Towards a New Paradigm of Sovereign Power? Community Governance, Preventative Safety and the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships

This paper aims to introduce readers to the contemporary British experiences of crime prevention, crime reduction and community safety. The different terms used to depict the policies, practices, politics and theories geared towards the ‘prevention’, or failing that the ‘reduction’, of crime, and those strategies aimed at the promotion of ‘community safety’ are indicative of the changing and hybrid nature of the policy domain under scrutiny here. In part these different preventative logics and techniques arise out of criticisms of traditional ‘reactive’ criminal justice responses to crime such as punishment and individualistic treatment approaches. Both situational and social prevention approaches which came to the fore in the 1980s share a preoccupation with preventing ‘criminality’ before the event. Meanwhile, targeted crime ‘reduction’ approaches, based on the pragmatic evaluation of what can be measured and counted in terms of ‘what works’, have come to prominence since the late 1990s. The latter appear to be less concerned with ‘prevention’ and more focused on the manageable and seemingly ‘rational’, ‘scientific’ reduction of unacceptably high levels of crime and disorder. And finally, ‘community safety’ strategies appear to call for multi-agency partnership and community-based approaches in which a more expansive and broader project of social regeneration, social inclusion and communal ‘responsibilization’ is sought (see, Gilling, 1997; Hughes, 1998; Wiles and Pease, 2000) The specific focus of this paper is on the significance of the rise to prominence of the ‘partnership’ approach in this policy domain. In order to do this the paper engages critically with one of the most influential criminological texts on contemporary crime control and criminal justice to be published in the past decade, namely David Garland’s (2001) The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. The structure of this paper is as follows. First, a brief description of the main trends in current