ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the stated or implied preferences – values, visions, and policies – to which this literature has been leading. There was something genuinely creative in the impulse that some twenty years ago in North America and Western Europe took hold of much liberal and radical thinking about crime and punishment, deviance and social control. The inspiration behind the prosiac phrase "decentralized community control" can be understood in another way: a vision of inclusion rather than exclusion as the preferred mode of social control. The traditional exclusionary mode was the product of the original projects of rationalization associated with the birth of the modern state: centralization, criminalization, classification, segregation, professionalization. In the 1960s most of the accepted systems and ideologies for the social control of deviants became the object of radical attacks under such organizing frameworks as destructuring, abolition, and inclusion. The desired alternatives came together in the vision of decentralized community control.
