Analysis of crime prevention strategies for sustainable governance in South Africa

Crime has a negative impact on the sustainable governance of any country. This paper examines the causes and impact of crime in South Africa, a new democratic state that is fighting to establish a moral society based on democratic values and social justice. The aim of the paper is to evaluate the cost-benefit approaches in South Africa to prevent crime. Crime pervades South African society through horrendous acts of murder, rape, armed robbery and heists, drug trafficking, corruption and white-collar criminal activities. The state has identified challenges such as lack of financial capacity and human skills to deal with crime, inadequate information regarding statistics of crime, backlog of cases, lack of institutional approaches, and strategies for planning and monitoring. To overcome these challenges the government has adopted an integrated justice system approach to develop cooperation and coordination between relevant departments. This approach may be significant in dealing with the pressure of severe impact of crime with variety of processes and interdependent links to achieve a common goal of combating crime. The country also has a National Crime Prevention Strategy that consists of four pillars namely: re-engineering the criminal justice system, reduction of crime through environmental design, promotion of community values and education, and trans-national crime for regional cooperation. The paper analytically reviews the pros and cons of the strategy and offers recommendations for improvement of existing challenges.