Crime Prevention and Volatile Social Issues

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Introduction
Crime prevention embodies a range of volatile social issues. These issues encompass public safety, mass media response, and political strategies which induce intense public debate and criticism, especially during an age in which the world is engaged in a “war on crime”. Given the role of policy makers in crime prevention, effective strategies are hinged on a consideration of all these issues rather than singular measures focused on isolated strategies. This facet of policy implantation is attracting growing attention as a viable source of crime prevention substituting traditional criminal justice mechanics. In fact, a significant fragment of criminological literature is receding from a dependence on criminal justice mechanisms to an acceptance of crime preventative policy implementation. Irrespective of this academic progression, Western Governments have continued a persisted focus on reinforcing the criminal justice system. This paper investigates the effects of these social issues and their requisite interaction with crime preventative initiatives as well as emergent and successful crime prevention tactics in the national and international contexts.
Crime Prevention and Politics
Crime prevention is generally not raised by politicians when discussing crime solution. In fact, crime prevention is generally omitted as an effective solution to crime prevention in the context of mass media discourse. The preferred course of crime prevention appears to include the institution of “quick fix criminal justice” mechanisms. The typical reaction by Western Governments in relation to delinquency and crime prevention has been framed as simply to “throw” money at the issues in order to produce criminal justice based solution...

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...ety with deficient expertise about the contexts and mechanics of effective intervention schemes. The challenge for Australian and foreign governments is to apply evaluation standards for crime prevention to scrutinise the effectiveness of proposals and implementations instead of being provoked by political and media influences and ignoring the effects of victimisation or promoting secondary victimisation fear. These issues require evaluative implementation and must be assessed as a group of coexisting factors to fully describe how they related to one another in the context of crime prevention. The risks of ignoring these factors is pellucid and the consequences of policy implementation that ignores these effects or commits solely to traditional law and order system augmentation without supplementary policy considerations runs the risk of enhancing these effects.

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