External Intimacy: Community-based Intervention Concerning Crime and the Integral State in Quebec

Abstract

This article deals with the contradictory way in which community-based intervention concerning crime relates to political domination and to the institutions of the State in Quebec, Canada by exploring the pertinence of the Gramscian conception of civil society. Surprisingly, although Antonio Gramsci offers an interesting set of concepts for the study of the relationship between civil society and government institutions, his ideas have rarely been used to understand community intervention in general and that related to public security in particular. Gramscian concepts such as civil society, political society, hegemony, and the integral State strike us as particularly useful in this regard. In our opinion, they offer a much more comprehensive view of the current relationship between community action (civil society) and the criminal justice system (the government) than narratives that insist on the alleged autonomy of civil society and on the weakening of the State. To show the utility of these concepts, we used them to understand community tensions related to racially discriminatory practices by police officers in the multiethnic borough of Montréal-Nord in Montreal.

Introduction

This article deals with community action and intervention with regard to crime in Canada, in the francophone province of Quebec. The notion of community action and intervention refers here to the activities that local communities deploy to accomplish goals related to crime prevention, social reintegration, and restoration in collaboration with the government (Soska and Ohmer, 2018). The article frames the study of this in the discussion of the evolution of the relationship between civil society and the State during the past decades in Canada. In this sense, one important goal of this paper is to show that the set of organizations involved in community action and intervention can be studied in a profitable way through the concept of civil society. In particular, the article highlights the relevance of philosopher and communist politician Antonio Gramsci's thought with respect to the understanding of the relationship between civil society (community action) and the state (the criminal justice system). The review of the Gramscian approach seems pertinent given its relative absence in most works concerning community intervention and its utility for the understanding of some particular contradictions related to it.

Overall, it is possible to distinguish two major streams of research work concerning the use of communities on crime control policies in North America. On the one hand, in the contexts of social work, administration, and criminology, some researchers focus primarily on the practical and organizational dimension of the issue. As such, with the help of concepts like social capital, partnership/consultation, collective efficacy, or even self-control, these researchers concentrate on the elaboration of intervention strategies aimed at improving the results of community mobilization and partnerships between civil society and government (Alain and Hamel, 2015; Hamel et al., 2003; Kearney and Vaillancourt, 2006; Kelling and Wilson, 1982; Soska and Ohmer, 2018; Spergel and Grossman, 1997). This kind of research can be appropriately described as applied.

On the other hand, other researchers show more interest in studying the societal causes at the origin of use of “the community”. Often developed through critical approaches and analysis, these studies mobilize theoretical frameworks stemming from the philosophical thought of Michel Foucault (Dufresne and Goupil, 2010; Mann et al., 2007; Rose, 2000), from political economy (Paquin, 2005; Bailleau et al., 2009), and from classic sociological approaches : Weber, Durkheim (Cauchi et al., 2015; Crawford, 2004; Defilippis et al., 2006). Although most of these studies include the question of the State in the analysis, they seem to take for granted its relationship to civil society. In particular, they do not adequately deal with the fact that, as part of civil society (this is, as part of the different organizations of society that take no part in the government), the different organizations related to community intervention dealing with crime seem to play a contradictory role because at the same time that they try to deploy non-repressive strategies to dealing with marginalized populations, they often end up contributing to the perpetuation of governmental dynamics causing marginalization, repression and political oppression.

Gramscian approach to civil society as well as concepts such as political society, hegemony, and the integral State seem to us to be particularly useful to explain these contradictions. Gramscian concepts offer a much more comprehensive view of the ambivalent relation between community action (qua part of civil society) and the criminal justice system (the government) than approaches that insist on the alleged autonomy of community action from the government and on the idea of the “challenged State” (as we will see, for some authors, the particularity of community action lies in the fact that it involves practices, knowledge and dynamics of development that are supposed to be autonomous from government bodies). Indeed, Gramscian ideas are particularly helpful to understand the increased presence and visibility that civil society organizations have acquired not only in the field of crime control policies but also as part of public policies in general since the end of the Cold War (see Buttigieg, 1995, Chandhoke, 2002; Fontana, 2009; Smith, 2011; Thomas, 2021). This is so because Gramscian thinking was nurtured by the goal of understanding the importance of civil society in the construction of political power in the West (Thomas, 2009).

With this logic, this article explores the pertinence of Antonio Gramsci's concepts to the study of the contradictory aspects of community intervention and of its insertion in dynamics of political oppression. In this sense, the notion of civil society is used in two different ways in this paper: on the one hand, as a descriptive term referring to actors and organizations that are not part of the government in Quebecois society and, on the other, as a theoretical notion stemming from Gramscian theoretical thinking. The paper is structured as follows: after a brief description of community action and intervention and its study, we explore, in a second section, the meaning and value of certain concepts developed by Antonio Gramsci. In the third section, we present an example of the application of Gramscian thought based on situations drawn from our field research conducted in the city of Montreal. The example we have chosen concerns the issue of the racial discrimination of black youth and the defies it poses to community stakeholders.

The State of Community Action

In Canada, the concepts of community action and intervention describe the practices of civil society organizations that—in collaboration with authorities—try to find solutions, often local, to concrete problems through specific projects. To do so, these organizations deploy strategies stemming from both local practices of mutual support (accompaniment, dialogue, informal collaboration, etc.) as well as from techniques developed by different professional disciplines (social work, psychology, criminology).

In a broader sense, community action can be described as a modality of what political science call collective action (Jetté, 2017). In fact, not only does it belong to the range of mobilization strategies through which popular movements try to transform their environment and their own condition, but it also represents—at least in a certain way—a particular example of the creation of what the pragmatic study of collective action calls the “self-institution of collectives”: the process through which the social group “represents itself, at the same time as it is working on itself to self-organize and self-govern” (Cefaï, 2013: 9). However, despite this undeniable tendency towards self-organization, community action and intervention is a contradictory modality of collective action because of its heavy dependency on governmental bodies both in financial and programmatic terms. And this is so to the extent that it cannot be understood without referring to this persistent relation to the institutions of the State (and here is where we need Gramsci).

In this sense, in the complex universe of collective action, community action draws its specificity from focusing on social issues relevant to State missions (poverty, public health, crime) through intervention that could be considered “structured,” as it involves specific action plans as well as the recognition of these by public agencies. Community action also distinguishes itself from the set of collective action by the fact that it depends on external financial support for its existence, often from the State. This condition greatly influences the work community organizations do, since in order for them to retain access to financing, they have to fulfill the expectations of funding agencies and donors in terms of accountability and efficiency. As we will see, the political implications of these features are not a minor issue.

Where community action focuses on crime, it may include actions such as the realization of projects targeting the redesign of local spaces, the creation of neighborhood consultation committees, the formation of alternative justice organizations, the realization of reach-out activities, the adoption of community policing strategies or the organizing of partnerships between members of the community and the police forces (Soska and Ohmer, 2018). Thus, as noted by Soska and Ohmer (2018), the range of objectives related to this type of intervention is wide: prevention, reintegration, surveillance, restoration, etc. Similarly, community organizations participating in these initiatives are heterogenous and relate to government agencies and other political actors in different and changing ways. This heterogeneity usually overlaps with different views about crime, its causes and solutions. Thus, while some of them join some conservative narratives on crime, other prone approaches focusing on social justice issues. We will come back to these differences later.

In Quebec, the background of the use of “the community” in crime control public action dates back to the existence of religious charitable organizations that were appointed by the province to take charge of various marginalized populations. The most salient example of this intervention are the “reform” and “industrial” “schools” that were created by religious groups to control “problematic” children and youth in the 19th century (Ménard, 2003; Trépanier, 1999). It should be noted that the populations targeted by these former religious organizations were, in one way or another, affected by issues that, today, are the subject of community intervention: young offenders, orphaned or homeless children, sex workers, etc. In fact, the work of these charitable organizations can be seen as an important precursor of the strategies of diversion and reliance on the community that the Canadian youth justice system has promoted through different laws during his history and that are an important feature of the current Youth Criminal Justice Act.

Following a long period during which their presence was relatively discreet, community action organizations seem to have gained more public recognition in Canada (and all over the world) in recent years (Côté et al., 2009; Helly, 2001; Jetté, 2008; Rose, 2000). This seems to be related to transformations in the State itself, which were described by some authors as pertaining to the decline of the Keynesian State (McBride and Shields, 1993) and, by others, to the emergence of a “Third Way” of development for capitalist societies, one that allegedly goes beyond the dynamics of the market and the Keynesian State, relying significantly on citizen participation (Côté et al., 2009). “Community” emerged then as a key element of an ideological construction praising the emergence of a new kind of citizenship, more collective than individual. ¹

In this sense, when explaining the spread of the public recognition of community action in Quebec, Christian Jetté (2008) refers to the gradual abandonment—beginning in the 1970s—of the welfare social development model, which involved centralized, redistributive management of public services. According to Jetté, the quasi-industrial rationality of this model inhibited the development of the dynamics of community action, which are supposed to be mostly related to donation and reciprocity. This situation would have changed with the decline of the Keynesian State. According to Jetté (2008), this process gave place to the flourishing of a “Quebecois model for social development” based on community organizations (see also Caillouette, 1994).

By contrast, critical political economy called this new societal logic “conservative” or “neoliberal” (Mayer, 2007; McBride and Shields, 1993). According to McBride and Sheilds, while conservatism/neoliberalism initially involved the reduction of the State apparatus in favor of private interests, at a later time (that of roll-out neoliberalism), it included a sort of devolution of responsibilities to local institutions (Gilmore and Gilmore, 2016) as well as the delegation of social services to grassroots organizations (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Mayer, 2007). ² McBride and Shields (1993) explain the conservative rationale behind this gradual transfer of responsibilities on the part of certain Canadian public institutions to civil society (including community organizations) in the following way: “To resurrect the traditional role of the church, family, and private benevolence, as providers of charity and social provision, it (was) necessary to break the State's monopoly on welfare role” (p. 36).

Let us emphasize the fact that this dynamic was not only favorable to a rather contradictory citizen participation (contradictory since it involved forms of participation that were associated to the disengagement of the government), but also to an increased intervention by the private sector in managing public affairs and, in the worst cases, to the imposition of certain private interests into the public agenda through the multiplication of public-private partnerships (Paye, 2005). It is in a certain way because of this growing influence on policy that the geographer David Harvey considers neoliberalism to have been primarily a political triumph of the dominant classes (those promoting the neoliberal agenda) and an economic failure (since it did not achieve constant and persistent economic growth—see Harvey, 2005).

More specifically, in terms of public security, the increasing reliance on civil society and, in particular, on community action was guided by discourse defining public security as the result of a societal coproduction, a lasting partnership between public and private entities, between the government and civil society (Mann et al., 2007; Paquin, 2005). Faced with an alleged increase in crime rates in the 1990s (Brodeur, 2003) and with a questioning of legitimacy due to an economic crisis (Gilmore and Gilmore, 2016) in both the US and Canada, the proponents of these community and local approaches often pointed to the “failure” of traditional police services (patrols, police investigations, the timeframe of interventions) (Brodeur, 2003) and insisted on the need to develop new intervention strategies. Community policing (that is, the paradigm of policing that emphasizes proximity with citizenry as well as the adoption of problem-solving strategies by police officers) and models of social intervention based on community mobilization (i.e. security local partnerships, diversion programs or restorative justice) were the main results of this process. ³

David Garland (1996, 1997) saw in the emergence of these strategies a kind of paradoxical reconfiguration of the sovereignty of a State superseded by both global dynamics and local events beyond its control. Garland associated the State responses to this crisis of sovereignty (adaptive or negating) with the emergence of two major and contradictory discourses on crime. On the one hand, there is one that advocates for hardening the judicial treatment of ordinary crime (notably that associated with the other, the immigrant) and of conflict in neighborhood life (judicialization of social problems). The question of prevention of social crises and that of the identification of populations “at risk” of becoming criminals remain at the heart of this approach, which has been defined by other authors as “actuarial” (Mooney and Young, 1999), “punitive” (Waquant, 2004), or “interventionist” (Hall et al., 1978).

On the other hand, reliance upon community has been associated, according to Garland (1996), with the dissemination of a discourse insisting on the importance of closeness between citizens and the police, on the diversion of treatment of certain social issues (notably when they concern the collective membership of individuals, the “we”), and on the need to fight crime using prevention strategies focusing on collaboration between justice officials and different civil society organizations. Both discourses are related, according to Garland, to an important transformation on the limits of the sovereignty of the State, which involves the proliferation of “beyond-of-the-state” tasks and actors in the field of crime control.

Focusing on the United Kingdom, Adam Crawford (2004) approaches reliance upon community in a similar way. He sees it as an indicator of a transformation in the nature of formal and informal relations existing between three societal entities: the State, the market and the civil society. Crawford conceives of these three bodies as different or separate, but also as acting together in the act of governing. According to him, in the context of globalization and the tensions between the local and the global, the increasing influences of civil society actors (entrepreneurs, foundations, community organizations) on the functioning of the justice system has resulted in a greater influence, mainly informal, of private actors on the operations of the nation-state, with sovereignty appearing challenged. More specifically, Crawford evokes the fact that the private sector has established itself as dominant in public policy through the promotion of management models such as that of New Public Management: “Thus, the modern state has become confronted by its own limitations, even in its last bastion of political power. These challenges have produced a volatile policy climate in which, as Garland suggests, State sovereignty over crime is ‘simultaneously denied and symbolically reasserted’” (Crawford, 2004: 295).

This approach is shared by Sylvie Paquin (2005) who considers that, in the Quebec context, even though community collaboration and mobilization have proven to have a positive impact on the fight against crime at the local level (with respect to, for example, information sharing or effective use of limited resources), major issues persist concerning the managerial nature of the partnership vision. These issues are associated not only with the subsidiary and subordinate role that community action is assigned by the government and by private interests, but also with economic (survival of community organizations) and ethical (dissolving of forms of accountability) problems.

Like Paquin, Crawford, and Garland, we also attach central importance to the question of the State in the study of community intervention concerning crime, however, we disagree with the way these authors tend to approach these two entities (the State and the community milieu) and their mutual relationships. In fact, we believe the social dynamics that have given rise to reliance upon community in crime control policies can be captured in light of the study of the relation between civil society and the government (political society) from a Gramscian perspective. Such a study will show that community action and intervention are not subsidiary or external to State policies, but that they are mutually entangled as part of a contradictory process of reproduction of dynamics of political and cultural domination (which are also reinforced by the State mechanisms of political repression). In this regard, in the next section of this article, we would like to highlight the relevance of Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci's concepts for such a project. Surprisingly, the Italian philosopher's thought, which offers us a whole panoply of concepts for understanding the relationship between civil society and the State, has been barely used by researchers studying community-based intervention concerning crime.

The reasons justifying Gramsci's absence in studies on this topic are numerous, the first being that such studies take a more “applied” approach and tend to leave aside the more sociological debates. Gramsci's communist affiliation may also be put forward as a possible cause in an academic milieu that is usually resistant to Marxist political thinking. The fact that the postmodern wing of cultural studies has reduced Antonio Gramsci's thought to the status of “cultural critic” may also explain his absence from studies on community action and crime (Harris, 1992). Finally, we could mention the influence that a much more popular thinker has had on contemporary critical criminology: Michel Foucault. Indeed, Foucault (as well as Deleuze) seems to be an important reference when considering the filamentous extensions of the State in society. This article does not aim to discuss Foucauldian thinking and concepts; suffice to say here that we share Žižek's argument that the conception of the subject that lies at the heart of Foucauldian thinking prevents it from capturing the fissures and misrecognitions that we want to highlight here about Western liberal democracies. As Žižek states it: “Habermas and Foucault are two sides of the same coin” (Žižek, 1989: XXIV).

Gramsci and The Prison System

Journalist, socialist, and communist activist; organizer and mobilizer of different labor groups in Turin; leading intellectual of the Communist Party of Italy (Tosel, 2016): Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) devoted his intellectual production to the study of “the people” and the Italian working class, as well as to understanding the reasons that led to the communists’ failure to take power in Italy, unlike the Bolsheviks in Russia during the same period (Cardosi, 2018; Tosel, 2016). This task took the form of an ambitious reflection on the way political domination works in European and North American societies (From Russia to de United States). At the heart of this thinker's interests lies the question of class rule and the emancipation and victory of the oppressed classes, which he described as “subaltern.” Gramsci, who had actively participated in the spread of communism and who had gotten to know famous communists like Lenin, Trotsky and other international leaders of the movement, was imprisoned for two decades by Benito Mussolini's fascist regime. Paradoxically, as it is well known, it was during this dark period of his life that he developed, in the form of notes, the most instructive elements of his work. These were collected in The Prison Notebooks (from which important extracts may be found in Gramsci, 2012).

Gramsci's influence on the social sciences was particularly important in the second half of the twentieth century (Anderson, 2017), notably with respect to the emergence of British cultural studies (especially as a result of the work of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall in the 1970s) and with respect to the creation of South Asian Subaltern Studies (Guha, 1997). More recently, the dissemination of Antonio Gramsci's work has undergone an important revival (see, for example, Anderson, 2017; Dainotto and Jameson, 2020; Fontana, 2009). This re-emergence of his thought has appeared in a variety of works. Thus, while some of these works seem to relate to postmodern approaches, which put an emphasis on the discursive and cultural dimension of Gramscian thought (such as in Hetherington, 2011, Laclau and Mouffe, 2014), others assert instead the Marxist dimension of his thought, while emphasizing his pertinence to the study of civil society in the context of neoliberalism (Smith, 2011) as well as the political philosophy approach that lies at the heart of the Gramscian proposals (Thomas, 2009). For these authors, the most important aspect of Gramsci's work is the attempt to develop a philosophy of praxis, insisting on the essentially historical and political nature of all human production.

Although they are not used in studies on community intervention concerning crime, Antonio Gramsci's ideas are certainly not unknown in critical studies of the State and criminality (even though their absence in certain works is sometimes surprising, such as in the case of Crimes of the Powerful, the seminal work of Marxist criminologist Frank Pierce). Thus, certain Gramscian concepts have been applied in an instructive manner.

This is true, for example, of the concept of hegemony, a key concept in the whole Gramscian thinking (Cutler, 2005; Hall et al., 1978; Halliday, 2019; Kennedy, 1982; Platt et al., 1977). Hegemony offers a response “to the historically given problem of the uneven stratification of the subaltern social classes and the consequent need for a structured project capable of engaging those different strata in the learning processes specific to their own self-emancipation” (Thomas, 2021: 15). The construction of this engaging project and its political direction concern the practice of hegemony as such. In more general terms, hegemony can be described as referring to the fact that, in modern society, State dominance stands not only on coercion, but also on the ethico-political guidance of a particular political project (this is, societal guidance through a set of moral values). The process of achieving this guidance over the various classes and groups through the legitimation of a particular set of values is hegemony, strictly speaking.

Stuart Hall and his colleagues (1978) used the notion of hegemony to explain the sociopolitical context at the origins of the moral panic about delinquency in England in the 1970s. Hall and his colleagues established a link between this panic and the hegemonic crisis suffered by the economic order of the second post-war period in England, a crisis conducive to the rise of Thatcherism qua new hegemonic configuration of political and cultural relations between the English social classes. The concept of hegemony was also very influential in the development of the concept of “legal consciousness” in sociolegal studies (Cutler, 2005; Halliday, 2019; Kennedy, 1982). Thus, Litowitz (2000), for example, suggests the notion of the “hegemonic code” to describe the principles and values that, similar to Foucauldian epistemes, structure the legal order in contemporary society and contribute to the development of a sociolegal consciousness.

Another Gramscian concept that has been used in studies on crime and the justice system is that of the organic intellectual (Ciocchini and Khoury, 2017; Kennedy, 1982). In general, Gramsci (who considered that every individual is, through the use of their mental faculties, an intellectual) developed the concept of organic intellectual to refer to individuals who, because of their social and ideological action and standing, play an active role in the construction of consciousness in the population collectives they belong to, and, therefore, in the acceptance or contestation of the ethico-political principles upon which hegemony is built. Gramsci made the distinction between “organic intellectuals” (those who are organically articulated into particular groups of society, dominant or not) and “traditional intellectuals” (members of the elites who have historically dominated the evolution of cultural or artistic production). Following that rationale, Kennedy (1982) has suggested considering employees of the justice system as “intellectuals of legality” whose primary task is to show people from dominated classes what they can or cannot do as members of society. Similarly, Ciocchini and Khoury (2017) proposed seeing judges from the justice system as agents whose function oscillates between exercising coercion (which makes them “technicians” of repression) and developing moral leadership (which makes them organic intellectuals).

Yet, despite these interesting contributions, Gramsci's theoretical proposals remain relatively underused in many areas of criminology research. In particular, they seem to have gone unnoticed in research on community action and intervention focused on crime. The relevance of the Gramscian approach to the latter seems to us to be undeniable. In his writings, one finds not only concepts useful for understanding collective action, its relationship to the State and to social change (including, for example, concepts previously mentioned: hegemony, organic intellectual, historical bloc), but also a comprehensive vision of the State that is quite unique and unlike approaches generally used to explain the relationship between the justice system and community action, between the government and civil society (see Thomas, 2009).

In that sense, as we have seen, most research on community action tends to conceive of civil society (of which community action is a part) as an entity separate from the State, using a typical liberal logic (for a criticism of this liberal approach, see Buttigieg, 1995). In our opinion, one problem with this approach is that it tends to see the existence of close ties between civil society and government, ties that have nevertheless always been present in the whole evolution of modern societies, as anomalies (or contrary to the “normal” condition both of the State and of community action). However, as Adam Crawford himself highlights it (2004), the collaboration between the State and civil society in public security tasks is identifiable during various historical periods in capitalist societies. This long-standing collaboration not only speaks to the persistent links between civil society and the government, but also points to the fact that civil society as such is an area in which political processes concerning the reproduction of political domination take place.

In this respect, the Gramscian approach suggests considering the State as an expression of the unity of political society (the government) and civil society (see Buttigieg, 1995). Gramsci uses the idea of the “integral State” to talk about this unity. Why is it relevant to rely on such a vision of the State in the study of community action and intervention? In fact, as we have shown in various works (see, for example, González Castillo, 2015; González Castillo and Goyette 2020), challenges faced by community intervention, which any researcher can easily identify in the field, involve to a significant extent the relationships between community organizations and the various representatives of political society: the police, social and healthcare workers, bureaucrats, elected officials, and representatives of political parties.

These relationships, which are political relationships, and which impact the entirety of community action, are often considered by researchers to be external or foreign to the “essence” of community action, which is usually depicted as reciprocal and progressive (see Jetté, 2008). They (the relationships) are also often described as being the result of a sort of illegitimate appropriation (co-optation) of civil society organizations by the government. ⁴ However, field research constantly shows us the prevalence and decisive nature of the relationships that community organizations maintain with government representatives, to the extent that these relationships—and the tensions associated with them—appear to be constituent of the community action as such. In the same way, the community's economic dependence on public funding (see Depelteau et al., 2013) points to the constituent nature of these “external” relationships, which, in Lacanian terms, could be better described as “extimate” to community action, this is, both external and intimate at the same time, “intimately exterior.”

This extimate dimension stems from the dialectical unity of civil society and the government (or political society, as Gramsci used to call it). As we have already mentioned, the idea of the integral State allowed Gramsci to evoke the unity existing between political and civil society in modern social formations. In the Gramscian equation political society + civil society = integral State (whose equivalent, for the purposes of this paper, would be criminal justice system + community action milieu = integral State), the term political society refers, broadly speaking, to the government apparatus and its representatives; that of civil society applies to the whole of society as it emerges from the adherence of its members to ethico-political principles that structure the social order and upon which political society's (the government's) rule is established. Thus, within this logic, both civil and political society must be seen as arising from the same political dynamic: the definition of cultural leadership and political domination from a particular set of ethico-political principles that are recognized as legitimate by the various members of society.

In this context, the dominant classes are such not only because they control the repressive apparatus that political society offers to them (law enforcement agencies, for example), but also because they have been capable of imposing as legitimate, in the context of various processes of struggle and negotiation, their visions of the world and their ways of doing things (their ethico-political principles) onto society as a whole (including community organizations). Conscious of their own class interests, the dominant groups steer the integral State, leading the entire society, with the help of these ethico-political principles. At the same time, they perpetuate the “fragmented” nature of the “subaltern” classes, which, unable to react in a unified way, find their only form of integration in the mediation of these dominant ethico-political principles, thus, in civil society (Thomas, 2018). Community organizations are certainly not external to this process, and thus reproduce political and cultural domination in a particular and contradictory way, as government bodies do.

We want to emphasize the fact that the ethico-political principles, which are legitimate at a given moment in history and which, as various authors point out, are enshrined in the law (Ciocchini and Khoury, 2017; Cutler, 2005; Litowitz, 2000), are subject to constant “negotiation” between the dominant classes and the subaltern groups. That means, on the one hand, that their hegemony relies on a process of conflict, which has nothing to do with a simple, unilateral, immoveable position.

William Roseberry has called the various opposing discourses in this process of conflict “the languages of contention,” which can be associated with practices of resistance as well as with forms of consent by the subalterns (Roseberry, 1994; see also Hall, 1986). So, the conflicting voices that we can find in civil society are “languages of contention.”: e.g., some civil-society organizations can adhere to conservative approaches to crime control while others can question them or only partially accept them. On the other hand, the fact that the dominant ethico-political principles become the object of processes of struggle and negotiation means that their definition and concrete “application” through the law or through other hegemonic codes requires a certain flexibility; that is to say, the interpretation of their contents and their application varies, depending on the state of power relations between groups of society.

This flexible nature explains the fact that, as Charles Tilly points out (2000), the limits of legality and illegality are often elastic, and that the dominant classes can, through control of political society, benefit from this elasticity to ensure their domination. Thanks to this flexibility, the governmental apparatus is always capable of integrating (or alienating) various kinds of illegal, informal or non-governmental actors when ensuring social control and shaping politics of public security (Charles Tilly mentions, for example, the use of pirates by the British Crown during the period of colonial expansion). This is also the reason why the dominant groups can develop policies that seem to obey to “anti-state” tendencies without losing control of the State apparatus (Gilmore and Gilmore, 2016). In this process, no automatic threat to the State's sovereignty is in action because the elastic determination and application of these principles are part of the historical prerogatives of groups in power. In this order of ideas, narratives presenting community action as a relatively new and autonomous third sector of contemporary society seem to miss the point: the capitalist integral State has always been able to define and redefine both the internal divisions and the external limits of civil society as part of the process of domination.

What are the hegemonic values structuring contemporary society? Gavin Smith (2011) proposes the notion of “selective hegemony” to describe the cultural ethico-political principles that were gradually imposed in the Global North as hegemonic in neoliberal society, since the seventies. These are principles that, in the context of the disarticulation of major compromises which have allowed for the consolidation of the welfare state (and, therefore, the existence of “expansive” hegemony), emphasize identity, difference and cultural specificity when organizing the State's treatment of the public in general, and of the most disadvantaged groups in particular. This involves the proliferation of social policies addressing parts of the population based on their various forms of defining identity: children, youth, seniors, women, visible minorities, Indigenous people, etc. ⁵ As we have already seen, in security matters, these dominant ethico-political principles are accompanied by a sort of promotion of the participation of community, by conservative approaches of prevention of social crisis as well as by the punitive control of minorities in low-income neighborhoods.

We are convinced that studies on the challenges and tensions pervading community action in general, and those concerned more specifically with community intervention dealing with crime, would gain explanatory power by using the ideas regarding the integral State and the whole of the Gramscian approach. Accordingly, particular attention should be paid to the way in which the community movement is shaped through its interactions with agents often perceived as foreign to its functioning. In this sense, these interactions ought to be examined by taking into account their “extimacy,” that is, the fact that they are as much a part of the dynamics structuring the community movement from within as they are a part of the processes contributing to the structuring of the integral State in general.

Let us examine, in the final section of this article, an example of the application of these concepts to the study of community action focusing on crime. This example is taken from field research (ethnography) conducted in the city of Montreal in the past years and is related to questions of community intervention about crime and racist practices concerning immigrant youth. Since the main goal of the following paragraphs is to illustrate the pertinence of Gramscian concepts to the study of community action in the context of dynamics involving racial discrimination, they refer only in a succinct way to the scientific literature on racism (González Castillo and Goyette 2014).

In the next section, the data used mostly stems from a research evaluation of a program of street work in the borough of Montréal-Nord in 2014. The research involved 36 interviews (with youth with access to street-work services and members of the community setting); a survey conducted among the same category of youth (n = 108); participant observation and two focus groups with the team of street workers. The transcripts of the interviews and of the focus group were analyzed through inductive thematic analysis; the survey served, among other things, to determine the sociodemographic profile of the youth through a frequency analysis. Subsequent studies have also allowed us to follow the evolution of the community setting in the borough and we use them to develop our argument.

Gramsci in Montreal

A persistent problem in Quebec, and in North America in general, is that of racially discriminatory practices carried out by the police and other representatives of the judicial apparatus towards black people, Indigenous people and “visible minorities.” These practices are part of the presence of systemic racism in the functioning of the various institutions of the Canadian state (Henry et al., 1998). In the case of Montreal, this situation has been documented by various researchers, who have shown not only the gravity of the problem, but also its systemic nature (Livingstone et al., 2018, 2021; Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse, CDPDJ, 2011). Current literature on racial profiling and discrimination in North America relates these problems to issues such as white supremacist ideology (Daniels, 2009; Weed, 2017), racist practices in “democratic” institutions (Henry et al., 1998), post-9/11 security policies (Mamdani, 2004; Nagra, 2017), or neoliberal narratives of alleged post-racialism (Costa, 2016; Donald, 2012).

In this context, while most activists and scholars dealing with racial discrimination by the criminal justice system tend to attribute its origins to the justice apparatus itself and to the functioning of the police, they also tend to perceive community action as a kind of antidote. On the surface, this approach seems adequate. However, upon closer examination, we see that the community milieu is itself riven by tensions concerning the questions of security and of cultural differences, “ethnic” or “racial,” among some parts of the population (González Castillo 2015; Cauchi et al., 2015).

Tensions concerning racially discriminatory practices manifest within the milieu of community action through contentious speeches with which, for example, those who are largely critical of police behavior confront those who, in contrast, see the recurring intervention of law enforcement agencies in certain population groups with varying degrees of sympathy. The atmosphere of competition for funding that exists between community organizations makes these tensions even more bitter, a logical consequence of the fact that organizations rely on access to limited funding for survival (bear in mind that external funding is a major challenge for community action) (see González Castillo and Goyette 2020). This competition also lies at the origin of constant and changing alliances between community organizations, officials, academics, social movements, and political parties.

We have addressed the question of the insertion of the community into racial tensions in various studies conducted in the city of Montreal (González Castillo 2014, 2015, González Castillo and Goyette 2014, 2020). These studies looked at the tensions between youth and the police in the Montreal North (Montréal-Nord) neighborhood, which is one of the most underprivileged in the city and is home to a significant immigrant population from countries in the Global South. Fieldwork has allowed us to note not only the persistence of racial tensions among community organizations and members in various local spaces, but also the way these tensions are connected to relations with actors external to the milieu of community intervention as such: social service workers, public servants, partisan actors. In what follows, we would therefore like to consider just one particular situation to show the entanglement of community action, racial discrimination, and the criminal justice system in this Montreal neighborhood. The situation in question dates back to 2014.

At the time, an argument had broken out between the neighborhood community organizations around the performance of certain stakeholders: they were street workers (“travailleurs de rue”) whose main task was, in accordance with the principles of selective hegemony, to approach only youth with academic or economic difficulties or in conflict with the law (in most cases, due to violations of municipal regulations or minor theft) and to refer them to relevant organizations or agencies (the final decision of visiting or not these organizations depended on the youth). The most important goal of this work was to prevent these youths from developing criminal behaviors. Note that both the street workers and the majority of the youth targeted by this intervention came from the immigrant population that has arrived in Montreal since the 1960s from countries such as Haiti, Algeria, and El Salvador.

This immigrant background was clearly involved in the argument. Thus, one of the terms that was used to describe these youth was one that explicitly associates crime and insecurity with immigration in Quebec: the term “gang de rue,” street gang. Indeed, in the Quebecois literature on the subject, ethnicity and immigrant background are often mentioned as features of this kind of groups (for a critical review of this literature, see González Castillo and Goyette 2015). In this sense, it is possible to say that the dispute in question was based on long-term difficulties related to the insertion of these poor immigrants (some of them refugees) in a local context of economic decline and deteriorating work conditions, dynamics that were related to the delocalization of some industrial companies from the borough during the eighties. In general, poor immigrants tended to join the ranks of the underemployed population and to inhabit the most deteriorated sectors of the neighborhood (Bernèche, 1983).

In this context, in 2014, some community organizations were questioning not only the performance of the street workers, but also their integration within the local setting of community organizations (“le milieu communautaire”). It was implied by this criticism that the funding given by the city administration to the organization in charge of the street worker program was not well invested. Complaining organizations mentioned, for example, the non-attendance of the coordinator of the street workers at local consultation meetings, the lack of referrals by the street workers (for some community organizations, one important indicator of the performance of street workers was the number of referrals of youth to their own facilities) and a sort of absence of street workers from public spaces (“we don't see them, we don't know what they do”). Some community organizations even claimed that the effects of street work were not “visible.” The proof: gatherings of young people (most of them Haitians) occupying public space in the neighborhood on a daily basis had not disappeared. So, for some of these organizations, one important responsibility of street workers was dispersing these meetings … and the completion of this task was a central issue in the quarrel.

According to testimonies gathered during fieldwork, police interventions with respect to youth gatherings were solicited not only by people living in the nearby streets, but also by representatives of community organizations who felt a certain discomfort or even mistrust due to the presence of these groups of youths in public spaces. Since this tendency to call the police was not favorable to the mission of some of these organizations (who were supposed to work with vulnerable youth), this action was usually done with great discretion. But one way or another, this was known by the street workers and their coordinator, who saw this situation as proof of the fear that haunted some community organizations and that kept them away from some of the youth that they were supposed to serve.

Within this perspective, the insistence on the necessity for “more referrals” by some community organizations was seen as a sort of delegation of the responsibility of reaching out to this youth with a recent immigrant background. It is pertinent to note here that street workers were also the object of this mistrust, since at least one of them, from a Haitian background, had experienced some problems with the law in his youth (hiring people with a criminal record is a common practice in street work).

In this way, street workers seemed to be stuck between the interests of the population they were meant to be serving (marginalized immigrant youth and their families) and the demands and expectations of various actors of the community milieu and of government institutions. Some of the latter found the conservative and preventative discourses in the fight against anti-social behavior (“incivilities”) legitimate. Some of them tended to collaborate with authorities and partner organizations responsible for the promotion of prevention practices in security matters in various neighborhoods. In Montreal, one of most important groups in this regard is the TANDEM network, which, in partnership with the Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM), has been working since the 1980s on implementing community-based policing (“police de proximité”).

Certain members of these community organizations were also courted by political parties or politicians promoting preventative approaches to public security. As such, at various times in the history of the neighborhood, representatives from the community milieu have been presented as candidates in municipal politics by various political parties (notably by that which some call “the Liberal machine”), with varying results (sometimes defeat, sometimes victory). In Montréal-Nord, the importance of electoral politics in the community milieu of the neighborhood is so persistent that one can say that the political election cycle influences the evolution of the political relations between community organizations in a continuous and very direct way.

But the alliances and relationships between the youth, community organizations, and various public officials were far from responding to the simple model of a one-dimensional, unequivocal partnership, since tension, fragmentation and recombination were persistent. The police, bureaucrats, political parties, and community organizations were themselves part of a kind of political kaleidoscope, where the ties and formations made and remade themselves, depending on the issues of the moment. Thus, while some members of the local bureaucracy were suspicious or distrustful towards street workers, other neighborhood stakeholders viewed the street workers’ performance with sympathy. Thus, a social services worker stated, “The street workers have maybe tried to name the difficulties that our youth here in Montréal-Nord may experience: Racial profiling, problems in their relations with police officers, and not just with police officers, I think, with the whole community.”

Even relations with police officers were not unequivocal. Thus, against all odds, an employee (associate) of the neighborhood street workers (who, don't forget, were often the focus of criticism by organizations in favor of preventative security), confirmed having their most important partner in the police:

Our best partner is the police. They listen to what we do … All of this with the desire to improve the relationship of the youth with the police. They’re the partner who recognizes and conveys the impact of street work. Police officers are there to arrest criminals, and there is another part of the population that isn't criminal, but that needs to be taken care of by the institutions.

As part of this collaboration, in certain cases, before intervening, police officers telephoned the street workers to ask them to disperse the gathering before the arrival of the patrols (but things never happened the other way round: street workers never called the police officers or shared information about youth with them). Interestingly, the same stakeholder did not hesitate to name the police services as primarily responsible for confrontational interactions between the police and youth from recent immigrant families. This refers not only to the excessive surveillance of these immigrant youth by certain officers, but also the forceful interventions that often run the risk of going wrong. In this sense, informants invoke the figure of “cow-boy”, the police officer who routinely claims a supposed “adrenaline rush” as a means of justifying the misuse of violence against youth. Some police social workers also acknowledged the importance of the collaboration with street workers, but criticized the allegedly reckless behavior of certain youth, who “put themselves in certain situations for nothing” (González Castillo and Goyette 2014).

Street workers were therefore caught in the middle of all these dynamic relations of collaboration and conflict by acting as a sort of mediator between the marginalized youth, the community setting and other public bodies. Such relations proved to be determinant for the survival of the street workers’ organization and made clear the contentious character of the process of reproduction of the community milieu qua asymmetric and conflictual arena.

In this sense, in Montréal-Nord, the argument concerning the street workers and the immigrant youth never really ended. Because of its good relationships with the local administration of the neighborhood, their organization was able to keep running the street work program for a while. However, some years later, a significant political turn changed the game as a member of the “complaining” organizations won a prominent position in the local government through a nomination by a party in the city. This change seems to have influenced the conditions concerning access to funding in the local community setting. Eventually, because of the difficulties related to the renewal of its usual funding, the team of street workers reduced its size (going from four stakeholders to only one of them).

What we would like to emphasize when referring to all these changing and contradictory relationships between community workers, the police, and political society is the fact that community intervention does not relate to the problem of racial tensions in a unique, coherent, or unproblematic way. The community setting works, on the contrary, as an open political arena in which both internal and external actors have a certain influence. In a general way, the community milieu in Montréal-Nord was mostly flawed, fragmented, and riven with tensions concerning the positioning of various groups around the ethico-political principles of the actuarial/punitive approach (which, as we have mentioned, focuses on the prevention of social crises from the definition of levels of risk among different populations) and the way this approach deals with impoverished immigrants. Through these tensions between community workers, police officers, neighborhood residents, and public servants, the application of these principles was constantly being negotiated, refused, or accepted, which showed its contentious nature. The controversy around the performance of the street workers spoke volumes: it points to the contradictory nature of the relationships that community action maintains with the dynamics of oppression that structure society.

Certainly, community organizations and actors, on their part, react in different ways, at the individual level, when dealing with these principles: some of them adhere, some refuse. However, the point is that they all are modulated by this interaction, to the extent that the relationship to political power is constitutive of the community milieu as such, is “extimate” to it. No dialogue can completely change this because structural transformation is also needed (this is, a transformation of the whole integral state). In the particular case of racial discrimination practices, change cannot neither simply come from civil society as such, because it is also an active and contradictory site for the reproduction of these practices. Thus, from a Gramscian perspective, street-workers and other community actors’ main critical challenge is the one becoming the progressive organic intellectuals of the subaltern groups they serve (and to which they belong) by questioning the ethico-political principles that are at the root both of the structuration of their intervention and of the formation of the whole community milieu. According with Gramsci, this process is only achievable through the dissolution of the values on which bourgeois/liberal civil society is based and through the creation of a new set of values reflecting the interests of the subalterns in a unified way.

The Gramscian approach may not only contribute to a better understanding of today's community action and intervention concerning crime, but it may also help us to see the basis on which a genuinely transformative collective mobilization could be organized in our capitalist societies. Thus, from the Gramscian perspective, community mobilization and collective transformation must aspire not only to the destruction of mechanisms of political repression used by political society in an unequal society like ours, but also ultimately to the abolition of civil society as it exists today, as a space of political fragmentation (selective hegemony) and cultural domination. As Gramsci pointed out, the construction of an ethically just society must involve the dissolution, by all subaltern classes, of coercive and hegemonic mechanisms specific to the functioning of class-based society and the transformation of the integral State into a truly ethical one (that is to say, free of relationships of exploitation), guided by the broader movement of the subaltern groups, henceforth unified.

The Last Word

The study of the way in which civil society integrates itself into the constitution of the integral State offers us useful pathways to understanding the way that community intervention interacts with the criminal justice system. In this regard, research on this subject has tended to overlook this interaction, giving rise to narratives that either present civil society as strictly different and disconnected from State (and therefore, as a victim of predatory cooptation practices by the government), or the community milieu as essentially autonomous or independent of political society (the government). However, what field research has shown us is that the relationship with the State, as such, is extimate to the whole community milieu, this is, is an external structuring element of it. And this manifests in the form of multiple tensions and contradictions that contribute to the reproduction of oppressive relationships.

A typical liberal approach would see the path towards a solution of conflicts in the community setting in communication and open dialogue (that is, in the exercise of communicative rationality à la Habermas). However, without dismissing the importance of such practices, we contend here that a complete solution calls for the transformation of the political basis on which contemporary community intervention is constructed. Thus, what the Gramscian approach allows us to see is that the tensions involved in racial discrimination practices do not relate only to police actions (and no justification nor excuse is intended by this for police brutality) or to the specific positioning of certain community organizations, but also—and perhaps above all—to the major political processes, associated for their part with the confrontational negotiation of hegemony, the ethico-political principles that regulate the articulation between civil and political society within the framework of the integral State.