Lincoln, RA

Wilson, Paul

English

Many years ago I addressed the Australian Crime Prevention Council and basically accused them of being a well-meaning body of men and women but one whose conceptual and theoretical understandings of what was involved in crimeprevention were naive in the extreme. Since that talk it has been a long time between invitations to speak to this august body and I suspect that after this talk, it will be even longer before I am invited back again. In the intervening years I have been involved - before, during and after my time at the Australian Institute of Criminology - in many crime prevention projects. These included the only overall evaluation of crime prevention approaches yet published in this country (with Ivan Potas and Adrian Vining). It is heartening to see such an upsurge in crime prevention generated by the Council, governments, business and academia. However, we still maintain that there are some very real difficulties in how the term is used, implemented and conceptualised.In our examination of the current situation of crime prevention in this country, we have elected to focus on juvenile justice policies and programs for most of the more comprehensive and recent work has been done in this area. But we need tobegin by asking some basic questions: who comprises the group we call “youth”, do we take a justice or a welfare approach to their situation, and are they predominantly victims or offenders? In addition we need to examine the broader questions: how do changes in public attitudes (like victims rights and law and order lobbies) affect youth policies, and how does fiscal constraint and political expediency alter the policy directions? This paper explores these questions and then examines recent juvenile justice developments in Western Australia and Queensland. It critically analyses the schemes in these States to arrive at the view that the justice and welfare models are not additive and that is therefore time to take a new approach - namely a social development model to crime prevention

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Crime prevention - Now for the hard questions?

https://pure.bond.edu.au/ws/files/27381521/Crime_prevention_Now_for_the_hard_questions.pdf

Crime prevention - Now for the hard questions?

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