International Journal of Crime Prevention and Ccommunity Safety
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from the average schoolboy; and there was precious little surplus spending power for teenage binge-drinking and late-night carousing. Moreover, where there was temptation it was generally put beyond reach. Shopkeepers, for example, prudently put goods on one side of the counter and customers on the other. So economics does have a role (and long may the IEA who published this book continue to promote the debate), but it is mostly to incentivise governments, service providers, manufacturers and retailers to design services and products which do less to provoke crime and are more resistant to it. Let those who lead us into temptation deliver us from evil. Crime has many root causes – perhaps the least of which is the quantum of “criminals” at any given time. Certainly crime is not unstoppable. It has been declining for a decade (not that you would know it if you believe what you read in the papers), and the epidemic of antisocial behaviour can be tackled equally successfully, in part by tough enforcement (zero tolerance of those who are drunk and disorderly) but also through economic incentives (by stopping licensed pubs and clubs making profit at society’s expense). Which brings me to one of the useful lessons from this book. Paul Ormerod borrows from (though does not credit) Malcolm Gladwell’s observations that crime, like fashion or so many other things, is not linear but is susceptible to tipping-points, so at a certain point small changes can have watershed effects. Crime can be cut – and if you do it right it can be cut radically. But, as any economist should know, it will usually be easier to change circumstances than to change people.
Nick Ross I n t er n at io n al J o u r n a l o f C r i m e P r e v e n tion a nd C commu nity Sa f et y Simon Hallsworth Street Crime 2005. Cullompton, Devon, Willan Publishing. IISBN: 1-84392-028-X Crime Prevention and Community Safety (2006) 8, 205–208. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpcs.8150019 Simon Hallsworth has written a book that is intriguing and challenging and at times, perhaps, also a little frustrating. Its declared purpose is to “take street crime seriously” something, he argues convincingly, that rival schools of thought in criminology have singularly failed to do. On the right, that failure
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Crime Prevention and Community Safety 206
is attributed to a tendency to try to understand street crime within the broad discourse of a criminology of the underclass. Within the discourse of administrative criminology (whether its original forms or its newer post-1998 “realist” versions) the inadequacy is linked to a set of ideas that imply that street crime can be successfully “policed away”, “locked away” or “designed out” of existence (p. 170). From the point of view of left, or critical, criminology (and here, notwithstanding Hall et al’s pathbreaking Policing the Crisis (1978)), the problem has involved the efforts to diminish the significance of street crime and to attempt to shift focus back to the (more numerous, more costly, more harmful) crimes of the suites
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