, these spatial developments were much copied, and by the end of the nineteenth century 77 per cent of the population of England and Wales lived in cities (Saunders 1981:14). Much of the rest of the world urbanised in the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it has been estimated that for the first time in history, more than half the world’s population live in cities. This proportion is expected to rise to three-quarters of the world’s population by the middle of the century, with around one billion living in slums without proper sanitation or services (The Guardian 2014). The ‘shock cities’ of today continue to be built. They have exploded in numbers most recently across Asia, South America and Africa. In their divided and divisive physical form, they seem not to have the learned the lessons of the nineteenth-century cities but have largely followed similar patterns of spatial segregation, re-creating the slum conditions and inequalities of old.

Classical sociology and the study of community

Ferdinand Tönnies

So the decades around the turn of the twentieth century saw transformations in the social world which were revolutionary in character and which overturned centuries of tradition and have become embedded as accepted social ordering. Industrialisation, the birth of capitalism, the rise of the city, the unleashing of productive forces and global trade networks which fed imperialist appetites were all intimately linked. These decades also saw the birth of sociology as an academic discipline, so it is unsurprising that the earliest sociologists attempted to understand the significance of these transformations. The emergence of the city and the transition from a rural to an urban way of life were considered to have incomparable social significance, inspiring a great deal of interest in the constitution of a social order in the modern world and in the basis of new forms of association. Hoggett (1997) writes that, following Elias (1974), sociologists usually locate the origin of a sociological interest in the concept of ‘community’ in this time period and more particularly in the work of Ferdinand Tönnies, a sociologist and philosopher born in Schleswig, Denmark (which was later incorporated into Germany). By the time Tönnies began his academic research, the economic system of capitalism was firmly established. According to Hobsbawm, ‘It was the triumph of a society which believed that economic growth rested on competitive private enterprise’ (Hobsbawm 1975:1), but more than this the transition to capitalism, he argued, created not only division but also:

a world of suitably distributed material plenty ... of ever-growing enlightenment, reason and human opportunity, an advance of the sciences and the arts, in brief a world of continuous and accelerating material and moral progress.’

(Hobsbawm 1975:1)

Tönnies’s work must be located in this political and social context and forms both an exploration and a critique of these changing times. According to Braeman (2013), two key themes shaped the early work of Tönnies – first, the distinction Hegel made between Gesellschaft (“society”) and Staat (“state”), both of which were modern social organisations, and second, an interest in the concept of the Volkgeist or ‘spirit of the people,’ which has more traditional and premodern roots in the shared customs, traditions and beliefs of former eras. These themes informed his most influential work, originally published in 1887, entitled Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, which was later translated as ‘Community and Society’. Much of Tönnies’s work explored the essential elements of these fundamentally different types of social organisation. He distinguished between two different kinds of relationship which people engage in – the voluntaristic and the rational. The first is based in emotion and psychology and can be found in the ties that bind family and intimates, whereas the second is more commonly perceived as the basis for contractual relationships and business associations. Underlying Tönnies’s work was an interest in the emergence of capitalism and the forms of relationship which are entered into – whether freely or not – for the pursuit of material advantage. In his work can be seen an implicit preference for Gemeinschaft which he considered to be the most enduring and preferable of the two. In his later years, Tönnies even hailed himself a social democrat and developed a sympathetic interest in collective social organisations such as the emerging trade union and socialist movements, workers’ education and cooperatives (Braeman 2013). It is clear from Tönnies’s work that he believed that Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft coexisted, that Gesellschaft did not replace Gemeinschaft but that the new social forms were grafted on to preexisting relationships. So it was possible to distinguish the structures of ‘community’ within the structures of ‘society’. In Tönnies’s life and work, therefore, we can identify the idea that capitalism was more responsible than urbanism for the predominance of the rational sentiment over the affective represented by ‘community’.

Emile Durkheim

Another key contributor to the study of community was the French sociologist and contemporary of Tönnies, Emile Durkheim. Durkheim also explored the changing social relationships of the period, and although his work appears to complement that of Tönnies, Durkheim approached his study from a somewhat less critical perspective. Durkheim, unlike Tönnies, hailed from a scholarly family and had grown up in the city rather than a rural community. He was more influenced by the philosophy of Rousseau than of Hobbes (whom Tönnies cited as influential to his thinking) and was more wedded to the ideas of scientific rationalism and progress. Like Tönnies, however, he was interested in exploring the nature of the ‘ties that bind individuals to one another, the connectedness among individuals that has been argued ... to be the core meaning of community’ (Somerville 2011:6). Durkheim identified two types of social solidarity – ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’. Mechanical solidarity, he argued, flows from conditions in which people think and act alike, sharing common values and perspectives. He saw mechanical solidarity as a function of homogeneity within social organisation and a collective morality, transgression of which is perceived as transgression against the social and which can result in harsh and repressive response. Organic solidarity, on the other hand, derives from more heterogeneous social relations in which individual difference is accepted and expected. Durkheim argued that while mechanical solidarity is assured through collective social censure, organic solidarity requires the institution of a set of more objectively constituted laws which proscribe what is and what is not harmful to society or a transgression of societal expectations.

Modern society, for Durkheim, was characterised by relations of organic solidarity which arose in conditions where traditional ways of life and traditionally-held values were replaced as people were uprooted from thei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The meaning and uses of community
• 2 Community and crime
• 3 Disorderly communities
• 4 Regenerating communities
• 5 Fractured communities
• 6 Suspect and profiled communities
• 7 Policing communities
• 8 The problem of community
• Index