{"id":91663,"date":"2024-04-02T14:50:22","date_gmt":"2024-04-02T18:50:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsroom.carleton.ca\/?post_type=cu_story&p=91663"},"modified":"2025-08-19T09:37:03","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T13:37:03","slug":"tackling-causes-of-crime","status":"publish","type":"cu_story","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/story\/tackling-causes-of-crime\/","title":{"rendered":"Tackling the Causes of Crime, Not Sending More People to Jail, Is the Only Way To Fight It"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Tackling the Causes of Crime, Not Sending More People to Jail, Is the Only Way To Fight It\n <\/h1>\n \n <\/header>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/path>\n <\/path>\n <\/svg>\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

This article is republished<\/a> from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. All photos provided by The Conversation<\/a> from various sources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jeffrey Bradley<\/a> is a Ph.D. Candidate in legal studies at Carleton University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Canadians want to fight crime<\/a>, but Conservative Party proposals to increase incarceration aren’t likely to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Based on our analysis<\/a> for the Canadian Centre for Safer Communities, there is a way to significantly reduce violent crime within the next five years. It requires becoming not \u201ctough on crime,\u201d but \u201csmart on crime\u201d before it happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This approach requires governments to invest in enough proven prevention measures to greatly reduce injuries, trauma and loss of life stemming from violent crime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cities like Glasgow in Scotland<\/a> have demonstrated a 50 per cent reduction in violence in just three years by appointing a senior official to expand the use of proven programs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The city’s community safety plan diagnosed the risk factors and focused proven prevention initiatives on those most vulnerable to violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The U.K. government is replicating the Glasgow model across the country and evaluating whether it’s working<\/a>. The city of London has adopted the Glasgow model via its Office for Violence Reduction, and in four years has seen a 25 per cent reduction in homicides and robberies<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Horner recommendations<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Thirty years ago, Bob Horner, a staunch Conservative and former RCMP officer, chaired a parliamentary committee on crime prevention in Canada.<\/a> He was blunt: \u201cIf locking up those who violate the law contributed to safer societies, then the United States should be the safest country in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Horner did not just criticize, he made recommendations on how to prevent crime. He correctly called for an official at a senior level to be solely tasked with putting effective prevention into action. Unfortunately, two decades later, there is still no such senior official responsible for reducing violence and advocating for the smart investments needed to do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Horner also called for an annual investment in crime prevention equivalent to five per cent of the expenditures spent on policing and criminal justice. No government in Canada has reached this modest target.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, a rising $18 billion is spent on policing<\/a> annually and another $6 billion on prisons<\/a> as violent crime ticks back up<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both the Jean Chr\u00e9tien and Stephen Harper governments allocated the equivalent of one per cent of their federal policing and prison expenditures to a strategy that consisted of little more than small, short-term crime prevention projects<\/a> unlikely to influence national rates of violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Public Safety Canada’s own evaluation of its national crime prevention strategy<\/a> recognizes two challenges: First, the work of crime prevention is split between two departmental branches \u2014 emergency management and crime prevention. Second, it lacks the technological infrastructure to monitor and learn from the results of programs aimed at preventing crime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Public Safety Canada’s annual spending on expanding proven prevention programs that tackle the causes of crime are woefully short of the equivalent of five per cent of its annual expenditures for the RCMP and Corrections Canada. Not surprisingly, Public Safety’s departmental plan<\/a> shows it does not meet its own targets for reducing crime nationally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Preventing violence<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

We have stronger evidence today than in 1993 on what prevents violent crime before it happens. That evidence is publicly available from various sources, including the United States Justice Department’s Crime Solutions<\/a> platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As part of our analysis<\/a>, we examined Crime Solutions and several similar platforms to explain to decision-makers how these programs are proven to stop violence and how to implement them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Public Safety Canada has a crime prevention inventory<\/a> based on results from some of its own short-term prevention projects, and illustrates the savings<\/a> in tax dollars. The U.K., meantime, is spending $350 million over the next 10 years just to share their effective prevention strategies<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Key components of these proven solutions include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n