Flashcards
Crime Prevention
Cards in this deck (16)
- 1outline1. Jane Jacobs and ‘natural surveillance’
2. Oscar Newman and ‘defensible space’ Case study: Pruitt Igoe
3. The social ‘cost’ of crime prevention (see ‘Broken Windows’)
4. Crime Prevention strategies from the 1970s to 2001 (from routine activities to a medical model) - 2Jane Jacobs (1961) The Death and Life of Great American Cities (key text)“Great cities are not like towns only larger; they are not like suburbs only
denser. They differ …in basic ways…one of these is that cities, by
definition, are full of strangers.” (p.351)
responding to both the kind of growth of cities across the early part of the 20th century. Referring to white americans moving out to suburban areas and how radically changing the nature of city living
“Sidewalks, their bordering uses, and their users, are active participants in
the drama of civilization versus barbarism in cities.” (p.351)
“Today barbarism has taken over many city streets, or people fear it has,
which comes to much the same thing in the end.” (p.351)
she identified cities as offering a unique and different way of living in a community although shes talking about is less community than a collection of individuals illustrated in the 1st quote "a collection of strangers" - 3Jane Jacobs (1961) The Death and Life of Great American Cities (key text) continuedheightens the importance in this - that to be an active participant in a city in trying to develop a community and not trying to move away from a collection of individuals/strangers is to demarcate a line between barbarism and civilisation. Barbarism in this sense is just to maintain this idea of cities as being a collection of individuals or strangers
3rd quote - the fear of crime impacts people much more greatly than the lived reality of being a victim - fear is a generally held sensation that affects lots of people and how they live their lives
"natural surveillance"
Source: Blackwell City Reader - 4Jane Jacobs“The first thing to understand is that the public
peace …is not kept by the police…It is kept
primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious,
network of voluntary controls and standards
among the people themselves, and enforced by
themselves.” (p.352)
“…there must be a clear demarcation between
what is public space and what is private space.”
(p.354)
“Inhabitants must be looking out for one
another. Literally and figuratively. People must
use the sidewalks continuously.” (p.354)
natural surveillance - she believes that people need to be kind of out on their stoop, out on their front step, chatting to neighbours, looking at whos coming into the neighbourhood so there is a kind of surveillance carried out by inhabitants of a local area. people engage with one another and make social connections/bonds- links to Durkheim
Source: The Blackwell City Reader - 5Pruitt-Igoe Opened 1954 Oscar NewmanPruitt-Igoe was a large scale housing development built in St. Luis designed to replace slum housing
33 identical 11 storey buildings
(The prewett section of the development was originally intended for black residents so was to be a segregated housing development)
in 1954 there was a key piece of legislation that caused a so-called white flight from inner city areas right across America out to suburban areas
91% occupancy in 1957
35% occupancy in 1971
was a heavily landscaped area but over time as the plumbing systems broke down, multiple windows were smashed. On the interior heaters broke down, electricity broke down too, toilets broke and little upkeep of the buildings
Demolished in 1972 - - 6Oscar Newman (1971) creating defensible spaceOscar talks about Pruitt-Igoe in his text 'creating defensible space'
“Defensible space”
Responsibilization (talks about defensible space in the sense about human interactions)
In relation to Pruitt-Igoe there was a lack of Responsibilization for the occupants of the housing blocks. If the occupants were given the responsibility to maintain small areas they would have done so and this would have fostered jane jacobs idea of natural surveillance and so would have forced people to make social bonds - durkheimian notion of the importance of developing social bonds to reduce crime
Giving ownership of space to inhabitants
Subdivision of public space into private areas
Empowering the local population so that they can realise their commonly held values and lifestyles - 7Zimbardo, 1969more of an administrative approach to crime prevention
he left a car environment on a city street and saw that the car was taken apart and vandalised and because no one intervened it was allowed to carry on - 8Wilson and Kelling expanded on thisand suggested that its these small scale interventions or criminal acts if they go unpunished that kind of radiate out to the rest of the community/environment
A stable neighbourhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other’s children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders cam change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle. A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy. Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of the corner store. The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates. People start drinking in front of the grocers; in time, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off. Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers.
believed that unattached adults, teenagers, panhandlers are responsible for these acts and what those acts might be - like low level social disorder eg drinking
(emphasis added, Wilson and Kelling, 1982: 32) - 9....some interventions they point to that can intervene in the physical environment to reject those populations who are going to cause the low level social disorder
these are visible interventions/visible signs within the urban environment. These interventions deal with the symptoms of particular acts but not the causes
- 10Is there a cost to low crime?82% drop in homicides between 1990 and 2009 (Zimring, 2011)
Bratton (1998: 42-3) – NYPD chief during the 1990s – suggested that zero tolerance does not ‘capture the meaning of what happened in New York City’
-Use of Compstat and targeting of crime hotspots
-Decentralisation of police responsibility and accountability
Bowling (1999) suggests that the decline was due to the stabilising of the crack epidemic. Alternatives point to mass incarceration.
Wilson and Kelling disputed use of zero tolerance, preferring closer community relations with Police
so whilst some of the success of the decline in violent crime in New York was initially kind of given over to the broken windows approach there are other kind of counter narratives - 11phagic and emicphagic and emic strategies
A phagic strategy involves consuming or consumption (in terms of criminology they consume and bring a community together)
whereas an emic strategy is one that involves vomiting or ejecting ( in terms of criminology - where a community group or individual is injected like the visible intervention strategies) - 12over the course of these decadeswe have seen from the 1960s - Jane jacobs and the importance of natural surveillance and Kitty Genovese case study (her murder occurred in an inner city street and even when she cried no one came to help her - prompted the development of the bystander effect - there is a need for natural surveillance
in the 1970s we saw the destruction of Pruitt-Igoe and the rise of ideas like creating defensible space by Oscar Newman
1980s - see the development of the broken windows approach - Wilson
1990s we see that both kind of application of the broken windows approach and a kind of zero tolerance approach too. There is a cost to that - 131976 administrative criminal approachPrimary prevention
-Physical measures (target hardening)
Secondary prevention
-Changing the (potential) offender - making interventions into the socio kind of environment of that potential offender
Tertiary prevention
-Reducing recidivism (how can you stop them doing it in the future)
Brantingham And Faust - 141979 if you take away one of the corners then its going to reduce crime a critique is if it still holds true in 2021 the suitable targets they were referring to were high cost domestic goods but things have changed and we dont really have those kinds of high cost goods absence of suitable guardians working on the principle of people not being in their homes from 9-5 what was a typical working day now work patterns have changed
- 15—Ekblom idea of the conjunction of criminal opportunity
can be linked back to new criminologists model of criminal act that tries to take a holistic approach to an explanation of how crime occurs
Ekblom is looking at it from the other end of the spectrum by taking a holistic approach to crime prevention
at the very top there are remote causes of crime or disorder (the large scale and perhaps sociological, economic, political origins of criminal act) and there are little ways which those can be dealt with but if we can make interventions in those causes eg perimeter access and security - these are target hardening, increased surveillance, deterrents and discouragements
and so he is drawing upon the ideas of Brantingham And Faust put together and cohen and felson and taking this holistic approach to ensure there is an absence of crime
- 16Targeting: three levels of crime prevention (Ekblom, 2001)primary - focusing on the general population of potential offenders, or of potential crime situations or human and material targets of crime
secondary - focusing on people at particular risk of offending, on targets at risk of victimisation or on places at risk of setting the scene for victimisation
tertiary - focusing on those already convicted or victimised, or targets and scenes of existing crime (linking to the concepts of repeat victimisation, repeat offending, and hot-spots – generally shown to be a very efficient approach to targeting scarce resources)
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- Flashcards on Crime Prevention, created by megan trent on 27/01/2021.
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- megan trent
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