Abstract
Numerous scholars have observed that neo-liberal rationalities have resulted in the replacement of interventionist State-run welfare initiatives with community-based risk managing schemes in a process called responsibilization. These risk management policies have become influential in the domain of crime prevention and in the shaping of the future conduct of the ‘at-risk’ youth. This article details, ethnographically, the goals and activities of 10 responsibilized community-based organizations and the conceptualization of ‘risk’ by practitioners from these organizations. The findings suggest that social abandonment and surveillance-centered risk management schemes co-exist with welfarist notions. The findings have implications about whether crime prevention is as post-welfarist as some theorists maintain.
Introduction
Crime prevention has significantly expanded over the last two decades, leading O’Malley and Hutchinson and others (e.g. Edwards and Hughes, 2005; Garland, 2001; Hughes, 2007; Tonry and Farrington, 1995) to assert that it is moving ‘from the sideline of crime control to being among its most prominent domains’ (O’Malley and Hutchinson, 2007: 375). At the same time, not only has the ascendancy of risk re-structured contemporary crime control and correctional methods, but risk has also reshaped crime prevention in the direction of risk predictions and risk-based techniques (O’Malley and Hutchinson, 2007). Consistent with neo-liberal mentalities, other models of governance, such as social management by welfare agencies, have now been replaced with individualized risk management programs, cost–benefit analysis (O’Malley, 2010), and situational preventive schemes (Garland, 2001). Risk is now central to the ‘management of exclusion’ in post-welfare strategies of control (Rose, 2000: 332). In this article, I wish to interrogate the question: in the USA, how far has neo-liberal risk-based crime control triumphed in the field of community-based crime prevention? I provide evidence to support the development of a thesis that welfarist traditions survive the transition to late modern risk management developments.
Youth-serving community-based organizations are a key feature in the neo-liberal devolution of social crime prevention to the citizenry and the promotion of risk-based models of governing crime (O’Malley, 2001). This formula of managing the ‘at-risk’ youth, however, tends to get less ‘on the ground’ empirical examination and critical theoretical analysis within criminology and sociology. The limited examination, predominantly in the USA, may be partly due to the perspective that empirical analysis should be left to policy-oriented scholars who assess program efficacy—a sort of ‘what-works’ technicist analysis. We should be cautious in taking this view because it neglects the connection of crime prevention to the wider political and social trends in crime control. Armstrong (2002), for example, found that non-profit organizations in the private prison debate are ignored because they are assumed to be less harsh and rehabilitative in nature, as opposed to being oriented to containment or a retributive ethic. Upon examination, however, the non-profit juvenile provider ‘tends to take on the qualities of the State system that it was designed to replace’ (Armstrong, 2002: 362). Moreover, there is a wide range of ‘governmental rationalities from neo-liberalism to neo-conservatism and a wide range of governmental technologies – from the exclusionary to the inclusionary – on which the contemporary governance of young people is now based’ (Muncie, 2006: 771, emphases in original). Thus, if we take seriously that crime prevention is a prominent domain in crime control, we are incumbent to take seriously the organizations and people that carry out its efforts, namely, youth-serving community-based organizations.
In the USA, community-based organizations (or CBOs) carry out not only delinquency and violence prevention, but perform state-sponsored interventions and re-entry services for youth returning from detention. CBOs should be following the risk prediction model where the social causes of delinquency are less important than addressing more individually based ‘causes’ such as thinking errors, self-control problems, or poor parenting practices. That is, CBOs have been brought in line with the prevailing risk paradigm perspective, and more or less restrain some youth who are likely to pose a problem to society by, for example, keeping them under increased surveillance. This perspective is consistent with the view that risk-based crime prevention is considered an emerging field for managing the ‘dangerous’ classes (Gray, 2009) in aid of the ‘Security State’ (Hallsworth and Lea, 2011). It is part of the tough on crime turn, expanding State power (Crawford, 2006) alongside direct crime control through the police, courts, and prisons (Garland, 2001).
In other crime control fields the modernist agenda, such as rehabilitation, gave way to the post-welfarist, risk assessment, and management policies (Garland, 2001). Kemshall’s (1998) study of risk in probation practice and policy, however, highlights that ‘there is a difference between crime control developments that are “risk driven” in principle and risk delivered on the ground’ (Kemshall, 2003: 98). Agents in the justice system resist risk models or adapt them to their own ‘social work’ orientations. Further, the policy trends of the ‘new penology’ (Feeley and Simon, 1992) do not always actualize at the level of implementation in other domains as well. One example is the federal Weed & Seed project in the USA, a multi-agency partnership whose aims are targeted suppression, violence prevention, and neighborhood restoration (Miller, 2001a). In a similar way, Lynch’s (1998) ethnographic study of probation agents—also investigating the operation of the ‘new penology’ paradigm at the level of implementation—found risk management to operate more at the level of policy and leadership, but less so at the level of implementation. O’Malley (2001, 2010) stresses that the nature of risk and the resulting programs of neo-liberalism are capable of, and not resistant to, deviation and modification. They are both ‘unstable, unfinished, multivalent, and always available to change’ (O’Malley, 2001: 90). For example, the neo-liberal governance of illicit drugs through harm minimization is ‘rejected as a strategic model, precisely because of the “amorality” and “tolerance” projected by this particular form of risk-based response’ (O’Malley, 2001: 93). With respect to crime risk factors, the social psychological lists of such things as ‘poor social skills’, ‘poor cognitive skills’, and the community-level risk factors are all seemingly identical to the lists of causes of crime under the welfare state. Recent scholarship shows that the neo-liberal framework may function as a creative force rather than simply a negative consequence of marketization (Goddard and Myers, 2011). Though neo-liberal risk management has emerged as a vehicle for crime control, the outcomes of such offloading are not written in stone. Local communities may undermine the ideologically driven outcomes of neo-liberal governance—including the economic exclusion, the abrogation of state supports, and the advent of mass incarceration—in support of issues of economic inequality, restorative peacemaking, and justice reinvestment (a strategy to reduce the use of incarceration and divert the savings to improve the circumstances of communities). 1
In this article, I critically consider whether risk governance has superseded welfare schemes in the context of crime prevention, as carried out via CBOs. This article is based on my study of front-line CBOs who carry out risk-based interventions as part of a broader community crime prevention initiative. I examine their goals, activities, and attitudes with respect to social abandonment, the dismantling of the welfare state and the ubiquity of risk management schemes in the field of youth justice. I draw from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in an urban city in Southern California, USA, at 10 CBOs and one multi-agency community partnership—all of which have the goal of preventing violence and delinquency of ‘at-risk’ youth.
Notably, ‘at-risk’ youth are considered particularly vulnerable to committing more serious offending, joining a gang, being victimized, and are highly monitored by the criminal justice system and law enforcement. What is more, in the urban centers of Los Angeles County, this cohort of ‘at-risk’ youth are comprised mostly of young men and older boys of color (Black and Latino) who experience material deprivation. Thus, the CBOs’ choices disproportionately affect underprivileged male youth of color, and therefore speak to issues of race and poverty in crime control.
There appears to be an assumption that these organizations are extensions of the formal juvenile justice system and as such fall in line with the risk management paradigm—one that favors risk-based strategies and mentalities in management of the (projected) youths’ tendencies to commit crime. An outcome of CBOs adopting the risk management paradigm should then be that they function to protect law-abiding society against ‘risky others’. Accordingly, CBOs are containing the apparent danger that male youth of color are projected to pose in the future, as opposed to utilizing a social-centered framework that focuses on the ‘root causes’ of crime. I investigate whether contemporary crime prevention is a post-welfarist risk management arrangement, as appears in most crime control arenas.
My findings suggest that the neo-liberal responsibilization approach that shifts the responsibility for managing and preventing crime among ‘at-risk’ youth is an arrangement of co-existence of the new mentalities of risk and social-centered welfarist practices. Although these organizations utilize—somewhat selectively—the Risk Factor Prevention Paradigm, their overarching approach is one that is less about managing an underclass of ‘at-risk’ individuals. Instead, their approach is more about improving the social conditions of communities and addressing the economic disadvantages experienced by ‘at-risk’ youth and their families. The neo-liberal shifting of the responsibility of crime prevention is not only risk management, but also an arrangement of welfarist notions not unlike the social engineering framework consistent with the ‘Chicago School’ (Shaw and McKay, 1942). Further, the practitioners appear both to support and to oppose notions of the ‘at-risk’ youth of color as unruly kids, outsiders, or threats. Such contradiction suggests that, on the ground, there is a cultural ambivalence towards some of the policies that most affect the communities in which practitioners work. These findings have implications for our understanding of how the community governance of youth operate as well as the theoretical work about risk, crime prevention, and the turn to non-State CBOs.
Crime prevention and the neo-liberal turn to non-State actors
In the 1990s, situational crime prevention lay at the forefront of crime policy in the USA and UK. Target hardening—shaping the physical environment by methods such as increasing the number of streetlights or installing closed circuit television (CCTV)—emerged as a way of making the opportunity of crime difficult or impossible. This environmental risk management model was replacing, or at least publicly outshining, the social service-oriented model where youth-serving organizations work to reshape the individual and welfarist agencies that tackle social and economic conditions of disadvantaged communities. The welfarist youth-serving organizations, whose aim of ‘saving’ the youth before—or at the first sign of—wayward behavior, fell out of favor, as technological advancements geared for managing risk and the ‘nothing works’ in penology began to dominate the crime control landscape. During late modernity, proponents of the neo-liberal agenda placed the management of risk, rather than the prevention of crime per se (Hughes, 1998), onto communities and community partnerships. In the 1990s, the passage of such laws as the federal Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 in the USA and the Crime and Disorder Act of 1998 in the UK, more or less solidified this adjustment by these governments. The thinking was that the Government cannot—or should not—be solely responsible for reducing crime rates. Rather, community safety and crime prevention has been devolved from a centralized authority to local community partnerships, and carried out by local community-based organizations (Crawford, 1999; Rose, 1996). To quote a 1997 US government report, Crime Prevention and Community Policing: A Vital Partnership: Like crime prevention, community policing owes its inspiration in large part to the legacy of rethinking public safety that arose out of US Department of Justice (DOJ) anticrime efforts of the 1970s and willingness on the part of various local agencies to experiment with and improve on crime prevention and policing concepts. The decade saw police administrators turning to the public and admitting that the police could not shoulder the burden alone—citizens needed to help.
Partnerships may take the form of a local taskforce that plans and oversees a neighborhood, police beat, or an entire city’s strategy to reduce crime and delinquency. Their goals can range from working with law enforcement on planning suppression and intervention strategies to the bringing together of direct service providers, namely, CBOs. In the USA, the federal Weed & Seed project is (or was) an exemplar of the approach. 2 Partnerships also include indirect ventures between government agencies and a CBO—where the exchange consists of knowledge sharing, financial support, and progress monitoring of the local organization by the State ‘at a distance’. In some instances, CBOs must match the grants given by the (federal and state) government, and at other times, the government offers yearly or multi-year grants, or grants for specific initiatives such as serving 300 at-risk youth for six months. This appears to follow a populist logic, however, the discourse involved in this approach is undergirded with neo-liberal logic, such as market efficiency and the autonomy of individual organizations. The consumer (i.e. the CBO) will make the best choices in reducing crime and rates of violence, with only ‘behind the scenes’ assistance from the State. This approach shifts the risks and accountability for crime control onto these non-State community-based organizations, and the CBOs act as a buffer against public criticism, though the State’s support allows it to take credit for any successes. Since CBOs are participants in both types of partnerships, they are the focal point of this article. I explore community-based organizations which are linked directly to a state agency or indirectly through a community partnership.
The study
Surely the State has powerful capabilities to affect the mentalities and activities of local organizations assuming responsibility for crime prevention, but how far has neo-liberal risk management triumphed in the field of community-based crime prevention? Through the Government’s underwriting of crime prevention initiatives, it requires such things as specific evidence-based elements, and the use of the Risk Factor Prevention Paradigm (RFPP) to target and govern youth. In the USA, government agencies (federal or state) guide CBOs’ activities by granting funds to those who use preferred programming, as well as funding stipulations and eligibility requirements. These techniques define who the eligible ‘at-risk’ targets are and how to act on their projected risk. This study suggests, however, that community-based crime prevention organizations carry out the terms required by the State, but then reformulate and revise their practices to fit their own philosophies or agendas. Further, the practitioners of CBOs displayed a curious perception of the ‘at-risk’ youth, one that is multi-dimensional, thus, complicating the assumption that they are risk managers containing the threat of urban youth (usually of color). From these findings, I argue that, in turning to communities, what emerges is site-specific knowledge, expertise, and general ways of doing things that complicate the notion of the responsibilization strategy as a mechanism of risk management and social abandonment.
Methods
This article draws upon 12 months of qualitative research investigating 10 youth-serving CBOs and one community partnership in an ethnically heterogeneous city in the county of Los Angeles, California, USA. The data sources include publications by the US federal government, the state of California, and local CBOs; face-to-face interviews with CBO directors and staff; and participant-observations of CBO activities and the community partnership meetings.
In terms of the data collection timeline, I began by observing the monthly meetings of a multi-agency community partnership whose purpose is to design and oversee crime prevention initiatives (including coordinating the diverse groups, or ‘partners’, in the community). Attendees of this partnership included civic leaders, directors or liaisons of local CBOs, law enforcement officers, probation officers, elected officials, school board members, professionals associated with prevention programs, residents of the community, and invited guests (e.g. a criminology professor, the deputy mayor, the city prosecutor).
I next selected 10 youth-serving CBOs based on three criteria: (1) they are directly associated with the aforementioned community partnership; (2) their primary crime prevention targets are ‘at-risk’ youth between the ages of 14 and 22; and (3) their mission statement is to prevent crime and violence. The organizations varied in how many youth were served by their programs, from about 50 to 300 at any given time. I toured each organization and in some cases I spent multiple days observing the program activities. I also interviewed 16 directors and key staff members at the 10 CBOs in order to understand the philosophic underpinnings of the organization, what informs those philosophies, the activities that comprise the programs, the measures and procedures used to implement those activities, how success is measured, and problems of implementation, if any. In other words, for each organization, the purpose was to inquire why the agency exists, what it does, how it does it, and what outside social factors may work against the agency’s goal in the view of directors and staff members. I assigned gender-consistent pseudonyms in order to maintain confidentiality. 3
Connecting the goals of the CBOs to crime and violence prevention
The competitive grant-based system is a coercive element in which community-based organizations are brought in line with the prevailing risk-based crime and violence prevention technologies. Two of the organizations in this study had long-term contracts with the United States Congress and the remaining eight organizations received one-year or multi-year grants from the state of California or the US federal government. 4 The 10 community-based organizations had goals and activities that were consistent with the official information sponsored by government sources, such as the RFPP.
Although CBOs receive funding from the State through its departmental agencies, such as the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), the goals of the CBOs were nevertheless reminiscent of the War on Poverty and employment service bureaus of the 1950s and 1960s. The primary crime prevention methods of two CBOs were vocational training and academic assistance. For example, one CBO, Youth Work, primarily utilized vocational job training to ‘prevent violence and delinquency among at-risk youth and young adults’. The foci of three other CBOs were academic assistance and family assistance. The remaining six organizations utilized such programs as mentoring, psychological counseling, poverty assistance, or social skills development to prevent delinquency and violence. Furthermore, directors and staff at the CBOs defined their crime prevention role as part of a broader social mission concerned with cultural and economic inclusion beyond the role of pre-emptive targeting of youth ‘at-risk’. For example, one CBO, Mission for Change, viewed preventing violence and delinquency by workforce integration, ‘introducing youth to different industries and providing internship experiences’, establishing permanent housing, and achieving community-wide economic stability generally. Thus, non-State community-based organizations prevent the risk of delinquency and violence using welfarist interventions, and frame it in risk management discourse. The devolution of social crime prevention to the citizenry allows the space for the coming together of new mentalities with those that were previously practiced—producing emergent hybrid strategies.
Since the late 1990s, criminologists working in public policy (e.g. Petersilia, 2002; Sherman et al., 1997) have recommended expanding research on youth-serving programs and have called for the use of evidence-based practices. Larry Sherman and colleagues (1997), for example, recommended to Congress in 1998 that funding only be allocated to crime prevention programs that use scientifically based practices and that have shown evidence of successfully deterring delinquent behavior. By tying federal research and development more closely to program funding, ‘the Congress can leverage taxpayer dollars to guide local crime prevention as well as supplement its funding’ (Sherman et al., 1997: 54). Thus, sponsoring and disseminating crime prevention models are mechanisms of governance, and using evidence-based, best practices, is key for CBOs being funded by the State. Practitioners appeared, however, to be using the language of government-supported approaches to simply re-label or re-name old practices and reframe them as violence prevention pursuits. For example, one of the vocational training academic-focused agencies has provided vocational training for over 30 years, and now labels teaching union trades in its brochures as an evidence-based curriculum of ‘vocational competence’. An academic-centered/family assistance organization, Justice Club, has provided after-school tutoring since 1994, but recently re-labeled it as providing ‘academic competence’. That is to say, welfarist interventions like ‘job training’ are now called ‘vocational competence’; tutoring has become ‘academic competence’; providing fun activities for youth has become ‘providing opportunities for pro-social involvement’; and bible study has become ‘fostering spirituality’. The evidence-based practices grounded in the RFPP appear to have layers of meaning, and as such, differing scientific, governmental, and popular uses. It seems a ‘double hermeneutic’ (Giddens, 1984; Hayes, 1992) is operating where the authority to translate the practices to reduce risk is somewhat open to judgment.
Adopting new language, regardless of actually adopting new techniques and practices, appears to serve the function of displaying the utilization of State-sponsored models to prevent crime in the service of, as one respondent put it, ‘rallying the resources or the powers that be, on behalf of those who are in poverty’. The director of Enlace, Christine Moore, explained how delinquency and violence prevention includes equipping and developing leaders from the (primarily Latino) immigrant community, as well as a host of other projects—from helping families launch micro-loans for expanding local businesses to housing code enforcement. Practitioners observed in this study appear part of a local culture-of-prevention expertise whose interests sometimes collide with the more narrow crime control interests of the State. A common goal of this expertise is working on structural problems in disadvantaged communities rather than monitoring delinquent youth, fear-reduction, or managing a troublesome ‘risky’ class of people. Since practitioners of CBOs are advocates and leaders from the community themselves, they seem to view the unruly kids, offenders, and their families as marginalized from socio-economic opportunities—not as outsiders or threats. The observation suggests that sociological theories of crime control should give greater consideration to the complex and unpredictable ways that individuals and communities shape, implement, and manage crime prevention and risk management efforts under late modern conditions.
Moreover, the activities included in the community-based organizations moved beyond targeted intervention activities such as encouraging alternative thinking strategies, behavioral modification, and surveillance of the youth. According to Daryl Jefferson, executive director of the CBO Community First, violence and delinquency prevention is poverty reduction. In this case, the State funded the overhead, staff, and activities for youth, but the director obtained alternative funding sources in order to expand the activities to include all ‘at-risk’ youth in the community: Although we get money from the Government to provide services to these lower income youth, we also created a non-profit alignment with an agency so that we could receive contributions from anyone, any foundation, so that no youth had to be turned away.
The skill of navigating diverse funding streams is an essential component of the CBOs in this study. Community First’s crime prevention strategy is an exemplar of these organizations carrying out the terms required by the State, but then reformulating and revising their practices to fit their own philosophies or agendas. The professionals who direct prevention agencies develop expertise in securing funding, such as collaborating with alternative, non-governmental sources. Community-based prevention professionals have their own agendas and ideas of what they are doing to address crime and those individuals whom they believe are ‘at risk’ for offending. The findings suggest that governing crime through the responsibilization of communities splinters into different hybrid forms that counter the social abandonment of the neo-liberal agenda, which the original legislation did not anticipate.
This thesis is further suggested by the targeting of low-income immigrant and undocumented residents. The CBO Enlace was, according to director Christine Moore, patterned after a Salvadoran violence prevention model to empower immigrant families to develop and participate in crime prevention and social service programs. According to its mission statement, Enlace’s design is to integrate undocumented immigrants to the broader community through economic and cultural activities. The CBO Start Now, directed by Donna Oppenheimer, also assisted immigrant families (both documented and otherwise) with accessing higher education: ‘We had workshops on, you know, how your immigration status affects the ability for your child to go to college.’ The poverty reduction organization Community First actively embraced undocumented residents of the city as well, an activity that federal requirements of citizenship prohibited: This is a neutral, less threatening site where [undocumented] people can come and fill out the applications for their children or themselves if they do qualify and actually get food stamps and not have to do fingerprinting and some of the other intimidating things that they would have to do if they went to the County Office.
The director of Saving Youth, Elliott Stevens, explained: ‘We also target the undocumented kids silently because they don’t have the same opportunities, so we help them with scholarships because they’re not eligible for other government scholarships’ (emphasis added). 5 Although crime control and prevention brings these groups and agencies together, the interests of responsibilized groups seem more about improving the quality and future prospects of youth of color and their ethnically diverse community. The implications of this are that the responsibilization development in crime prevention allows welfarist ideology to continue. This may help make clear the reason that numerous programs, funded by the United States Justice Department, and run by CBOs and partnerships, appear more concerned with social support (e.g. employment opportunities) than with overt crime control (see also Muncie and Hughes, 2002).
The dichotomous conceptualization of ‘at-risk’ youth
In this section, I describe CBO directors’ and staff members’ conceptualization of ‘at-risk’ youth (of color) and the indicators of future criminal potential. The ‘at-risk’ youth designation essentially determines the targets of crime prevention and in large part defines the goals of responsibilized organizations (O’Malley, 2010). Youth and their families are exposed to a number of factors which may increase their risk for problems such as abusing drugs or engaging in delinquent behavior. These factors are understood in the context of the Risk Factor Prevention Paradigm, which has become increasingly influential upon government responses to youth offending (Haines and Case, 2008). Risk factors predictive of offending range from individual factors, such as low intelligence and impulsiveness; family factors such as incarcerated or antisocial parents and poor parental supervision; and community and peer factors such as socioeconomic deprivation and negative peer influences. Thus, probability statistics describe what is normal, and who within society is normal (Ericson and Doyle, 2002).
Even though scientific methods are applied to human behavior using empirical data and statistical measures, presumably there are narratives that are omitted. Cultural assumptions shape what and who is perceived as ‘risky’ and lead to blaming ‘risky’ groups or institutions for perceived threats. The construction of some individuals or groups as ‘at risk’ inevitably involves political, ethical, and moral judgments by some in relation to others (Cieslik and Pollock, 2002: 2). Sometimes persons are characterized as risks when they are a hazard, or as ‘at risk’ when they are vulnerable to being adversely affected by something else (Garland, 2002).
The observation by Garland and others is empirically supported in this study. The director of a vocational and academic-based organization, Pacific Cultural Center, Charles Wellington, discussed the use of risk factors to explain the characteristics of participants in the organization: The risk factors … we use a lot of different things: one, single-parent families; someone who comes from a community that is primarily low income; lack of education, you know, high school drop outs; and then there’s a combination of developmental skills.
He went on to say: We have a lot of young people that come to us that haven’t had stable housing. And the reason they haven’t completed school is not because they have no academic skills, it’s because they’ve moved so many times and they don’t have the stability.
Here the director conceptualizes ‘at-risk’ as an explanation of why a youth in his organization needs assistance. It does not appear as an indicator, or disposition, of being prone to violence, but rather as a causally linked explanation for the youth being ‘at-risk’ for academic failure, economic failure, anti-social behavior, or delinquency. In another case, the federal government required the director of Community First, Daryl Jefferson, to use the risk factor ‘youth in poverty’ as an eligibility requirement for participation. The director, however, contested this eligibility requirement because he believed all youth in the area to be ‘at-risk’: If we couldn’t serve one under the government umbrella, we could serve them under this non-designated dollar umbrella because there’s a lot of kids who make one dollar over or twenty dollars over in their families [and] they’re not eligible, but they’re still living in the same conditions as their friend.
Respondents were also critical of the term ‘risk’ and the use of the Risk Factor Prevention Paradigm. When asked about what puts youth ‘at-risk’ for offending, the director of Saving Youth, Elliott Stevens, replied: I don’t even like the term at-risk. I’ve had a clash with my board with using it on our brochures because it automatically assumes because they either live in a certain place, or they make a certain amount of money, or that they don’t have a proper family that they’re bait for gangs. And it’s not true. You can have a very modest income and a very strong family structure and not be at-risk.
Through their own subjective interpretation and critique of ‘at-risk,’ directors often framed risk management in their own terms. Specifically, they emphasized the notion of risk as a youth in need rather than a threat to public safety. Their perceptions of any particular ‘at-risk’ youth are not as a deviant other who has a bad disposition, who takes the easy way out of poverty by stealing, who is incorrigible, or is just a thug. Instead, they generally view the youth as a kid who needs ‘wrap-around’ services, motivation, or guidance. The findings suggest that front-line prevention practitioners exhibit a culture of crime prevention expertise and way of doing things, which is, in part, resistant to the criminalization of urban youth of color associated with the risk management paradigm.
This picture, however, is not at all one-dimensional. The perceptions of the directors and staff members sometimes shifted toward a conception of ‘at-risk’ as youth with a bad disposition who are a part of a dangerous class of people (Gray, 2009). In discussing who should be targeted for services, the director of Youth Are Our Hope stated, ‘It used to be middle school, but now we need to reach [youth] earlier, before it’s really too late.’ Executive director of Justice Club stated that, ‘many young people have lost hope and feel they won’t live past their 20s. How do we help a kid who thinks this way?’ The director of the Pacific Cultural Center, Charles Wellington, who discussed the use of risk factors above, also states: And you know … there are those who are different, there are a small group among these populations … not pretty much the one’s we have, but I’m talking about the gang psychology, they are dangerous people because there’s no sense of remorse in their system whatsoever.
This director’s perception of youth was exemplary of a dual meaning of ‘at-risk’ that emerged in this study: a youth in need conception—circumstances that lead to social failure (e.g. school dropout); and a dangerous youth—individual pathology or disposition for delinquency. The two conceptions parallel policy trends: social welfarist ideals, reminiscent of the New Deal and Youth Savers of the early 20th century, which focus on economic integration and socialization (Platt, 1969); and the more contemporary ‘tough on crime’ ideology of managing dangerous segments of society with a focus on deterrence and punishment. The youth in need conception of risk lines up with factors such as living in concentrated disadvantage. The stigmatizing dangerous youth conception of risk lines up with dangerous classes of society—engendering a strategy of discipline and regulation enforcing social inequality and class control. What is more, it appeared easy to traverse between (or worse conflate) ‘disadvantaged individual’ and ‘dangerous classes’. Risk is articulated and understood differently as the notion that ‘at-risk’ youths have the potential of facing problems or have the potential of posing problems.
The dichotomy is convenient conceptually, but intertwined empirically on the ground. CBO directors and staff (some more than others) displayed a nervous dichotomy between controlling and monitoring potential offenders and providing meaningful alternatives to criminal behavior. For example, the director of Saving Youth, Elliott Stevens, worked with law enforcement in identifying ‘at-risk’ youth in the organization (or acquaintances of youth in the organization) who have begun to associate with local gangs: If I know a kid is about to get into a gang, because they do sometimes in the [nearby] field, I call the police and say do you know so-and-so? He’s hanging out with so-and-so, and they’re like ‘oh yeah, okay’ and then they’ll address it.
This director also stated, however, that he would contact the local gang taskforce officer and advocate for youth who were not associated with gangs, but detained as suspected gang members because of their ‘gang appearance’. On the one hand practitioners engage in surveillance of youth, but their goals (from the respondents’ perspectives) are more about personal development, normalization, workforce integration, or merely giving youth something to do during the after-school hours. That is to say, they understand the ‘at-risk’ youth as someone who is facing problems and in need of social support, or quoting a comment made by the chair of the community partnership, ‘we’re turning at-risk youth to at-promise youth’.
Concluding remarks about risk
CBO practitioners translate risk targets as ‘in need’ on the one hand, and as a ‘threat’ on the other hand. At a policy level, the ‘threat’ conception—consistent with the law enforcement-centered preventive model—engenders such actions as strict enforcement of a 10.00 pm curfew for youth under the age of 18, city injunctions, truancy policing, preventive detention, and the like. The risk conception as ‘in need’ engenders responses including programs such as workforce preparation, job training, education programs (e.g. after-school classes, mentoring), recreational activities, and conflict resolution. Notably, the ‘threat’ conception is particularly important with respect to race and poverty. While youth in general are subject to a great amount of surveillance, economically underprivileged urban youth of color tend to be particularly vulnerable to State surveillance when compared to their middle-class suburban counterparts (Bridges and Crutchfield, 1988). In this urban location in Los Angeles County, youth populations of color make up the majority of the ‘at-risk’ population, and therefore receive the greatest amount of surveillance. Scholars typically connect the higher degree of minority surveillance to the high proportion of Black and Latino people incarcerated in the United States (Beckett and Western, 2001). This surveillance-incarceration carousel creates and reinforces the ideology that conceptualizes urban minority youth as a threat and engenders intensive governance by the State (Muncie, 2006).
Certainly, the use of risk techniques can be abused, enhancing liberty for some at the expense of others. It can offer ‘automatic, self-validating legitimacy to established law and order’ (Douglas, 1992: 8). Nevertheless scholars examining risk make problematic assumptions that risk-centered government is one thing, ‘rather than a heterogeneous array of practices with diverse effects and implications’ (O’Malley, 2004: 325; see also Maurutto and Hannah-Moffat, 2006). The findings presented here support O’Malley’s (2004) position in that risk can be simultaneously associated with therapeutic, restorative, and social justice policies, and surveillance and incapacitation.
Conclusion
The study has theoretical implications for social theorists who speak of broad trends related to the neo-liberal offloading of crime control onto non-State organizations and communities. The social engineering, social welfare rationalities continue to operate through these locally run organizations. The patchwork nature of the turn to CBOs seems to draw less scholarly attention and sociological explanation than more punitive policies. Yet the lack of attention to this informal system of CBOs and community partnerships should not obscure the fact that they pose a challenge to the idea that the USA is as post-welfarist as some scholars maintain. In fact, some respondents in this study once belonged to the now defunct welfare state, but continue its programs under the guise of violence prevention and using risk predictions to steer their projects. For example, Daryl Jefferson held executive positions related to the federal Job Training Partnership Act of 1982 and the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of 1973, both of which established federal assistance programs to prepare youth and unskilled adults for entry into the labor force and provided job training to economically disadvantaged individuals (Job Training and Community Services Act, 1973). And although this sample is small, it calls into question the conclusion that crime prevention has moved away from a social-centered, social engineering framework. Similarly, it confirms that non-State community governance is more open to variation and possibilities than critical commentators would predict.
Furthermore, it appears that risk discourse and welfarist discourse are not mutually exclusive, in the sense that strategies to change the socioeconomic ‘causes’ of crime are reformulated in terms of risk management. To be clear at the outset, this is not postmodern relativism; rather, it is a description about how strategies actually operate in community governance ‘at-a-distance’. Mona Lynch’s (2010) work on penology is illustrative of national level shifts being blends of rationalities and consisting of a ‘heterogeneous array of practices’ (O’Malley, 2004: 325). In Lynch’s historical study of the prison system in the state of Arizona, USA, rehabilitation of the offender never really dominated, and to suggest Arizona is another example of post-welfare risk management penal policy is incorrect. Lynch found that the discourses of rehabilitation and risk management co-exist, and, albeit implicitly, have co-existed for a long time. Similarly, the post-welfarist, risk management discourse in crime prevention co-exists with welfarist, social-change discourse. The ‘in need’ conception of the ‘at-risk’ youth maps onto the social engineering social-centered practices once openly favored by US and British governments. The ‘threat’ conception of the ‘at-risk’ youth maps onto the idea that these individuals lack self-control and need managing and, if unmanageable, then need to be ‘warehoused’. Furthermore, both broad discourses find a home in the two political camps of US legislators. Although beyond the scope of this article, a cursory review of federal crime prevention laws in the USA reveals poverty reduction, employment services, and the like, exist side-by-side with increased funding for situational crime prevention, surveillance, and tough on crime initiatives.
For sure, the study of society always involves the study of people, and people’s history, training, preferences, and proclivities impact what they do (or do not do). The local CBOs appear to resist supra-national and national governance because the neo-liberal turn to communities functions with the idea that local groups make innovative decisions. The State’s power is dependent upon the local agencies’ acquiescence to act (Hughes, 2007)—and CBOs have diverse programs available to them, as long as the goal is to prevent delinquency and gang and youth violence.
6
This ‘power dependence’ is built into community governance and is fundamental to how it operates. Metaphorically, the State writes the script and encourages compliance to a (funding dependent) community body, but the agents’ intentionality to act in accordance with the script is an open question. The reason: the script is broad and is only partially defined. For example, to quote Assistant Attorney General Laurie O. Robinson (Office of Justice Programs, 2010): The Department of Justice supports community involvement in the choice, design, and implementation of programs, as well as the flexible use of federal funding, to ensure the creative integration of local, state, and federal resources to maximize the return on taxpayer dollars while promoting the sustainability of local public safety programs.
That is, community governance depends on the power of local actors to act; and they bring to the table personal histories, know how, and cultural points of view that impact purposive activities—and it makes no small difference that these views often derive from the ‘at-risk’ neighborhood itself. Thus, community governance is predictably going to be a blend of the provincial and the national. For sure, the new public–private mix in crime control is a ‘re-articulation and re-organization of the State’s powers through new strategies’ (Lea and Stenson, 2007: 21), but the dispersal of former State roles in the neo-liberal process of governing behaves symbiotically.
As illustrated here, risk-based crime prevention rationalities and activities have meaningful elements from earlier periods, but are now done in the name of violence prevention. It appears community governance involves an ‘interaction effect’ that produces and denotes a hybrid of old and new policies that leads to results that would not be anticipated on the basis of the supra-national and governmental agendas. The ‘power-dependent’ community governance in 21st Century crime prevention is unresolved – by design. The conclusion helps explain the ‘braided’ nature (Hutchinson, 2006) of strategies and discourses that operate empirically on the ground.
Footnotes
Notes
Author biography
Tim Goddard received his doctorate in Criminology, Law and Society from the University of California, Irvine, USA. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Florida International University, USA.