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

NSfK´s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998
While drafting the program and trying to use all information we have on effects of preventive
measures, it was painful to notice how little we know. Perhaps we understand the criminal
behavior relatively well. That’s good. But we have really limited knowledge of what works.
The scientific base of the car traffic safety planning is essentially stronger: in traffic safety
planning there is lot of evidence what works and this knowledge is well documented. I like to
use car traffic safety as a comparison. The task of crime prevention is to prevent damages
caused by crime analogically to the task of traffic safety planning to prevent damages caused
by traffic accidents.
In crime prevention there is an overflow of weak and unrealiable information, badly done
evaluations, descriptions of enthuasiastic initiatives without any evidence of effects and, in
the worst case, abused research. To manage this overflow of information has become more
and more demanding task for us who try to take care honestly our duties in crime prevention
and even keep the critical mind alive.
Crime prevention has challenged criminology. It has done that in a new and more
thoroughgoing way than traditional competing criminological theories of causes of
criminality challeged each other. And, I will lastly point out, I’m not at all harnessing
criminology to serve policy making only. The challenge comes from the pure scientific
interests: it calls for development of criminological theories and methods.
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