Is Communalism Dead? Reflections on the Present and Future Practice of Crime Prevention: Part One

Abstract

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.