o'malley reinventing prevention

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doi:10.1093/bjc/az1092 BRIT.J. CRIMINOL. (2007) 47, 373-389Advance Access publication 29 November 2006

REINVENTING PREVENTIONWhy Did 'CrimePrevention'Develop So Late?

PAT O'MALLEY and STEVEN HUTCHINSON*While crime prevention is taken to exemplify governance in the 'risk society, it may represent aretarded example of risk-based urban security. Crime prevention was unaffected by risk-basedprevention characteristicof much nineteenth-century government of this domain. The develop-ment of risk-based ire prevention, by contrast,was substantially in placeat the turn of the twen-tieth century, promoted by the convergence of insuranceand other interests in securingproperty.Rather than seeing crime prevention as exemplifying the move toward the 'risk society' thesis, itmay be better understoodas a case in which neo-liberalgovernance and insurance technologiestransformed a domain of governance that had been unusually resistant to risk-basedapproaches.

Crime Preventionand the Risk SocietyIt is widely accepted that the rise of crime prevention is linked with a convergence ofsocial forces associated with the 'risk society' and the ascendancy of neo-liberal governancefrom the 1970s forward (Hughes 1998; Ericson and Haggerty 1997; Garland 2001).This transformation in crime control is characterized by the networking of state andnon-state agencies aimed at effecting reductions in rates of offending by deploying risk-based or 'actuarial' interventions. Among the earliest to recognize signs of a shift ofthis sort, Stan Cohen's (1985) Visions of Social Controlpointed to a declining faith in thetraditional welfare sanction, most especially with respect to attempts to uncover thesocial causes and individual motivations that lead to offending. In its place, Cohendetected an increasing emphasis on behaviours,and, in particular, increasing attentionto spatial distributions of crime and opportunities to offend. In the same year, Shearingand Stenning (1985) noted the emergence in the private sector of a more instrumentalform of control in which environments were being constructed in order to minimizeopportunities for unwanted behaviour. In a host of mundane ways using innocuous orcovert devices such as railings, cameras, gates and signposts, authorities were 'invisibly'channelling people into orderly and conforming behaviour, focusing not so much ondisciplining individuals but on regulating mass distributions and flows. Shearing andStenning alerted criminologists to the importance of noting that such transformationsin many ways displaced the need for coercive and disciplinary interventions by statepolice: civil society was becoming an increasingly important site for crime control. Aswell, they drew attention to the fact that such preventative models of regulation weredriven by an intention to reduce losses rather than a concern with moral reform. Thisbusiness ethic and its implications for crime control, they hinted, offered up signs of a* Pat O'Malley, Faculty of Law, University of Sydney, 173-175 Pitt Street, Sydney, NSW 2000. Australia; [email protected].

Steven Hutchinson is at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, and can be reached at [email protected]

TheAuthor 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime andJuslice Studies (ISTD).All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]


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possible future in which risk management would prevail over moral reform. At thesame time, other commentators (Reichman 1986; Simon 1987) were linking similarchanges to the dissemination of models native to insurance risk management. Whereasthe collection of crime data had previously been linked primarily to issues of the socialcauses of crime, in new developments they were being used to inform the identificationof risk factors, typified by the practice of situational crime prevention. In place of evid-ence on 'broken homes', 'anomie' or 'zones of transition'-with their implications forsocial justice concerns-the new statistical evidence related to security, to the identifi-cation of what David Garland (1996) was later to call 'criminogenic situations'. In turn,these interventions were being subjected to cost-benefit analyses, indicative that thekey issue was loss prevention rather than moral rectification (Reichman 1986). Mostpresciently, although this theme was not to be taken up for some years, JonathanSimon (1987) regarded these changes in crime control as associated with a far broader,insurance-informed transformation toward a 'risk society'.By the late 1980s, while still little recognized in much criminology, a new focus on riskwas taking shape. The next decade saw this become something of a new criminologicalorthodoxy. Feeley and Simon's (1992; 1994) major intervention took this in the directionof analysing penology with their theorization of risk-based or 'actuarial' justice. In placeof sentencing based on judicial experience and pre-sentence reports based on reform-oriented expertise, actuarial tables would dictate sentences whose content would prima-rily take the form of incapacitation. Justice was thought to be shifting ground, from pro-portionality between offence and sentence to proportionality between future risk andsentence, from rehabilitation of offenders to risk reduction for potential victims (Floudand Young 1982). With respect to crime prevention, O'Malley's (1991; 1992) workhelped to valorize what were to become three major threads in this analysis: the role ofthe insurance industry; the importance of networked connections between police, insur-ance and others; and the neo-liberal shaping of risk techniques. The insurance industrywas seen not only to be providing actuarial models for the technical governance of pre-vention, but also as acting the part of an agent of prevention by requiring policyholdersto introduce new 'target hardening' modifications to their property. Networking wasstimulated through insurance requirements that policyholders also report burglaries tothe police, and through industry funding and promotion of crime prevention pro-grammes such as Neighbourhood Watch (O'Malley 1991). On the other hand, the neo-liberal shaping of risk was characterized by the change in risk techniques. Previously,crime prevention had been a rather latent issue, thought to be effected largely throughsocial engineering, of the sort exemplified by the 'Chicago School' approaches, andthrough the deterrent effects of sentencing. By the mid-1990s, crime prevention was notonly recognized as becoming more central, but also as permeated by a neo-liberal riskfocus on financial accountability that linked crime prevention to cost-benefit analyses.The broader forms of social intervention had ever been dogged by their own admissionthat social engineering would only reduce crime in the long run. In the new environ-ment, also consistent with insurance-based thinking, benefits were to be demonstrable inthe short run, and on a financial register.By the mid-1990s, then, criminology had identified a threefold trend in crime con-trol: first, toward statistical and actuarial preventative technologies; second, toward thenetworked extension of the government of crime beyond police and the state-notablyinvolving the insurance industry; third, toward to a focus on 'designing out' crime and

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on situational opportunity reduction rather than previous preventative models thatfocused on deterrence, correction and the social and psychological causes of crime. Inthe late 1990s, the last part of the emerging analytical framework was set in place whena number of writers (e.g. Hebenton and Thomas 1996; Ericson and Haggerty 1997)linked these developments to the risk society thesis of Ulrich Beck (1992). Crime pre-vention now emerged-as had been suggested by Simon (1987) a decade earlier-as acutting edge of a much broader contemporary social transformation in which risk wasdisplacing other forms of governance.

A very considerable literature has developed in the last decade that has been map-ping, refining and updating this understanding of risk and crime prevention. Broadlyspeaking, a double shift was identified in which crime prevention was changing itsnature in the direction of risk-based techniques, and at the same time was moving fromthe sidelines of crime control to being among its most prominent domains. Accord-ingly, it appears almost odd to ask why did risk-based crime prevention occur, historicallyspeaking,so late? Yet, despite our current fixation with the risk society, it is not at al l thecase that risk-based prevention is new. To the contrary, the nineteenth century was thesite of some of the most spectacular governmental projects in urban security, environ-mental design and risk reduction. Notable were the huge engineering commitmentsinvolved in the development of sewerage and the provision of pure drinking water(Osborne 1996), while the 'designing-out' of disease and disorder was a priority ofurban planning (Joyce 2003). As Patrick Atiyah (1979) had stressed, the nineteenthcentury saw the discovery and generalization of a recognition that changing individualswas difficult and expensive, and that it was far cheaper and more effective to redesignenvironments so that individual morality or rationality ceased to be pivotal. ForFoucault (1984), this distributional and environmental governance was the second'axis' of power that developed at the time, alongside that of discipline. In criminologyand penology, as elsewhere in the social sciences, there has been an inordinate amountof attention to the growth of disciplinary institutions-notably the panoptical prison.Perhaps it was the intense focus on individual discipline in Foucault's (1977) Disciplineand Punish that has been responsible for the apparent novelty of risk-based governancein more recent analyses. Nevertheless, Foucault also stressed that the 'regulatory' axis,governing distributions and aggregates, was of equal importance. In fields such asmental health and eugenics, statistical and distributional techniques were beingdeployed in ways that were to affect whole sectors of the population, simultaneously'improving' population health and removing those who represented risks from generalcirculation (Castel 1991).

Such nineteenth-century developments in relation to risk-based or preventative gov-ernment could arguably be differentiated from current risk manoeuvres because of thelatter's being shaped by neo-liberalism. It has been stressed, for example, that currentapproaches to risk are distinguished by the fact that they individualize risk and 'respon-sibilise' the citizenry (O'Malley and Palmer 1996; Garland 2001). In the crime preven-tion field especially, individuals have been rendered responsible for their own riskmanagement, with respect to both their bodies and their property (Stanko 1990;O'Malley 1992). But, in this, there is little that is peculiar to the present. Early liberalgovernment also prioritized a preventative orientation in its cellular relations of con-tract and individual prudence. As the work ofJeremy Bentham illustrates, liberal politicaltheory assumed the formation of subjects who exercised foresight, who made plans and

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provided for anticipated accidents and misfortunes, and who took practical steps toavoid harm (O'Malley 2004). For example, the doctrine of 'contributory negligence'-in which an injured worker was found negligently to have contributed to his or her ow ninjury-effectively denied compensation to many. However, this was regarded as 'just'because the workers rather than the employers were seen as in the best place to avertthe harm. To award damages against the employer appeared not only unjust, butremoved the most effective risk reduction mechanism-the self-interest of the worker.Thus, if 'situational crime prevention' has its parallel in nineteenth-century 'situationaldisease prevention' (hydraulic engineering that 'designed out' typhus and dysentery),and if the statistical identification and incapacitation of high-risk potential offendershas precursors in contemporaneous psychiatric shift from dangerousness to risk, so the'responsibilised' potential victim of crime prevention had her parallel in the subject ofthe law of accidents.Of course, it might be argued that these developments are so far removed from thegovernance of crime that crime prevention interventions based on risk were in someway overlooked. But, in our view, this runs foul of a vital comparison to which we brieflyturn attention: that of fire prevention. The governances of fire and crime were, in prac-tice, rather closely linked. Apart from obvious issues of overlap relating to security ofproperty, public safety and order, in both Britain and North America fire services wereoften formally combined with police. At the close of the nineteenth century, this was truein a number of major boroughs, including Bristol, Liverpool, Nottingham, Portsmouthand Lancaster (Blackstone 1957: 283-6) and in many major North American cities(James 1955; Bugbee 1971). It is highly significant, then, that risk-based, networkedand responsibilizing fire-preventative governance was set in place during the last quar-ter of the nineteenth century in Britain and North America. With respect to tech-niques, discourses and forms of governance, fire prevention at this time bears astartling resemblance to developments that were not to occur in the field of crimeprevention for almost a century.

Risk-BasedPreventionand the Government ofFireWhile our current thinking about 'prevention' might not include the operations offire-fighting, nevertheless, this was clearly understood well into the nineteenth centuryas a principal means of 'fire prevention'. In Britain and North America, fire-fightingwas provided until well into the 1800s by volunteer brigades, often funded and some-times organized by fire insurers. In practice, this was the primary form of fire preven-tion practised by insurers who averred that other forms ran counter to their interests bytoo much reducing fire risks. While there is much dispute over why volunteer brigadeswere displaced by municipal and professional departments-including the claim thatinsurers demanded more effective intervention-it is clear that by the 1850s, they hadestablished a definable masculine culture associated with 'fighting' fire (Blackstone1957; Greenberg 1998). It was taken for granted that this dangerous work was exclu-sively to be performed by men, but because of the nature of early equipment-whichrequired great athleticism to drag fire engines through streets and operate manualpumps-by mid-century, fire-fighting was associated with a melange of Victorianmanhood: strength, fitness, heroism, dedication and skill. Perhaps not surprisingly, bri-gades were from an early date equipped with military-style uniforms, which, in keeping

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with the times, were often quite spectacular. These survived their municipal transfor-mation (Greenberg 2003) and, indeed, all of these masculine attributes were takenover into the municipal departments, where their previously democratic organizationwas displaced by a quasi military hierarchy. Prevention, in this context, had come to beassociated with the prevention of conflagration and the saving of lives: the containmentof harm and damage rather than a more risk-based approach that prevented the initialoutbreak of fire. Combined with the imagery of heroic manhood, the culture, organiza-tion and structure of fire departments were thus wedded to a masculine model of'protection'-in the sense of 'preventing by fighting'. As will be seen, this is markedlysimilar to what occurred with the contemporaneous development of police.

However, after the middle of the nineteenth century, new interest in more risk-basedfire prevention began to develop. One of the first indicators of this was a move fromfire insurers on both sides of the Atlantic against the fact that they were required tofund fire-fighting brigades (normally through a tax on premiums). Thus, in Britain,the secretary of the Phoenix insurance company reported to a Select Committee in1876 that the fire offices' contribution should be diminished because a large propor-tion of fire-fighting resources:.. . had been diverted to another purpose in which the fire insurance offices had no interest whatever.The protection of life was a subject altogether foreign to the interests of the fire offices. The insurancecompanies wanted stations in the centre where the big warehouse risks were, not in the suburbs.(Quoted by Blackstone 1957: 209)On the United States, likewise, Tebeau (2003: 213) notes that tw o very differentcourses were being plotted: 'firefighters increasingly associated fire danger with itshuman cost, whereas fire underwriters saw fire as primarily economic risk.' Fire-fightingwas thus beginning to be differentiated from a quite distinct idea of prevention by adouble-pronged shift-and, like crime prevention long after, not always without sometension between 'fighters' and 'preventers'. On the one hand, saving lives was regis-tered by the development of reactive technologies facilitating fire-fighters' entry intoburning buildings, which fitted well with the heroic legacy. On the other hand, whilefire insurance pursued its traditional concern with property, new risk-based predictivedevelopments appear. In Britain and America, insurers had long collected informationabout fire hazards. But, hitherto, this had occurred on a small scale, intermittently andunsystematically. Data were processed into rules of thumb and homilies about specifickinds of fire dangers, such as the need for fire doors to be closed and the dangers asso-ciated with wall openings through which belt pullies ran (Arkwright 1912). As Pearson(2004: 319) notes with respect to British fire insurance, the tendency was for flurries ofactivity investigating types of risk in the wake of short-term crises. In his view, littlesystematic data collection was carried out because fire insurance of business and indus-trial risks was, as yet, small beer. Most fire insurance ran at a loss in the first half of thenineteenth century, but was cross-subsidized by the highly profitable insurance of theresidential insurance policies of the large industrial and commercial policy holders.Fire policies were issued on businesses largely as a goodwill practice (Pearson 2004: 321).

After the middle of the century, however, information began to be gathered moresystematically. As well, these data were being analysed and worked upon by engineers,surveyors and actuaries employed by the insurers, with the aim of systematically iden-tifying, recording and quantifying fire risks (Manufacturers Mutual 1935). In turn,

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fire-prevention materials and technologies that came to be much sought-after by theproducers of such commodities-thus extending further their effective regulatoryreach. By the end of the century, this regulatory networking process was developing inmany directions, including interpenetration of state and insurance regulations. InBritain, this began as early as the 1870s, with legislation relating to boiler safety's beingshaped by insurance knowledge (Clayton 1971: 117-18). The formation of the BritishFire Prevention Committee in 1897-composed of insurers, engineers, architects andsurveyors-created a body that both carried out tests on materials and published find-ings and recommendations for fire-prevention regulations (BFPC 1902). The parallelformation of the American National Fire Prevention Association in 1896 broughttogether the resources and expertise of US and Canadian fire insurers, and increasedthe capacity of the industry not only to regulate its own customers, but increasingly toprovide regulatory models and standards for much wider consumption. One of themost important of these was to be the provision of draft fire codes for adoption bymunicipalities (Bugbee 1971). More than this, fire insurers not only had long lobbiedfor better municipal governance of fire risks, but had used the same techniques thatthey used with respect to private industry to regulate the public sector-most notablythrough the setting of fire insurance rates for cities and towns (Tebeau 2003). Effec-tively, this levied a fine on those municipalities that failed to conform to insurers' pre-ferred standards with respect to such matters as building codes, fire hydrants andzoning regulations. Nor was the potential to regulate fire departments in this wayignored by fire insurers. In the years that followed the turn of the twentieth century,leverage on municipalities allowed insurers to assess and rate fire departments them-selves. This put pressure on fire departments to develop their own fire-prevention offic-ers and bureaus-a process that advanced rapidly during the first 20 years of the newcentury (O'Malley and Hutchinson 2006).

In addition, across North America, insurance leverage resulted in the formation ofmany fire marshal's offices (often funded out of a levy in fire insurance contracts)which had further regulatory implications for fire departments, and more widely. Anearly development, paralleled on a more modest scale by the British Fire PreventionCommittee, was the mounting of public fire-prevention campaigns. This reflected thegrowing concern with the 'moral factor' of carelessness that had become a recurringtheme in late-nineteenth-century insurance literature. Thus, in 1884, Edward Atkinson-oneof the founders of the Boston based 'Factory Mutuals' network of fire insurers-bemoaned that 'the only persons who can prevent loss by fire are the owners or occu-pants of the premises. Upon them rests the responsibility for heavy loss in nearly everyfire' (Manufacturers' Mutual 1935: 96). By the end of the First World War, this concernhad grown in significance to the point at which it had come to be targeted as the singlemost important risk factor (Grove Smith 1918). To a risk-based and networked regimeof prevention ranging across the public and private sectors had been added a strongtheme of 'responsibilisation'.

We will return to some of the wider implications of this in the conclusions to thepaper. However, here, we want to stress that late-twentieth-century crime preventionthen was not at the cutting edge of such risk-based preventative government in urbansecurity, as we may have assumed. It had significantly comparable precursors in fire-prevention developments of almost a century earlier. Consequently, we now wish toreturn to our unexpected question-which may now appear less quirky. Why does

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crime prevention occur so late in the genealogy of the risk-based government of urbansecurity?

Police,Police Science and LiberalPreventioniIt is often argued that the fear of the continental system of Police played a key role inshaping the modern Police force, and, from that observation, it could be deduced thatthis was highly relevant to the fate of early crime prevention. Up to a point, this is true,although it is essential to note the 'exception' offered by Colquhoun. As is well known,Colquhoun proposed that the new Police of the nineteenth century should ratherclosely mirror the preventative and all-surveying mandate of Police. In his view, 'theprevention of crimes and misdemeanours is the true essence of Police' (Colquhoun1796: 259). As Neocleous (2000) points out, Colquhoun's preventative blueprint forpolice involved giving them wide-ranging powers. These powers were not to be limitedto the specific field of criminal law and justice, because Colquhoun related the originsof crime to more general issues of disorder and especially to the problem of indigence.Thus, the criminal police were to be a uniformed body with powers to enforce the crim-inal law, but the Municipal Police, of which they were a branch, were to carry out a gen-eral watch function, and to regulate cleaning of public spaces, license activities thatencourage fraud, oversee the measures for preventing and fighting fires, govern trans-portation and roads, remove and abate nuisances, police the building of houses and anunspecified array of other 'useful improvements'. It is clear that what Colquhoun hadin mind was a centralized organization composed of many branches,of which the crimi-nal police were but one (Colquhoun 1796: 35). Together, these various branches were(as the subtitle of his Treatise on Police states) to prevent harms to 'Public and PrivateProperty and Security'. In this sense, he can be regarded as developing a conception ofurban security that was prescient rather than retrogressive.

While the Municipal Police certainly took a form consistent with the detested PoliceScience, which likely ensured that Colquhoun's scheme would never get off theground, nevertheless, his proposal foreshadows the formation of urban security net-works over the next two centuries. That is, while the idea of a centralized police agencywas anathema to liberals, William Novak's (1996) work reveals that the regulatory functionsenvisaged in Colquhoun's police-minus the overarching focus on crime prevention-were to emerge in dispersed and fragmentary form in the work of a host of inspectors,by-law officers, court officers and police. Significantly, his analysis ignores the role ofthe private sector, already seen to be vital in the regulation of fire, and which was laterto become important in crime prevention. Functions more closely linked with thecriminal police-which nevertheless still preserved a preventative focus of a specificsort-were to appear in related form in Robert Peel's proposal for a MetropolitanPolice.Both Henry Fielding and Robert Peel were, like Colquhoun, part of the surge ofpreventative governance associated with the development of liberal government. ForPeel, in particular, the basic concept of the Metropolitan Police was to be preventative:It should be understood, at the outset, that the principal object to be attained is the prevention ofcrime. To this end every effort of the police is to be directed. The security of persons and property,

1We would like to acknowledge the meticulous research assistance provided by Daniel O'Malley in the preparation of this section.

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the preservation of public tranquility, and all the other objects of a Police Establishment will thus bebetter effected than by the detection and punishment of the offender, after he has succeeded in com-mitting the crime. (Quoted in Gilling 1997: 108)Prevention was thus directly linked with what we see as the formation of modern police.However, we should not read 'prevention' in the context of the emerging (criminal)police as coterminous with crime prevention of the twentieth century, although,clearly, there was some degree of overlap. Thus, for both Peel and Colquhoun, a ke ypreventative role concerned the gathering of information relevant to possible crimesand the surveillance of known offenders. While these have potential for risk-baseddevelopment, this was not to occur, for they remained primarily linked to knowledge ofspecific events in the form of 'detective' work. Even so, perhaps most important of allwas the assumed preventative role of police patrols-a model still firmly in place by the1960s. In other words, while police were associated with the preventative telos of thetime, we should not read history backwards and assume that police involvement incrime prevention meant then what it means now, after the 'revolution' of the 1980s.

Nevertheless, we might still want to ask why criminal police did not shift in the directionof risk-based crime prevention since, as will be seen, fire departments (as part ofColquhoun's broader preventative police) were to do this-albeit also often unwillingly-by the turn of the twentieth century; and, second, why didn't the broader preventativenetwork of agencies or 'branches' focused on crime prevention, as envisaged byColquhoun, shift toward risk-based models, also until the last quarter of the twentiethcentury? In some degree, these questions can be answered separately.

Police,Risk and InsuranceFrom 'the mid 19th century to about 1950 the trend in police activity was away fromorganized preventative activity' (Hudson 1974: 293). Hudson's thesis, later supportedby Emsley (1983), is that this reflects the difficulties of demonstrating the effectivenessof crime prevention, for it is hard to assess when a crime has been prevented.2 After1856, when the Metropolitan Police model became the standard required by the state,funding for uniforms and equipment was to be made available relative to efficiency,and this was difficult to demonstrate with respect to preventing crimes. Rather, num-bers of arrests and clearance rates-the effectiveness specifically of crime fighting andreactive detection-came to be the critical issue. Accordingly, emphasis on prevention-even in the limited form assigned to criminal police-tended to give ground to reactivemeasures. But, as Gilling has noted, while this shift may be attributable to pressurefrom the top, 'it is unlikely that it went without support at the bottom'. Preventativework of the sort outlined by Peel was likely to be uncomfortable and tedious, whereascrime fighting and reactive detection 'must have looked like a glamorous and moreproductive alternative to an occupational culture geared primarily to the removal ofsources of trouble from the streets' (Gilling 1997: 111). Equally to the point, as theplethora of studies on police 'working culture' reveal, this specific orientation becameembedded in the informal organization of policing, so much so that while (masculine)

2 Nor had this view changed a century later. In the 1960s, the Chief Constable of Shropshire noted that 'crime prevention doesnot lend itself easily to statistical analysis. A crime completely prevented is a crime unrecorded .... Crime prevention is essentiallya matter of faith in the value of the work being done' (Osmond 1962: 225).

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crime fighting appears as 'real' police work, crime prevention and its sibling, com-munity policing, have not sat well with this even into the present day (Chan 2003).In short, one part of this story is that while nineteenth-century liberalism generated astrong emphasis on prevention, with respect to crime prevention this was primarilytranslated into a specific form-in which the primary body to focus directly on crimecontrol had little or no incentive, and rapidly declining interest, in pursuing even itslimited mandate in prevention. Crime fighting-in the sense of patrol, detection andapprehension-came to be seen as preventative in the sense of deterring offenders andprotecting the public. Thus, even in the 1950s, it was still possible for a member of theHome Office Working Party on Crime Prevention to believe that 'crime prevention wasthe responsibility of every member of the service and that it would be a retrograde stepto set up crime prevention departments' (Security Gazette 1964: 175). This view, persist-ing well into the 1960s, assumed that:The twin police duties of preventing and detecting crime are interchangeable: prevention may oftenlead to detection, and detection followed by imprisonment prevents crime by at least one individualfor some time to come. Since the mere presence of a constable can be a deterrent it is also true to saythat every officer in uniform is concerned with crime prevention'. (Security Gazette 1964: 209)As the Report of the Royal Commission on the Police (1962) stated rather more succinctly,'the uniform man on the beat . . . provides the most effective deterrent to crime'(quoted in Rawlings 2002: 203).'In turn, this orientation was supported by a police working culture that came to val-orize a style of masculinity that emphasized danger, courage, action, the threat of viol-ence and the need to organize around this. No doubt, its formation was inflected bythe Victorian cult of manhood, which was also influential in the related field of fire-fighting. It may be true that this did not reflect the reality of much police work, for gen-erations of sociologists have' mapped out the mundane labour of police as quite distinctfrom that of the heroic 'thin blue line'. (And much the same is true for fire-fighters.) Itmay also not even be particularly important that the imagery of the masculine-heroicpolice officer has been culturally valorized in the mass media. What matters here is thatwithin the police, as they have developed across Britain and North America, there weremarked (and masculine) pressures that do not favour the pursuit of a risk-orientedcrime preventative model. 'Protectiveness', rather than risk-based 'prevention', isperhaps the better descriptor of how police had come to be oriented by the twentiethcentury. This was still at the centre of much police consciousness as late as themid-1960s, if not later. In 1964, there was a serious increase in specific types of crime,notably burglaries and housebreaking, which increased by nearly 15 per cent over theprevious year (Security Gazette 1965: 288). While, elsewhere, the Home Office and theinsurance industry were beginning to respond to such developments with the risk-oriented prototypes of what would become late-twentieth-century crime prevention, theCommissioner of the Metropolitan Police ignored this direction. He proposed instead athree-pronged attack: the creation of a special crime squad; the harnessing of the uni-formed branch to the investigation and detection of crime; and the formation of a specialpatrol group (Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis 1964). Thus, 'crime fighting'

3Or, again, consider the judgment of the Chief Constable of the Lancashire Constabulary that 'the most effective crime preven-tion measure yet devised is certainty of detection' (Security Gazette 1965: 170).382


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and 'prevention through patrol' remained most salient in police consciousness. This wasalso, perhaps, cemented in place by the tendency of police to protect its turf. That is,while networking came to be the hallmark of crime prevention in the late-twentieth cen-tury, it was still the case in the 1960s that this was regarded as a problem for implement-ing crime prevention. Thus, the (diplomatic) editor of the Security Gazette (1963: 6)commented that while the police were renowned for their skills:Nevertheless their practice of modern crime prevention techniques tends to be handicapped by twobasic defects: a certain distrust of public relations principles and a suspicion, more natural to tradeunion psychology, that appear to impinge on professional spheres of interest.., few police authorit-ies really show any practical desire to work intimately with outside bodies.To the extent that networking becomes the hallmark of preventative governance, aswas the case with fire prevention and late-twentieth-century crime prevention, clearly,this resistance represents a further barrier, and perhaps one of the factors inhibitingthe development of crime prevention from within police.

No matter in what form, as far as police and the Home Office were concerned at thistime, crime prevention still occupied 'a position of relative obscurity and unpopularity'(Gilling 1997: 69). Nevertheless, there were some stirrings. In Britain, for example, in 1951,the Home Office had run a National Crime Prevention campaign (not to be repeated until1965). Over the next decade, some police forces began to introduce crime prevention offic-ers. Usually one-officer concerns, these crime prevention units were very small in scale,marginal in the organization and specialized in providing advice to crime victims, mostly inthe business sector, on how to improve security. As this implies, the emphasis was to be onproperty. On this matter, Hudson (1968: 213)-formerly head of the crime preventionprogramme at Staffordshire Police College-is revealing, commenting that:The immediate aim of the police prevention activity in Britain has nevertheless been a modest one: toraise security levels in property by persuading occupiers of vulnerable premises to take simple-andoften inexpensive-measures to reduce the risk of crime. In a word, to secure the cooperation ofoccupiers to remove the opportunities which are available to criminals in this time of affluence, whensuch opportunities and incentives for crime are more numerous and greater than ever before.First, the focus on property is indeed significant, so much so that when the HomeOffice created a Standing Committee on Crime Prevention in 1967 (under sustainedpressure from the insurance industry (Wilmott 1968: 253)), it was divided into tw o sub-committees-surprisingly, not 'property crime' and 'crimes against the person', but'static' and 'mobile property'. Perhaps this is less surprising when we consider that theorganizations represented on that committee were, in addition to the Police Service, allfrom the world of insurance (four representatives) and commerce and industry (ninerepresentatives) plus a single representative from the British Security Industry Associa-tion. This focus on property suggests that a second aspect of Hudson's assessment may

' Muir (1962: 190) indicates a typical pattern of activity which-as will be seen-is reminiscent of the scale and level of(un)sophistication of fire insurance inspectors' reports ofalmost a century previous:

In connection with this scheme we have a Crime Prevention Advice Book. This book, with leaves in triplicate, is filled in on the spotby the Officer making the survey or giving advice. The original and one copy is then sent to Force Headquarters, the other copyremaining in the book. The original is sent to the owner of the premises with an accompanying letter and the remaining copybecomes a working copy. The working copy is returned to the Division when a check-up visit is due and the officer making thecheck-up records his observations on the back of the form. He also completes the back of the form remaining in the Advice Book.

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be highly relevant: the post-war emergence of the 'affluent society'. The developmentnot simply of 'prosperity' but, more crucially, of the consumer society may have been afactor that influenced the insurance industry to become increasingly involved in lobby-ing for crime prevention and pressuring the police to become more involved in thisfield. So, where had the insurance industry been all this time? Why had insurers-whowere to become so important in late-twentieth-century crime prevention-not effectedthe kinds of changes that had shaped risk-based fire prevention so much earlier?Perhaps the central issue is that property theft and burglary did not become signific-ant issues for the insurance industry until quite recently. While fire prevention hadbeen becoming a core insurance concern over the last half of the nineteenth century,this was not the case with crime-with the exception of arson, which substantially fellinto the field of fire prevention.5 In 1890, there were only tw o companies issuing bur-glary policies in Britain-and, until the end of the nineteenth century, burglary insur-ance had been regarded by the industry with contempt (McMillan 1922: 248). Untilwell into the twentieth century, insurance of this kind remained marginal; the indus-try's InsuranceGuide and Handbook did not even have a section on burglary insuranceuntil its 5th edition in 1912 (Simmonds 1912). In the 6th edition of 1922, it was madeclear that burglary insurance was not a mass industry but was largely restricted to cer-tain 'shopkeepers and householders who had special reasons for desiring to be pro-tected against loss by burglary' (1922: 249). Overwhelmingly, the latter referred to thewealthy, for, even by this comparatively late date, the three insurance classes of prin-cipal concern to the industry were 'collections of pictures, glass and curios', 'silver andgold plate' and jewellery, furs, dressing cases and similar property' (McMillan 1922:249-50). The poor state of development of the industry in this respect is reflected bythe fact that, as McMillan complains (1922: 270-1), so little accumulation and poolingof relevant data had occurred that there was no satisfactory method even of assessingthe premium to be charged for burglary risks of any magnitude.

In practice, this field of insurance remained relatively minor, if profitable, until well afterthe Second World War, when losses from burglaries and related 'outside' losses sustainedby commercial concerns began to gain significance (Litton 1982).6 During the 1960s, insur-ers began to respond to increasing losses by imposing improved security requirements onbusinesses (Pugh 1976). At least in the view of the insurers ('Companyman' 1977: 2094),this had a roll-on effect, for so effective were business crime prevention interventions seento be that this 'started to make things rather difficult for the professional thief and therewas a noticeable turn by the criminal fraternity to the private house risk'. It was this dis-placement that was assumed by some insurers to be responsible for the industry's pressur-ing householders to take greater precautions (Litton 1982: 129). In other accounts fromwithin the industry, the problem was more simply interpreted as 'soaring losses due totheft' (Security Gazette 1965: 410)-and, while this could be put down to exaggeration by theinsurers, it is significant that such protests were a new phenomenon, and the Security Gazette'Thus, arson investigation was to be the central concern of the fire marshal's offices set up around the turn of the twentieth cen-

tury (O'Malley and Hutclhinson 2006).6 It should be noted that losses occasioned by businesses in the absence of clear evidence of breaking and entering had longbeen excluded bv insurers due to the difficulties of establishing the causes of stock losses in settings in which breakage, shoplifting,mistakes in serving and theft by employees are all possible. These were 'so much under the control of the insured it is regarded bythe companies as being outside the scope of any practicable scheme of insurance' (McMillan 1922: 254). No doubt, this is one ofthe stimuli behind the growth of private security agencies in the industrial and commercial sector, and likely a reason why insur-ance interests were little exercised on the question of commercial crime prevention until the 1960s.

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here estimated that for the first time, crime losses had reached half the level of fire losses.Linked direcdy to this observation, unfavourable comparisons were drawn between the twofields of fire and crime prevention. For example, it was lamented that police crime preven-tion officers were small cogs in the police machine, and possessed few powers--certainlynone to match the Fire Prevention Officer's statutory powers of inspection of premises, andthe existence of an effective 'propaganda' or public relations organization (Security Gazette1965: 124). As this latter editorial mourned, given that the evidence pointed to the growingcost of crime, and the fact that this was approaching the cost of fire losses, 'Why is it then isit that one type of emergency can stimulate the government to arrange cooperative counteraction, but in another the CPO (crime prevention officer) is left to fight a lonely battle?'.

In short, our answer to this question is that despite the significant development of apreventative telos of government in the nineteenth century, a number of forces hadpropelled police away from a risk-oriented framework of prevention. On the one handwas the development of police as a quasi-military form of organization and the growthof a police culture that emphasizes a form of masculine heroism. As with fire depart-ments, this pressed them toward crime fighting and protection rather than the kind ofrisk-based crime prevention that was to arise in the last quarter of the twentieth century.With respect to fire prevention, however, the insurance industry had entered the fieldearly and aggressively, developing its own regulatory initiatives toward risk-based, net-worked and 'responsibilising' prevention in the late 1800s. By the early twentieth century,this had extended, via influence on municipal governance, to colonization of the firedepartments themselves-something that was not to happen with respect to police andcrime prevention until the last quarter of the century. With respect to crime prevention,however, the insurance industry was not oriented toward crime prevention until into the1960s, at which point, it began an involvement that was to become increasingly activeboth as a pressure group and as an 'agent of prevention', helping to effect and generalizea new approach to crime prevention (O'Malley 1991; 1992; Ericson et aL 2003).

Conclusions:Neo-Liberalism, Risk andPreventativeGovernmentIt is not our intention to turn current theses on their head, and suggest that theirreading of the impact of neo-liberalism on shaping and promoting such develop-ments as crime prevention have been wrong or grossly exaggerated. The evidencesupporting such claims is far too strong to permit such a position. What our evidencedoes suggest, however, is that risk-based preventative government, with its correlativeelements of responsibilisation and networking, were in place in contiguous domainsin the nineteenth century. There, they were nestled quite comfortably with contem-porary (and enduring) liberal concerns about the significance of prevention andforesight, and of the central place to be given to utilitarian ideals and to individualresponsibility. While actuarial techniques were developing earlier in such fields aslife insurance, fire insurance proved to be a site in which actuarial techniques weredeveloped, and indeed were innovated with prevention rather than just (insurance)compensation in mind. While risk developed in fire prevention-and in related andoverlapping fields such as engineering and architecture at this time (Clayton 1971:117-18)-risk did not automatically spread-at least in this form-throughout alldomains of government. Crime prevention is an example of an area in which non-riskpractices were set in place organizationally and by the working culture of practitioners

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pivotal to the field and in the absence of other impetus toward risk-originating, forexample, from the insurance industry-risk-based prevention did not take root.We have been, to this point, self-consciously silent about areas in which crime preventiondid develop in ways foreshadowed by Colqhoun's Municipal Police. Criminology, social work,psychology, the courts and the correctional service, inter alia, all engaged with crime preven-tion in this period. Significantly, such developments took off particularly in the latenineteenth century, especially with respect to young people. But, for the most part, the pre-ventative model deployed was only peripherally related to risk-at least in the sense thatcrime prevention was to become identified with it by the 1980s. Rather, the focus was to beupon the causes of crime-those causes that the welfare state and its experts identified andtreated through 'the welfare sanction' and all manner of community interventions. Indeed, itis the contrast between such social-causal approaches and the emerging risk-based tech-niques that was to give the new wave of 1980s crime prevention much of its character.Together with the crime prevention models of traditional policing, welfare-focused crimeprevention was to be the 'other' against which risk-based crime prevention defined itself(O'Malley 1992; 1999).Perhaps what this reveals is that under the influence of neo-liberal governance, risk-based prevention-like 'responsibilisation' to which it is linked-was being re-invented inthe late twentieth century rather than generated de nova. After the 1970s, it was applied-often against resistance from institutions occupying the field-to areas of governance inwhich it had not previously taken hold, or in which it had been displaced by techniques ofthe social. In this, of course, there are strong and significant comparisons to be made withthe reinvention of 'markets' by neo-liberals in which certain techniques associated withmarkets, such as outsourcing, competitive tendering and consumer audits, were general-ized and applied to sites such as state offices where this had previously appeared 'inappro-priate' (Rose 1999). Nowhere has this been more apparent than with respect to policing,with the rise of police customer audits, new developments in financial accountability andmanagement practices, and competition with private sector providers (O'Malley andHutchinson, forthcoming; O'Malley 1997). In this respect, the development of risk-basedcrime prevention and its impact on police appears at the convergence of at least two devel-opments that have rather different genealogies. On the one side was the development ofneo-liberalism. While its opposition to welfare interventions in the governance of crimehas been endlessly explored, also vital is its determination to reform police. Against signi-ficant resistance, neo-liberal governments have struggled to bring police into line withpolitical axioms of accountability, market reform and new managerialism. This did not, byitself, guarantee that risk-based crime prevention would appear on the agenda, eventhough this can be seen to be a development consistent with neo-liberalism (O'Malley1992). What did put this firmly on the agenda, we suggest, was the increasing interest andlobbying of the insurance industry and its recognition that risk-based prevention-exemplified by fire prevention--could have major affects on loss reduction.7 It was a7Reference may here be made to almost any edition of the Security Gazette between 1962 and 1968. The Gazettewas fond of repro-ducing and editorializing about the speeches and articles of senior police managers, Home Office officials and cabinet ministers onthis topic, as well as having its own regular column from its 'insurance correspondent'. Of course, it ma y be taken for granted thatthese reports are highly selective, reflecting the security industry and insurance industry preferences for reform. However, if it can-not necessarily be taken as a representative index of what these various constituencies thought across the board, it does index whatmany industry leaders and senior government officials were thinking about at the time--and, from the sheer frequency and rangeof such reports and sources, these must have constituted a significant current of opinion at the time.

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change that fitted admirably with just about everything dear to neo-liberal doctrine, andthus became part and parcel of a series of reforms that would be carried through against aresistance that the insurance industry alone was unlikely to have overcome. The emer-gence of risk-based crime prevention is thus not best seen as an inevitable effect of the riseof a risk society, any more than was true for the emergence of much earlier and very simi-lar regime of fire prevention. Instead, it appears as one of a number of neo-liberal imagin-ings whose transformational implications were none the less significant for beingreinventions.

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TITLE: REINVENTING PREVENTION Why Did |DsCrime

Prevention|DS Develop So Late?

SOURCE: The British Journal of Criminology 47 no3 My 2007

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