This book focuses on the ways in which security as an idea, an ideal and a practice can shed light on the intersections and entanglements between welfare and crime, and the ambiguities, tensions and contradictions that arise from them. It is concerned specifically with the increasingly blurred area between social and crime control policy and the way in which it is managed. The book asks why security has become such an important idea and how the notion of security links the different domains of social, personal and political life, and especially the worlds of crime control and welfare. It seeks to make sense of the changing nature of the relationship between security and insecurity, as expressed in state policy.In this context, the book explores some of the consequences and implications of policies and practices aimed at creating security. Such innovations may not have the desired consequences or they may have outcomes other than those intended. The book approaches the search for security, and the unintended effects that arise from it, through a range of contemporary issues and standpoints: from the apparently most individual and personal within families to the most distant threats of war and disease and from attempts to construct safe communities through gated housing developments to the construction of new forms of criminalisation exemplified through policies aiming to control anti-social behaviour and hate crime. Running throughout the book is an emphasis on evidence and the role that different forms of social data play in the analysis of ideas of security and the development of policies intended to deliver it.