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37 Aust. & N.Z. J. Criminology 1 (2004)

handle is hein.journals/anzjc37 and id is 1 raw text is: Is Communalism Dead? Reflections on the Present and Future Practice of Crime Prevention: Part One W.G. Carson University of Melbourne,Australia T his 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 Address for correspondence: W.G. (Kit) Carson, Department of Criminology, University of Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia. Email: k.carson@dcsi.net.au THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY VOLUME 37 NUMBER I 2004 Pp. 1-21

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