NCJ Number
162083
Journal
Crime & Delinquency Volume: 42 Issue: 3 Dated: (July 1996) Pages: 398-420
Date Published
1996
Length
23 pages
Annotation
This article examines Tasmania's strategy of crime prevention, which focuses on a combination of restorative justice and community enhancement.
Abstract
Despite having little serious crime in the form of homicide or sexual assault, the state of Tasmania in Australia has enough crime in terms of assault, burglary, and public order offenses to generate a reasonably high level of fear of crime. The Tasmanian government has embarked upon a novel attempt to address simultaneously both crime and fear of crime through a strategy of crime prevention that focuses on a combination of restorative justice and community enhancement. This positive, developmental approach to crime prevention is fundamentally integrative and stands in sharp contrast to the punishment-oriented policies currently popular in many American jurisdictions; those policies leave the fear of crime problem unresolved, leading to a continuous upward spiral of punitiveness. The Tasmanian experience demonstrates that criminal justice policy must pay attention to community-level concerns such as the fear of crime. In many respects, those concerns are the source of much of the discontent about crime. Tables, figure, references