ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses the potential of local communities to support and engage with efforts to reintegrate offenders. It deals with some general observations concerning the extent to which local urban communities are equipped, or engaged to address, the reintegration of ex-prisoners. A number of antithetical discourses are presented situated in various traditions – behavioural, cultural, structural and institutional – which privilege different readings of the relationship between crime, place and the community. There follows a discussion of the general policy responses that derive from each of these divergent theoretical positions with respect to individual and social approaches to crime reduction and community safety. The first systematic understandings of crime, criminality and place are commonly thought to have originated at the Chicago School of Sociology – a consequence of early research carried out into processes of urbanisation and social and economic inequality. Social disorganisation theory neglected to specify which factors within the total social and economic framework predict which outcomes.
