āEach one of the destructuring ideologies which appeared in [the 1960s and 70s] (decarceration, diversion, decentralization and the rest) and their implied or actual preferences (community control, informalism, reintegration, etc.) are sustained by, and owe their public appeal to, the rhetorical quest for community. It would be difficult to exaggerate how this ideology- or, more accurately, this single word - has come to dominate Western crime-control discourse in the last few decades.
It is not at all clear what community control (or community treatment, community alternatives, community corrections, community care, community policing) actually means. This conceptual and actual blurring is, if not always deliberate, certainly part of the appeal. Almost anything can appear under the heading of 'community' and almost anything can be justified if this prefix is used.
At first glance, though, the surface ideal looks simple enough: to replace, wherever possible, individualistic modes of intervention (as represented by cellular confinement behind the walls of the classic penitentiary) by forms of control in the community. These new forms are described, theorized about or idealized primarily in negative or abolitionist terms: that is to say, they are not segregative, not behind walls, not in an artificially created institution, not individualistic. When the imagery is positive, the terms used are 'natural', 'open', 'integrative' or simply 'in the community'. In the hagiology and demonology of 'progressive' crime-control talk, the contrast is between the good community - open, benevolent, accepting - and the bad institution - damaging, rejecting, stigmatizing.
This is the iconography in its purest form: closed prison against open community. But the ideology of community spreads well beyond the restricted issue of the physical location of punishment. [It...] refers not just to 'institution' in the lay sense, but to the sociological sense of the whole structural network (law, police, courts) of deviancy control. Community, then, is not simply the preferred alternative to the cell as a place for doing things to offenders, but the physical (and metaphysical) space in which the whole network is to be bypassed (diverted) or replaced.ā
- Stanley Cohen, Visions of Social Control. Crime, Punishment and Classification. Polity, 1985.Ā p. 116.
