NCJ Number
204934
Date Published
2004
Length
25 pages
Annotation
This chapter explores policy transfer concerning local crime control efforts in advanced liberal democracies.
Abstract
The processes of economic, cultural, and political globalization has influenced crime control policies among advanced nations primarily by drawing attention to the threat of transnational crime. The result has been cooperation concerning transnational policies and policing initiatives designed to control cross-border crimes, such as drug and human trafficking and terrorism. However, in the wake of transnational cooperation concerning cross-border crimes, there also been an international trade regarding the more mundane, local volume crimes, such as crimes against the person and routine acquisitive crimes. This has been coupled with a growing shift away from reactive crime control policies and toward more crime prevention strategies. The authors question the transatlantic origins of local partnership approaches to crime control in Britain in the 1980's and 1990's. The modern examples for British urban regeneration and crime prevention were developed in the United States under the Reagan and Bush senior administrations. The goals of modern crime prevention were to remove crime and serious criminals from areas in decline and then introduce urban regeneration initiatives that would be sustainable through local citizen and business initiatives. However, within the British context, this was a difficult mission to accomplish given that British businesses had not accepted leading roles in local governance since the rise of the welfare state. Thus, significant modifications were made to the United States model to better suit local conditions in the United Kingdom. Despite the reinvention of these policies, local businesses failed to lead in the way desired, which illustrates the second main point of the chapter: policies and initiatives that emanate from those in power are dependent on local actors for their implementation. This raises the possibility of an "implementation gap" which threatens policies that are derived in a top-down fashion and leaves room for local resistance and avoidance. In the United Kingdom, the result was that local actors had room to diagnose local issues of crime control and promote locally appropriate solutions. The authors conclude that policy discourses that construct problems and solutions without regard to local context inhibit the desire and capacity to put such solutions to work. References