ABSTRACT
Modernisation has been the keynote of New Labour’s tougher stance on crime, and despite its essentially contested nature, the concept of ‘community’ has been central to its approach. The Labour Party had subsumed concern about crime into concern about inequality and poverty; it had tended to believe that if the latter were addressed directly, the former would decline as a result. The Crime and Disorder Act added an array of new community measures to complement the basic supervision order, including two that were quite without precedent: Parenting Orders for adults and Child Safety Orders for youngsters under the age of prosecutability. Local authorities and police forces are to work with other key agencies at a district level to develop and implement three-year rolling strategies for reducing crime and disorder. Over the 1980s and 1990s there has been a progressive intensification of public debate on race and crime in England and Wales.
