Crime as a cascade phenomenon

ABSTRACT

The Peacebuilding Compared project deployed South Asian data to conclude that war tends to cascade across space and time to further war, crime to further crime, war to crime, and crime to war. This article is an analytic sketch of crime as a cascade phenomenon. Examining crime through a cascade lens helps us to imagine how to more effectively cascade crime prevention. Like crime, crime prevention often cascades. Braithwaite and D’Costa (2018) show how peacemaking can cascade non-violence, how it cascades non-violent social movement politics, and vice versa. Seeing crime through the cascade lens opens up fertile ways of imagining macrocriminology. Self-efficacy and collective efficacy are hypothesised as catalysts of crime prevention cascades in such a macrocriminology. Australian successes with gun control and drunk driving point to the importance of explicitly connecting evidence-based microcriminology to a macrocriminology of cultural transformation. More structurally, building collective efficacy in families, schools and primary work groups may cascade collective efficacy into neighbourhoods and vice versa. The microcriminology of hot-spot policing might be elaborated into a macrocriminology of inkspots of collective efficacy that cascade and connect up.

KEYWORDS:

• Crime
• cascades
• self-efficacy
• collective efficacy
• war
• macrocriminology

Notes

1. In the state of New South Wales alone (where Homel focused his research), alcohol-related traffic deaths were around 400 a year up to 1980 and in spite of great growth in population and car ownership have been far fewer than 100 per year every year in the current decade, hitting a low of 45 in 2015 (Centre for Road Safety, 2018).

2. Fractals are objects that manifest self-similarity. This means geometrical features of similar structures across a range of scales.

3. Like Sampson’s, my work has always been about the idea that disadvantage (and domination) and ecological concentration of disadvantage are mutually reinforcing drivers of high crime rates (based in part on comparision of US with Brisbane and Tokyo data from half a century ago) (Braithwaite, 1979). My initial forays as a scholar and political activist into how to dampen and disperse ecological disadvantage in Australian cities in the 1970s developed into a responsive regulatory approach. This regulation of the urban involved a diversity of approaches to gradually transforming concentrated disadvantage, particularly by mandating private housing developers to integrate publicly-funded housing for the poor into class-mixed developments in a way that is contextually responsive to complex emergence in urban ecologies.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council.

Notes on contributors

John Braithwaite

John Braithwaite is a Distinguished Professor at the Australian National University where he founded the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet).  He works on peacebuilding, corporate crime, the globalization of regulation, and the ideas of responsive regulation and restorative justice.