ABSTRACT
This chapter will provide a sociological overview of recent developments in the fast changing and growing field of crime prevention and public safety. The sector of ‘prevention’ now complements – and at times competes with – the older fields of ‘policing’ and ‘penality’ in the late modern crime control complex (Garland, 2001). The chapter begins by plotting the emergence of the new preventive logics in the governance and control of crime and insecurity in recent decades across late modern societies like the UK.1 Here, particular attention will be paid to the ‘solution’ offered by ‘social’ and ‘situational’ crime preventive measures and strategies to the crisis of both traditional criminal justice and welfare state responses to crime. These ‘techniques’ are now embedded in most late modern states’ policies of prevention and reduction. Next, the chapter looks at the reductive, self-proclaimed, modernising ‘experiment’ of the New Labour Government in the UK in the first decade of the new century as a case-study of the late modern state’s attempts to manage crime control and social exclusion. This discussion focuses on the inter-connected development of a national and centralised ‘what works’, ‘evidence-based’ paradigm, and the institutionalisation of statutory local crime and disorder reduction partnerships through which responsibility for the production of community safety is seemingly handed over to a plurality of local actors. Finally, the chapter considers in brief comparative trends in community safety and crime control and the possible futures of crime prevention and the politics of safety.
