Organised Crime & Crime Prevention - what works? - Scandinavian ...

NSfK´s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998
crime prevention. - Luckily conflicts in criminal policy issues haven’t got in Finland such
kind of party political character we can find in several other countries.
The mandate of the Finnish crime prevention council is limited. The statutory provision states
that special attention should be paid to the possibilities to reduce crime by influencing
conditions that cause crime. Our main focus is thus the s.c. situational crime prevention.
The background for this limited mandate is officially that in the field of the situational crime
prevention there was earlier no special planning body and therefore there was need to
strengthen planning in this crime prevention strategy. There are other explanations, too. In the
Finnish criminology a long tradition, longer and stronger than in other countries, has been to
use the opportunity structure as the main explanation for the variations in crime. I refer
especially to the work Patrik Törnudd has done in the Finnish criminology. The third
explanation is that the mandate was very much written in Strasbourg, where I met frequently
ex-director of the Swedish crime prevention council, Bo Svensson. According to him other
approaches of crime prevention mainly lack the documented evidence of success.
I’m proud of the work the Finnish council has done in the situational strategy in spite of it’s
young age and minimal working resources. For example our study on situational prevention
of economic crime is internationally the first comprehensive study in this field, as far as I
know. Our report on bank robberies is a Finnish success story in crime prevention.
The council is not a research unit, but planning unit. Borderline between planning and
research is often vague because all good planning is based on research. However in principle
there is a clear division of tasks and on the other side a tight co-operation between council
and the criminological unit of the Research Institute of Legal Policy. The council works
physically and intellectually, but not administratively in the same environment. The situation
has shown to be fruitful for both parts, not only for us. The council believes that it has a right
to articulate crime prevention interests in the Finnish criminological research and therefore
we subscribe research and provide financial support for it.
The main task for our council under last one and half year has been drafting the national
crime prevention program for Finland. The example we have used in our work is Swedish.
That illustrates the value of the Nordic co-operation in crime prevention: in our countries it is
not necessary to do the whole work every time right from the beginning, but we can often use
the work already done in the other Nordic countries.
Our council proposed to the Government that Finland should prepare a similar kind of crime
prevention program Sweden have. The Government responded with enthusiasm and gave the
council the drafting duty.
Now the council’s work is almost done. The draft contains - not suprisingly - a lot of similar
ideas as the Swedish program. But it is not a copy.
In Finland we have been in that lucky situation that by beginning our work later than Sweden
we have been able to “Sherman check” our proposals. At leats our proposals try to follow
more close the ideal of evidence-based crime prevention than the Swedish program.
That leads to the main point of my presentation:
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