Crime Prevention Defined

This chapter looks at the various ways in which crime prevention and crime reduction have been defined in the past and explains why these definitionsCrime defining now need expansion. It then points to the large (and growing) base of valuable research on crime prevention that informs the task, including the databases that exist, the government and private research labs that have been set up, and the multitude of Ph.D. students and other researchers found in criminologyCriminological theory and criminal justice departments in Australian universities. These include scholars who have developed and expanded the so-called ‘What Works?What works’ literature that has been available to governments for thirty years. The chapter concludes on a despairing note, however, highlighting the inexplicable reluctance of policymakersPolicymakers to be informed by the theoretical and practical research findings (let alone to act upon them), and who regularly fail to rely upon the wealth of evidence found in the available evaluative data.