Crime Prevention

• Right Realism - Clarke - Crime Prevention

  • Sees Situational Crime prevention as a pre-emptive approach that relies simply on reducing crime opportunities for crime.
  • Rational Choice - criminal weighs up the costs and benefits of committing the crime
  • Suggests that ‘Target Hardening’ approach
  • Measures aimed at situational crime prevention:
  • Direct at specific crimes
  • Involve managing or altering the immediate environment of the victim
  • Aim to increase the effort and risks of committing crime as well as reducing the rewards of committing crime.
• Marcus Felson

  Example of situational crime prevention

  • The port authority bus terminals poor design was a perfect location for deviant conduct such as luggage thefts, rough sleeping.
  • Solution - Replace the larger sinks where the homeless people were bathing with smaller ones.
• Evaluation of Marcus Felson

  • Situational crime prevention does not reduce crime it simple moves it elsewhere.
  • 5 Forms of displacement
  • Spatial - moving elsewhere for crime
  • Temporal - Committing at different time
  • Target - choosing different victim
  • Tactical - different method
  • Functional - different type of crime
• Right Realism

  • Environmental Crime Prevention
  • Wilson and Kelling -
  • Broken Window theory - Argues that leaving a broken window unprepared, tolerating aggressive behaviour sends out that no one cares. Absence of both formal social control (police) nd informal social control (community) means members of community feel intimidated and powerless.
  • Zero tolerance policy.
• Oscar Newman

  • Defensive space
  • A residential environment whose physical characteristics function to allow inhabitants themselves to become key agents in ensuring their security.
  • Community buildings like tower blocks, communal stairways / lifts and gardens don’t often give residents a sense that it belongs to them, they do not take personal ownership and take care of them.
• Left Realism - Crime Prevention -

  • Social and Community based prevention - Sure start
  • Community service
  • Electronic Tagging
  • Ethnic Minority police officers
  • Community orders.
  • Perry Pre-school project:
  • Experimented on disadvantaged black 3-4 year olds, costs were high but benefits were higher, drop in criminality. Decision making and problem solving.
• Surveillance - Crime Prevention

  • Left and Right realism
  • Benefits car parking crime not further crimee
  • Wall - Cybe crime (media)
  • falsely reassure public about their security
  • monitoring behaviour through observation, regulate and manage behaviour.

  Foucault

  • Sovereign power and disciplinary power,
  • Self surveillance - Confrom by the fact you may be watched

  Mathiesen

  • The many can control the few - politicians

  Feely and Simon

  • Prevention happens through calculation risk - technology of power
• Prisons - Crime Punishment

  Different functions

  • Most severe form of punishment - ideological function
  • Rehabilitation - Prevent reoffending - ‘Just desserts‘
  • ‘University of crime‘ - leads to reoffending
  • Deterrence - General and Individual - Fear of punishment
  • Public Protection - Imprisonment protection from harm.
  • Prisons are costly and problems with overcrowding.
  • Transcaseration - Moving from one environment to another.
• Functionalism - Crime Punishment -

  RID to reduce crime

  • Rehabilitation - Changing behaviour
  • Incapacitation - Remove offenders capacity to offend
  • Deterrence - Deter from reoffending

  Durkheim 2 types of justice

  • Retribution - Paying back to society for crime they cause
  • Restitutive - Restore things to how they were to maintain social order.

  Crime can be a boundary Maintenance
• Marxism - Crime Punishment

  • Harsher sentences benefitted the ruling class
  • The working class were a reserve army of labour

  Althusser

  • Ideological state apparatus through laws
  • punishment reinforces ruling class interest

  Marx

  • Capitalism is equal to imprisonment
  • Punishment protects the ruling class wealth.