It’s Mine Technology intelligently saying what needs to be said!

Friends of this website, It’s Mine Technology, recently submitted a paper to the Justice Select Committee arguing for a more evidenced based approach to crime prevention, combining effective technologies with behavioural science.

And the authors hold nothing back!

‘There is little empirical evidence that anything the Ministry of Justice has ever done since its inception in 2007 has had any impact on the commission of crime.’

 ‘The police have no idea what effective role they have had in reducing crime, no idea, based on evidence, about what works and little or no evidence to back any initiatives.’

‘It is pretty embarrassing to criminology as a profession that nobody has come close to explaining the huge drops in crime experienced in industrialised countries in the last decade or so..’

There are just too many golden nuggets to keep on quoting them from the paper and you simply HAVE to read this short, punchy paper at this link to get everything into context and to see exactly where the authors are coming from and where they would like to see the government and justice system going to.

The paper promotes a social contagion strategy to affect crime, similar to that which brought huge reductions in drink driving and smoking.  There’s a suggestion that a lot more people should be prosecuted for receiving and being in possession of stolen goods so that it becomes as socially unacceptable as drink driving, because this would shrink the thieves’ market place.

I’m going to say no more about the paper, save to say that I agree with a great deal of the content and its message, although I would take issue with them over some excellent evidence based police crime prevention initiatives I used to work on!

If you have a spare 15 minutes and you don’t shock too easily and you’re as interested in preventing crime as I am then this paper will get you thinking!

It’s Mine Technology’s website: http://www.itsminetechnology.com/

The Written Evidence: http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/WrittenEvidence.svc/EvidencePdf/3095