Control, punishment and victims

• Situational crime prevention: Focuses on reducing opportunities for people to commit crime. For example target hardening, where criminals are prevented from committing crimes by making them harder to carry out.
• Examples of target hardening: CCTV, locks, gates and security guards
• Clarke (1992): Argues that most crime is opportunistic.
• Real life example of situational crime prevention: The port authority bus terminal in new York changed the lighting and toilet doors which caused less crime to be committed.
• Displacement: Situational crime prevention don't reduce crime they simply displace it to other areas. E.g. suicide didn't decrease when gas in ovens was replaced with a less toxic gas because people just found other ways of killing themselves.
• Evaluation of situational crime prevention (Strengths):

  • Works at stopping certain types of crime such as street crime.
• Evaluation of situational crime prevention (Limitation):

  • Displaces crime instead of getting rid of it.
  • Only focuses on petty street crime, ignores white collar crime.
  • Assumes criminals make rational decisions.
  • Ignores root cause of crime.
  • CCTV mostly focuses on young males.
• Environmental crime prevention: Wilson and Kelling's broken window article states that people may be more inclined to commit crime if they see that someone else has already done it. For example if graffiti is left on walls people may be more likely to continue as it sends signals of disorder and a lack of concern.
• Zero tolerance: A policy where police crack down on any behavior which is seen as disorderly as an effort to deter criminals.
• Social and community crime prevention: An aim to remove conditions that predispose people to crime, focuses on long term solutions to tackle to root cause of offending. E.g. The Perry pre-school project.