The Importance of Taking Responsibility

When people think about approaching crime as a public health problem often they envisage treatments that would undermine a person's ability to take responsibility for their own decisions. So I don't think that policy has to be retributive in order to affirm agency of a certain kind and encourage us to be capable of taking responsibility. And in fact often the focus on individual choices and retribution is in many ways counterproductive for that. Many of the strategies used in the public health model aim at basically strengthening these abilities, all of these factors which tend to make people more vulnerable to crime also made them less effective at making the kinds of decisions they want to make.