Article

Crime prevention and control : Western beliefs vs. traditional legal practices

Amedeo Cottino

• International review of the Red Cross, Vol. 90, no. 870, June 2008, p. 289-301

English

This paper raises two main questions. The first concerns the current idea that punishment - conceived as the loss of liberty - has an effect in preventing unlawful behaviour. It can in fact be shown that, in general, sanctions have a poor individual preventive effect. As to general prevention, punishment may be expected to have a deterrent effect when the unlawful behaviour is the result of a rational decision, that is, a decision based on a cost-benefit analysis. However, a wide variety of factors, from group support to situational and systemic factors, may very well counteract the threatening effect of the sanction. The second question concerns the feasibility of nonstigmatizing ways to cope with crime. The few examples borrowed from legal anthropology seem to indicate that viable alternatives exist. But the transfer of a non-Western, indigenous problem-solving process to culturally different contexts is problematic and should be carried out with extreme caution.

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• International review of the Red Cross / ICRC
• International review of the Red Cross [Vol. 90, no. 870, June 2008] / ICRC