British Journal of Criminology Advance Access originally published online on November 29, 2006
British Journal of Criminology 2007 47(3):373-389; doi:10.1093/bjc/azl092
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The British Journal of Criminology 47:373-389 (2007)
© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD). All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Reinventing Prevention
Why Did Crime Prevention Develop So Late?
* Pat O'Malley, Faculty of Law, University of Sydney, 173175 Pitt Street, Sydney, NSW 2000. Australia; pat_omalley{at}carleton.ca. Steven Hutchinson is at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, and can be reached at shutchi2{at}connect.carleton.ca.
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While crime prevention is taken to exemplify governance in the risk society, it may represent a retarded example of risk-based urban security. Crime prevention was unaffected by risk-based prevention characteristic of much nineteenth-century government of this domain. The development of risk-based fire prevention, by contrast, was substantially in place at the turn of the twentieth century, promoted by the convergence of insurance and other interests in securing property. Rather than seeing crime prevention as exemplifying the move toward the risk society thesis, it may be better understood as a case in which neo-liberal governance and insurance technologies transformed a domain of governance that had been unusually resistant to risk-based approaches.