Conflicts as Property: Fear of Crime, Criminal Justice and the Caring Community

Abstract

Contemporary policies in the Western industrialised world show a tendency to cut back on certain formal social services. This tendency is attributed in the introductory paper by Lentjes and Jonker to two considerations: 1) a distaste for what are seen as large impersonal institutions and a desire to promote smaller “mediating” structures; in other words to promote (or restore) a “caring community”, and 2) a desire to diminish the financial burden of the collective sector in society. There is, however, another aspect of contemporary policies which deserves our attention in this context. There is not only a tendency to cut back certain formal services; there is also a tendency to increase other formal services: the police, courts, prison (Rutherford, 1984). My paper will address the question how this switch of resources from certain social services to other services (criminal justice) has to be assessed in the light of the central theme, “how to bring about a policy that creates the conditions for a caring society”. Some conditions promote such a society; others form an obstacle to it. The thesis of this paper is that criminal justice activities are an obstacle to a caring society. Thus the switch of resources towards criminal justice is incompatible with a policy intended to promote the conditions for such a type of society. On the contrary, “reducing criminal justice” should be one of the important strategies in such a policy. I will address three aspects of criminal justice which run counter the ideal of a caring society.