Crime Prevention in Australia: Beyond ‘What Works?’

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 article 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.