Prevention without politics?

Abstract

The State of Victoria pioneered the late-modern `rediscovery' of community-based crime prevention in Australia when it implemented a Good Neighbourhood Programme in 1988. Loosely based on France's so-called Bonnemaison scheme, Good Neighbourhood was the first of a succession of strategies. The article summarizes the history of crime prevention in Victoria from 1988 to the present, and documents the strengths and weaknesses of each programme implemented. It argues that crime prevention and community safety has been a chameleon movement, capable of accommodating itself to a wide range of political and administrative regimes. Academic criminologists should give greater recognition to the expressive and political dimensions of community safety and crime prevention. Assessments that focus purely on whether initiatives have worked in a technical sense, or that strive simply to locate crime prevention and community safety within broader theories about power and governance, fail to understand key aspects of the Victorian experience.

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