The politics of crime prevention presents a stark paradox: whilst some nations successfully reduce prison populations through research-informed policies, others remain trapped in cycles of punitive populism. The Netherlands and the UK offer contrasting case studies in how narrative shapes policy - and ultimately, outcomes. This is particularly evident in the approach to knife crime, where divergent policy responses have led to markedly different results.
1. The narrative battle: Preventive justice vs retributive populism
The tension between preventive and retributive approaches reveals a fundamental clash in how justice is narrated and understood:
In the UK, knife crime serves as a powerful rhetorical device, a shorthand for broader social anxieties. Many politicians and media outlets frame the issue through a lens of moral panic, emphasising immediate threats over systemic causes. This framing demands visible action, typically in the form of increased stop-and-search powers and harsher sentences, regardless of effectiveness. The narrative often focuses on individual incidents of knife violence, which drive policy responses that prioritise enforcement over prevention.
The allure of retributive justice lies partly in its narrative simplicity. It offers clear villains, decisive action, and the satisfaction of punishment. Politicians can point to longer sentences for knife possession and increased police powers as tangible proof they're "doing something" about crime. This approach aligns with tabloid narratives of crime and punishment, where complex social issues are reduced to morality tales of good versus evil.
Preventive justice, by contrast, struggles for political oxygen. Its narratives are inherently more complex, its successes less visible, and its timeframes extend beyond electoral cycles. When knife crime is prevented through youth work, education, or community intervention, there is no headline, no photo opportunity, no clear moment of resolution. The political challenge of selling prevention is compounded by the need to justify spending on social programmes that may take years to show results.
The funding disparity between these approaches is telling. While millions flow into policing and enforcement measures around knife crime, preventive programmes face constant scrutiny and budget cuts. Youth services, mental health support, and community programmes, all proven to reduce weapon carrying, must repeatedly justify their existence, while spending on reactive measures faces little questioning.
The Dutch approach offers an instructive contrast, emerging not from grand policy vision but from a pragmatic recognition of changing crime patterns and a cultural aversion to harsh punishment. Their success in reducing violent crime, including knife offences, stems partly from resisting the pull of punitive populism. Dutch political discourse maintains space for prevention alongside punishment, allowing policies to follow research and trendlines rather than headlines.
2. Political framing and the boundaries of policy possibility
The relationship between political framing and criminal justice policy reveals how discourse shapes the boundaries of what's politically possible:
The politics of framing
Political framing operates on multiple levels simultaneously. At the surface, it shapes public debate through rhetoric and media coverage. More fundamentally, it determines which policy options can even be considered legitimate. This dynamic creates what criminologists call the "policy possibility space" - the range of approaches that can be seriously discussed without political annihilation.
In Britain, this space has progressively narrowed. Politicians across the spectrum find themselves trapped in a punitive arms race, each trying to appear tougher than their opponents. This "tough on crime" posturing creates a ratchet effect in policymaking: measures can be made more punitive but rarely less so, regardless of research findings about effectiveness. The political cost of appearing "soft on crime" effectively excludes many research-informed alternatives from consideration.
Institutional memory and policy innovation
The Netherlands offers an instructive contrast in how historical experience shapes political possibilities. Their cultural memory of authoritarian control during WWII created an enduring scepticism toward harsh state punishment. This institutional memory manifests in concrete ways: from judicial training that emphasises proportionality to media coverage that regularly questions the value of incarceration.
This different framing allows Dutch politicians to advocate for more nuanced approaches without facing the same political penalties as their British counterparts. When Dutch judges favour community service over imprisonment for minor offences, they're working within a political framework that values rehabilitation over retribution.
The feedback loop between framing and implementation
Political framing creates self-reinforcing cycles in policy implementation. When British politicians frame crime primarily as a failure of punishment, they naturally gravitate toward solutions involving more punishment. This framing then shapes how policies are implemented: police focus on enforcement rather than prevention, courts emphasise deterrence over rehabilitation, and resources flow accordingly.
The same dynamic works in reverse. Dutch framing of crime as a public health issue leads to different implementation priorities: more resources for prevention, greater emphasis on rehabilitation, and more attention to social factors. These implementation choices then generate different outcomes, which in turn reinforce the original framing.
The challenge of populism
However, even the Dutch model faces growing challenges from populist pressures. Recent years have seen some Dutch politicians adopting more punitive rhetoric, particularly around issues like organised crime and youth violence. This shift highlights how the durability of research-informed approaches depends on actively maintaining supportive political narratives against populist simplification.
The rise of social media has intensified these pressures. The platform economy rewards emotional engagement over nuanced analysis, making it harder to maintain complex narratives about crime and justice. Individual incidents can quickly become nationwide moral panics, pushing politicians toward reactive policies regardless of research evidence.
Breaking the cycle
Breaking out of punitive cycles requires understanding how political framing constrains policy choices. Reform efforts need to address not just specific policies but the broader narratives that make those policies possible. This might involve:
∙ Developing new ways to frame success in criminal justice that don't depend on punishment metrics
∙ Creating institutional buffers between criminal justice policy and short-term political pressures
∙ Building broader coalitions that can maintain support for research-informed approaches even during moral panics
∙ Finding ways to make prevention's successes more visible and politically salient
The challenge isn't just implementing better policies but creating and maintaining the political space that makes better policies possible.
3. The impact of "othering" in crime prevention
The practice of "othering” - treating certain communities as fundamentally different or threatening - undermines effective crime prevention in multiple ways:
In many cities, this manifests through linguistic devices that paint entire demographics as risks to be managed. Terms like "these people" and "those communities" create artificial divisions between "dangerous" and "respectable" society. This framing justifies discriminatory practices like stop-and-search, which create self-fulfilling prophecies through targeted surveillance and enforcement.
The Netherlands' relative success partly stems from treating crime as a public health issue rather than a moral failing. This framing enables more nuanced responses, focusing on prevention and rehabilitation rather than punishment and containment. However, even this approach faces challenges from rising populist rhetoric that threatens to reintroduce more divisive narratives.
4. The prevention paradox: Long-term solutions vs Short-term politics
The challenge of implementing effective prevention strategies reveals a fundamental tension in crime policy:
Prevention programmes typically deliver results over years or decades, while political careers operate on much shorter timelines. When Home Secretaries serve average terms of two years, long-term thinking becomes politically costly. The visible action of enforcement delivers immediate political dividends; the patient work of prevention does not.
The Netherlands' experience offers insight into managing this tension. Their success stems not from eliminating political pressures for quick results, but from creating institutional and cultural frameworks that enable longer-term approaches to coexist with short-term political imperatives.
5. Cultural attitudes and policy choices
The relationship between cultural attitudes and policy choices emerges as both barrier and opportunity:
The Dutch case demonstrates how cultural attitudes, shaped by historical experience and reinforced by institutional practices, can create space for research-informed reforms. Their cultural scepticism toward harsh punishment provides political cover for more rehabilitative approaches, even in cases involving weapon possession and youth violence.
The UK's experience shows how cultural attitudes can also entrench ineffective policies. The media's role in amplifying fear and moral panic around knife crime creates a cultural environment where research-informed policies face significant resistance. The portrayal of knife crime as an epidemic requiring emergency response often drowns out evidence about effective prevention strategies.
6. Child-First Justice: rights, reform and the future
The evolution of youth justice systems reveals another stark contrast in how societies balance punishment with protection. Whilst some jurisdictions embrace child-first approaches that prioritise rights and development, others remain wedded to mini-adult models that perpetuate cycles of harm.
The rights-regarding paradox in youth justice manifests most clearly in how systems process children who offend. Traditional approaches, still prevalent in much of British political discourse, treat young offenders primarily as wrongdoers who require punishment, with rehabilitation as a secondary concern. This framing persists despite overwhelming evidence that punitive responses often entrench criminal behaviours rather than preventing them.
Child-first jurisdictions, exemplified by New Zealand's youth justice reforms and Scotland's Children's Hearing System, operate from fundamentally different premises. These systems begin by recognising children as rights-holders whose development and welfare must be prioritised, even (perhaps especially) when they transgress. This reframing shifts the focus from punishment to addressing underlying needs and strengthening protective factors.
The contrast appears most starkly in how each approach handles children's participation in justice processes. Traditional systems often exclude or marginalise children's voices, treating them as objects of intervention rather than subjects with rights. Child-first approaches, conversely, build meaningful participation into every stage, from initial contact through to rehabilitation planning.
Yet implementing child-first approaches faces significant political headwinds. Media narratives about "feral youth" and "teenage thugs" create pressure for punitive responses, regardless of evidence about their ineffectiveness. Politicians find themselves trapped between research showing what works and public demand for visible punishment.
The economic argument for child-first approaches proves compelling but often struggles for political traction. While prevention-focused systems show better outcomes at lower costs - New Zealand's reforms led to a 70% reduction in youth custody within five years - the investment horizons extend beyond electoral cycles. The political challenge lies not in proving effectiveness but in maintaining support for long-term approaches against short-term pressures.
The rights-regarding future of youth justice depends largely on how successfully reformers can reframe public discourse. Success stories from child-first jurisdictions demonstrate that public safety and children's rights need not conflict - indeed, protecting rights often enhances safety more effectively than punishment. However, maintaining this understanding requires constant work to counter simplistic narratives that pit rights against responsibility.
Institutional architecture plays a crucial role in sustaining child-first approaches. Systems that separate youth justice from adult criminal justice, like Scotland's Children's Hearings, prove more resilient to punitive pressures. Similarly, embedding children's rights in statutory frameworks provides crucial protection against policy shifts driven by moral panics.
The challenge moving forward isn't just implementing better policies but creating and maintaining political space for approaches that prioritise rights and development. This requires:
∙ Developing new narratives about youth justice that emphasise prevention without appearing soft on crime
∙ Building institutional frameworks that can protect child-first approaches from political pressures
∙ Creating metrics that capture long-term outcomes rather than just immediate compliance
∙ Maintaining public support through transparent demonstration of effectiveness
The experience of successful reformers suggests that transitions to child-first approaches, once established, can create self-reinforcing positive cycles. Lower reoffending rates build public confidence, which enables further reforms, leading to better outcomes still. However, initiating this cycle requires sustained political will to weather initial scepticism and resist punitive impulses.
It's not all doom-and-gloom, the devolved administrations of Scotland and Wales have led the way and carved distinctive paths in enshrining children's rights and future generations' interests into law, marking a notable departure from Westminster's more tentative approach to preventive justice. Scotland's incorporation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) into domestic law, despite initial constitutional challenges, represents a bold commitment to children's rights, dovetailing with its welfare-oriented Children's Hearing System. Wales, meanwhile, has pioneered groundbreaking legislation through its Well-being of Future Generations Act 2015, requiring public bodies to consider long-term impacts of their decisions, whilst its Rights of Children and Young Persons (Wales) Measure 2011 made it the first UK nation to embed the UNCRC in domestic law. These legislative frameworks reflect a more expansive view of preventive justice, extending beyond immediate crime prevention to encompass broader social and environmental sustainability. Such approaches stand in marked contrast to England's more reactive stance, suggesting that devolved administrations are more willing to experiment with radical, rights-based approaches to social policy. This divergence has particular significance for youth justice, where Scottish and Welsh frameworks increasingly emphasise prevention through rights protection and future-oriented policymaking, rather than traditional criminal justice interventions.
The broader rights-regarding future of youth justice ultimately depends on our ability to maintain what criminologists term the "developmental perspective", understanding young offenders primarily as children in development rather than criminals in training. Until we consistently frame responses to youth crime through this lens, we risk continuing cycles of ineffective intervention that neither protect public safety nor support healthy development.
Moving forward: Implications for reforming justice
The comparison of these approaches suggests several key lessons for reforming justice:
First, changing narratives about crime and punishment must precede or accompany policy change. Success stems not just from different policies but from different ways of understanding and discussing crime. This is particularly evident in approaches to knife crime, where media narratives and political discourse shape the range of possible responses.
Second, prevention programmes need institutional protection from short-term political pressures. This might involve creating independent bodies with secure funding, similar to public health institutions. For issues like knife crime, this could mean further ring-fenced funding for youth services and community intervention programmes.
Third, addressing "othering" requires more than policy change - it demands fundamental shifts in how we discuss and conceptualise crime and punishment. The tendency to stereotype young people from certain communities as potential knife carriers creates self-fulfilling prophecies through discriminatory enforcement practices.
The real challenge lies not in choosing between competing approaches but in creating political and cultural space for evidence-based reforms. Until we address how fear-based narratives around knife crime undermine effective prevention, we risk remaining trapped in cycles of ineffective but politically expedient responses to crime.
The success of reform efforts ultimately depends on our ability to align political incentives with evidence-based approaches - a task that requires changing not just policies but the narratives that make those policies possible.
"The true measure of a justice system lies not in how many crimes it punishes, but in how many it prevents. Every punitive response represents, in some way, a previous failure of prevention. We must ask ourselves: are we investing in failure, or investing in prevention?"
Prof. Stan Gilmour KPM FRSA, Oxon Advisory
oxonadvisory.com
