Comment on “Oakeshott and the New Crime Prevention”
| Author | Peter Grabosky |
| Published date | 01 April 2004 |
| DOI | 10.1375/acri.37.1.141 |
| Date | 01 April 2004 |
141
THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
VOLUME 37 NUMBER 1 2004 PP.141–143
Address for correspondence: Peter Grabosky, Regulatory Institutions Network, Research
School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia.
Email: Peter.Grabosky@anu.edu.au
Comment on “Oakeshott and the New
Crime Prevention”
Peter Grabosky
The Australian National University
In this article the author responds to “Oakeshott and the New Crime
Prevention” by Paul Knepper, which was published in the Australian and
New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 36(3) pp. 338–353. Knepper’s
rejection of traditional knowledge, which he claims dominates traditional
criminology,is critiqued.
In the article by Paul Knepper titled “Oakeshott and the New Crime Prevention”
published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, Volume 36,
No. 3, pp. 338–353, the work of Michael Oakeshott, a 20th century British politi-
cal philosopher, is invoked to criticise recent crime prevention trends in Australia,
Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Knepper takes particular aim at
situational crime prevention, social (e.g., developmental) crime prevention, and
evidence-based policy more generally.
Oakeshott was not a criminologist. Indeed, Knepper candidly admits that
“Oakeshott wrote more about horse racing than he did about crime”(p. 339) and
that he “barely mentions the subject” (p. 350) in his writings. Nevethless, Knepper
seizes upon Oakeshott’s apparent rejection of social science in favour of “tradi-
tional knowledge”, and “the poetic character of all human activity,” to denigrate a
significant branch of contemporary criminology.
Knepper takes issue with what he perceives to be a rejection of traditional
knowledge and the “whole of experience” by the “technicians” who dominate
contemporary criminology. His criticism refers explicitly to the Campbell
Collaboration, an international consortium of scholars who seek to advance
evidence-based public policy. (Readers unfamiliar with the Campbell Collaboration
are invited to visit the following websites: http://www.campbellcollaboration.org/
http://www.aic.gov.au/campbellcj/)
None of us involved in the Campbell Collaboration (I am a member of the
Campbell Collaboration Crime and Justice Steering Group) will argue that social
science holds the key to all the world’s problems. We do, however, maintain that
social science can inform public policy. Whether we like it or not, governments
will continue to intervene to improve the health, welfare and security of their
citizens. We know that not all of these interventions have their desired effect, and
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