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The Goals and Logic of Crime Prevention

Learning Objectives

• Understand the goals and logic of crime prevention
• Identify the personal, social, and financial costs of crime
• Distinguish between criminal behavior and other types of antisocial behavior
• Understand how crimes are classified
• Identify the primary measures of crime, how they differ and their strengths and weaknesses
• Understand the objectives of prevention science.

Introduction

Consider the following three scenarios:

Scenario 1 On January 5, 2015 in Chicago, a woman was awakened late at night and saw a man going through the jewelry box on her bedroom dresser. She screamed. Startled, the man attacked her: covering her mouth, tying her up and raping her. When he left shortly before daybreak, he took all her expensive jewelry.

If this violent crime happened to your mother or sister, you would almost certainly want this man found, arrested, convicted, and sent to prison for a long time. You would want justice. But wouldn’t it be better, for your mother or sister, for yourself and for the whole community, if this crime never happened in the first place? If the personal, social or environmental factors that led this man to commit this violent crime had been recognized earlier in his life and some action taken that would change his and the victim’s future? If this event could have been prevented, and this victim never assaulted, wouldn’t it be even better than having to seek justice after the fact?

Scenario 2 The young man who committed the rape and burglary was caught two weeks following this event, was convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison. After serving 9 years, he was released back into the community on parole. Twenty days after being released, he was involved in a carjacking which left the car owner with a serious head injury requiring hospitalization. The perpetrator was again apprehended by police, convicted and sentenced back to the same state prison that previously hosted him.

When the victim of the first crime found out that her attacker was released from prison and committed another serious violent crime, she was outraged. Do you agree with her? Wasn’t justice served, given that the man was caught and punished for the first crime and served nine years in prison? Would you be satisfied with his punishment if you knew that there were treatment options available in his prison that could successfully rehabilitate nearly half of participants so that they would not re‐offend once out of prison, but that he never received this treatment? Wouldn’t requiring that the offender receive treatment be a better option than releasing him back to the community with no help in addressing the problems and conditions that led him to commit another crime?

Scenario 3 In 1967, the manager of public safety in Denver, Colorado was reviewing a report of yet another robbery of a city bus driver that happened the night before. She was angry about how many similar robberies had occurred in the past several years and the recent increase in such crimes in the past year. Bus drivers were often targets for robbery, as they carried relatively large sums of money toward the end of their shift, after cash fares had accumulated. Not only was the city losing a significant amount of money, but in an increasing number of cases, bus drivers were injured in these robberies.

Although the city manager did not realize it at the time, a relatively simple prevention strategy was available that had been shown to greatly reduce bus and transportation robberies. In the late 1960s, locked bus fare boxes, similar to safes in homes, were introduced in order to reduce bus drivers’ and would‐be offenders’ access to cash. As a result of this innovation, opportunities for successful bus robberies were significantly lowered. Moreover, these reductions resulted in savings that far exceeded the cost of installing the boxes. Unlike crime prevention strategies that try to change an individual’s behavior, which can be difficult, this and other types of situational crime prevention efforts try to affect the circumstances or opportunities that make it easier or less risky to commit a crime.

As these examples show, criminal behavior, no matter what form it takes, can result in significant financial costs to society and much pain and suffering for victims and their families. One of the first questions asked after events like those described above is: Why did this happen? This question is often followed by another: How could we have stopped this from happening? Then we might ask: What was going on in these offenders’ minds? What happened to them at school, work, or in their homes that led them to even consider, let alone carry out, these crimes? Why was this particular person or place targeted? How can we make places and persons less vulnerable to crime?

The implication is that if we knew more about what caused a crime, we could do something to prevent it from ever happening. The goal of crime prevention is to reduce the number of persons or groups committing criminal acts in society, to reduce the number of offenses they commit, and to reduce the overall number of criminal acts committed in a school, community, or society.

It is generally accepted that the causes which lead a person or group to initially engage in a crime might be psychological or biological (e.g., a mental health disorder, genetic predisposition, or some type of physical illness); found in the offender’s childhood upbringing; or related to the conditions, situations, or experiences the person or group encountered while at school, in their family, at work or in their neighborhood. While it may not be possible to change or fix some of these factors, others can be successfully modified using carefully designed and well‐implemented prevention programs, practices, or policies. As we will emphasize throughout this book, one key to crime prevention is successfully identifying the cause(s) of crime. The logic of crime prevention is to then do something about these causes. Doing so may involve changing the conditions, situations, personal characteristics, and experiences which influence offending by individuals or groups.

Intellectuals solve problems. Geniuses prevent them.

Albert Einstein

Different types of crimes may require different types of crime prevention programs or policies. To prevent the rape and burglary described in the first scenario of this chapter, we would use what is called a universal or selective prevention program. This type of intervention involves working with an individual or group before any criminal behavior has occurred; the goal is to reduce the likelihood of future criminal behavior. The type of prevention program that would address the crimes of the offender in the second scenario is called an indicated prevention program. This type of intervention is aimed at individuals who have already committed an illegal offense. The goal is to end or at least reduce their further involvement in criminal activity. The third scenario described an environmental or situational prevention strategy to reduce bus robberies. Rather than trying to change individuals, these types of prevention try to alter social or physical environments that facilitate or provide opportunities for crime, making it harder to carry out crimes and/or increasing the likelihood offenders will be caught. In some cases, they might involve creating legal statutes and policies to deter criminal activity among the general population.

We will provide more details about these and other types of strategies that can be used to prevent crime in the following chapters. The goal of this textbook is to share with you exactly what criminologists know about crime prevention, including the types of actions highlighted above as well as many other crime prevention strategies. Even if you do not think you have been directly affected by crime, it is likely that you have felt its impact in some way. For example, have you ever been afraid to walk down a dark alley or gone back to your car or house to make sure it is locked? If so, you have been affected by crime. The main point to realize right now, and what we will emphasize throughout this book, is that crime can be prevented. This is very good news!

Also encouraging is that, in the past 30 years, major advances have been made in crime prevention. Since the mid‐1990s, the national crime rate in the United States (USA) has declined and it is generally believed that the development of better crime prevention programs played a role in facilitating this decline. We now know a lot more than we used to about the many causes of crime, how to change many of these factors and conditions, and how to design and test different types of preventive interventions. We have also learned a lot about what works and what does not work to prevent crime, how to increase the use of effective prevention strategies, and how to ensure that these programs and practices are well implemented. This emerging field of study and body of knowledge is called prevention science and is described in more detail in Chapter 3. In later chapters we will explain how this information is being used in crime prevention efforts today.

So that you can properly appreciate the need for crime prevention, we will first describe the financial and emotional impact that crime has on society....