Development, crime prevention and social policy in post-apartheid South Africa

Crime has gained an extraordinary pre-eminence among the social problems of our age, and preventing it has become a priority for many governments around the world. This has led to some significant normative disagreements about the relationship between crime prevention and social policy. Different bodies of work warn against both the 'criminalization of social policy' and the 'socialization of crime prevention'. The more integrated notion of 'social police' put forward 200 years ago by Patrick Colquhoun, and the complex relationships between crime prevention, social policy and development that emerge from policy documents published in South Africa since 1994, suggest that, under certain circumstances, crime prevention may indeed be a legitimate goal of social policy, but that a principled approach to deciding its relative priority in the development process is needed if crime is not to be allowed to trump all other social problems.