ABSTRACT
Crime prevention has many different faces. This applies to Germany in particular because of the federal structure of the country. The German constitution provides a highly differentiated separation of powers within the wide field of criminal justice: the central government retains the legislative competence for criminal law and criminal procedure, whereas police laws and strategies are a matter for the 16 federal states. Moreover, the smallest administrative unit in Germany, the local community, is entitled to pass a broad range of regulations concerning public order and social policy that can be very influential for the implementation or development of local prevention policies. Hence, it is not surprising that such a federal structure leads to a rather patchy picture of crime prevention policies. Nevertheless, there have been and there are today some common trends and developments in Germany as a whole. The aim of this chapter is first to give a brief account of crime prevention strategies applied from the 1970s until the 1990s, before looking at recent policies since the turn of the millennium. Finally, there is a critical summary of the major developments in German crime prevention policies during the past decades.
