Crime Prevention Policies in Comparative Perspective

Adam Crawford

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781843924128
• eBook ISBN: 9781134027583
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book brings together a collection of leading international experts to explore the lessons learnt through implementation and the future directions of crime prevention policies. Through a comparative analysis of developments in crime prevention policies across a number of European countries, contributors address questions such as: How has 'the preventive turn' in crime control policies been implemented in various different countries and what have its implications been? What lessons have been learnt over the ensuing years and what are the major trends influencing the direction of development? What does the future hold for crime prevention and community safety?

Contributors explore and assess the different models adopted and the shifting emphasis accorded to differing strategies over time. The book also seeks to compare and contrast different approaches as well as the nature and extent of policy transfer between jurisdictions and the internationalisation of key ideas, strategies and theories of crime prevention and community safety.

Chapter 1

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Situating crime prevention policies in comparative perspective: policy travels, transfer and translation

Adam Crawford

The aim of this chapter is threefold. First, it is intended to raise certain comparative questions and highlight challenges of comparison in order to inform and frame the subsequent country-specific accounts and trajectories of development that follow in later chapters. It poses the question, how might we understand comparative differences and similarities between jurisdictions? In this light, connections will be made with the emerging literature on comparative penal policies. Second, the chapter explores the conceptual parameters of policy convergence and divergence with regard to crime prevention. Implicitly, it poses and responds to the question, is there a common European direction of travel evidenced by the jurisdiction-specific journeys? In so doing, it explores the extent to which particular crime prevention-related policy ‘ideas’ may have been the subject of diffusion across Europe in recent years. Finally, it considers the extent to which the different experiences of the countries outlined in this collection corroborate or counter a number of dominant assertions that abound within the literature about the origins, nature and implications of the ‘preventive turn’. Throughout, in reference to crime prevention policies, the focus deliberately seeks to include both strategies and structures: the content of policies and the mechanisms elaborated for their delivery.

Comparing crime prevention policies

What becomes clear from the collection of chapters in this volume is that some notion of crime prevention (re-)emerged in the last third of the twentieth century in diverse European countries, albeit at different moments in time, in direct response to specific stimuli and events, and following somewhat contrasting trajectories. However, at the evident risk of overgeneralisation, we can highlight the confluence of a number of similar factors and impulses that inter alia propelled and informed developments. These include:

• Public concerns over increased crime and the fear of crime, prompted by greater ownership of commodities vulnerable to theft and property-derived incentives to security.
• Growing acknowledgement of the limited capacity of formal institutions of criminal justice adequately to reduce crime and effect change in criminal behaviour, spurred by a recognition that the levers of crime lie beyond the reach of formal institutions of control.
• Concern that many of the traditional bonds of informal social control — that operate through families, kinship ties, communities, voluntary associations and other social networks — may be fragmenting and weakening.
• A decline in the attachments by liberal elites to social welfare-based responses to offending as captured in the ‘rehabilitative ideal’ and the concomitant rise in importance attributed to the role of victims of crime within public policy.
• A political desire to explore alternative means of managing crime that avoid the economic, social and human costs associated with over-reliance on traditional punitive — law and order' — responses.

The turn to prevention, therefore, can be seen as having emerged as an adaptation to both perceived changes in social conditions — mass consumerism, growing individualisation, high crime rates as ‘a normal social fact’ (Garland 2001), a culture of insecurity and the politicisation of disorder — and the acknowledged failings of the formal apparatus of criminal and penal justice, given its marginal role in regulating criminal acts (most of which never come to official attention) and its shaky assumptions about offenders and changing offending behaviour.

Brantingham and Faust's (1976) conceptual distinction, drawn from the healthcare analogy, between primary, secondary and tertiary prevention is useful in highlighting the broad shifts in contemporary understandings of prevention over recent times. They differentiate between primary prevention, directed at general populations to address potentially crimogenic factors before the onset of problems; secondary prevention, targeted at potential offenders who express or are identified by some predispositional risk factor; and tertiary prevention strategies that respond to known offenders in order to reduce further crimes or the harm associated with them. Van Dijk and De Waard (1991; and see Chapter 6) add a second dimension to this typology by differentiating between three targets of preventive interventions — offenders, victims and situations — to produce a ninefold categorisation. The assumption is that different types of measures will produce distinct benefits where aimed separately at preventing people from offending (often referred to as social prevention) or preventing victimisation (frequently conceived as safety advice or victim assistance), as against preventing crime opportunities in particular places (often referred to as situational prevention) and that these may be directed at the general population, at risk groups or places and those known offenders, victims and crime hot spots.

These categorisations remind us that prevention was not invented in the late twentieth century; rather it has been reconfigured and reconcep-tualised, previously having been disaggregated and contained within certain domains. Thus, primary prevention, where it existed, had been the stuff of social policy, but was rarely articulated or named as such. State-provided education, health, social housing and welfare, for example, for the most part were not justified in terms of their potential crime prevention effects, but rather in terms of their more direct and primary goals of an educated and productive citizenry, a healthy population, affordable housing and social security. It is only latterly that these have come to be viewed, and in some instances justified, by their ancillary crime preventive implications. Secondary prevention tended to be sidelined, given the dominant emphasis on universal social provisions. Where programmes were targeted (via means testing, more often than not) these tended to see crimogenic ends subsumed within welfarist notions of poverty prevention and alleviation. Tertiary prevention, by contrast, was the stuff of criminal justice, constituting an elaborate infrastructure designed to respond to crime (after the event) with only a limited wider primary prevention role by way of its residual deterrent effects. Thus, institutional and state bureaucratic structures tended to determine the language and location of what we now have come to define as crime prevention and community safety. A large part of the story about the ‘preventive turn’ is a tale of institutional reconfiguration within and between policy domains and among relations between (and responsibilities of) the state, market and citizenry.

As a distinct policy domain, crime prevention and its siblings, ‘community safety’ and ‘urban security’, emerged in an awkward policy void between criminal justice on the one hand, and social and urban policy on the other. In continental Europe, ‘prevention’ is commonly contrasted with ‘repression’. It therefore might be instructive, in considering comparative crime prevention, first to assess the insights offered by contrasts in penal policies. Before doing so, it is worth noting that just as criminal justice policies have changed and been redrawn in the last 30 years, so too social policy has been transformed. In different ways and to a greater or lesser extent in different countries, we have seen more targeting of resources (on the basis of some notion of identified need or risk) and increased conditionality.

One thing that changed with the arrival of the prevailing winds of neo-liberalism — propelled by the gulf-stream of globalisation — was that social welfarism itself became increasingly discredited as the organising governmental narrative and raison d'être for social policy. Not only was redistributive social welfare costly to large sections of the population in many countries, who saw little direct benefits and warmed to the politics of tax cuts, it also came to be seen as unduly paternalistic, overly interventionist, dominated by self-serving professional elites and premised on misplaced assumptions about human motivation and agency (Le Grand 2003). Marquand's evocative caricature of Fabian social policy captures well this shifting logic:

Civil society was seen, all too often, not as an agent but as a patient: an inert body, lying on an operating table, undergoing social democratic surgery. The surgeons acted for the best, of course, but they acted on the patient from without; the patient merely received their ministrations. But in reality, of course, governments cannot behave like surgeons. Here, at any rate, Hayek was right. It is not possible to re-make society in accordance with a grand design, since no conceivable grand design can do justice to the complexity and reflexivity of human behaviour. Nor is civil society much like a patient … Instead of lying passively on the operating table, it insisted on arguing with the surgeon, or at least trying to do so. (1999: 17)

What is more, policies of social welfare were argued to be, themselves, crimogenic in fostering a ‘culture of dependency’ and loosening bonds of moral restraint (Murray 1990). From this perspective, social welfarism is envisaged as the antithesis of enterprise, autonomy, responsibility and freedom. For some, social policy came to be seen as part of the problem of crime and disorder rather than as contributing to the preventive solution.

Comparative penal policies

Analysing the comparative fortunes of penal policies in various jurisdictions might tell us something about both (i) the relative place of crime prevention within different polities and (ii) how to draw comparisons — similarities and differences — between the experiences of assorted European countries. Cavadino and Dignan's (2006a, 2006b) recent analysis of imprisonment rates, youth justice arrangements and privatisation policies in 12 western jurisdictions provides a useful reference point. Drawing upon the work of Esping-Andersen (1990), they outline a fourfold typology of criminal justice systems, situated within different kinds of political economy: the neo-liberal, conservative corporatist, oriental corporatist and social democratic. These four ‘family groups’ are differentiated with regard to a range of criteria including their form of economic and welfare state organisation, extent of income and status differentials, degree of protection afforded to social rights, political orientation, and scale of social inclusivity. For the purpose of a European analysis, only three of these typologies are relevant, as the oriental corporatist model seeks to explain the case of Japan (and hence will not detain us here). While neo-liberal political economies (including England and Wales) are marked by the free market and minimal welfare state provisions, as well as extreme income differentials, conservative corporatist societies (including the Netherlands, France, Germany and Italy) feature comprehensive, moderately generous, but non-egalitarian welfare states, which reflect pronounced, but not extreme income differentials (Cavadino and Dignan 2006b: 441). By contrast, social democratic regimes (notably Sweden and Finland) are marked by more universalistic, generous welfare systems and exhibit relatively limited income differentials. These ‘family traits’, they suggest, appear to be associated with some striking and enduring differences in terms of penal policies, notably rates of imprisonment (see Table 1.1).

According to Table 1.1, with only one exception (the Netherlands), all the neo-liberal countries have higher rates of incarceration than all the conservative corporatist regimes. Most strikingly, the Nordic social democracies, with the addition of the single oriental corporatist country (Japan), have the lowest imprisonment rate of all. Furthermore, the social democratic systems of the Nordic countries have succeeded in sustaining relatively humane and moderate penal policies in the period during which some of the neo-liberal countries — notably the United States and to a lesser extent Britain — have been moving in the direction of punitive and exclusionary policies of mass incarceration. Furthermore, Cavadino and Dignan suggest that as a society moves in the direction of neo-liberalism, its punishment tends to become harsher. The most dramatic example of this is the Netherlands, where the imprisonment rate rose exponentially between 1975 and 2006, from 17 to 128 prisoners per 100,000 population. This is a useful starting point, for our purposes, as it alerts us to the importance of differences, despite globalising pressures, in the form of variations of political economy, and also highlights sites of continuity, namely the connection between neo-liberal influences and apparent punitiveness.

Table 1.1 Political economy and impriso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: The preventive turn in Europe
• 1 Situating crime prevention policies in comparative perspective: policy travels, transfer and translation
• 2 The political evolution of situational crime prevention in England and Wales
• 3 The preventive turn and the promotion of safer communities in England and Wales: political inventiveness and governmental instabilities
• 4 The development of community safety in Scotland: a different path?
• 5 The evolving story of crime prevention in France
• 6 Forty years of crime prevention in the Dutch polder
• 7 ‘Modernisation’ of institutions of social and penal control in Italy/Europe: the ‘new’ crime prevention
• 8 Crime prevention at the Belgian federal level: from a social democratic policy to a neo-liberal and authoritarian policy in a social democratic context
• 9 Going around in circles? Reflections on crime prevention strategies in Germany
• 10 Crime prevention in Hungary: why is it so hard to argue for the necessity of a community approach?
• 11 International models of crime prevention
• Index