Having been to all intents and purposes 'banished' from the criminal justice domain, welfarism made a return in the 1980s through the vehicle of crime prevention, and especially through its 1990s incarnation, community safety. This article charts the process of this return and questions the wisdom of welfarist objectives in social policy becoming associated with a new form of crime control. The dangers for welfarism lie in alternative agendas that entwine community safety with a bid for relegitimation, which ties it to the coat tails of a new urban policy and seeks to 'criminalize the discourses of social policy'.

This paper begins by outlining and critiquing what we term the dominant anglophone model of neo-liberal community safety and crime prevention. As an alternative to this influential but flawed model, a comparative analysis is provided of the different constitutional-legal settlements in each of the five jurisdictions across the UK and the Republic of Ireland (ROI), and their uneven institutionalization of community safety. In the light of this it is argued that the nature of the

The role of the community safety practitioner is a newly emerging expertise in local government. A survey conducted with local authorities reveals a relatively fluid and unstructured profession of highly educated or experienced individuals with heavy workloads. Practitioners inhabit a contested policy terrain in which they express a preference for a social regeneration agenda rather than narrower crime specific strategies.

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