{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02185792349726776, 'fraction_numerical': 0.020036429872495445, 'mean_word_length': 5.103703703703704, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Police and the prevention of Crime: Commerce, temptation and the corruption of the Body Politic, from Fielding to Colquhoun

The prevention of crime is central to the ideology of the modern criminal justice system. Prevention is generally seen as a humane alternative to the punishment of an offence after it has been committed and is often understood as fundamental to liberal democracy. Although the notion of prevention came under attack in the late twentieth century as impractical and ineffective, with business-derived models of detection and professional prosecution being preferred by the late Conservative governments, the election of New Labour signalled a return to prevention as a central feature of government policy on crime (Reiner 2000: ix, 60-80, 209-10). 2 At the same time, the idea of prevention came under renewed academic scrutiny in the work of Mark Neocleous (2000a; 2000b). Systems for the prevention of crime are generally understood to have emerged in London in the second half of the eighteenth century, closely associated with the idea of ‘police’ and the writing of Henry Fielding and Patrick Colquhoun. Long mistakenly assumed to be advocates of a force like the London Metropolitan Police introduced in 1829, it is now clear that Fielding and Colquhoun had something very different in mind from the Metropolitan force (Neocleous 200b; Reynolds 1998). In fact, the idea of prevention developed in their work, and that of their contemporaries, emerged from a very different notion of ‘police’, common in continental Europe and just beginning to be articulated as a distinct discourse in Britain in the late eighteenth