Crime Prevention and Community Safety: New Directions

`This text represents a major contribution to the literature on crime prevention and community safety. It goes beyond existing literature in bringing together sophisticated theoretical analysis on these topics which are core issues for government at local as well as national levels. And it also brings a much needed international perspective to our understanding of the local governance of crime′ - Kevin Stenson, Professor of Criminology, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College

Crime Prevention and Community Safety provides an essential introduction to the complex issues and debates in the field of crime control and the new politics of safety and security across the globe. Collectively the contributions to this volume present a critique of current policy and open up the field of study to new directions.

While engaging with the dominant focus on `what works′ in crime reduction and community safety, the book also moves beyond the traditionally narrow, technical boundaries of much previous debate.

Crime Prevention and Community Safety: New Directions looks at:

-The relationship between crime control, communities and the nation state;

-The diverse and changing sites of conflict, compromise and collusion around crime control policies;

-Wider issues relating to `risk′, ′safety′ and `security′.

The central feature of the volume as a whole is a commitment to exploring new directions for research and analysis, theoretically, empirically and comparatively. In opening up the varying and volatile spaces for crime prevention and community safety within the more general politics of social order, the book provides a critical rethinking of traditional connections between criminology, social policy and politics.

Crime Prevention and Community Safety will be essential reading for students of criminology, criminal justice, community safety, socio-legal studies, sociology of crime and deviance and social policy.

This is a course Reader for The Open University course D863 Community Safety, Crime Prevention and Social Control

Eugene McLaughlin is Professor of Criminology and co-director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Research. He is also a member of the Centre for Law Justice and Journalism. He completed his postgraduate criminology studies at the University of Cambridge and the University of Sheffield. Eugene has held various academic appointments including at the University of Hong Kong, the Open University and the University of Southampton. He has also been Visiting Professor at the Department of Sociology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, the Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. He is an associate editor of Crime, Media and Cultureand is on the editorial board of Criminal Justice Matters. He has served on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Criminology, Critical Social Policy, the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice and was co-editor of Theoretical Criminology.


John Muncie is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at the Open University, UK. He is the author of Youth and Crime (5th edition, Sage, 2021), and he has published widely on issues in comparative youth justice and children’s rights, including the co-edited companion volumes Youth Crime and Justice and Comparative Youth Justice (Sage, 2006). He has produced numerous Open University texts and readers, including Crime: Local and Global (Willan, 2010), Criminal Justice: Local and Global (Willan, 2010), The Problem of Crime (2nd edition, Sage, 2001), Crime Prevention and Community Safety (Sage, 2001) and Imprisonment: European Perspectives (Harvester, 1991). He has also contributed nine volumes to the The Sage Library of Criminology (Sage, 2007–2009). He is co-editor of the Sage journal Youth Justice: An International Journal.