Crime Prevention and Control
Situational Crime Prevention
Clarke describes situational crime prevention as a “pre-emptive approach that relies, not on improving society or its institutions, but simply on reducing opportunities for crime”.
Can link to right realist views and solutions for crime.
He identifies 3 features of measures aimed at situational crime prevention:
They are directed at specific crimes.
They involve managing or altering the immediate environment of the crime.
They aim at increasing the effort and risk of committing crime and reducing the rewards.
For example, “target hardening” measures such as locking doors and windows increase the effort a burglar needs to make, while increase surveillance in shops via CCTV or security guards increase the likelihood of shoplifters being caught.
Underlying situational crime prevention approaches, is an “opportunity” or rational choice theory of crime, contrasting theories of crime that stress “root causes” such as the criminal’s early socialisation or capitalist exploitation.
Clarke argues that most theories offer no realistic solutions to crime and that the most obvious thing to do is to focus on the immediate crime situation, since this is where scope for prevention is greatest.
Felson- The Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York was poorly designed and provided opportunities for deviant conduct- e.g. the toilets were a setting for luggage thefts, rough sleeping, drug dealing and smexual activity.
Re-shaping the physical environment to “design crime out” greatly reduced such activity- e.g. large sinks which the homeless used for bathing, were replaced by small hand basins.
Evaluation- Displacement
It doesn’t not reduce crime, but displaces it.
Chaiken et al found that a crackdown on subway robberies in New York merely displaced them to the streets above.
Displacement can take several forms:
Spatial- moving elsewhere to commit crime.
Temporal- committing it at a different time.
Target- choosing a different victim
Tactical- using a different method.
Functional- committing a different type of crime.
Perhaps the most striking example of success of situational measures is not about crime, but about suicide.
In the early 1960s, half of all suicides in Britain were the result of gassing.
Britain’s gas supply came from highly toxic coal gas but from the 1960s, coal gas was gradually replaced by less toxic natural gas and by 1997 suicides from gassing had fallen to near 0, and other types of methods were not carried out by individuals, meaning there was no displacement.
Further evaluation
Situational crime prevention works to some extent in reducing certain kinds of crime, however, with most measures there is likely to be some displacement.
It tends to focus on opportunistic petty street crime, ignoring white collar crime, corporate and state crime, which are most costly and harmful.
It assumes criminals make rational calculations which seems unlikely in many crimes of violence, and crimes committed under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
It ignores the root causes of crime, such as poverty or poor socialisation. This makes it difficult to develop long- term strategies for crime reduction.
Environmental crime prevention
This approach is based on Wilson and Kelling’s Broken Windows theory (right realist).
They argue that leaving broken windows unrepaired, tolerating aggressive begging etc, sends out a signal that no one cares, allowing high levels of crime to be committed in that area.
In such neighbourhoods, there is an absence of both formal social control (the police) and informal control (the community).
Zero tolerance policing
Disorder and the absence of controls leads to crime so the solution is to crack down on any disorder, using a twofold strategy.
First, an environmental improvement strategy: any broken window must be repaired immediately, abandoned cars towed without delay etc. otherwise more will follow and the neighbourhood will be on the slide.
Secondly, the police must adopt a zero tolerance policing strategy. Instead of merely reacting to crime, they must proactively tackle even the slightest sign of disorder, even if it is not criminal.
This will halt neighbourhood decline and prevent serious crime taking root.
The evidence
Great success have been claimed for zero tolerance policing, especially in New York.
For example, a crackdown on “squeegee merchants” discovered that many had outstanding warrants for violent and property crimes.
Between 1993 and 1996, there was a significant fall in crime in the city, including a 50% drop in the homicide rate- from 1,927 to 986.
However, it is not clear how far zero tolerance was the cause of improvements:
The NYPD benefitted form 7,000 extra officers.
The early 1990s had seen a major recession and high unemployment, but from 1994 many new jobs were being created.
There was a decline in the availability of crack concaine.
While deaths from homicides fell sharply, attempted homicides remained high. It has been suggested that the fall in the murder rate owed more to improved medical emergency services than policing.
Social and Community crime prevention
Place the emphasis firmly on potential offenders and their social context- associated with left realist approaches.
The aim of these strategies is to remove the conditions that predispose individuals to crime in the first place.
These are longer-term strategies, since they attempt to tackle the root causes if offending, rather than simply removing the opportunities for crime.
Because the causes of crime are often rooted in social conditions such as poverty, unemployment and poor housing, general social reforms made to tackle these specific conditions may have led to indirect reductions of crime.
The Perry pre-school project
An experimental group of 3-4 year old Black children from Michigan were offered a two year intellectual enrichment programme, during which time the children also received weekly home visits.
A longitudinal study followed the children’s subsequent progress and showed striking differences with a control group who had not undergone the programme.
By age 40, they had significantly fewer lifetime arrests for violent crime, property crime and drugs, while more had graduated from high school and were in employment.
It was calculated that for every dollar spent on the programme, $17 were saved on welfare, prison and other costs.
Evaluation
Both prevention measures (environment and Social/ community) focus on fairly low-level crimes and/or interpersonal crimes of violence, disregarding the crimes of the powerful and environmental crimes.
The definition of the “crime problem” reflects the priorities of politicians and agencies tasked with crime prevention, meaning not all of crime would be reduced, only the ones that benefit patriarchy or capitalism, conflict theorists would argue.
Social and Community crime prevention measures have been criticised for somewhat victim-blaming parents and children and assuming parenting styles were inadequate. e.g. economic deprivation.
Surveillance
In today’s late modern society, surveillance involves the use of sophisticated technology, including CCTV cameras, biometric scanning, automated number plate recognition (ANPR), electronic tagging, and databases that collate information from different sources to produce profiles of groups and individuals.
In turn, this data may be used for crime and disorder control, and to control the behaviour of workers and consumers.
Foucault: Birth of the Prison
Sovereign power- typical of the period before the 19th Century, when the monarch had absolute power over people and their bodies.
Control was asserted by inflicting disfiguring, visible punishment on the body.
Punishment was brutal, emotional spectacle, such as public execution.
Disciplinary power- becomes dominant from the 19th Century. In this form of control, a new system of discipline seeks to govern not just the body, but the mind or “soul”, through surveillance.
One view is that brutal bodily punishment disappeared from Western societies because they became more civilised or humane.
Foucault rejects this liberal view, claiming that disciplinary power replaced sovereign power simply because surveillance is a more efficient “technology of power”.
The Panopticon- A design for a prison in which each prisoner in their own cell is visible to the guards from a central watchtower, but the guards are not visible to the prisoners.
Thus the prisoners don’t know if they are being watched, but they do know that they might be being watched. As a result, they have to behave at all times as if they were being watched, and so the surveillance turns into self-surveillance and discipline becomes self-discipline.
Unlike sovereign power, which seeks to crush or violently repress offenders, disciplinary power involves intensively monitoring the individual with a view to rehabilitating them.
The “dispersal of discipline
Mental asylums, barracks, factories, workhouses and schools from the 19th Century began to use surveillance too in Foucault’s ideas.
Furthermore, non-prison-based social control practices, such as community service orders, form part of a “carceral archipelago”.
That is, a series of “prison islands” spreading into other institutions and wider society, where professionals such as teachers, social workers and psychiatrists exercise surveillance over the population.
In Foucault’s view, disciplinary power has now dispersed throughout society, penetrating every social institution to reach every individual.
Thus the form of surveillance in the Panopticon is now a model of how power operates in society as a whole.
Evaluation
The shift of sovereign power and corporal punishment to disciplinary power and imprisonment is less clear than Foucault suggests.
He is also accused of wrongly assuming that the expressive (emotional) aspects of punishment disappear in modern society.
Goffman- shows how some inmates of prisons and mental hospitals are able to resists controls, showing Foucault’s exaggeration of control through surveillance.
Foucault also overestimates the power of surveillance to change behaviour.
CCTV cameras a form of panopticism- we are aware they exist but are unsure of we are being recorded, but this does not stop people committing crime.
Norris- reviewed dozens of studies worldwide and found that while CCTV reduced crimes in car parks, it had little or no effect on other crime, and may even cause displacement.
Gill and Loveday- few robbers, burglars, shoplifters or fraudsters were put off by CCTV.
CCTV’s real function may be ideological, falsely reassuring the public about their security, even though it makes little difference to heir risk of victimisation.