Prevention of crime

12 Key excerpts on "Prevention of crime"

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  Criminology

  The Basics

  • Sandra Walklate(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  In this chapter we shall consider the key trends in crime prevention that have occurred over the last 30 years and we shall explore their links with different strands of criminological thought. More importantly, however, this chapter will be just as concerned with demonstrating what has been made visible and invisible within these trends. In other words, the reader will be asked to think about what kinds of crimes policy trends have paid attention to and why. However, first of all, it is important to say something about what is assumed by the idea of crime prevention.

  WHAT DOES PREVENTION MEAN?

  In general terms, ‘prevention’ is taken to be a ‘good thing’. Whether with respect to health, poverty, or crime, prevention is assumed to be a good thing because social problems are seen to be bad things. However, in any context, understanding prevention involves two connected processes; being able to predict the outcome of a chain of events, and then being able to devise a way of intervening with, or altering that predicted outcome. Within criminology crime prevention implies that we can identify the cause of crime and on the basis of this devise policies that can stop crime from happening. (For those of you who have managed to make it this far through this book, you should already be aware of what a tall order this is!) The ever changing nature of crime, and the ways in which it is committed, indicate how complicated a relationship this may be. Nevertheless, policy makers and politicians, sometimes informed by criminologists sometimes not, spend a good deal of time being preoccupied with crime prevention. In recent years, however, it has become more popular to talk of crime reduction and/or community safety, or even the notion of resilient communities. This change in terminology sends out the message that the possibility of preventing crime is less likely than reducing it or managing it better as a social problem, in order to make people feel better about crime. The reader will undoubtedly make up his or her own mind on whether this is likely to be the case.

  As this chapter unfolds it will become clear that there are different ways in which crime prevention is understood and subsequently acted upon. Ken Pease (2002), an internationally recognised criminologist who has frequently worked within the crime prevention area, argues that there are three broad approaches to the cause of crime. We have used his terms earlier in this book but to reiterate them here they are: psyche, opportunity and structure. These terms all articulate different ways of thinking about how to proceed with crime prevention (reduction).

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  Psychology and Crime

  2nd edition

  • Aidan Sammons, David Putwain(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  10

  Crime prevention

  The goal of crime prevention is to reduce the amount of criminal activity and the harm that it causes along with the number of criminal offenders and their victims. Crime prevention strategies are used by individuals, communities, businesses and government to target those factors that are known to cause crime in order to facilitate a reduction in crime. This chapter surveys some of the ways in which psychology can contribute to reducing crime. It starts by distinguishing between different types of crime prevention and then discusses how crime can be prevented by altering the environment, intervening with people at risk of involvement in criminal activity and by helping to rehabilitate offenders.

  Approaches to crime prevention

  The Public Health Model is an approach to crime prevention adopted from the medical profession. The medical approach to, for example, heart disease is not solely based on emergency procedures that occur once someone has already had a heart attack, but on ways in which people can reduce their risk of developing heart disease in the first place (e.g. adopting a healthy lifestyle). In the Public Health Model of crime prevention there are three interrelated and coordinated approaches for reducing the seriousness and incidence of criminal behaviour: primary, secondary and tertiary (Mackey, 2012). Primary and secondary preventions are forms of deterrence; they try to encourage people not to commit an offence. Tertiary prevention aims to reform offenders so that they do not reoffend (see Chapter 9 ).

  Primary crime prevention refers to proactive attempts to prevent crime before it happens. These include strengthening resiliency factors that help individuals to avoid criminal behaviours, and reducing risk factors that increase the likelihood of criminal behaviour. Such programmes could include those in schools designed to reduce risk factors in children and adolescents that might lead to more serious criminal activity later in life such as drug and alcohol use, carrying a knife and joining a gang (Regoli et al., 2010).

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  Community Policing

  A Contemporary Perspective

  • Victor E. Kappeler, Larry K. Gaines, Brian P. Schaefer(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Complex problems cannot be solved using simple responses. Historically, police departments, when faced with a problem, would increase patrols in the problem area or increase investigative efforts. Today, police departments must be more innovative. They must recognize that, in many cases, multiple, complementary programs are required to resolve crime and disorder problems. This often entails the coordination of traditional and community policing measures.

  Summary

  Crime prevention is an important component in a comprehensive community policing approach. There are a number of crime prevention programs that not only reduce crime, but also foster better relationships with the community. Crime prevention is rooted in disorganization theory, rational choice theory, and routine activities theory. These theories help to explain how crime prevention can be successful. According to Linden (2007), there are five levels or strategies of crime prevention programming.

  The first is social development programs that attempt to negate the factors that influence juveniles and adults to engage in criminal behavior. In the long term, social development programs have the most potential to reduce crime compared to any other type of crime prevention. If we can keep youths from entering a life of crime and drug abuse, we will have a more drastic impact on crime. Unfortunately, political leaders have not invested in these types of programs. The second crime prevention strategy is situational crime prevention. Situational crime prevention attempts to make crime more difficult through environmental design and enhanced surveillance. It involves making crime more difficult and increasing the risk to potential criminals. In essence, situational crime prevention attempts to deter criminals. The third strategy is community crime prevention programming. The essence of community crime prevention is community involvement. The police have long understood that efforts to combat crime can be successful only when people are actively involved in assisting the police. Examples of these programs include neighborhood or block watches, citizen patrols, the identification of property, and media campaigns. The fourth category of crime prevention strategy is legislative/administrative strategies. Programs within this strategy include efforts to pass statutes and administrative regulations that prevent crime or enhance law enforcement’s ability to tackle a particular crime problem. Over the years, there have been a number of legislative changes relating to domestic violence, gangs, driving while under the influence, and municipal code enforcement that have provided law enforcement with new tools to counter a particular crime or disorder problem. Finally, police programs include traditional police responses to crime. Community policing departments must maintain some level of traditional methods of combating crime. However, when these methods are coupled with community policing and crime prevention activities, the police generally experience more success.

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  Criminology NQF3 SB

  TVET FIRST

  • M Schoeman(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Topic 6 The effectiveness of different strategies and programmes to reduce or prevent crime and victimisation 140 Topic 6: The effectiveness of different strategies and programmes to reduce or prevent crime and victimisation Crime reduction or prevention strategies and programmes Overview At the end of this Module, you should be able to: • debate the different definitions of crime reduction or prevention • distinguish between models, strategies and programmes • evaluate the effectiveness of specific crime reduction or prevention strategies and programmes to deal with specific types of crime. Introduction Crime prevention is any initiative or policy that aims to reduce or eliminate crime and victimisation. It includes Government and community-based programmes that aim to reduce risk factors that could cause criminal behaviour and victimisation. Criminologists such as Gottfredson, McKenzie, Eck, Farrington, Sherman, Waller and others have been at the forefront of analysing what works to prevent crime. In this Module, the various definitions of crime prevention will be discussed, a distinction will be made between a model, strategy and programme, and the effectiveness of various crime prevention strategies will be discussed. Unit 16.1: Different definitions of crime reduction or prevention There are several definitions of crime prevention. Some of these definitions distinguish between crime prevention and crime control, while others follow a more comprehensive approach. Having said this, there is no generally accepted definition for crime prevention. Tuck defines crime prevention as ‘all actions aimed at preventing crime that do not include the criminal justice system’. It can therefore be interpreted as the measures that authorities, communities, businesses, and individuals take to prevent crime. Crime prevention activities aim to address the crime problem by means of educational campaigns and socio-economic upliftment of people’s socio-economic situations.

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  Crime Prevention

  Theory, Policy And Practice

  • Daniel Gilling(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Consequently, the modern use of the term to refer to contemporary developments in crime control, sometimes complementary and some times in opposition to more traditional institutional responses (police, probation and prisons), is in fact somewhat misleading, and fails to capture the essence of the changes currently taking place in crime control policies both in England and Wales, and across much of the world. Crime prevention, then, is too vague and broad a term on which to hang a study such as this, and requires further elaboration, for as it stands it has a catch-all nature that defies disciplining, enabling it to embrace a range of areas that would by themselves be worthy of study in their own right. Crime prevention incorporates not only the practices of the entire criminal justice system, but also those of many other social and public policies, as well as those of private citizens and private enterprise. The situation is further complicated when one considers that the Prevention of crime is often not the primary rationale for practices that do, nevertheless, have a crime preventive effect.

  If we were to unpack the concept of crime prevention, we would immediately recognize that crime itself is by no means a precise term, covering a host of qualitatively and quantitatively different acts that, as befits social constructs, vary across time and space. But the real problem lies with the word prevention, which Billis (1981:368) succinctly and accurately describes as “slippery”, and certainly difficult to contain. Freeman (1992) explores the reasons for this by breaking the word down into two constituent parts, namely prediction and intervention. That is to say that in order to prevent the occurrence of something one must first be able to predict where it is likely to occur, and then apply appropriate intervention at this predicted point. Prediction is, however, literally a risky business. It depends upon a theory of causality, and when applied to social constructs such as crime and criminality it is very uncertain, drawing as it does upon social scientific knowledge and understanding that has historically proved to be “more successful at predicting the experience of populations than of individuals.” (Freeman 1992:36). Social science, as Graham (1990:11) observes, “is not an exact science. It deals largely with probabilities and correlates rather than certainties and causes.”

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  Psychology and Crime

  2nd edition

  • Aidan Sammons, David Putwain(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  129 Crime prevention C H A P T E R 10 The goal of crime prevention is to reduce the amount of criminal activity and the harm that it causes along with the number of criminal offenders and their victims. Crime prevention strategies are used by individuals, communities, businesses and government to target those factors that are known to cause crime in order to facili-tate a reduction in crime. This chapter surveys some of the ways in which psychol-ogy can contribute to reducing crime. It starts by distinguishing between different types of crime prevention and then discusses how crime can be prevented by alter-ing the environment, intervening with people at risk of involvement in criminal activity and by helping to rehabilitate offenders. Approaches to crime prevention The Public Health Model is an approach to crime prevention adopted from the med-ical profession. The medical approach to, for example, heart disease is not solely based on emergency procedures that occur once someone has already had a heart attack, but on ways in which people can reduce their risk of developing heart dis-ease in the first place (e.g. adopting a healthy lifestyle). In the Public Health Model of crime prevention there are three interrelated and coordinated approaches for reducing the seriousness and incidence of criminal behaviour: primary, secondary and tertiary (Mackey, 2012). Primary and secondary preventions are forms of deter-rence; they try to encourage people not to commit an offence. Tertiary prevention aims to reform offenders so that they do not reoffend (see Chapter 9). Primary crime prevention refers to proactive attempts to prevent crime before it happens. These include strengthening resiliency factors that help individuals to avoid criminal behaviours, and reducing risk factors that increase the likelihood of criminal behaviour.

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  Changing Lives

  Delinquency Prevention as Crime-Control Policy

  • Peter W. Greenwood(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  Let’s turn to the crime-control sphere first. Concerns about crime occur in two different dimensions, as illustrated by the rows in table 2.1: the past and the future. One dimension is purely reactive and focuses on crime that has already occurred. Identifying and punishing the offender, assisting the victim, restoring order and peace to the community, and assigning blame for any lapses in security that allowed the crime to take place — all are aspects of this reactive approach. Traditional law enforcement investigation and prosecution efforts are largely focused on this dimension, as are the more recently developed programs in “balanced and restorative justice” (Braithwaite, 1989). The other dimension is anticipatory and proactive, and focuses on the future in the attempt to prevent or ameliorate crimes before they occur. All efforts to prevent crime fall within this latter category, but within it there is a broad array of different strategies and mechanisms. Some focus on the physical and social environment in which the crime might be committed, as indicated in the lower-left cell in table 2.1. Some involve direct investments in security systems or devices including locks, guards, and surveillance equipment or alarm systems. Others involve more indirect investments in making the environment safer, such as improved lighting, changing traffic patterns to make escapes more difficult, or removing shrubs and other obstructions where predators might hide (Clark, 1995; Taylor, 2002). The law-enforcement approach is to increase the likelihood of arrest and severity of penalties so that potential offenders will be deterred. The public-health approach to the prevention of violent crimes restricts access to alcohol, for example, which can increase the likelihood of a crime’s taking place, or to guns, which increase the chances of a crime’s being lethal (Mercy & O’Carrol, 1988).

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  Crime Prevention

  Theory and Practice, Second Edition

  • Stephen Schneider(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Local governments must provide adequate financial support to these initiatives. 2. Develop and use (computer-based crime mapping) in order to facilitate the identification of needs and the targeting of investments (Canadian Forum for Crime Prevention, 2003). Crime Prevention: Theory and Practice 298 was premised on federal crime-control policy, which asserted that “the formal crimi-nal justice system by itself cannot control crime without the help from neighborhood residents in fostering neighborhood-level social controls” and that the “community should play the central role in defining community crime prevention and that orga-nized groups of residents are perhaps the best vehicle for responding to local crime” (United States Department of Justice, 1977, 3). A sample of past and current Department of Justice agencies and funding programs that include a strong crime prevention or community policing focus is summarized in the succeeding text. What is apparent when examining those federal programs that advocate crime prevention is that a community-based, proactive, and problem-oriented philosophy is viewed as one of many complementary approaches to tackling crime. In other words, as far as contemporary Department of Justice programs and program funding are concerned, the principles and strategies of crime prevention are integrated within a comprehensive approach to crime that includes traditional criminal justice responses.

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  Crime Prevention and Intervention

  Legal and Ethical Problems

  • Peter-Alexis Albrecht, Otto Backes(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  3. Prevention as a Problematic Objective in the Criminal Justice System Peter-Alexis Albrecht I. Prevention as an Idea in Legal and Social Theory 1. Prevention as a technology of social control Prevention is currently used to justify completely different measures of social policy, ranging from classical social welfare policies to classical policies of crime control. There has been a convergence of diverse sociopolitical subsystems into mechanisms of social control qua prevention. Social policy is increasingly performing functions of social control. 11 Similarly, criminal justice policy, by adopting a preventive orientation, has assumed more comprehensive powers of a traditionally sociopolitical nature than could be justified by its traditional orientation toward punishing overt, legally defined deviance. 21 Faced with demands for a greater preventive effectiveness in the pursuit of empirically definable external goals, criminal law may soon lose most of the formal constitutional basis for its legitimacy. While the traditional model confined the social-control aspect of criminal law to the resolution of disputes and the stabilization of expectations, the current trend is for the claims of the criminal law to expand into the use of prevention to resolve systemic conflicts. This extension of the criminal law's claim to control, which can be seen throughout the criminal justice system, is the focus of this report. The principal goal of this study is to determine the function of what is commonly called prevention. In this article the term prevention is not applied in the narrow, legal sense. Thus it means more than special prevention 3) or general prevention 41 in their usual legal meanings. What is intended is rather a comprehensive, and offensive, strategy of social control technology that reaches far beyond the traditional decisionmaking powers of the criminal justice system.

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  Crime Prevention

  Principles, Perspectives and Practices

  • Adam Sutton, Adrian Cherney, Rob White(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  This means that not only do policies need to draw on a range of third parties and partners, but also need to be mindful of their potentially negative impact on particular groups and communities. As such, how we actually ‘do’ crime prevention demands that transparency and accountability be built into the process. From the outset we have said that ultimately crime prevention is also a matter of politics. It is about power and decision-making, resource allocation and budget priorities. We conclude with the observation that where we put our time, energy and money says a lot about the kind of society we live in now, and the kind of future we see for ourselves and our children. For us, crime prevention is integral to sustaining an exciting, pleasurable, safe and secure environment: one that opens up possibilities for human creativity, satisfaction and happiness. 222 Glossary affective results – the symbolic or expressive goals of crime prevention, such as reaffirming key social values, which need to be expressed as part of crime prevention policy and practice so they resonate with public perceptions, emotions and values. audits – audits of a particular local environment that focus on examining and documenting the physical environment (identifying sites considered to be unsafe or threatening); the social environment (different users and uses of public space); the regulatory environment (the nature of police and security approaches); types of amenities (youth-specific and youth- friendly); and movements through public places (flows of people through particular areas). The purpose of such mapping exercises is to gain accurate information on how public spaces are used at different times and by different groups. broken windows thesis – the argument that people constantly monitor spaces they move through for signs that order is being preserved.

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  Social Intervention

  • Klaus Hurrelmann, Franz-Xaver Kaufmann, Friedrich Lösel(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  304 F. Lösel 4. Problems and Perspectives The roughly outlined evaluation of crime prevention is typical of the social scientist's confrontation with the unmanageableness of complex spheres of reality. However, a skepticism toward fashionable slogans of prevention does not imply a basic pessimism. The further development of refined concepts for prevention is undoubtedly one of the most fruitful developments within the practice of social intervention. This requires, however, a greater concentration on basic problems, and an emphasis on their reduction in research and practice. We will now briefly discuss some of these aspects. 1. Theoretical foundation: Further improvements in crime prevention measures above all require a better theoretical foundation. A large number of the measures are based on more or less eclectic assumptions about the causes of crime instead of empirically tested theories. This is partly understandable since there are numerous theories in criminology that confront each other in a rather disconnected manner, and practice cannot wait until theories are sufficiently proven. However, it is both possible and necessary to develop a stricter orientation to theory in prevention research and practice. We must particularly consider the fact that popular assumptions on causes of crime, such as unemployment, dissolution of family ties, socioeconomic disadvantage, urban living conditions, etc., are theoretically poorly differentiated, and the empirical findings are somewhat ambiguous (Lösel, 1982; Kaiser, 1985). On the other hand, there are elaborated theories which show consistency in their hypotheses and a substantial degree of empirical support. This applies, for instance, to cognitive —social learning theories (e.g., Sarason, 1978; Bandura, 1979), theories of informal social control (e.g. Hirschi, 1969; Elliot, Huizinga, and Ageton, 1985), and decision theory approaches to criminality (e.g. Lösel, 1975; Cornish and Clarke, 1986).

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  International Handbook of Penology and Criminal Justice

  • Shlomo Giora Shoham, Ori Beck, Martin Kett(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Participation also varies according to the type of prevention program (Hope and Lab 2001; Lab 1990). This means that the potential impact of neighborhood watch and community crime prevention is untested in many areas and on the populations where the greatest margin for change exists. It is in these areas where engendering participation is most challenging, in part because of a vicious cycle between involvement and fear/crime. That is, fear and per-ceived risk may lead people to retreat into their homes and avoid other people, which in turn mitigates the possibility of group action to address fear and victimization. 7.4.3 Summary The evidence tends to support the basic idea of neighborhood crime preven-tion as a means of combating crime and the fear of crime. Research generally presents neighborhood watch and its component activities as effective meth-ods to reduce crime, victimization, and fear of crime. The magnitude of the changes, however, often appears to vary greatly from study to study. The discrepant results can be attributed to several factors. Foremost among the causes is the fact that the neighborhood initiative was not successfully imple-mented. That means that the failure is not in the crime prevention program itself, but is from a failure to mobilize the citizens, initiate the intervention, or bring the measures to bear on the problem. 7.5 General Deterrence Any discussion of primary prevention would not be complete without a look at the deterrent effects of punishment. Recall that primary prevention attempts to eliminate or reduce the level of deviant behavior prior to its occurrence. Most people today feel that official agencies of social control are, or should be, responsible for eliminating crime. Indeed, the actions of crim-inal justice agencies are aimed at the elimination of crime through deterrence. Crime Prevention 247 One of the leading writers on the subject defines deterrence as “influenc-ing by fear” (Andenaes 1975).

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