Crime provention

Crime provention

1. Social Control - Ensuring that people follows societies norms, values and rules.

   • Formal social control - Police, law and punishment.
     • Informal social control - Peoples reactions to behavior - controls how we behave, dress in public, etc.

2. Forms of crime prevention linked into right realism

   • Situational crime prevention - Clarke - Situational crime prevention is tempting to create a situation where people will be put off comitting crime. It is directed at specific crimes, for example, pretecting property from bulary. It involves managing the emeadiate enviroment where a crime might occur. The aim of sinal crime provention is to put the criminal off comitting crime and is based on the rational choice theory - where the criminal thinks that the risk will be greater than the benefits of the crime. Crime is mostly oportunistic. Therefore, it's important to remove the oportunity. for example, going down to a shop with no security camras, no staff, is opitunitistic to steal something. However, enviromental crime provention introducing cctv and security guards will act as a deterent crime and zero talerants crime. ASBO's and on the spot crimes.
     • Felson - He looked a situational crime techniques used in a bus station in New York. Changing the enviroment so people can't commit crime. The bus station was redesigned to prevent crime, for example, seats were made uncumfortable so as rough sleepers and drug dealers could not settle in to sleep the night. The basens in the toilet were replaced with really small sinks so as homeless people couldn't wash in them. The crime rates fell dramatically because of the changes.
     • 1960's half of all suicides in Britain was the result of gasing becuase the gas used in ovens was highly toxic. As a crime prevention technique the gas for ovens was changed to a less toxic gas and by 1997 suicide for gasing were none existent.
     • Chaiken - the biggest problem with situational crime provention is displacement of crime - moving the crime to somewhere else. There are several forms of crime displacement; Spatial displacement - The criminal moves somewhere else to commit the same crime, eg, somewhere where there is no cctv. Temporal displacement - The criminal commits the crime at a different time. Target displacement - where the criminal chooses a different victim, eg a house that doesn't have a burgalar alarm. Tackle displacement - where the criminal chooses a different way to commit a crime. Functional crime displacement - commiting a different type of crime, eg bank robbery to commiting internet fraud.

3. Enviromental crime provention - maintaining an ordered appearance of neighbourhoods - This gives the impression that the neighbourhood is well looked after and that there is a lot of informal control, eg the nieghbours are very observant and would call the police if they saw trouble, eg vandalism in an area which is well kept, you're unlikely to commit the crime as you know you will get caught. This connects to the broken windows theory (Willson) Areas which are very run down attract criminal behavior eg, drug dealing and prostetution because they don't look like they're policed and so the offender can get away with the crime.

   • Zimbardo - Stanford prison study. Set up a fake prison scenario, where some people were prisoners and others were officers. This links into the idea people do assume the role that they are given very quickly - supports willsons theory.
   • Feminists would argue that enviromental crime provention should focus on areas where there is a high level of tax on women, eg improving lighting in streets and car parks and increasing cctv to prevent violence against women.

4. Zero tolerance policing - where the police target minor offenses, eg begging and litter dropping. This may involve on the stop crimes and supposed to prevent criminals from progressing to more serious crimes, such as violence.

   • Left realists would argue that this deals with the crime but not the causes of the crime, eg poverty and unemployment. It also fails to deal with corperate crimes and only wants to look at street crime.