John Braithwaite. Photo by Darren Boyd.
Spending money on crime prevention might prove a wiser investment than building more prisons, writes Australian Research Council Federation Fellow JOHN BRAITHWAITE. Between 1910 and 1990 Australia had an imprisonment rate at approximately half what it is today. Punitive thinking led to the tragedy of massive public investment in prison building in an era when the evidence suggested this was not an effective way of reducing crime. A shift of investment from prisons to evidence-based crime prevention can bequeath a safer society to our children. When I was a young criminologist, the evidence seemed to be that better policing policies made little difference to the crime rate. Now we have superior evidence from randomised controlled trials showing, for example, that violence can be sharply reduced by police targeting hot-spots of violence. Another area of evidence-based crime prevention where we have made inroads is restorative justice.
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