The Governance of Crime in Italy: Global Tendencies and Local Peculiarities

The essay explores how "transfer processes" work in the particular field of security and crime prevention policies, focusing on the policies developed in Italy in the last decade. The type of ‘transfer’ in question is related to some specific issues: the way to define the same policies under different titles in different contexts, the influence of certain ideas and practices in a particular socio-political context, and how this context adopts and re-shapes those ideas and practices. At the same time, the paper offers a framework about the development of an Italian way to security and prevention. The focus is on some specific issues in contemporary Italian security policies, such as the use of the word ‘security’; the model of crime prevention emerging from the convergence between the national context and the external infl uences; the idea of partnership (a leit-motif of the security policies, as we currently understand them) and the involvement of community organisations in crime prevention.