Rationale

The field of public policy today tends to understand urban crime as determined by structural violence. If we were to deny the social causes of crime, we could then attribute it to the criminal's moral or mental depravity, and thereby legitimise—but above all demand—more repression. This is how the arguments demanding policies for repression and punishment are constructed: by decoupling poverty from crime.

Nevertheless, the field of public policy in Uruguay has prioritised structural violence (Bourgois, 2005), and the bulk of the interventions by State protection agencies are designed to address it. This attention to structural violence generated a series of intervention mechanisms and, with them, a classification of their different dimensions: work, education, health, food, housing, etc. And if these interventions are not to be considered preventive but rather reparative, or—on their own terms—as questions of “equity”, it is easy to make the shift from “social security” actions, which seek to reconstruct “integration”, towards “violence prevention” actions, which seek to keep the crime from being committed. This shift means moving from “social security”, which guarantees citizens' welfare and quality of life, to “citizen security”, which protects the integrity of assets and persons (protection of life itself).

All that is required is a logical leap to expand the notion of crime prevention: if structural violence determines criminal violence, and educational, occupational, housing, etc. interventions reduce structural violence, therefore these interventions prevent—or reduce—criminal violence. This reasoning, strictly speaking, is faulty. The probability that an individual will commit a crime is indeed related to social inequality, employment insecurity, and poverty; nonetheless, the social dimensions of criminal violence itself would be difficult to elude. Otherwise, we would have to understand that preventing violence is similar to trying out educational and cultural policies, supporting job placement programmes, and implementing policies for gender equity and domestic violence prevention and response; but then the question arises: Isn't this exactly what we have been doing?

It would seem that the reasoning we make explicit above strips violence of its manifest autonomy: peer groups, environments where “vulnerable individuals” are socialised, moral concepts, and a list that could be enumerated of circumstances associated with the specific reality of a crime, thus, stop being a constitutional part of its prevention. A shift occurs that, on the one hand, affects understanding of the phenomenalistic qualities of violence, as attention is focused on the invisible multidimensionality that determines (structural violence), and not on its visible multidimensionality (crime understood as a set of social relationships); and, on the other hand, it expands the causality of violence by considering it to be the product of certain determinants, to the point where any violence can be determined thusly—in either version.

The (mis)understanding to which we allude carries the risk of falling into an extreme variant of the discourse of violence. This standardises in the concept of violence something that actually—and for some—is multiple (Soares, 1995; Rifiotis, 1995). But, are we looking at this multiplicity?

Without falling into an extreme version of the discourse of violence, one understands that when it comes to prevention, i.e., of a certain form of intervention, attacking the causes of violence will then mean intervening in the educational, cultural, and employment dimensions (whose unequal distribution constitutes the socio-economic inequality) while never losing sight of the quotidian social conditions that configure criminality as a social reality.

The Comprehensive Citizen Security Management Programme

With these guiding principles, the Programme arose as a comprehensive intervention in three police districts in the city of Montevideo.  Its objectives were to transform traditional police action towards a preventive paradigm and consolidate a secondary prevention model for addressing adolescent violence in the neighbourhoods of the Programme's districts.

For the first of its objectives, strategic partnerships were consolidated with the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at University College of London, and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at New York University. Each centre agreed to give theoretical-practical courses on strategic analysis, problem-oriented policing, and criminal investigation. Action protocols and system monitoring were added on top of the courses to guide the change process. Today problem-oriented policing has substantially reduced crime rates in the first police district to receive the intervention based on situational preventive strategies coordinated with different State agencies.

The second objective required the services of the Ministry of Social Development, which is in charge of supervising the Programme in its social dimension. All adolescents detained in our police districts are invited to participate in an interdisciplinary project that seeks to offer them opportunities to avoid a criminal future. The proposal has been very well-received and, while it is still too early to evaluate the results, many of our adolescents have taken up their studies again or found internships, after receiving job training, in different organisations, both state and private.

Lastly, the Programme has developed an innovative communal mediation strategy based on the methods of the British Restorative Justice conferences. Today, police officers with special training in these methodologies work as extra-judicial facilitators, managing to peacefully resolve neighbourhood conflicts. This initiative repairs the damage to the victim, reconstitutes neighbourhood social bonds, and offers opportunities for change to those offenders who are so inclined, after this process of mutual understanding between the affected parties, to change their lifestyle.

The EUROsociAL Programme has been an invaluable partner for training the operators of our social protection programme for adolescents, diagnosing and facilitating the coordination with different State agencies to fulfil our objectives, and training the police Restorative Justice facilitators. Moreover, we have created protocols and consultancies for the purpose of institutionalising this latter initiative—unprecedented in the country‏—which is turning out to be very promising.

Today the Ministry of the Interior, the Public Prosecutor's Office and the Judiciary are working together to design a structure that admits Restorative Justice in Uruguay. In this, we also enjoy the stimulation and unconditional support of the EUROsociAL Programme.