Drinking and Crime: Perspectives on the Relationships between Alcohol Consumption and Criminal Behavior

rehabilitation have proven to be ineffective responses to crime, attention should now be focused on the prevention of crime and reparation by offenders, in which community involvement would be of central significance. The success of many existing crime prevention initiatives makes heartening reading against the otherwise gloomy backcloth of current policies; so that the proposals for treating many minor crimes virtually as torts and developing mediation procedures in which the community would be involved, as a means of reconciling offender and victim, have much to commend them. Nor should such ideas be dismissed as unrealistic in view of the success of some American schemes. Sadly, however, regardless of the merits and viability of such radical ideas, which are well-argued and developed by the author, political, public and judicial attitudes to crime and punishment will probably override the persuasive rationality of the arguments presented in this book which, none the less, deserves to be widely read and debated. Adrian L.