| This dissertation focuses on the concept of community in legal sites relating to crime and its control. It draws on three case studies: community notification of sex offenders, community policing strategies designed to address gang loitering in Chicago, and the proliferation of gated communities.; While other work emphasizes the dominance of advanced liberal governance or the rise of a preventive state, these case studies draw out diverse translations of the concept of community in law, as it is deployed for achieving governmental ends relating to crime prevention. In so doing, this dissertation treats the documents produced within legal sites as empirical representations in the history of legal ideas, and as evidence of how social issues are imported, defined, translated, and negotiated within the legal field. The case studies demonstrate that the invocation of community in these sites operates in conjunction with other operative concepts, such as risk, harm, or the material form that community may be taking. This provides insights that are missed in more general accounts, including the interplay between community and risk management, the inflections of law and community implicated in the constitution of community harm, and the spatial vision of community motivating the adjudication of boundaries between gated communities and non-residents.; This dissertation finds that governing through community is not as stable as theories of advanced liberalism suggest. Instead, invocations of “community” draw on and inform other visions alongside (or instead of) dominant political rationalities. This includes the “people's welfare” of police science, divergent visions of the “social,” and an array of expert, lay, and administrative knowledges that are authorized by law in constituting risk and its management. These hybridities, in turn, have practical effects for the legal programmes and rationalities developed in creating, implementing, and adjudicating crime prevention efforts. |
