COMMUNITY IN GERMAN CRIMINAL-JUSTICE - A SIGNIFICANT ABSENCE

The article is prompted by an apparent paradox. In Germany, working re lations between state criminal justice agencies and non-state institut ions within a locality are often extremely close, relying upon network s of communication and a degree of mutual reliance, which in Britain w ould undoubtedly invoke reference to the idea of 'community'. In Germa ny, however, criminal justice professionals rarely describe this in te rms of community. Though the emergence of locally based criminal justi ce initiatives has been later and less extensive in Germany than in Br itain, there have been significant institutional developments in this direction over the last decade, particularly in the fields of crime pr evention and victim-offender mediation. Yet even those organizations w orking closely with local people or reliant upon the efforts of indivi dual volunteers or charitable bodies do not appear to perceive their w ork as community-orientated. This is the 'significant absence' of our title. By reflecting on why it is that in Germany the vocabularies in which local or informal criminal justice initiatives have been framed rarely make reference to the idea of 'community', we may hope to gain some insight also about the conditions under which the appeal to commu nity becomes powerful in societies such as Britain.