MULTI-AGENCY DRUG INTERVENTION PROGRAMME

Multi-Agency Drug Intervention Programme

Multi-Agency Drug Intervention Programme

Introduction

This paper higlights the role of multi-agency approach, that was first initialised by the Morgan Report, published in 1991; with a especial emphasis on drug intervention programmes.

Hard on the heels of the great paradigm shift towards prevention and, later, local partnerships in law and order policy making during the 1980s came a development of potentially greater importance: the shift to 'community safety' planning. Pioneered initially as a social democratic and 'welfarist' antidote to the retributivist drift in national criminal justice policy, community safety approaches were adopted within progressive local government circles for a combination of both ideological and instrumental reasons (Bottoms, 1990).

Yet just as the election of a new government, with its declared commitment to the community safety agenda, promising a new statutory responsibility upon local authorities and requiring the establishment of strategic community safety partnerships, appeared to bring community safety planning to the centre of the local stage, so the first murmurings of criticism of this new paradigm began to make themselves heard (Brake, Hale, 1992).

Growth of Crime and Limits of Crime Prevention

If it is accepted, as suggested earlier, that an important paradigm shift from crime prevention to community safety has occurred, we still need to understand why. There is, as Hughes has noted, something of an apparent contradiction in the flourishing of this ostensibly positive, progressive and, even purportedly democratic, approach to community crime problems in the chilling climate of populist retributivism that has shaped many recent debates on law, order and justice (Hughes, 1995).

It may be, as some commentators have argued, (Jones et aI., 1994) that we have witnessed a fragmentation in the operating philosophies of the criminal justice system or, indeed, in Young's terms, a broader 'crimi no-legal crisis' (Young, 1996). The ways we appear to want to punish offenders, because they seem to have little discernible impact on rates of offending, needed to be supplemented by alternative methods of order maintenance (Bright, 1991).

Multi-Agency Approach

The goal of community-based processes is to enhance the ability of communities to provide more effective prevention and treatment services for substance abuse. The utilization of this strategy includes organization, planning, building coalitions, and networking. Community and neighborhood training as well as multi-agency coordination are some of the methods used to implement this prevention strategy (Bright, 1997).

The pioneering work on local victim surveys; the situating of crime within a wider array of harms, deprivations, fears and risk processes; the direct engagement with processes of multi-agency policing at the community level and the recognition of the pivotal role of local government (in any event the only receptive audience at the time) in co-ordinating local strategies is both fully described, justified and theorised in a series of books and articles by (Young, 1996).

The Morgan Report

The Morgan Report (1991) spelled out the important differences of emphasis in the ideas of crime prevention and community safety. The term crime prevention is often narrowly interpreted and this reinforces the view that it is ...