Crime Prevention

How can we 'catch' and prevent crimes before they are committed?

In this explanation, we will address and go through the various answers to this question.

• We will clarify the meaning of crime prevention.
• We will focus on the primary strategies of crime prevention in sociological theory: situational, social and community-based, and environmental crime prevention.
• We will explore and evaluate these three measures.
• We will also see examples of each.

The meaning of crime prevention

First, let's look at a definition of crime prevention:

Now that we are familiar with the meaning of crime prevention, let's go through the various methods through which society attempts to prevent criminal activity.

Crime prevention strategies

There are three main crime prevention strategies to be aware of:

• Situational crime prevention

• Social and community-based crime prevention

• Environmental crime prevention

Let's go through each in turn. We will define the strategies and their aims, look at practical examples of their implementation, and assess their advantages and disadvantages.

Situational crime prevention

The first and most commonly cited method is situational crime prevention.

The goal of situational crime prevention is to increase the amount of effort it takes to carry out criminal activity, and reduce the rewards one obtains from it.

Examples of situational crime prevention

An example of situational crime prevention is what is known as target hardening - implementing barriers such as door and window locks, CCTV, security personnel, and anti-climb paint. This serves to remove the opportunity to either break in or commit a robbery.

Another aspect of situational crime prevention is designing out certain features of an area that may enable crime. This can look like installing sloping seats at bus stops or adding armrests in the middle of park benches to prevent homeless people from sleeping on them, or, in more extreme cases, the use of 'anti-homeless architecture' in certain parts of a city or area.

Felson (2002) observed designing out measures being used in the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal. The bathroom areas were used for drug dealing, baggage thefts, rough sleeping, and sexual encounters. The bathroom sinks were made smaller to prevent homeless people from bathing in them.

Designing out can also include spikes, barbed wire, and other features that make it difficult to climb or enter a property.

Advantages and disadvantages of situational crime prevention

Situational crime prevention is quite controversial. Let's look at its praises and criticisms.

Advantages of situational crime prevention

• Situational crime prevention is a cost-effective and relatively simple method of curbing crime and can therefore be appealing as a short-term solution to many common crimes.

Disadvantages of situational crime prevention

As with anything, there are disadvantages as well.

Crime displacement

• One of the most prominent objections to situational crime prevention is displacement - rather than reducing crime, it simply causes the crimes to move elsewhere. For instance, removing homeless people from the streets does not erase the issue of homelessness/rough sleeping, but perhaps only forces those people to 'squat' somewhere else.

• Chaiken et al. (1974) found that doubling down on dealing with subway robberies in New York resulted in crimes being displaced to the street level above.

• There are several forms of displacement: spatial (committing crime somewhere else), temporal (committing crime at a different time), target (committing crime on a different victim), tactical (committing crime in a different way), and functional (committing another type of crime).

Root causes are ignored

This leads to another significant issue with this method, because it does not address the root causes of crime. Criminal activity doesn't usually arise out of nowhere. It is the result of complex societal and cultural factors. Many common crimes such as petty theft or rough sleeping are often due to poverty, deprivation, and inequality.

The narrow focus of the types of crime addressed

Situational crime prevention generally only focuses on 'street' crime and the causes behind it. It does not engage with other forms of criminal activity such as interpersonal violence, white-collar crime, and state crimes.

Fig. 1 - Situational crime prevention attempts to eradicate "street crimes" such as break-ins.

Social and community crime prevention

This is a strategy of crime prevention that is founded on a very different ethos from its situational counterpart.

Strategies usually include grouping individuals who are more likely to commit crimes and intervening in some form. Proponents of this method assert that the risk conditions of crime such as poverty, unemployment, lack of housing, etc., need to be urgently addressed to truly eradicate crime.

Some groups in society appear to be more susceptible to the risk conditions, such as low-income populations and some ethnic minority groups. To combat this, interventions that target issues faced by these groups address the social determinants of crime.

This includes methods such as enrolling children in pre-school classes and adults in parenting classes. This attempts to correct low educational attainment and family conflict, both of which may lead to crime.

Examples of social and community-based crime prevention

Real-life examples of social and community crime prevention schemes include:

• The Troubled Families Programme established in the UK

• The Perry Pre-School Project in the US

These target 'troubled families' and vulnerable children, in order to reduce criminality and other social problems. These initiatives have both proven successful.

Advantages and disadvantages of social and community crime prevention

Let's study the strengths and weaknesses of this crime control strategy.

Advantages of social and community crime prevention

• As these types of schemes are the most comprehensive at addressing causes of crime, they are also usually the most expensive of all crime prevention methods. They may therefore be difficult to implement on a large enough scale.

• Social and community-based approaches, similar to their situational counterparts, only target 'working-class' crime and urban communities, leaving 'elite' crime unresolved. These include green crimes and financial crimes such as fraud.
• Marxists would also argue that while policies such as the Troubled Families Initiative do address experiences of deprivation, they do not eradicate the systemic economic inequalities at the heart of capitalist societies which cause these issues to begin with.
• Finally, Michel Foucault and Foucauldian sociologists criticise intervention-focused mechanisms as having little do with tackling crime; in fact, they are just more opportunities for state surveillance and controlling the public.

Environmental crime prevention

The third and final crime control strategy we will cover is environmental crime prevention.

The theory states that visible signs of decay in a neighbourhood or area (litter, broken windows, graffiti, abandoned housing) signal public neglect, leading to a fear of crime which prompts ‘respectable’ community members to leave.

This makes it more difficult for the community to maintain order and control anti-social behaviour and so results in the eventual decline of the neighbourhood. Therefore, the environment itself needs to be discouraging towards crime.

Examples of environmental crime prevention

Zero tolerance policing (ZTP) is a form of environmental crime prevention where even minor misdemeanours are treated the same as serious crimes in order to discourage them.

Similarly, Antisocial Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) mean that people can potentially be sent to jail for slight acts of deviance. The reasoning behind both is that it is better to prevent the slide into crime than deal with the aftermath.

Advantages and disadvantages of environmental crime prevention

Like all others, environmental crime prevention has drawbacks and benefits, as follows:

Advantages of environmental crime prevention

• It can be considered quite effective. Zero tolerance policing in New York, USA led to a lot more people being arrested for misdemeanours such as marijuana possession. In the UK, ZTP methods have been applied in Liverpool and have resulted in a fall in the overall crime rate, particularly violent crimes.
• It is also a relatively cheap strategy and appears to have an immediate effect on crime, which can be reassuring to the public.

Disadvantages of environmental crime prevention

• Environmental crime prevention can be disproportionately harsh. ZTP has resulted in people facing severe consequences such as losing their jobs. ASBOs can also give people criminal records even if they did not commit any crimes.

• Techniques such as zero-tolerance have been deemed unnecessary, as crime has decreased in countries that did not adopt such techniques.

• Environmental crime prevention strategies can feed prejudice - assuming an area is more prone to crime because it looks 'rough' is not always accurate or warranted.

• ZTP often disproportionately affects ethnic minorities due to biases.

Fig. 2 - Environmental crime prevention is based on the idea that "rough" neighbourhoods invite crime.