Abstract
Throughout the years, governments all over the world have struggled with the crime enigma: why do some people commit crimes? What can be done to counteract this type of unwelcome behaviour? In search of qualified answers, governments have asked professionals for help, primarily social scientists who should be able to interpret the crime phenomenon, and propose strategies for fighting crime. Accordingly, institutes of criminology have popped up around the world, teaching students different ways of understanding and solving the crime challenge. However, even though much has been achieved, there still exists a paradoxical difference between input and output in the war on crime. As Braithwaite (1989) has pointed out, it is thought-compelling that the country with the highest number of criminologists is also the country with one of the highest crime rates. Perhaps, therefore, it is not lack of knowledge about the crime enigma that represents our biggest challenge?
The market is saturated with books on crime prevention, and numbers of White Papers all over the world have analysed what could be done. Annual competitions are arranged and awards are given to the best crime preventing measure. In much the same way as we believe we one day can solve the cancer enigma through committed research, we like to think that criminologists will give us a scientific answer to the crime enigma. This is work in progress.
A recent contribution to the burgeoning literature on crime prevention is Tore Bjørgo’s Preventing Crime: A Holistic Approach. Bjørgo, a professor of Police science at the Norwegian Police University College, Oslo, legitimizes the need for another book on this topic by saying: ‘[t]raditional “schools” of crime prevention, like the criminal justice model, social crime prevention or situational crime prevention, have proved to be too narrow and do not combine well with other approaches’ (cover page). Accordingly, Bjørgo sets out to extract the main preventive mechanisms of existing approaches in order to develop a more holistic approach. The model he develops consists of nine preventive mechanisms: building normative barriers to crime; reducing recruitment; deterrence; disruption; incapacitation; protecting vulnerable targets; reducing benefits of crime; reducing harm; and facilitating desistance. From this starting point, Bjørgo illustrates the usefulness of his model by applying it to five very different forms of crime: domestic burglary; criminal youth gangs; driving under the influence; organized crime originating in outlaw motorcycle clubs; and finally, terrorism.
Bjørgo represents what we could designate a ‘pure science’ school of criminology: finding out what are the facts, and then proposing the best evidence-based practice. However, he does not hide that his writing is (ideologically) influenced by the so-called Nordic model of crime prevention: no simple measure alone can reduce a particular type of crime, but through a comprehensive strategy one should be able to establish a series of barriers that can work together. This is not a unique message. However, the model Bjørgo proposes is a generic part of the Scandinavian, social democratic welfare state, emphasizing a universal approach to social problems where ‘solidarity’ and ‘justice’ are core values. In other words, combatting crime is not only a (scientific) question of ‘best practice’; it is also a question of values and priorities.
Bjørgo is well schooled in the criminology of prevention. He guides the reader through huge amounts of empirical research on who, what, where, when and why. It strikes the persevering reader how much we really ‘know’ about crime. In this regard, this book is a valuable source of information about the present status on crime prevention strategies (at least ‘in the Nordic/Western countries’). By applying the same analytical approach (cf. the nine preventive mechanisms) to all of the five types of crime he looks at (see above), the book is easy to read and easy to follow; almost like a cookery book! In this way, the author has succeeded very well in his ambitions: to present a general model for crime prevention that can be applied by students, practitioners within the police, the correctional service, local authorities and voluntary organizations. What’s more, Bjørgo advises his target audience (which actually is all of us) to apply the model to all types of crime.
Bjørgo is careful to compel the people who are planning and implementing crime prevention initiatives to reflect on the different measures he proposes. After having analysed measures, main crime preventing actors, target groups and benefits of the proposed deterrence strategies, he discusses drawbacks and negative side-effects. This is important.
However, questions relating to ethical and political dilemmas in crime prevention are not very well developed in this book. Bjørgo has written an excellent book from a top–down, governmental, social engineering perspective. He has written a book that shows his genuine interest in ‘removing’ one of the negative side-effects of modernity: ‘the exclusive society’ (Young, 1999). But there are two principally different ways to think and talk about crime: one is to define crime as a ‘problem’; another is to define crime as a ‘conflict’. The first approach invites a social engineering way of thinking, where the involved crime combatants look for ‘best practice’ and ‘what works’. This is the approach where science can give advice about regulating, controlling and repressing crime. The other approach looks at what Bjørgo (and others) defines as the ‘root causes’ of crime. Since Bjørgo’s ambition is to present a comprehensive model of crime prevention, he, of course, also mentions socio-economic conditions (‘great disparity between rich and poor provides even more fertile grounds for property crime’ (p. 40)). However, as the late Norwegian criminologist, Nils Christie (2011: 708), has argued:
The most important tasks for those of us working in the area of criminology might be to function as readers and translators of these acts [crimes] and not first and foremost as assistants to the system obliged to control the talkers.
Of course, society should and must ‘combat crime’. Politicians and their prolonged arm have to do their best to stop indecencies of all kinds. But a scholar maintaining to offer a universal and all-encompassing model for crime prevention should be careful to address the basic question: what is the problem? Bjørgo writes: ‘[a] comprehensive strategy must therefore be based on establishing a series of barriers that can work together: the criminal acts of actors not stopped by the initial barrier may be stopped by one of the others’ (p. 240). In my translation: if we do not succeed in creating a just and inclusive society, we have to step up the other ‘preventive mechanisms’ (like deterrence, disruption, incapacitation, protecting targets, etc.). I am not sure about how to interpret Bjørgo at this point, but in the huge amount of means to prevent crime that he proposes, the overarching perspective becomes obscure.
Crime prevention is most of all about combatting social and economic inequality, about creating justice, respect and recognition (Barry, 2016). From Merton (1957) to Wilkinson and Pickett (2009) this perspective has been underlined time and again. In his ambitions to include ‘everything’ in his crime prevention model, there is a certain danger that Bjørgo could bring more fuel to ‘the culture of control’ (Garland, 2001). In 1999 Fukuyama wrote that ‘at the “end of history” there is a widespread acknowledgement that in post-industrial societies further improvement cannot be achieved through ambitious social engineering’ (1999: 4). Bjørgo is much more optimistic about what governmental (and other) institutions/organizations can attain through ingenious interventions. Coming from a geographic area that criminologist John Pratt (2008) has described with the term ‘Scandinavian exceptionalism’, Bjørgo has good reasons for searching for, and documenting, the panacea recipe for crime prevention. Even if the book has not too much to say about value conflicts, power, inequality and justice, it is definitely an excellent guide for those looking for operational interventions in the ongoing war on crime.