Background and Aim: Over the past century, Iranian legislative and executive bodies have repeatedly sought to transplant crime-prevention institutions and policies from Northern Europe, Canada, Japan, and Malaysia, yet these legal transplants have not reproduced the outcomes observed in their countries of origin. This study aims to provide a comparative legal explanation of that failure and to identify the institutional precondition whose absence renders both foreign transplants and religious-moral prescriptions ineffective. Method: The study is qualitative and descriptive-analytical, conducted through documentary and library research within a most-different-systems design. Alongside scholarly literature, provisions of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, ordinary statutes concerning transparency and administrative integrity, and international instruments were examined through qualitative content analysis. Findings: The success of the selected legal systems in containing crime derives neither from penal severity nor from policing technique, but from an infrastructure of accountability, transparency, and institutional trust. At the normative level the Iranian legal system is largely adequate: Articles 8, 24, 90, 173, and 174 of the Constitution, together with related statutes, establish a relatively complete architecture of answerability. The deficiency lies in the enforcement component and in the unequal application of law. Conclusion: The missing link for sustainable crime reduction in Iran is neither policy importation nor intensified faith-based prescription, but the governing system's will to activate the enforcement of accountability already embedded in its constitutional order, to institutionalize criticism, and to define its ultimate purpose while realistically matching means to ends.