Safeguarding sustainable crime prevention: The Rocky case of the Netherlands

The international decline of crime prevention in so many countries begs the question which factors have propelled the sudden rise of crime prevention as a new policy concept in the 80s and 90s over the last century, and which factors have been instrumental in its subsequent stagnation or decline thereafter. In this paper we will examine this issue with an in-depth case study of the institutional history of crime prevention in the Netherlands between 1965 and 2015. We will document how crime prevention in The Netherlands went through the usual stages of the policy cycle between 1965 and 2015, and examine which factors have shaped its ever changing activities and agenda. More specifically, we will try to identify which factors seem to have been responsible for the downfall of many of the support structures for crime prevention after 2000. Although we are aware of the idiosyncratic nature of much what has been occurred in the Netherlands with regard to the national crime prevention agenda, we will attempt to draw out some “lessons learned” which might be of interest to those who are committed to the promotion of crime prevention in other places in the world, now and/or in the future.