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CRIME PREVENTION - Coggle Diagram
CRIME PREVENTION
SITUATIONAL
- Clark identified 3 features of measures aimed at situational crime prevention:
- they're directed at specific crimes
- they involve managing/altering the immediate environment of the crime
- they aim at increasing efforts and risks of committing crime and reducing the rewards
- Examples include target hardening- measures such as locking doors and windows increases the effort a burglar needs to make
- Surveillance in shops via cctv/security guards increase the likelihood of shoplifters being caught
- CLARKE- 'a pre-emptive approach that relies on reducing opportunities of crime, not on improving society or its institutions
- includes strategies which focus on the specific point at which potential victims and criminals come together making it harder for the criminal to commit crime
- it is very local
- its a rational choice theory of crime- view that criminals act rationally, weighing up the costs and benefits of crime opportunity before deciding whether to commit it
EVALUATION:
- These measures don't reduce crime, they displace it - if criminals are acting rationally they will respond to target hardening simply by moving to where targets are softer
- CHAIKEN ET AL (1974) found a crackdown on subway robberies displaced them to the streets above
- Displacement can take several forms:
- Spatial: moving elsewhere to commit
- Temporal: at a different time
- Target: different victim
- Tactical: different method
- Functional: committing a different type of crime
- Only focuses on opportunistic street crime and ignores white collar, corporate, state crime which are more costly and harmful
- Assumes criminals make rational calculations- this seems unlikely in many crimes of violence and crimes commited under the influence of drugs or alcohol
- ignores the root cause of crime such as poverty or poor socialisation which makes it difficult to develop long term strategies for crime reduction
- Successful in the case of reducing suicides by gassing.
- In 1960s half of all suicides in Britain were a result of gassing
- From 1960s coal gas was replaced by less toxic natural gas and by 1997 suicides from gassing had fallen to near zero
- Overall suicide rate declined- there was no displacement
ENVIRONMENTAL
WILSON AND KELLING use the phrase 'broken windows' to stand for all various sings of disorder and lack of concern for others that are found in some neighbourhoods
- This includes graffiti, begging, dog fouling, littering vandalism etc
- They argue that leaving broken windows unreoaired, tolerating aggressive begging etc send out a signal that no one cares
- In such neighbourhoods, there is an absence of both formal social control(police) and informal social control(community)
- The police are only concerned with serious crime and turn a blind eye to petty nuisance behaviour , while respectable members of the community feel powerless and intimidated
- without remedial action the situation deteriorates tipping the neighbourhood into a spiral of decline- respectable people move out and the area becomes a magnet for deviants
ZERO TOLERANCE POLICING:
- Wilson and Kellings key idea is that disorder and the absence of control leads to crime
- Their solution is to crackdown on any disorder using a twofold strategy:
- 1) an environmental improvement strategy- any broken window must be repaired immediately, abandoned cars towed without delay, otherwise more will follow
- 2) the police must adopt a zero tolerance policing strategy- they must proactively tackle even the slightest sign of disorder even if its not criminal
- This will halt neighbourhood decline and prevent serious crime from taking root
EVALUATION
- Great success have been claims especially in New York - 'clean car programme' reduced graffiti on the subway (cars were taken out of service immediately if they had any graffiti on them)
- However its not clear how far zero tolerance was the cause of improvements
- the NYPD benefited from 7000 extra officers
- there was a general decline in crime rate in major cities at the time
- there was decline in availability of crack cocaine
- more expensive than situational crime prevention- it takes a lot of police to patrol an area and clampdown on anti-social behaviour
- REINER argues the police would be better deployed focusing on more serious crime hotspots rather than clamping down on minor forms of anti-social behaviour
SOCIAL AND COMMUNITY
- Place the emphasis firmly on the potential offender and their social context
- The aim of these strategies is to remove the conditions that predispose individuals to crime in the first place
- These are long-term strategies since they attempt to tackle the root causes of offending rather than simply removing opportunities for crime
- Because the causes of crime are often rooted in social conditions such as poverty, unemployment and poor housing, more general social reform programmes addressing these issues may have a crime prevention role
THE PERRY PRE-SHOOL PROJECT:
- One of the best known community programmes aimed at reducing criminality is the experimental Perry pre-school project for disadvantaged black children in Michigan
- Experimental group of 3-4 year olds were offered a 2 year intellectual enrichment programme, during which the children also recieved weekly home visits
- Longitudinal study showed striking differences with a control group that hadn't undergone the programme
- By age 40 they had significantly fewer lifetime arrests for violent crime while more had graduated from high school and were in employment
EVALUATION:
- if done effectively, these are the most costly of all crime preventions
- if done properly, community prevention measures can save hundreds of thousands of pounds by turning a potential criminal into an employed tax payer
- Marxists argue these policies may tackle deprivation but they dont tackle the underlying structural inequalities in the capitalist system which are the root cause
WHAT IS MISSING?
- These approaches take for granted the nature and definition of crime
- They generally focus on fairly low-level crimes or interpersonal crimes of violence- tis disregards the crimes of the powerful and environmental crimes
- the defenition of the 'crime problem' reflects the priorities of politicians and agencies tasked with crime prevention
- E.G WHYTE conducted aa survey of 26 crime and disorder area partnerships in the north west of England to discover what crimes their strategies were targeting
- Environmental crimes were not targeted even though the north west has one of the most heavily concentrated sights of chemical production in Europe
- He argued that there was no logical reason why such activities shouldn't be included in the crime and disorder partnership agendas despite their potential and actual effect on the health of local communities