Environmental crime prevention

• Wilson and Kelling - ECP

  • community-based approach
  • argues that high levels of crime occur in neighbourhoods where there has been a loss of social control
  • it low-level antisocial behaviour can be prevented, then the escalation to more serious criminal acts can be stopped
• Newman - defensible space

  • by changing the design of streets and housing estates, it is possible to make them safer
  • his ideas led to the demolition of many high-rise flats with shared public spaces because they were thought to attract deviant elements
• Routine Activities Theory

  crime tends to occur when a likely offender and a likely target come together at a particular time and in a place where there is no ‘capable guardian’ to stop or discourage offending
• Cons of the ECP

  • Marxists - it is doomed to failure because they are treating the symptoms rather than the cause of the social disease of crime
  • politicians need to address the economic and social conditions that bring about the risk conditions for crime
  • there isn’t enough police and it is too costly to employ more police to enforce all minor laws
• Retributive justice (pay back)

  • the offender has broken the social rules which bond individuals together as a society
  • it is deliberately severe because it has to convey the message that society is more important than the individual
• Punitive punishment and control

  • punishment, eg. prison
  • favoured by the New Right
  • many US states practise the “three strikes rule”, on an offenders 3rd strike they automatically receive a life sentence whatever the offence
  • some argue that prison is an opportunity for the reform and rehabilitation of offenders so that they do not return to crime once they have been released