“RISK, POWER AND CRIME PREVENTION”

Pat O’Malley (1992)

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SITUATIONAL CRIME PREVENTION AND THE OFFENDER

Situational crime prevention destroys the disciplines’ biographical individual as a category of criminological knowledge, but the criminal does not disappear.  Opportunities only exist in relation to potential criminals who convert open windows into windows of opportunity for crime.  To install such an agent, situational crime prevention replaces the biographical criminal with a polar opposition – the abstract and universal ‘abiographical’ individual – the ‘rational choice’ actor […].

                However, while abstract and abiographic, this rational choice individual nevertheless is clearly structured.  It thinks in cost-benefit terms – weighing up the risks, potential gains and potential costs, and then committing an offence only when benefits are perceived to outweigh the losses […].

Situational crime prevention’s rejection of concern with biographical-causal approaches to understanding crime, and the focus on the targets of crime rather than on offenders, combine to deflect attention from the social foundations of offending.  The effect is achieved in the case of the rational choice model by its rejection of our agnosticism toward conditions which may have given rise to the offenders’ action, but also and especially by constructing the offender as abstract, universal and rational.  […] Such abstract and universal, equal and voluntary individuals are free to act in a perfectly ‘rational’ self-interested fashion, maximizing gains and minimizing costs.  They are free to commit crime or not to commit crime.

                This latter point suggests that not only is the knowledge of the criminal disarticulated from a critique of society, but in turn, both of these may be disarticulated from the reaction to the offender.  As Foucault made clear, what he saw as the ‘criminological labyrinth’ was constructed around the assumption that crime is caused, and that cause reduces responsibility (1977: 252).  Elimination of cause from the discourse of crime obviously restores responsibility and this has its effects on punishment.  Thus the logical corollary of situational crime prevention from the point of view of a New Right discourse, is a policy of punitive or just desserts sentencing, rather than a program of sentencing for reform.  Compatibility of crime prevention thinking with these models is furthered by the argument that salutary punishment in the form of imprisonment incapacitates offenders and thus acts directly as a means of behavioural crime prevention.

                Thus the criminal, becomes individually responsible for our concern with offenders as such ceases with that knowledge.  In consequence, any class, race, gender, or similar foundations of crime, especially as identified by causal criminology, are automatically excluded from consideration except in their role as risk-enhancing factors.  If bothered with at all they are taken to be predictive of behaviours, not explanatory of meaningful actions.

                This shift in understanding eschews also the moral dimensions of the sociological criminologies, condemned to the status of ‘failures’ by situational crime prevention theorists […].  Out with them go their respective agendas linking crime and social justice – for example that of strain theory and its concerns with relative deprivation and inequality of opportunity, and the appreciative recognition of cultural variability and of the impact of material degradation of the inner-city poor that was the hallmark of ecological analysis.  Academically as well as politically and administratively, it now becomes respectable to regard criminals as unconstrained agents, and to regard crime control policy as divorced from questions of social justice.

                Finally, the ‘politics of failure’ provide a technical glass to justify punitiveness.  If correction and deterrence do not work, then  sanctions based on these ideas must be swept away.  What is left for the offender but punishment, retribution and incapacitation?

SITUATIONAL CRIME PREVENTION AND THE VICTIM

If situational crime prevention short-circuits the link between criminality and social justice, then it might be expected that the victim of crime moves more into the centre of concern.  In some sense this is undoubtedly the case, as the rhetoric of ‘protecting the public’ rings loud throughout this program (e.g. Home Office, 1990).  However, just as the offenders are disconnected from the political dimensions of their existence, so too are the victims, for victims like offenders are to be understood as rational choice actors, responsible and free individuals.

                Prevention now becomes the responsibility of the victim.  This view is by no means the construct of academic reflection but permeates crime prevention thinking at all levels.  At one level, this position emerges no doubt because it reduces pressure on police forces, which have not noticeably reduced crime victimization and which are therefore vulnerable to political pressure for this reason.  Thus a senior official of the Australian insurance Council has noted: ‘Severely restricted police resources and the sheer frequency of crime, means that any improvement in the situation will rely heavily on property owners accepting responsibility for their own property and valuables’ (Hall, 1986: 243).

                At broader political levels similar arguments are being presented for much the same reasons.  Responding to news that  crime rates in Britain have reached record levels, ‘the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, blamed a large portion of the crimes on the victims’ carelessness.  “We have to be careful that we ourselves don’t make it easy fro the criminal” she said’ (Age, 28 September 1990).

                Not only does responsibility and thus critique shift, but so too do costs.  Privatization of security practice and costs – to be seen in the trend toward private security agencies, security devices, domestic security practices, neighbourhood watch schemes (with attendant insurance underwriting) – generate the rudiments of a user pays system of policing security.  Closer to the heart of neo-conservatism, the rational choice public will come to see the justice in this:

The general public’s apathy about self-protection arises mainly from ignorance of the means of protection, and a perception that somebody else – ‘the Government’ or insurance companies – bears most of the cost of theft and vandalism.  The community is beginning to realize however that crime rates are rising despite increased penalties, that the judicial system cannot cope, and that it is the individual who eventually foots the bill for crime through increased taxes for expanded police forces and more jails, and through higher insurance premiums.

(Geason and Wilson, 1989: 9)

In this process, security becomes the responsibility of the private individuals who through the pursuit of self-interest, and liberated from enervating reliance on ‘the state’ to provide for them will participate in the creation of the new order.

                Putting these points together, it can be seen that in this construction of situational crime prevention there is no conflict between risk-management per se and punitiveness.  Quite to the contrary, in the privatization of the actuarial techniques are the same notions of individual responsibility and rational choice that are present in the justification for expanding punitiveness.  Reliance on the state, even for protection against crime, is not to be encouraged.  Quite literally therefore it represents the expression in one field of the New Right ideal of the Strong State and the Free Market, combining to provide crime control in a period when the threat of crime generated by the Right’s own market-oriented practices can be expected to increase.

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