ôThank you very much.
Thank you very much for the invitation to come here. I hope I can be of assistance in your discussions. It's quite like coming in from outer space, not knowing too much about what you talked about before.
I want to touch on three things in my brief 10 minutes: first, to outline some of the main parameters and developments in crime prevention as it's evolving; second, to touch on issues of project implementation and evaluation; and third, to look at some of the challenges that those problems of implementation and evaluation pose for any policy development in the area of crime prevention and criminal justice that are relevant to the topic of social finance.
To give you a very brief account of my own background, I'm a sociologist and a criminologist with experience in the United Kingdom and Canada. Before coming to Canada, I worked for over 20 years in the Home Office in the research and planning unit of the crime policy planning unit. I carried out a number of studies there with regard to parental supervision, youth court sentencing, and particularly prisons, crime prevention, and prison rehabilitation. That included a random controlled trial of a prison rehabilitation program, which I'll come to later on.
In Canada I've undertaken quite a number of research projects for the federal government over the years, particularly on women's offending and women's prisons, including for the Task Force on Federally Sentenced Women, on issues of restorative justice and policing and evaluation and trafficking.
I taught criminology at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia for 10 years, until I joined the International Centre for the Prevention of Crime in 1999. After 13 years I left the centre to have a little bit more free time, but I continued to work on issues of crime prevention in Canada and elsewhere. I am currently working as a consultant to ICPC for a specific project, which has made some constraints on me being able to give you fuller information today, or beforehand.
ICPC covers a huge range of things. I've covered many of those over the 13 years, from schools and women to hate crime and the role of local governments. I should stress that what I'm talking about here is on the basis of my experience and not on behalf of the centre. I should also make it clear that my experience in relation to crime prevention is the area that I'm talking about. I'm not an expert on social finance, although I have tried to become acquainted with some of the recent developments.
ICPC itself is a quite unique centre. It's the only international organization in the world concerned with crime prevention, founded by the governments of Canada, France, and Quebec in 1994, and wonderfully supported by the Government of Canada and its other governments. We can talk about ICPC, if you prefer, later on.
Much of ICPC's work is concerned with the crucial role of government in enabling and supporting the development of well-planned and strategic crime prevention, both policies and programs, that prevent harm and promote safe and healthy communities—and that save a great deal of money in the process.
Crime prevention, when I first became aware of it in the United Kingdom, was a task that was undertaken by beat police officers. It was primarily concerned with encouraging people to lock their doors and their car doors, and to lock up their bicycles. The standard joke in a police station for the crime prevention officer was, “So how many crimes did you prevent today?”
Since that time, crime prevention has undergone an extraordinary evolution in terms of its coverage in the space of some 30 or more years. It's become an international movement now. It is supported by two sets of United Nations guidelines, which set out the components for effective prevention and the principles on which they should be based.
Like Canada, many other countries around the world now have national crime prevention strategies and they fund projects on the ground. Institutions like the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Health Organization, UN-Habitat, UNDP, UN Women, UNODC—all of them now support the development of local citizen safety and security strategies, which are based on very similar principles for preventing and reducing the incidence of crime and violence.
It's now recognized, based on many years of experience and research, that crime prevention covers a wide range of approaches. It's not one particular thing you do.
There are four main types of approach. Social and educational approaches are a very big area that includes early intervention projects that work with families, children, schools. It can be targeted to particularly high-risk areas, or parents and families at high risk, or children at high risk, such as young people in gangs.
Secondly, there is community or locally based crime prevention, which works not so much with families and individuals as with communities and areas. They engage local communities, the residents, the businesses, and the local services, to work together to resolve local problems. Quite often it can include communities that are experiencing a lot of economic and social problems.
The third group includes a range of situational and environmental approaches, which focus on things that encourage offending and the opportunities offered by nobody being around, no street lighting, or poorly designed parks and buildings. Situational crime prevention is intent on reducing the rewards and the provocations for offenders, and making it much riskier for offenders to commit crimes.
Finally, the fourth approach to crime prevention is reintegration programs. These are programs that work with individuals, or groups with children, young people with adults, to help them reintegrate into society and into their communities when they are released from institutions or from care.
Projects and policies can be universal to everybody, or they can be targeted to particular groups who are at high risk, such as young people or elderly residents in an area.
There are now many strong evaluations of effective programs, and we know a great deal more about what seems to work. There are a lot of demonstrations of the cost-effectiveness and cost benefits of reducing the future criminal justice, social, and family costs that would be incurred if somebody became involved in a life of crime. Crime prevention practice and knowledge continues to evolve all the time, and there are a lot more things coming out.
Looking at the implementation and evaluation of crime prevention projects, there's a very active community of researchers and practitioners and experts working in this field, and it mirrors the evolution of prevention. Policy-makers want to know the best and most effective approaches, so they can use their resources wisely. There's long been an emphasis on finding what works. This has come to dominate crime prevention at various times, particularly in the United Kingdom in the 1990s. The “what works” phenomenon was very strong under Tony Blair's government.
On the basis of a number of successful pilot projects, many researchers have said that they know what works to reduce crime. The government listened to them and put a very large amount of money, something in the region of 550 million pounds, into the crime reduction program, for a series of programs to reduce residential burglary, truancy, theft around schools and schoolchildren, and violence against women, in some other targeted programs.
The most significant lesson from that very big program was that the implementation of projects—how they were set up, who they worked with, and who ran them—were just as important as the projects themselves. In other words, it was about the kind of thing that you were doing with people. What they discovered was that the people conducting the projects funded by the Home Office didn't have the knowledge and skills necessary to collect the right data, to run the project properly, to target the right people, to undertake the evaluation. It became quite a large exercise in the implementation failure of programs, in spite of the fact that they had started with programs that worked. That lesson has been taken to heart by many crime prevention specialists and governments since then.
The second issue around the implementation of crime prevention is the issue of evaluation itself. I'm sure that you've heard quite a lot about this already. There are researchers—and there are many different schools of belief—who have established a gold standard for evaluating whether a project has actually brought about the kinds of changes that you anticipate. This recommends the use of random controlled trials or quasi-experimental trials, where you have a control group and an experimental group and you measure the progress of both as you would in a medical trial.
Some types of crime prevention are much easier to evaluate than others, and you can use those kinds of trials very easily. So if you want to look at the effects of improved street lighting on rates of sexual assault or burglary or theft in an area, it's relatively easy and quick to look and see whether the street lighting seems to have made a difference. But evaluating the effects of a series of interventions in a neighbourhood—a kind of community and local crime prevention approach that might make improvements to public spaces, develop a youth club, and provide support to families or single parents—is likely to be more difficult and may take a much longer time to show some clear results.
Policy-makers have understandably been very interested in funding evaluated projects that have repeatedly shown success in reducing crime, and there's a number of blueprint programs that I know you've heard about already, which have been developed in countries including Canada. They pay particular attention to the kinds of problems the British experienced, which were the attention to implementation of the project and to careful control, making sure the project was delivered exactly as it was designed to be delivered. This includes the kinds of cognitive skills programs developed and used by the Correctional Service of Canada and the current National Crime Prevention Centre projects on youth at risk.
But we've also learned over the years that the context in which a project takes place is extremely important. Sometimes it's when you go abroad and look at what it means to implement these projects in South Africa or in Brazil that you begin to understand some of these difficulties—
