NCJ Number
219287
Journal
British Journal of Criminology Volume: 47 Issue: 3 Dated: May 2007 Pages: 439-454
Date Published
May 2007
Length
16 pages
Annotation
This article presents a historical account of early British writings on the prevention of crime and the governance of freedom.
Abstract
Focusing on the 18th century writings of Henry Fielding and Patrick Colquhoun, the author’s main argument is that the emergence of a crime prevention discourse can be tied to the protection of property and the stabilization of the social hierarchy. However, this argument, originally promulgated by Fielding and Colquhoun, does not cast these reasons for the emergence of crime prevention as negative, but rather as the maintenance of freedom and the common good. This notion of the emergence of crime prevention is intertwined with notions that preventative crime strategies emerged from a liberal political system that conceived of crime prevention as a way to control threats to the natural operation of society. Fielding and Colquhoun argued that the crime was a public problem because it spread through society like a “disease,” corrupting the state and leaving it weak and open to dissolution. In these terms, the condition of national liberty was seen as something that had to be actively created through governance. Liberty and freedom, thus, were not viewed as a condition of minimal interference from government, but quite the opposite. This perspective was due to the view that the causes of crime and vice were rooted in the individual’s incapacity to resist temptation, which increased with the proliferation of luxury items during the 18th century. Footnotes, references