ABSTRACT
It can hardly have escaped the attention of those with a professional or academic interest in crime that there has been a great deal more attention devoted to the concept of crime prevention in recent years, although any criminologist with a sense of history would rightfully question the extent to which the phenomenon is indeed a recent one. There may be more talk about the prevention of crime today, with the concept being used as a contrast with more traditional criminal justice system approaches to crime control, but as a principle and objective crime prevention has always lain at the heart of criminal justice policy in the modern period, and the practice itself is much older. Hence, as Reith (1956) points out, the prevention of crime has been “the principal object” of the police since their establishment on a permanent footing in England in 1829, while the codification of the criminal law in the nineteenth century, the rationalization of penal policy around the central institution of the prison, and the eventual extension of penal discourses and practices into the community in the early twentieth century have all been similarly justified in the name of crime prevention.
