Crime prevention in Australia: beyond 'what works?'
Cherney, Adrian & Sutton, Adam (2007) Crime prevention in Australia: beyond 'what works?'. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 40(1), pp. 65-81.
Recent decades have seen governments around Australia launch crime prevention policies to much fanfare. Often, however, achievements have fallen well short of expectations. A key problem is that too many attempts to develop and implement crime prevention have not thought through and articulated what relevant strategies might signify and hope to achieve. In the absence of a basic understanding of, and agreement about, the overall enterprise in which central and local players are engaged, program sustainability and drift problems prevail. Attempts to overcome these difficulties simply by maintaining that polices must be based on "what works?" principles are not helpful. This paper works through the implications of the above observations for the way crime prevention strategies should be designed and administered. It argues that commitment to flexible problem identification and solving in the context of a clearly articulated crime prevention planning process is critical to success. However for crime prevention to emerge and be sustained, governments must see it as consisting of a dialogue between central and local levels. This will only be achieved if strategies developed by the centre are informed by, and reaffirm, a clear political vision and sense of mission.
Impact and interest:
Citation counts are sourced monthly from and citation databases.
These databases contain citations from different subsets of available publications and different time periods and thus the citation count from each is usually different. Some works are not in either database and no count is displayed. Scopus includes citations from articles published in 1996 onwards, and Web of Science® generally from 1980 onwards.
Citations counts from theindexing service can be viewed at the linked Google Scholar™ search.
|Item Type:||Journal Article|
|Keywords:||crime prevention, australia, what works, evidence based crime prevention, criminology|
|Subjects:||Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification > STUDIES IN HUMAN SOCIETY (160000) > CRIMINOLOGY (160200) > Police Administration Procedures and Practice (160205)
Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification > STUDIES IN HUMAN SOCIETY (160000) > CRIMINOLOGY (160200) > Causes and Prevention of Crime (160201)
|Divisions:||Current > QUT Faculties and Divisions > Faculty of Law
Current > Schools > School of Justice
|Copyright Owner:||Copyright 2007 Australian Academic Press|
|Deposited On:||20 Sep 2007|
|Last Modified:||10 Aug 2011 17:42|
Repository Staff Only: item control page