Crime prevention policies encompass a wide range of programs, interventions, technologies, and strategies. Unlike crime-control initiatives, which concentrate on reducing the impact of crimes that have already occurred, crime-prevention efforts work preemptively. Crime prevention in the United States originated in the wake of the historic rise in crime during the 1960s and with the public’s ensuing belief that the criminal justice system was failing to protect law-abiding residents and to punish or incapacitate (i.e., lockup) criminals. The widespread assumption that crime-control strategies were ineffectual led to the call for preventive options to supplement, complement, or supplant the traditional (largely reactive) anti-crime measures of the police, courts, and corrections.
The effects of criminal victimization can be long term and even life altering. Victims of violent crime can suffer serious injuries, leading to lost workdays and income as well as extensive medical bills and incalculable pain and suffering (physical and emotional). The costs of arresting, prosecuting, convicting, and punishing offenders run in the tens of billions of dollars each year. In high-crime neighborhoods, due to a fear of crime, residents often avoid interacting with neighbors or venturing out of their homes at night. Violent crime, in particular, diminishes the quality of life in families and neighborhoods and can collectively traumatize communities and engulf them in fear. Given the enormous social, economic, and psychological toll of crime, many consider implementing crimeprevention policies to be imperative.
At the federal level in the United States, the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice (1967) and the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (1969) issued a series of recommendations demanding more ambitious and innovative strategies to combat crime. Since then, numerous crimeprevention enterprises have been created to make the streets safer. These efforts can be categorized roughly in terms of their focus on communities, situations, or people (children, parents, adults in general, and offenders). The individuals who implement these efforts also vary, involving many different agents of change, such as local residents, teachers, parents, police officers, and treatment providers. In some instances, crime prevention relies on technology, for example, alarm systems, surveillance cameras, street lighting, and tracking devices in phones and cars. This entry describes the various targets and effectors of crime-prevention policies and practices in the United States.
Community Crime Prevention (Entire Neighborhoods)
Root Causes of Crime
The President’s and National Commissions’ recommendations ushered in a new era of anti-crime programs and changed the prevailing crime-fighting narratives and paradigms. No longer dependent on the formal agents of authority and enforcement, crime-prevention policies encouraged citizens to cooperate with police in the coproduction of neighborhood safety and invited nonprofit organizations to the forefront in the battle against crime. No longer incident-focused or reactive, crime-prevention efforts became broad based (e.g., entire inner-city communities) and focused on the root causes of crime (e.g., unemployment, social inequality, and undereducation). These efforts were also sweeping—directed at large geographic areas—and were theoretically informed. For example, the Chicago Area Project (launched in the 1930s and active as of 2017) endeavored to alter the characteristics of communities, such as pervasive social disorganization and community disintegration. Such conditions are correlated with fear of crime and physical and social disorder, all of which render neighborhoods less livable and less safe.
An early incarnation of community crime prevention was the Mobilization for Youth Program. Founded in New York City in the 1960s, it included a variety of interventions designed to increase economic opportunities and decrease the marginalization and disenfranchisement of innercity residents. At the core of its philosophies and prescriptions was the proposition that social services and social-action groups could empower people to rise above their impoverished conditions through the pursuit of legitimate opportunities instead of through involvement in illegal activities, antisocial networks (e.g., gangs), and alternative (i.e., underground or shadow) economies: selling drugs, stolen property, and prostitution.
Inclusive Community Efforts
In order to reduce crime, neighborhood-based crime-prevention programs or strategies are designed to change the social infrastructure, culture, or the physical environment of a location. Community-based models are quite diverse, ranging from neighborhood-watch programs to urban or physical-design modifications (e.g., alley gating to impede the ingress and egress of criminals). They can also be widely embracing and multidisciplinary, seeking to engage residents, faith-based organizations, and local government agencies in addressing factors that contribute to neighborhood disorder, delinquency, and crime.
Fighting crime can also involve community building. A shared sense of unity, cohesion, territoriality, and support from the community as a whole (i.e., collective efficacy) fuels anti-crime sentiments and efforts. Communities experience the damaging effects of crime to varying degrees. Some neighborhoods never exert serious, determined responses to public disorder and crime because they lack the capacity (i.e., social and economic capital) to do so. Neighborhoods with higher income residents who embrace middleclass values and are on the tipping point of more serious crime problems tend to be more active in efforts to combat street crime than are lower-class neighborhoods inundated with crime problems.
Reductions in Disorder and Decay
A sense of solidarity within the community can reverse the downward spiral of neighborhood disorder and decay. For example, groups of residents in block clubs and neighborhood-watch programs have joined together to clean up abandoned lots and implore the city to tow abandoned cars and shutter abandoned buildings. These are sights and sites that can encourage crime by leaving residents and offenders with the perception that the neighborhood is declining and drifting toward normlessness. This perception weakens the social fabric and invites incivilities that embolden offenders to become more active in their criminal pursuits. Concerted steps help residents become increasingly assertive and empowered, enabling them to restore a sense of general safety and to begin using their streets again, this time with less fear. The most effective community prevention programs concentrate solely on local community issues. Community anti-crime efforts are best developed by local community members, who work to alleviate the specific concerns of the community, build upon existing community assets, and move forward with the influence and momentum of the residents themselves.
Situational Crime Prevention: Specific Places and Times
Criminological Theories as Blueprints
Situational crime prevention is based on three major criminological theories. The first is rational choice theory, which posits that criminals decide to commit crimes after weighing the costs and benefits of such activities in a particular setting, at a particular time. The second is routine activities theory, which posits that crime occurs as the result of a confluence of a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of guardians to observe or stop crimes in progress. The third is crime pattern theory, which—similar to routine activities theory—posits that places can be crime generators, especially when they are hubs of activities for would-be offenders and victims. Places that provide criminal opportunities are known as crime attractors. And when these places have a dearth of protections or controls to prevent crimes, they are known as crime enablers.
Types of Situational Crime-Prevention Strategies
These three theories have become a roadmap for crime-prevention measures. The roadmap can be partitioned into four sets of strategies directed at the decision-making processes of motivated criminals in various circumstances. Strategy 1 makes offenders work harder to complete a criminal act. For example, target hardening protects property by placing it behind barriers. Stores with bars on the windows or solid steel retractable gates are more difficult to burglarize after business hours, compared with stores with glass windows or simple door locks. By applying techniques from the field of crime prevention through environmental design, homes and apartment buildings become safer by increasing prospect (i.e., the ability to clearly see an area through modifications that enhance open sight lines and illuminations), reducing refuge (i.e., providing few places for offenders to conceal themselves), and balancing escape (i.e., giving offenders fewer escape routes and potential victims more escape outlets).
Strategies 2 and 3 increase the risk and lower the rewards of crime, respectively. In Strategy 2, by increasing the risk of identification and apprehension through the placement of guardians (e.g., armed security guards) or surveillance technologies (e.g., closed-circuit televisions and cameras), offenders can be dissuaded from taking advantage of a criminal opportunity. In Strategy 3, the prospects for committing an offense are diminished when criminals are unable to clearly view a target and appraise its worth. Examples of reward reduction include jewelry stores that keep their most valuable items from public display, companies that design their mobile phones to disable if stolen or lost, property identification programs (e.g., operation identification) that help police return stolen goods to victims, and police operations that disrupt illegal markets for selling (fencing) stolen goods.
Strategies 4 and 5 are more complicated than the others. The former involves manipulating situational cues, such as creating settings that promote civility and lessen conflicts. Also included in this category are efforts to neutralize peer pressures to engage in delinquent and criminal behaviors and to discourage the imitation of major crimes (copycatting) by hiding details regarding the mechanics of offenses (i.e., modus operandi) from the public. Strategy 5 reminds people in public settings about the parameters and expectations that govern acceptable and unacceptable behaviors in those areas and limits the ingestion of drugs and alcohol, which lower inhibitions to engage in violent and other antisocial behaviors.
Developmental Crime Prevention: Youth and Families
Poor Parenting and Risk Factors
The propensity to commit crimes can appear early in life. Crime-prevention programs that assume a developmental perspective are mostly family-, peer-, and school-based. Lackluster or ineffective parenting has been implicated in several theories of delinquent behavior and is the subject of a variety of correctives to teach or model better child-rearing techniques. For example, parents who are neglectful and detached from their children produce young people with low selfcontrol and short time horizons, which contribute to criminal and similar high-risk behaviors (e.g., underage drinking and smoking). Other developmental avenues to crime prevention are administered in elementary schools in high-crime areas.
Other projects to prevent crime are directed toward altering the risk and protective factors in young people’s lives, which increase or decrease the likelihood, respectively, that they will enter a trajectory toward delinquent and criminal behavior. For example, risk factors can consist of individual characteristics or traits (e.g., hyperactivity, impulsivity, and intellectual deficits), family dynamics (e.g., child abuse and neglect), and peer pressures (e.g., inducements to join gangs and use drugs). Children reared in single-parent homes are at higher risk due to a lack of parental supervision and attachment. Similarly, young people who socialize with delinquent peers are also inclined to engage in delinquent behaviors. Protective factors are typically viewed as the opposite of risk factors. Hence, risk-focused crime-prevention interventions concentrate on reducing criminogenic forces and promoting protective influences in childhood and adolescence, thereby altering the pathway to delinquency and criminality.
Skills Building Among Youth
As noted, developmental crime-prevention programs are directed at the problem behaviors of both children and their parents. For example, the Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies program is geared toward enhancing the decisionmaking and social skills of young children. Fostering brain development helps children control their behaviors and impulsivity and delay gratification more effectively. Improvements in social skills encourage children to solve interpersonal problems with words rather than physical aggression. A number of programs, including the Yale Child Welfare Program, the Incredible Years Program, and the Syracuse Family Development Program, have directed their attention toward low-income families and better outcomes for children through parenting education, home visits, and daycare services that lighten the burden of single parents. In general, these programs have reduced antisocial behavior and violence among the children in targeted families.
Institutional Crime Prevention: Offenders
Policing Tactics
The police, courts, and corrections (the formal system of justice) are all involved in different crime-prevention undertakings. Mostly reactive in the past, law enforcement agencies now commonly engage in several types of measures to stop crimes before they occur. Characterized by a wide array of tactics and technologies, these strategies first appeared during the community-policing era that began in the 1970s. Community policing is also referred to as problem-solving policing, public-order policing, and quality-of-life policing. All of these terms underscore the police’s role in crime prevention.
At the heart of community policing is the building of proactive problem-solving partnerships with neighborhood residents. The police spend less time in patrol cars and more time on foot in an effort to understand fully the neighborhood’s most pressing needs and problems. Tackling small problems before they escalate to bigger problems, and eventually to criminal activities, is a principle crime-prevention component of community policing. For example, the dramatic downturn in crime in New York City began with initiatives that cracked down on subway toll jumpers (i.e., riders who avoided paying fares) and stopped improprieties and crimes on subway cars by placing police officers undercover as riders, creating a sense of the ubiquity of the police in that setting.
Based on the theory of broken windows, police attention to low-level public-order offenses (e.g., loitering, public drinking, panhandling, and noise pollution) fosters a social environment that is more hospitable to civil interactions and transactions and less amenable to disruptive and hostile behaviors that can often devolve into more serious criminal behaviors. Dampening down these social annoyances appears to be an effective preventive approach as environmental factors can have a powerful effect on people’s behaviors in the public domain.
The use of computer-generated crime statistics to map crime is another strategy law enforcement has employed to control and prevent crime. Crime mapping displays patterns of different types of crimes that are geo-coded (i.e., identified by street addresses). These patterns give police clear graphic representations of hot spots, which are concentrations of criminal incidents on streets and in neighborhoods that require police attention. By saturating these hot spots with police officers on foot, on bikes, and in cars, a number of crimes can be prevented in the short term, particularly when patrol officers stop and frisk pedestrians for intelligence gathering and gun and drug confiscations. Displacement of crime from hot spots to adjacent areas can be problematic, resulting in little or no overall net reduction of crime in a community. Even more concerning is that aggressive policing tactics can lead to citizens’ complaints about police abuse, harassment, and racial profiling.
Courts and Corrections
Other criminal justice efforts to prevent crime are aimed at changing the traits of criminals and would-be criminals. The principal agents of change are the courts and correctional systems. Their efforts have been long-standing and have embodied the notions of rehabilitation and deterrence. Rehabilitation is concerned with changing the deepseated nature of offenders by altering their fundamental views of themselves and others. Rehabilitation programs consist of a variety of interventions that aspire to alter the cognitions, feelings, and behaviors of sentenced offenders thereby altering their life courses from criminally inflected to law abiding. Examples include the adoption of religious orientations and beliefs, cognitive behavioral therapy, restorative justice programs, reintegrative shaming, and drug treatment.
Religious conversions and programming are common in prisons. The acceptance of common religious principles (e.g., love, forgiveness, faith in a higher power) is antithetical to criminal pursuits. Also modifying offenders’ self-concept and worldviews, but with a non-spiritual bent, cognitive behavioral therapy challenges distorted and irrational thinking and destructive habits and replaces them with prosocial views and strivings. Community-based, and involving community members and crime victims, reintegrative shaming and restorative justice programs hold offenders accountable for their crimes but ensure that they are welcomed back into society. Drug treatment has proved to be a reliable means to prevent recidivism among convicted offenders. Addiction is a crime intensifier. Hence, the achievement of recovery and sobriety is correlated with a desistance from crime and the resumption of schooling and employment. Particularly effective are therapeutic community programs in jails and prisons. Relatedly, vocational training and educational programs in correctional settings also lower the rate of recidivism among formerly incarcerated individuals.
Deterrence applies to both offenders and wouldbe offenders and assumes that people are hedonistic (want to avoid the pain of punishment) and rational (understand the potential consequences of criminal behaviors). Strict laws and harsh sentences are designed in part to dissuade convicted offenders from recommitting crimes and offenders-to-be from committing crimes in the first place. Called specific deterrence, the sentencing of an individual offender to serve a long prison sentence or pay a hefty fine is intended to ensure that the convicted person will be less likely to pursue future criminal opportunities. Called general deterrence, the generally known possibility of severe punishment for the commission of serious crimes is thought to keep in check the inclination to do so among members of the general public. The effectiveness of deterrence depends on the certainty, severity, and swiftness of punishment.
Final Thoughts
The implementation of crime-prevention policies aids in protecting the safety and well-being of residents, especially in poor neighborhoods where crime is more common and long-standing. Crime is costly to individuals, families, and communities, and the crime-control apparatus in the United States (i.e., the criminal justice system) costs the annual economy billions of dollars. Crime prevention must be multifarious. No one strategy will curtail the problem. The targets of anti-crime interventions include youth and their parents as well as members of the general public who are contemplating the commission of crimes and criminals who are considering reoffending. The targets can also be property, from cars to cell phones, as well as places, from subway stations to whole communities. The executors of crime- prevention policies, too, are varied. Teachers, neighborhood residents, police officers, and treatment providers can all contribute to the amelioration of crime and disorder in communities.
References:
- Farrington, D. P. (2000). Explaining and preventing crime: The globalization of knowledge—The American Society of Criminology 1999 presidential address. Criminology, 38(1), 1. doi:10.1111/ j.1745-9125.2000.tb00881.x
- Farrington, D. P., Loeber, R., & Ttofi, M. M. (2012). Risk and protective factors for offending. In B. C. Welsh & D. P. Farrington (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of crime prevention (pp. 46–69). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
- Gottfredson, M. R., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
- Lavrakas, P. J. (1985). Citizen self-help and neighborhood crime prevention policy. In L. A. Curtis (Ed.), American violence and public polic (pp. 87–115). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
- Rosenbaum, D. P., Lurigio, A. J., & Davis, R. C. (1998). The prevention of crime: Social and situational strategies. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
- Tonry, M., & Farrington, D. P. (1995). Strategic approaches to crime prevention. In M. Tonry & D. P. Farrington (Eds.), Building a safer society: Strategic approaches to crime prevention (pp. 1–20). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
- Welsh, B. C., & Farrington, D. P. (2012). Crime prevention and public policy. In B. C. Welsh & D. P. Farrington (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of crime prevention (pp. 46–69). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
- Welsh, B. C., & Pfeffer, R. D. (2011). Reclaiming crime prevention: A revisionist American history. School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Northeastern University.
Read More About Crime Prevention Policies: