Output details

Framing crime prevention discourse in Ireland: borrowing the appearance while avoiding the substance of the UN guidelines

The article was written as a response to the Irish Government’s publication of the first ever White Paper on Crime in Ireland. An earlier version was submitted to Ireland’s Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform by way of expert consultation. At issue is the White Paper’s formulation of crime prevention in Ireland which, the article contends, is shot through with statist conceptualisations of what crime ‘is’. The research makes explicit a concomitant focus of the state upon crimes likely to be associated with areas of social disadvantage. Serious organised crime or crime of elite society (e.g. tax evasion, banking fraud) are virtually ignored in the process, and discourses for dealing with them proactively are purposefully elevated for state rather than public conversation. As such, the paper argues, the White Paper reinforces a blurring of boundaries between organised crime and security, as well as low and high policing, with the attendant risk of privileging powerful societal interests. Empirically, the paper, thus, corresponds with the research agenda unfolded in my monograph and paper, ‘Securing the State…’, centred upon structural deficiencies in Irish national security policy that through reinforcing social marginalisation raise security risk. Conceptually, the paper’s innovation lies in the use of the United Nations’ Guidelines for the Prevention of Crime as scaffolding in which national policy is evaluated and through which policy analysis is internationalised. The article was co-authored with Dermot P.J. Walsh and we were assisted in early secondary research by members of the Centre for Criminal Justice, University of Limerick.