Responsibilization

Responsibilization concerns a shift of primary responsibility for crime prevention and public security away from the state and toward businesses, organizations, individuals, families, and communities. It is a strategy that involves a way of thinking and a variety of techniques designed to change the manner in which governments act upon crime. Instead of addressing crime in a direct fashion by means of the police, the courts, and the prisons, this approach promotes a new kind of indirect action, in which state agencies activate or generate action by nonstate organizations and actors. State agencies now adopt a strategic relation to other forces of social control. They seek to build broader alliances, enlisting the powers of private actors and shaping them to the ends of crime control. ...