ABSTRACT
For the past quarter of a century or so the growth of public policies and implementation strategies advanced across diverse jurisdictions in the name of crime prevention and community safety has constituted one of the major innovations in crime control, with significant implications for the manner in which crime and safety are governed. The ensuing ‘preventive turn’ has been variously described as representing a ‘major shift in paradigm’ (Tuck 1988), an ‘epistemological break’ with the past (Garland 2000: 1) and ‘a long-overdue recognition that the levers and causes of crime lie far from the traditional reach of the criminal justice system … afford[ing] the potential to encourage a stronger and more participatory civil society and challenge many of the modernist assumptions about professional expertise, specialisation, state paternalism and monopoly’ (Crawford 1998: 4). Others have proclaimed it as confirming the rise of ‘risk’ as an overarching governmental narrative (O'Malley 1992) or as ushering, and evidencing, a new era of ‘networked governance’ (Johnston and Shearing 2003). Despite these claims, conceptions of preventive governance are by no means new. In Britain, Patrick Col-quhoun (1797) and Edwin Chadwick (1829), among others, advocated forms of crime prevention through policing aimed at reducing opportunities and temptations that resonate strikingly with contemporary trends. More broadly, classical liberal thought in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries promoted the governance of future life choices on the basis of rational calculations of the relative balance between risk and reward that closely echoes the logic of modern crime prevention thinking, most notably its situational variant (Clarke 1995, 2000).
