Inside the System
and the befrienders, trackers and shadows - workers in high intensity
community programmes who attach themselves to individual
clients and make sure they get out of bed in time, get to
work and attend their therapy sessions.
Outside the city, who knows whether that happy group of kids
hiking up a mountain, building a campfire or swimming in a river
are not taking part in a delinquency programme such as ACTION
(Accepting Challenge Through Interaction with Others and Nature)?
73 The only way to tell that these are not, after all, boy
scoutS, would be to know that the participants had been pretested
and then, after coming back from the wilderness, would be
post-tested about their self-concepts, their relationship with their
peers and their perception of the role of authority figures.
Back in the city, there are other forms of treatment such as
community-service orders which offer further opportunity for the
normalized presence of the offender. Satisfying the aims of both
integration and reparative justice, offenders on such schemes are
sentenced to useful (usually su pervised) work in the community:
helping in geriatric wards, driving disabled people around, painting
and decorating the houses of various handicapped groups, building
children's playgrounds.
These are all the softer forms of the reintegration strategy at
work, and are directed at the individual offender after his apprehension
and conviction. Other forms of neighbourhood penetration
are not only 'harder', but move from the individual offender to
preventive and proactive strategies directed at whole groups or
environments (a move which, as we shall see, some observers consider
the most significant of all changes in social control).
Obvious examples come from the new forms of community
and preventive policing I reviewed earlier. In addition to the nowroutine
technologies of prevention, detection, deterrence and
surveillance in public and private space (stores, airpOl ts, shopping
malls), the reintegration ideology demands a more active form of
participation. Citizens are urged to provide neighbourhood centres
for potential delinquents, organize all sorts of surveillance and
early reporting schemes, take part in 'court-watching programmes'
and conduct crime prevention seminars in their homes. 74 Through
programmes such as CAPTURE (Citizens Active Participation
Through Utilization of Relevant Education) and national organizations
such as the National Centre for Community Crime Prevention,
neighbourhoods are absorbed into general crime-prevention
strategies. Some projects call for collective surveillance and reporting
(block clubs, neighbourhood watch, radio-alert networks,