Department of Epidemiology
Mailman School of Public Health
Columbia University
The work of the advisory group members was supported by the able assistance of staff from the John Jay College Research and Evaluation Center:
Nicole Alexander, Communications Specialist Edda Fransdottir, Research Associate Yuchen Hou, Graduate Research Assistant Victoria Wang, Graduate Research Assistant William Wical, Graduate Research Assistant
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Part of the book series: Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research ((HSSR))
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Situational crime prevention focuses on the settings for criminal acts rather than on the characteristics of offenders. It provides a practical approach to improving safety and challenges criminological theories based on offenders’ propensities for mischief. According to situational crime prevention, crime is the result of an interaction between disposition and situation. Offenders choose to commit crime based on their perceptions of available opportunities. Consequently, situational factors can stimulate crime and addressing these factors can reduce crime. Situational crime prevention focuses on very specific categories of crime or disorder, and takes particular note of crime concentrations. Understanding how crimes are committed is critically important to situational crime prevention. It uses an action-research model and demands considering numerous possible alternative solutions. Situational crime prevention has been widely used across the globe and has been applied to minor deviance (e.g., littering), standard crimes (e.g., burglary and robbery), and to extremely serious crime (e.g., international terrorism and maritime piracy). The evidence for situational crime prevention effectiveness is substantial. Research clearly demonstrates that it does not inevitably displace crime. In fact, it often reduces crime near prevention sites.
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Eck, J.E., Clarke, R.V. (2019). Situational Crime Prevention: Theory, Practice and Evidence. In: Krohn, M., Hendrix, N., Penly Hall, G., Lizotte, A. (eds) Handbook on Crime and Deviance. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20779-3_18
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Situational crime prevention.
Situational crime prevention (SCP) is a criminological perspective that calls for expanding the crime-reduction role well beyond the justice system. SCP sees criminal law in a more restrictive sense, as only part of the anticrime effort in governance. It calls for minutely analyzing specific crime types (or problems) to uncover the situational factors that facilitate their commission. Intervention techniques are then devised to manipulate the related situational factors. In theory, this approach reduces crime by making it impossible for it to be committed no matter what the offender’s motivation or intent, deterring the offender from committing the offense, or by reducing cues that increase a person’s motivation to commit a crime during specific types of events. SCP has given rise to a retinue of methods that have been found to reduce crime at local and sometimes national or international levels. SCP’s focus is thus different than that of other criminological theories because it seeks to reduce crime opportunities rather than punish or rehabilitate offenders.
SCP emerged more than 40 years ago, and its major concepts include rational choice, specificity, opportunity structure, and its 25 prevention techniques. Contrary to the common critique that SCP is atheoretical, it is actually based upon a well-developed interdisciplinary model drawing from criminology, economics, psychology, and sociology. Importantly, a growing number of empirical studies and scientific evaluations have demonstrated SCP’s effectiveness in reducing crime. Finally, the SCP approach inevitably leads to a shifting of responsibility for crime control away from police and on to those entities, public and private, most competent to reduce it.
The originating concept of situational crime prevention (SCP) is “opportunity reduction” (Clarke, 1980 ). It eschews esoteric matters or grand initiatives to transform society (Freilich & Newman, 2016 ; Newman, 1997 ; Tilley, 2004 ). Instead, SCP is uniquely concerned with the practical question of how offenders successfully commit their crimes. Understanding how the offender carries out the crime is used to craft interventions that remove crime opportunities and thereby prevent offending. In contrast, orthodox criminology is focused on why perpetrators offend, what Clarke ( 2004 ) and others refer to as the dispositional bias. Freilich and Natarajan ( 2009 ) explain that Ron Clarke, the founder of SCP, became interested in situational factors, opportunity, and crime prevention when he was studying for his doctorate. At that time, Clarke also worked as the research officer at the Kingswood Training School, a residential school for delinquent boys. His doctoral thesis examined why some boys ran away (“absconded”) from the school. At that time, most frameworks assumed that deep-seated psychological factors could explain absconding. But Clarke’s ( 1967 ) analysis of absconding records found that situational factors, such as daylight hours and sunshine, influenced the opportunity structure (longer periods of darkness provided youths more opportunities to escape unseen from school) and were related to absconding.
SCP primarily seeks to solve and reduce crime problems in an action setting. Newman and Clarke ( 2003 , p. 7) explain that SCP’s approach is similar to that of “operations research” (Wilkins, 1997 ), in which the researcher works closely with the persons who are actually on the job. Indeed, SCP’s focus on crime reduction has led to partnerships between academics, police, and practitioners, where SCP principles have been used to guide practice (see, for example, Braga & Kennedy, 2012 ; Scott & Goldstein, 2012 ). SCP is associated with problem-oriented policing, currently a leading policing strategy (Eck & Madensen, 2012 ). Problem-oriented policing calls for focusing on specific problems to devise proactive strategies to eliminate them (Clarke & Goldstein, 2002 , 2003 ; see also the extensive collection of Problem-Specific Guides for Police published by the Center for Problem-oriented Policing, many of which are heavily indebted to SCP). SCP proponents have also worked with private industry to design products based upon the principles of design against crime (DAC) that are resistant to theft and other crimes (Ekblom, 2008 , 2012a , 2012b ). These efforts all pinpoint the problem or problems, and then data are collected (sometimes in reverse order if it is difficult to identify the specific problem without first having collected the data). Next, solutions are adopted and then data are collected to find out whether a solution was successful. SCP’s method is to analyze and break down an identified crime problem into its specific parts, using whatever scientific techniques will do the job.
Currently, operations research has gone its own way, becoming highly quantitative and following the needs of computer programs to systematically develop and implement routine actions, feedback loops, and the like. However, in SCP, the modern version of operations research is called the “script” approach (Cornish, 1994 ), in which the detailed lines of action of offender behavior that are required to carry out a specific crime are described and analyzed. Cornish and Clarke ( 2002 , p. 47) explain that “crime [scripts] … involve such chains of decisions and actions, separable into interdependent stages, involving the attainment of sub-goals that serve the overall goals of the crime.” SPC’s specificity focus is discussed further in the section on *Specificity* .
SCP’s script method has also encouraged SCP scholars to focus on the location of crime. Brantingham and Brantingham ( 1981 ) introduced the geography of crime to criminology via crime pattern theory. They argued that crime was never random and demonstrated that criminal events and criminal behaviors were patterned according to specific times and places. The places varied from street corners to neighborhoods and other special places that attracted criminal behavior. As the technology of mapping developed, the concept of hot spots developed, and much policing today is driven by various conceptions of hot spots of crime (Eck & Weisburd, 1995 ; Weisburd et al., 2012 ). Adopting the SCP scripting method, a further elaboration of this idea was to follow the offender’s journey to crime and identify the favorite places, routes, and times where offenders would either congregate or carry out their criminal activity. A detailed knowledge of this information then provides insights as to where, in the chains of events situated in time and place, police or crime prevention specialists may intervene.
Importantly, SCP’s basic ideas are not new: there are many examples going back thousands of years that rely upon similar arguments and assumptions to reduce crime. Killias ( 2006 ) notes, for example, that Aristotle discussed the relationship between opportunity and theft. Marongiu and Newman ( 1997 ) point out that the ancient Romans relied upon SCP-like interventions, such as the use of walls and building designs to safeguard installations, houses, and other structures. There is thus a collective body of earlier knowledge on which SCP proponents can draw to reduce crime.
SCP has also been linked to Beccaria’s ( 1764 ) On Crimes and Punishments , the seminal Classical School text that helped create the academic discipline of criminology and criminal justice (Beirne, 1991 ; Newman, 1997 ). Becarria ( 1764 ) assumed that individuals were naturally inclined to place their own interests first and to seek out what pleases them, while avoiding unpleasant situations. Since most crime is committed to further an individual’s interests, there is no need to explain where the motivation to commit crime originates (Freilich, 2015 ; Newman & Marongiu, 1990 ). Thus, Beccaria was a proponent of deterrence and argued that the criminal justice system should use punishment to reduce crime in the future. In this respect, Beccaria’s forward-looking approach, though more general than that of SCP, anticipates SCP’s mission of preventing specific crimes (Newman & Marongiu, 1990 , 1997 ).
Bentham ( 1789 ), whose utilitarian approach anticipated operations research in post World War II Britain, similarly viewed human behavior as being motivated by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. In addition, people are said to have “agency,” the ability to control their behaviors and to make rational choices. To Bentham, a rational choice was to choose the course of behavior that avoided pain and consummated pleasure (Newman & Marongiu, 1997 , pp. 137–162). It was a “lightning calculus,” a mechanical assessment that individuals continuously made, rather like robots—which suggests that individuals may make decisions “without thinking,” setting the basis for what SCP would later call “limited rationality.” It followed that interventions to prevent crime were simply a matter of controlling such calculated behavior by reducing opportunities.
Rationality.
The narrow rational choice model forms the basis of the economic theory of rational decision making (Becker, 1968 ). It may or may not be “conscious,” but it is rational according to the external evaluation of the observer (the economist) (Opp, 1997 , p. 47). This model of decision making obviously poses a problem for modern rational choice theorists, since the common sense meaning of the word “rational” is taken to mean the conscious making of a decision. To address this problem of “unconscious” decisions, rational choice theorists have introduced the idea of “readiness” (Newman, 1997 , p. 21). There are basically three versions of readiness:
Situations may make individuals ready to commit crimes almost without their being aware of it. These include environmental cues that may provoke or prompt individuals to action (Wortley, 1997 , p. 66).
Background causal factors (“distal factors”) place individuals in different states of readiness (Wortley, 2011 ), which make them more sensitive to opportunities in the environment and thus account for individual and group differences in propensity to commit crime (Tilley, 1997 , pp. 95–107).
Individuals arrive at a conscious state of readiness as a result of evaluating alternative means of meeting a perceived need, and this conscious state is influenced by a host of background and situational factors (Cornish & Clarke, 1986 , p. 3).
Whatever the model, it is clear that rational choice can also be “irrational” (Tilley, 1997 , pp. 95–107), which therefore makes rational choice theory quite applicable to some crimes that are popularly thought of as irrational, such as rape, murder, and terrorism (see Freilich & Newman, 2009 ). The irrationality of rationality has led rational choice theorists to advance it as a “limited” or “bounded” model of rationality. Hsu and Newman ( 2011 ) note in relation to the third type of readiness described above, that Cornish and Clarke ( 1986 ) have advanced the idea that offenders behave in situations (physical and social environmental settings) according to the ways in which they perceive them. They perceive their own needs (they want money for a drug habit), and they perceive environments (near and far) as offering them opportunities to carry out their course of action, whether it be burglary, bank robbery, or a terrorist attack. Why offenders choose to commit crime as a means to get money rather than get a job is the question unanswered by rational choice theory. Or at least is seen as less relevant than the question why the offender chooses burglary instead of bank robbery, or why the terrorist chooses to bomb a building instead of hijack an airplane. It is offenders’ perceptions of both opportunities and constraints that condition their course of action. To the outsider or observer of their behavior, the courses of action taken by offenders may or may not appear rational. To the offender, the behavior is perceived as a rational way of achieving an end.
SCP calls for removing opportunities to prevent crime (Clarke, 2012 ; Mayhew, Clarke, Hough, & Sturman, 1976 ). Cornish and Clarke ( 1986 ) have repeatedly stated that SCP focuses on interventions to reduce very specific crimes (e.g., reduction of car theft in parking lots, not reduction of crime or even car crime). They note: “ … a crime-specific focus was adopted … because the situational context of decision making and the information being handled will vary greatly among offenses”(p. 2). In other words, SCP is at odds with “grand” or “general” theories about crime, such as Gottfredson and Hirschi’s ( 1990 ) theory that argued a single factor (low self-control) could account for all types of offending, from street crime to white collar crime, although control theory does provide the context within which choices are made, consistent with the SCP approach (Felson, 2014 ). Situations in which crimes occur are thus the focus of study as they demand specificity: they provide concrete clues to both the behavior of the criminals and how the environment (both social and physical)—as seen through the prism of the situation—may be changed to affect criminal behavior. This focus on the specificity of the crime was important to later research that evaluated the success of situational interventions, as seen in the many case studies in Clarke ( 1997 ) and in the SCP case studies database .
Focusing on specific crime types (or problems) will lead to the identification of the situational characteristics—the opportunities—that allow the perpetrator to successfully complete the crime. (This is discussed more fully in the next subsection.) The identification of opportunities highlights possible intervention points to remove them. Once the opportunities and possible intervention points are identified, the next step is to devise strategies to prevent the crime. SCP relies upon its famous 25 techniques of prevention to devise interventions to reduce crime in specific situations.
Examining the specific situations in which crimes occur leads us to look for the opportunities that situations provide for the offender or intending offender to commit crimes of specific kinds. This approach is commonly referred to as analyzing the opportunity structure of crimes (Clarke, 1997 ). Analysts begin with the situation or situations in which the crime occurs, and they almost always find that general settings can be broken down into increasingly small component parts. The ways in which this is accomplished may depend on the facilities or access to information available. It may require the collection of information from participants in the situations in which the crime occurs, such as offenders, victims, and law enforcement personnel. Information collected, however, is always focused on how the crime was committed, what facilitates its commission, what barriers are avoided or overcome by the offender, and so on. This focus leads to a mapping of the opportunity structure of the crime, and hopefully the point at which the course of action taken by the offender can be thwarted. Again, the conceptual approach is on “how” not “why”—although the answers to the “little whys” may he sought along the way, such as why did the burglar choose this house to enter rather than another. But the big sociological why, the why of “the causes of crime,” is not addressed (Clarke, 2012 ; Freilich & Newman, 2016 ).
In sum, the opportunity structure focuses on a specific crime and application of the script method (all discussed above) to uncover possible preventative interventions. This has led to a range of techniques that researchers and policymakers draw on to develop strategies of crime reduction.
The SCP framework currently includes five general strategies encompassing 25 techniques to reduce crime (Cornish & Clarke, 2003 ). They include both “hard” and “soft” interventions. Hard interventions include either deterring offenders from committing the offense, or making it impossible for the offender to commit the crime regardless of his/her intent or level of motivation. Many of these strategies, though not all, are consistent with Beccaria’s and Bentham’s ideas discussed above (Freilich, 2015 ). Soft interventions reduce situational prompts/cues that increase a person’s motivation to commit a crime during specific types of events (Cornish & Clarke, 2003 ; Freilich & Chermak, 2009 ; Wortley, 2008 ).
As described by Newman and Freilich ( 2012 ), Freilich and Newman ( 2014 ), SCP is dynamic and encourages innovation, which is why the types of interventions have evolved and increased over the years. SCP was first set forth in a Home Office paper (Mayhew, Clarke, Hough, & Sturman, 1976 ) that highlighted the concept of opportunity by emphasizing (a) the immediate physical environment that made particular crimes possible and (b) the situational conditions that were “stimulus conditions, including opportunities for action presented by the immediate environment, … to provide—in a variety of ways—the inducements for criminality” (Mayhew et al., 1976 , p. 2). The paper described other studies that demonstrated this aspect of opportunity in a variety of settings:
steering locks that prevented car theft
changes in the physical environment that reduced boys’ absconding from school
reductions in the toxicity of coal gas that resulted in the decline of suicide by inhaling coal gas, a common method of suicide at the time
carelessness of victims that made stealing cars and burglary easier
the poor design of housing estates that reduced surveillance by neighbors. thus increasing opportunities for crime and vandalism
damage on buses resulting from poor supervision.
Thus, opportunity explained a variety of crimes, even suicide, which has traditionally been studied by psychiatrists because of its “obvious” deep psychological motivation. The general applicability of “opportunity” and the situational environment are built into the origins of SCP. The same 1976 paper outlined the essential components of opportunity:
Offender-based opportunities, such as lifestyle, experience, age, and sex
Patterns of daily activity (clearly a precursor to routine activity theory)
The abundance of products that are available for theft (e.g., cars or items displayed in retail stores) or that may cause injury (e.g., guns).
Environments where there is reduced security, such as dark streets and public places that lack surveillance or supervision, such as buses, housing estates, or retail stores.
The four types of opportunity were connected to eight opportunity-reducing techniques (Clarke & Mayhew, 1980 ) classified into three types: target hardening, target removal, and various forms of surveillance. Subsequent research on routine activity theory (Cohen & Felson, 1979 ), inducements to crime, and issues of access control and defensible space (Poyner & Webb, 1991 ) resulted in 12 techniques, organized under three headings: Increasing the effort, increasing the risks, and reducing the rewards of offending (Clarke, 1992 , p. 11). Clarke and Homel ( 1997 ) added a column of “removing excuses” for crime to incorporate “folk crimes” that provide the excuse “everybody does it” (e.g., traffic offenses), unlike the predatory crimes of “hardened criminals” (Clarke, 1997 , p. 16). Finally, in response to criticism by Wortley ( 2001 ), who argued that situational aspects of the social and physical environments may precipitate criminal acts, Cornish and Clarke ( 2003 ) added another column, “reducing provocations,” for a total of 25 techniques (see Table 1 ; a more complete and interactive version is available at http://www.popcenter.org/25techniques/ ).
Increase the Effort | Increase the Risks | Reduce the Rewards | Reduce Provocations | Remove Excuses |
---|---|---|---|---|
1. | 6. | 11. | 16. | 21. |
2. | 7. | 12. | 17. | 22. |
3. | 8. | 13. | 18. | 23. |
4. | 9. | 14. | 19. | 24. |
5. | 10. | 15. | 20. | 25. |
To decide which of the 25 techniques to rely upon in each specific situation, SCP calls for reviewing the empirical literature to identify successful interventions that were used to combat similar problems (Clarke & Eck, 2005 ) and the innovative crafting of new strategies (Eck, 2002a , 2002b ; Ekblom, 2012a ). Invariably, a series of potential crime-reduction strategies are identified. What works will depend on many factors, including the cost and practicality of implementation. There are so many techniques available that it is hard to imagine any problem to which one or more of them would not apply. The techniques chosen will depend on which interventions local communities are most comfortable with after balancing public safety, individual rights, community concerns, and other factors (Felson & Clarke, 1997 ). As SCP’s popularity and its use have increased, a growing number of strategies have been identified and implemented that have in fact reduced crime (Clarke, 1997 ; Guerette & Bowers, 2009 ; Weisburd et al., 2006 ).
SCP is based upon a well-developed model (Freilich, 2015 ; Newman, 1997 ). It is not atheoretical as its detractors claim (Haywood, 2007 ) when they observe that SCP’s primary focus is crime reduction, achieved by an eclectic array of 25 techniques. Many critics mistake SCP’s interdisciplinary approach to crime causation for lack of theory. SCP uses a variety of causal models to achieve its crime-reduction goal but it also adds to, and qualifies, some of the major theoretical approaches of other disciplines. This section first describes the causal models SCP uses to reduce crime. Next it shows how SCP adds to the standard ideas of social structure and culture, two key sociological concepts, followed by a brief overview of the economics of SCP.
Many of SCP’s “hard” techniques are based upon the classical school and deterrence theory arguments that assume offender agency, hedonism, and rationality. As already noted, Beccaria assumed that because individuals want to avoid negative outcomes, they will choose to conform to avoid the costs of punishment.
Similarly, some SCP hard techniques (e.g., the use of CCTV cameras, the public deployment of police officers, and environmental design initiatives to increase surveillance) are consistent with Beccaria’s certainty claims, because they warn individuals that if they offend they are likely to be immediately apprehended (Cozens, 2008 ; Jeffrey & Zahm, 1993 ). Other SCP strategies converge with Beccaria’s severity arguments that called for increasing the magnitude of punishment. SCP proponents eschew the use of formal punishment and instead rely upon situational interventions. They claim that laws and punishment are too distant a threat to influence most offenders’ decision making during the crime event (Braga & Kennedy, 2012 ; Cornish & Clarke, 1986 , 2008 ; Cusson, 1993 ; Felson, 2008 ; Tilley, 2004 ). Some of the interventions (such as building a fence around a parking lot so that offenders must scale it to gain entry) make it more difficult for the crime to be committed. These interventions assume that persons will choose to conform because the increased costs no longer make it “worthwhile” to commit the crime.
SCP strategies also mimic Beccaria’s celerity arguments that for punishment to deter, it should immediately follow the crime. SCP recognizes that interventions and offender decisions must converge. Interventions that are temporally distant from crime scenes are usually ineffective. In this sense, SCP is faithful to Beccaria’s call for crime and punishment (or in SCP’s case, the intervention) to go together. Finally, SCP, like general deterrence theory, sees a role for publicity in reducing crime. Bowers and Johnson ( 2005 ) explain that publicizing SCP interventions will educate the public to take actions that raise the costs of offending to a potential perpetrator by increasing their risk of apprehension. Publicity can also be used to influence offenders’ perceptions of the difficulty/risks of committing a crime and their likelihood of being caught.
Significantly, not all hard SCP techniques are based upon the assumption of offender rationality or agency. Certain hard SCP strategies, the traditional version of SCP set forth in the 1970s, seek to thwart the offender by making it impossible for the crime to be committed no matter what the motivation, mindset, or emotions of the offender (Cornish & Clarke, 2008 , p. 41). Rational choice theory, in other words, is not needed to support this aspect of SCP. Newman and Freilich ( 2012 , p. 216) explain that “originally interventions were applied to the situational environment without regard to offender motivation or behavior. For example, the construction of physical barriers has nothing to do with the internal psychology of offenders. If it works, ‘it works’ and we know from many studies, that such hardening techniques work.” An effective hardening of the target would just as easily thwart a (legally insane) offender acting under an irresistible impulse (who did not possess agency), as it would a hedonistic offender who did possess agency and chose to try to commit the offense. This approach reflects the “black box” behaviorist theories of the 1950s: organisms respond to a given stimulus in predictable ways (responses), regardless of what is going on inside their heads.
SCP’s recently developed “soft” approaches also do not rely upon offender rationality or agency to reduce crime. Soft SCP approaches are instead based upon a complex social psychological theory of human behavior. The techniques seek to remove environmental cues or prompts that create, or increase, an individual’s motivation to commit crime. Wortley ( 1997 , 2008 ) identified empirical findings that, for instance, found that publicly displayed weapons (for example, by a police officer or private security guard) could cause some individuals to become violent. Wortley argued that characteristics of the environment provoked internal dispositions in the offender and that, without such stimuli, offenders would not be motivated to commit the crime.
Wortley discovered the controlling conditions that invoke these behaviors and implied that certain conditions were embedded within the psychology of individuals and may remain dormant unless the external (situational) conditions of provocation or invocation were actuated. Soft SCP endorses interventions that eliminate these cues and prompts. In terms of the weapon example, a soft SCP policy would ensure that in certain circumstances a police officer’s weapon would not be publicly displayed. The conclusion from this illustration is that offender agency, in the sense of conscious decision making, is not assumed by soft SCP (Freilich, 2015 ; Newman & Freilich, 2012 ), though it is possible that what Bentham meant by a “lightning calculus”—his view of rationality—was operative.
Finally, it is important to note that even if certain SCP techniques are based upon assumptions that take motivated offenders for granted, they still may differ in the degree in which they do so. Cornish and Clarke’s ( 2003 ) response to Wortley’s ( 2008 ) critique discussed three types of offenders, mundane, provoked, and antisocial predator. Interestingly, SCP proponents have not really elaborated upon the issue of offender types and varying motivation levels. It could be that SCP scholars are worried that engaging this issue will detract from their crime-reduction mission and situational focus by instead highlighting potential distractions like how the offender types emerge and other distal concerns (Freilich, 2015 ).
SCP has a very different take than does mainstream sociology on the key constructs of social structure and culture. Unlike most sociological works that focuses on the large-scale and abstract concept of the social structure, SCP demands specificity. In other words, SCP’s concern is the opportunity structure, not the social structure. It treats situations as concrete settings (this does not of course mean that they are physical settings). Thus, questions of the relationship between social class and crime—a perennial topic of study in the sociological approach to crime—are seen as too abstract. Further, they do not lead easily to prevention. It is the highly abstract nature of the concept of social class, for example, that makes it almost impossible to discern from the literature whether or not there is a correlation between social class and crime. This is also exacerbated by the vagueness of the word “crime,” which SCP also insists on breaking down to the most specific category of action possible.
Take the example of the classic “broken windows” paper by Wilson and Kelling ( 1982 ). They noted that neighborhoods (usually specific areas of the city) that were neglected and allowed to deteriorate, where vandalism and other minor crimes were tolerated, led offenders to perceive that social control was weak and that they could safely commit more serious crimes. Many inferences for changes to reduce or prevent crime in that and similar neighborhoods were made from these seemingly simple, perhaps even common-sense, observations (Garland, 2000 ). Had Wilson and Kelling applied the traditional sociological approach, they would have taken the run-down neighborhoods as symptoms of lower social class, which would have led to completely different policies, such as those advocated by Cloward and Ohlin ( 1960 ). Further, the inference is suspect that run-down neighborhoods are symptoms of low social class, since there are many well-kept streets and houses in poorer areas. Jumping to the abstraction of social class therefore introduces not only an element of vagueness, but also of bias. Worse, it leads to policies that cannot, without massive and perhaps even revolutionary social upheaval, ever be achieved (Freilich & Newman, 2016 ; Knepper, 2007 ; Tilley, 2004 ).
Thus, the contrast between opportunity structure and social structure is great. Opportunity structure is grounded in concrete analysis of the opportunities that situations give to would-be criminals. They make specific criminal activities possible. Social structure is grounded in generalities and inferences about income, employment, “class consciousness,” and so on, with a highly tenuous link between those abstractions and the equally abstract notion of “crime.”
It might be argued that focusing so closely on the opportunity structure of crimes in such narrowly defined situations ignores other significant and important aspects. Certain types of organized crime, in which criminals adhere to a particular set of values and ways of doing business, may be a particularly good example. Here, offenders bring a level of commitment to a situation, and it is this commitment that has to be recognized as part of the situation to be assessed. Similarly, certain Internet crimes are commonly believed to be the result of the “hacker's ethic,” which, it is often claimed, derives from a “culture” or “subculture” to which computer buffs adhere (Newman & Clarke, 2003 ). This raises the interesting question of the relationship between situations and culture. For is not culture a highly abstract term of the same kind, bringing with it the same problems as “social class”?
It is perhaps typical of the abstract nature of much of sociology that there has been a long and difficult controversy surrounding the concepts of culture and class. The work of Kornhauser ( 1978 ), for example, epitomizes this controversy, where it is argued that culture does not exist, or at least that it is subsumed within social class. Criminology textbooks compare and contrast cultural versus class explanations of crime. SCP does not need to address this issue, since it is concerned with applying techniques of prevention to specific situations. Whether or not a particular value is class-based or culturally based is largely irrelevant. All that is needed is that a particular value or set of values be identifiable empirically, and that these can be exploited to modify decision making in a specific situation.
The work of Cavallo and Drummond ( 1994 ) in Australia applied a number of situational techniques to reduce the level of drunk driving, not the least of which were random breath tests. One of the techniques used an intensive advertising campaign that targeted the beer-drinking culture. “Good mates don't let mates drink and drive” was the slogan. This approach acknowledges the existence of (in this case) a strong subcultural attitude that valued heavy drinking in any setting and refused to acknowledge that individuals who drove while drunk were either impaired or responsible for the accidents they may have caused. It also targeted a positive aspect of Australian subculture, the strong value of “mateship.” This was an example of targeting an advertising campaign at a specific situation—one in which a mate is urged to stop another mate from making an “idiot” of himself. Similarly, Freilich and Chermak ( 2009 ) highlight extremist ideology not to address distal factors but to use situationally crafted responses to prevent offending. This is a situational view of culture (and ideology), recognizing that a situation that is bound up with deep and broad cultural values can be modified using known techniques that intervene in an individual’s decision making at just the right time. Heavy assumptions of psychology are embedded in this approach (guilt, shame, and peer pressure) (Clarke & Homel, 1997 ; Wortley, 1996 ). But the techniques of advertising, which are essentially designed to affect directly an individual’s decisions and choices at a specific moment—usually to buy a particular product brand—are well established.
Economics and decision making.
In traditional economic theory, the concept of rational choice simply means that if economic conditions change, individuals will change their behavior in response. The principle of supply and demand provides the prime example. If a particular drug (e.g., heroin) is scarce (because it is illegal) then the price will be high because demand exceeds supply. If a dealer floods the market, then prices will drop and more people will buy the product. Markets therefore behave rationally because people do. Of course, psychologists rightly observe that taking heroin is not a rational choice—that is, it is bad for the user’s health (in most cases). Hsu and Newman ( 2011 ) note that the first decision to take heroin may have been rational from the user’s point of view (under pressure from peers, suffering excruciating pain, facing emotional stress, etc.) but choosing to continue its use is not a rational decision. In fact it may not be a decision at all because the user becomes addicted (i.e., habituated). Yet even in the case of a drug addict, carrying out a burglary to acquire heroin requires rational decision making—whether to find a dealer for the right price, to rob a convenience store to get the money, or to break into a pharmacy to steal the drug. These behavior sequences require some planning and some knowledge of the targets to be reached. It will be noted that these examples appear to be more complex than the overly simple model of rational choice assumed in basic economic theory (Opp, 1997 ). However, the more sophisticated version of rational choice put forward by Simon ( 1955 ), with his idea of “satisficing” (satisfactory and sufficient), a decision-making strategy that accepts a “good enough” outcome, rather than the best choice of alternatives as posed by Bentham originally and throughout economic theory, was adopted by SCP in its infancy (Cornish & Clarke, 1986 ).
Most crimes are committed by groups of two or more, which means that the decision-making process becomes considerably more complicated. SCP recognized early on that combinations of offenders create networks of varying complexity and thus offer opportunities for intervention and disruption (Clarke & Newman, 2006 , pp. 75–83). SCP has embraced the concept of markets in two respects: (1) the analysis and disruption of criminal markets (Natarajan & Hough, 2000 ) and (2) the use of markets to motivate businesses to reduce the negative externalities of their activities, such as designing crime-prevention techniques into their products and systems (Newman, 2012 , pp. 87–106).
There are a number of methodological challenges in measuring the effect of particular interventions designed to reduce or prevent specific crimes. Two major methodologies have emerged. The first is the script approach reviewed above. The script method analyzes the sequence of behaviors and events that are the result or cause of offender decision making and are used to identify the interventions (by first highlighting the opportunities and intervention points). The second is a special methodology developed to assess the specific effects of a particular intervention.
The second approach builds on the first to assess the level of, and/or change in type of, crime before and after the intervention. Some studies have used time series analyses to investigate the impact of specific interventions and found support for SCP’s claims (see, for example, Hsu & Apel, 2015 ). A number of studies, termed “cliff edge” studies (Perry et al., 2016 ) have found that there can be a dramatic drop in crime after an effective intervention. Traditional experimental designs are often not appropriate or needed, especially because these experiments occur in an action setting, so that political and ethical problems may be involved in allocating groups to experimental or control groups. Nagin and Weisburd ( 2013 ) and Perry et al. ( 2016 ) have shown that convincing and valid results can be drawn using quasi- experimental designs that focus on careful examination of time-series frequency tables.
SCP’s focus on situations that are essentially external to the offender led Clarke ( 1999 ) to identify the characteristics of situations that attracted offenders or facilitated their behaviors. This resulted in the idea of “hot products,” which led inevitably to examination of the ways in which products could be designed so as to make them less desirable to thieves (Ekblom, 2005 , 2012a , 2012b ). This meant that the point of intervention was, incredibly, not at the site where the crime might occur, such as, for example the arrangement of goods in a retail store, but at the earliest possible point, the design of the product that might be stolen. The characteristics of hot products were identified according to the acronym CRAVED (Clarke, 1999 ):
Concealable . Objects that can be hidden in pockets or bags are more easily stolen by shoplifters and other sneak thieves.
Removable . The fact that cars and bikes are mobile helps explain why they are so often stolen. Nor is it surprising that laptop computers are often stolen, since they are desirable and easy to carry.
Available . Theft waves can result from the availability of an attractive new product, such an iPhone, which quickly establishes its own illegal market. Desirable objects that are widely available and easy to find are at higher risk.
Valuable. Thieves will generally choose more expensive goods, particularly when they are stealing to sell.
Enjoyable . Hot products may be enjoyable things to consume, such as liquor, tobacco, and songs or videos.
Disposable . Thieves prefer products that are easy to sell.
The idea of hot products has led to the insight that crime prevention can be built into the design of products and services in the same way that safety is designed into automobiles (Clarke & Newman, 2005a , 2005b ; Ekblom, 2005 , 2012a , 2012b ). Packaging of products and their placement in stores may significantly reduce theft, or even murder, as in the case of the Tylenol poisonings. In 1982 , seven people died in the Chicago as a result of swallowing cyanide-tainted Tylenol. In 1988 , the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) received 488 tampering complaints, most of which concerned food and beverage products. Nor were these incidents confined to the United States. In 1989 in the United Kingdom, Heinz suffered an incident of tampering with its baby food products, which cost it at least £2 million in advertising to re-launch the product after it was protected with tamper-resistant packaging (Clarke & Newman, 2005 , pp. 55–57). Tamper-proof and tamper-evident packaging is now a basic feature of all consumable products.
As SCP’s popularity has increased, a growing number of strategies have been identified and implemented in an effort to impact specific crime problems. It is necessary to understand, though, that any intervention is not a zero-sum game (Clarke & Newman, 2006 ) and could result in a variety of outcomes. SCP’s ultimate and pristine approach is to create interventions that eliminate all opportunity to commit that crime. This rarely occurs, though, and SCP’s fallback position is to at least reduce the amount of the specific crime. Importantly, other SCP interventions do not seek to reduce or eliminate the specific crime’s occurrence but rather to reduce the harm it causes. For example, redundant computer systems are designed so that if a hacker destroys one system, the other will kick in, or redundant electricity grids are created to minimize harm caused by terrorist attacks.
Studies have shown that SCP interventions almost always influence offenders (Freilich & Newman, 2014 ). In fact, SCP interventions have consistently been found to reduce crime (Clarke, 1997 ; Hesseling, 1994 ). Thus, the common criticism that SCP’s interventions will simply displace the problem and not reduce or eliminate it has not been supported. The most common type of crime displacement is the shifting of crime from one place to another (spatial displacement) as a result of an intervention of some kind. Displacement may also occur in respect to time, target selection, one type of offense to another, or a change of tactics (Reppetto, 1976 ). Diffusion of benefits refers to cases where an SCP intervention is implemented in a location, and crime reduction also occurs in nearby areas or similar targets that have not received the intervention. Anticipatory benefits refer to crime reduction that occurs in an area while a proposed intervention is discussed but before it is implemented. In both cases, publicity is the mechanism that results in crime reduction. It is thought that offenders hear about the proposed intervention and mistakenly (but consistent with limited/bounded rationality) conclude that it has already been implemented in their area. The offenders thus decide to conform (Barr & Pease, 1990 ; Bowers & Johnson, 2005 ; Clarke & Weisburd, 1994 ; Smith, Clarke, & Pease, 2002 ).
Guerette and Bowers ( 2009 ) examined the effectiveness of SCP interventions in changing likely offender behavior. They found that many SCP interventions do not result in displacement (see also Bowers, Johnson, Guerette, Summers, & Poynton, 2011 ; Weisburd, Wycoff, Ready, Eck, & Hinkle, 2006 ). Guerette and Bowers looked at 102 evaluations of SCP projects that included 574 observations. They found that displacement occurred in 26% of observations, while the opposite of displacement, diffusion of benefits, occurred in 27% of the observations. Further, Guerette and Bowers, in their examination of 13 studies, which took into account spatial displacement and diffusion effects, found that when spatial displacement did occur, it was usually less than the treatment effect. The end result is that, even after factoring in displacement effects, the interventions usually resulted in an overall crime reduction. Further, SCP interventions often have positive spillover effects through the diffusion of benefits and anticipatory benefits that leads to crime reductions in locations beyond the target area (Guerette & Bowers, 2009 ; Freilich & Newman, 2014 ; Weisburd et al., 2006 ).
SCP effectively reduces crime, and it is based upon a complex, well-developed interdisciplinary model. In considering SCP’s future directions, consideration is given to two non-criminal-justice-system avenues that SCP advocates have recently increasingly used to reduce crime: civil government regulation and the shifting and sharing of responsibility for crime to those most competent to reduce it.
Civil and other government regulations have been used to good effect by SCP to regulate establishments, product design, and individual behavior to reduce crime. This approach is in contrast to the traditional justice system model that seeks to arrest offenders one by one (Mazerolle & Roehl, 1998 ). Clarke and Newman ( 2005a , 2005b ) have discussed six important points relating to government regulation of crime. First, the role taken by government in any specific case depends on the options available, which vary with the crime, with the state of current technology, and with a host of other circumstances, as shown by the Tylenol case described above. Second, the willingness of governments to intervene in the private sector depends on their political complexion. Thus, conservative governments have generally been reluctant to intervene in business practices or to expand the role of government in regard to business and industry. Which varieties of governments have been in power, and for how long, can therefore have a marked impact on a country’s use of regulatory power. Third, levels of concern about crime, which can vary considerably across countries, or in the same country over time, can strongly influence a government’s willingness to intervene and regulate business practices. For example, concern about car theft prompted the conservative government in the United Kingdom in 1992 to publish “league tables” of the most stolen cars in an effort to get manufacturers to improve their security (Pease, 2001 ).
Fourth, whether the private sector or government offers particular services is also subject to policy (Freilich & Newman, 2016 ). Thus, many services previously offered by government—rail services, subsidized housing, water, telecommunications—are now offered through private enterprise. Fifth, the government role depends on the system of government in place in the country concerned, its constitutional powers, and its relationship with the legal system. The multiple jurisdictions in the United States sometimes result in legal confusion, as when the banks challenged the right of the New York City Council to impose regulations on ATM machines on the grounds that banks were subject to federal controls (Guerette & Clarke, 2003 ). Sixth, the laws and legal traditions in different countries can greatly affect the scope for government intervention. In the United States, for example, there is a strong tradition, almost unknown in the United Kingdom, for example, of entrepreneurial lawyers filing class action liability suits on behalf of groups of citizens harmed by the products or practices of business and industry.
While many civil and regulatory initiatives are effective in reducing crime, they are a marked departure from most other criminology theories that highlight the importance of the police and the criminal law for crime reduction. Intriguingly, though, this evolution and increased reliance on civil law provides an opening for SCP advocates and legal scholars to collaborate and harness the increased use of regulations for crime prevention. However, the proponents of this tactic to reduce crime should keep in mind that civil actions are not predicated upon the determination of offender guilt or innocence, one of the central questions engaged by the criminal justice system.
An unconventional approach recently explored by SCP proponents has suggested that crime be conceived as something like pollution and regulated accordingly. This approach endorses using the cap-and-trade market approach that is now used to control carbon emissions (Newman, 2012 ). The prime advantage of the market approach to crime reduction is that it rests on the classical school’s recognition that businesses (and people for that matter) will take advantage where they see an opportunity to do so, and will not give it up until it costs more than it is worth (Beccaria, 1764 ). Crime-reduction trading assigns a monetary cost to accountability for a specific crime that is not directly imposed by a third party, such as a government imposing fines, but is imposed by the offending business or entity primarily responsible for the criminal opportunity on itself as it engages in the marketplace. The cap-and-trade approach to control opportunities for crime created by businesses (as negative externalities of their doing business) requires those most competent to reduce the opportunity for crime to take on the primary responsibility for its reduction, since they are also the most competent to do so.
The relationship between competency and responsibility in preventing crime is complex (Hardie & Hobbs, 2005 ). For example, are individuals who do not shred their credit card bills more responsible for their victimization than the corporations that fail to require PIN numbers for credit card use, or due to poor internal security allow card details to be hacked or stolen from their databases? These problems are accentuated by viewing the reduction of credit card fraud from a market perspective. All crime, including crimes like robbery, assault, or even murder, can be assessed from this point of view: which entity or person is most competent to prevent or reduce the specific crime? Very often, perhaps most often, such entities are not necessarily the police, or even government, for that matter.
This way of thinking about crime reduction also shifts the focus away from the traditional dispositional bias in policy making in criminology, which focuses on single cases, whether the deviance of individuals or corporations, and largely depends on the criminal justice system or heavy government regulation for its solutions. In the complex and rapidly changing world of crime, this is an inadequate policy approach since it assumes that police and others in the criminal justice system have the competency to solve crime problems, the immediate causes of which lie well beyond their resources or traditionally defined roles. The approach advocated here is to realign responsibility for responding to crime with the competency to do it. This means drawing on a wide range of institutions and organizations, including corporations large and small, trade associations, unions, NGOs, and interest groups, as well as government organizations, to solve specific problems of crime.
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Song-chia hsu.
1 College of Management, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei 10608, Taiwan
2 Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei 10608, Taiwan
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This study performed main path analysis to explore the academic field of crime prevention. Studies were collected from the Web of Science database, and main path analysis was used to analyze the studies and identify influential authors and journals on the basis of the g-index and h-index. Cluster analysis was then performed to group studies with related themes. Wordle was used to output keywords and word clouds for each cluster, both of which were used as reference to name each cluster. Five clusters were identified, namely crime displacement control, crime prevention through environmental design, developmental crime prevention, the effects of communalism on crime prevention, and the effect of childhood sexual abuse on crime. Each cluster was analyzed, and suggestions based on the results are provided. The main purpose of crime prevention is to advance our understanding of the psychological criminal mechanisms (i.e., personal, social and environmental impacts) associated with different criminal behaviors at the intersection of law by using main path analysis.
Crime prevention has garnered attention worldwide. It refers to the direct and indirect measures taken to reduce, inhibit, and prevent crime. Scholars have analyzed crimes such as theft, juvenile crimes, and robbery and factors related to them to develop crime prevention strategies; however, most crime prevention-related literature reviews have been limited. To comprehensively understand crime prevention, this study performed a main path analysis on the literature on crime prevention, investigating the development history and trends of crime prevention. The objectives were as follows:
Crime prevention involves improvements in the social and physical environments before, during, and after the occurrences of crimes to prevent, control, eliminate, and reduce them. Criminology approaches crime from the perspective of etiology and the environment [ 1 ]. Etiology is used to explore motivations to commit crimes, which are often diverse and cannot be explained by a single theory. As a result, scholars of criminology have combined several aspects of criminology to comprehensively explain these motivations and crimes. Analyzing crimes from the perspective of environment requires framing crimes as trade-offs between costs and benefits and acknowledging that humans’ understanding of consequences informs their decision to commit crimes. Before committing crimes, rational individuals assess the risks, the severity of the penalties, and the rewards. If the rewards outweigh the risks, the individuals will likely commit the crimes. We found that white-collar crime is the cause of crime that has been neglected in academic research. The concept of white-collar crime has a lot of confusion and controversy. The researchers suggest collecting various documents and data packages in recent years, including field observations, interviews and questionnaire surveys and other empirical research. However, in recent years, medical staff has been threatened with verbal threats or even physical violence during the medical process, which not only affects their health or safety but also interferes with medical operations and affects other patients’ treatment. This article used the situational crime prevention theory to prevent medical violence and analyzes the reasons, objects, places, and time of medical violence that often occur in court judgments and medical staff’s perceptions. By increasing the difficulty of crime, increasing the risk of crime, reducing crime opportunities and reducing post-criminal remuneration, we try to develop strategies to prevent medical violence. Through cross-field team cooperation to conduct a case review and preventive strategy management, we will continue to improve the personnel’s ability to prevent and handle violent incidents, and we will strive to maintain the safety of the medical environment and anti-violent incidents. Crime prevention models [ 2 ] can be technology-oriented (e.g., punitive, corrective, and mechanical), target-oriented, stage-oriented (e.g., prevention during intention, preparation, and attempt stages), those proposed by Podolefsky (involving strategies analyzing social problems and preventing victimization), conscious strategies (e.g., conservative, liberal, and radical models), those categorized by Naudé (e.g., biopsychic, sociological, physical, and legal sanction and punishment models), and those classified by Clarke (e.g., root cause, deterrence, rehabilitative treatment, and situational models). In conclusion, the model of crime prevention, literature research, and scholars suggest that the concept of “community policing” was born for the police. The local police must actively promote related measures, and the problem determination must show the importance of professionalism to the police. The concept of crime prevention and public service is increasingly advocated, and the police are expected to provide a safe and secure living environment.
Police enforcement agencies operate under the “tertiary prevention” principle advanced by public health agencies, emphasizing that prevention is better than the cure. Crime prevention involves eliminating opportunities to commit crimes, situational prevention, and relapse prevention. Targeted policies for each of these aspects may be more effective and thus reduce national and social costs. Crime prevention policies are a crucial aspect of national governance and can also be grouped as follows [ 3 ]:
Reviewing the literature on the definition of “tertiary prevention” related measures of prevention, it is particularly recommended that future research scholars put forward more suggestions on preventing child sexual abuse cases, including protecting the identity of the whistleblower and the right to work as well as creating a friendly campus and resettlement agencies environment, so that children have the courage to ask for help.
Crime prevention involves individual and situational models. In the criminal justice system, crime prevention involves patrol and arrest in traditional policing, prosecution, quick decisions made by judges, and deterrence and long-term incarceration in rehabilitation institutions. Drug crime prevention involves raising awareness of the risks of drug use, preventing smuggling, investigating drug trafficking and related personnel, and combatting drug trafficking organizations. Situational crime prevention involves measures to decrease the risks of certain specific crimes, reduce the rewards of crimes, and eliminate opportunities to commit crimes through environmental design and management. Community crime prevention involves altering the structure of a community (e.g., family, peers, and neighborhood organizations). Developmental crime prevention involves preventing individuals from developing the intention to commit crimes by eliminating dangers to individual growth, prioritizing children’s health and academic performance, and preventing individuals from becoming criminals because they were abused in their childhood [ 4 , 5 ]. Reviewing the recommendations for future research, scholars in the literature especially elaborate on the rehabilitated people who no longer commit crimes and the unfriendly eyes of the public observing the rehabilitated people. Regarding the characteristics of Japan’s rehabilitation practices, it is explained in perspectives of public sector organizations and manpower, private sector types and functions, crime victims-related measures, and crime prevention and recidivism prevention carry forward. Finally, these experiences of Japan compared with Taiwan’s current practices provide feasible advice for the references of planning and promoting future judicial protection policies by the relevant authorities.
Several scholars have performed path analyses and key-route main path analyses to review studies on science and technology. Verspagen [ 6 ], Fontana et al. [ 7 ], and Consoli and Mina [ 8 ] performed main path analyses to map technological trajectories. Bekkers and Martinelli [ 9 ] and Lucio-Arias and Leydesdorff [ 10 ] performed main path analyses to analyze technological changes. Bhupatiraju et al. [ 11 ], Calero-Medina and Noyons [ 12 ], Colicchia and Strozzi [ 13 ], Harris et al. [ 14 ], Liu et al. [ 15 ], Chuang et al. [ 16 ], Yan et al. [ 17 ], and Su et al. [ 18 ] performed main path analyses on literature reviews in various domains. Lee [ 19 ] performed a main path analysis to simplify and organize patent verdicts to explore their effectiveness. Lee [ 20 ] performed a main path analysis to identify key patent verdicts and explore patent misuse in the 20th century.
2.1. data source.
This study reviewed literature on crime prevention as the basis for a keyword search. The keyword “crime prevention” was used to search the Web of Science (WOS) database on 31 December 2020; the search yielded 1668 results. Duplicates and studies without authors, titles, and publication dates were removed, leaving 1554 studies.
Main path analyses can be used to process large numbers of citation data and review key knowledge in any academic field. Main paths connect the source (starting) and sink (ending) points in the literature. Main paths are identified by measuring the traversal counts of each path through search path count, search path link count (SPLC), and search path node pair [ 21 ]. This study referenced Liu and Lu (2012), who used global main paths and key route main paths. SPLC is superior to search path count and search path node pair [ 22 ], because it maps knowledge diffusion more effectively. Figure 1 presents the process of main path analysis based on SPLC weights. First, a path in the network is selected. The number of paths connecting source points and nodes to sink points and the number of possible paths connecting sink points to each node are multiplied to obtain the weight of each link.
Example of main path analysis based on SPLC weights.
The WOS database provides the journal in which a study was published, the study’s publication date, the journal’s g-index and h-index, and the author’s name and g-index and h-index. The g-index represents the number of citations an article receives, with top articles receiving at least g 2 citations, whereas the h-index represents the number of citations an author receives. This study used these indices as primary and secondary indices, respectively, to assess journals’ and authors’ contributions to their academic fields; the top 20 journals and authors in crime prevention were examined.
This study input the total number of studies on crime prevention published each year in the WOS database into Loglet Lab 4 to create a graph; the Y-axis was the number of papers, and the X-axis was the year. The graph enabled us to identify periods of growth and maturity in the field.
A cluster analysis was performed to group studies with similar themes. Each cluster was named on the basis of the studies’ keywords. An edge-betweenness clustering analysis was then performed. First, the betweenness in the network was calculated. Betweenness is the total number of shortest paths that cross the shortest path between any two nodes. Second, the path with the highest betweenness score was removed. If a new citation network was derived, the modularity of the cluster was calculated. If no new citation network is derived, the first and second steps were repeated until all paths were removed. Finally, the group with the highest modularity was identified as the optimal group; modularity was used to compare the strength of links connecting intercluster and intracluster nodes.
The labels for each cluster were input into Wordle to determine the frequency with which each title appeared in the literature and to output a word cloud; prepositions and definite articles were not included in the computation.
Figure 2 presents an Excel chart of the number of studies published each year and total number of studies on crime prevention from 1989 to 2020 in dark and light blue, respectively. The number of studies consistently increased. By 2015, the growth was exponential, and hundreds of studies were being published annually. This signifies that crime prevention began to garner more attention.
Cumulative papers on crime prevention. Title: Statistics on publication of crime prevention literature. Bottom left text: number of studies published annually. Bottom right text: total number of studies published.
This study used the g-index to identify the top 20 journals covering crime prevention. Journals with the same g-index scores were ranked on the basis of their h-index scores ( Table 1 ). The top five journals, in descending order, are The British Journal of Criminology , Journal of Experimental Criminology , Security Journal , Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency , and Criminology & Public Policy . The top journal, The British Journal of Criminology , published its first issue in 1989 and has since published 75 studies. The journal publishes high-quality studies on crime prevention from around the world and has indicated that professionals in criminology, sociology, anthropology, and psychology are crucial to crime prevention. Journal of Experimental Criminology focuses on criminological theories and high-quality experimental research for the development of judicial policies. Security Journal mostly consists of security analyses and reports on research and innovations in various fields. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency provides research notes, reviews of other journals, and explorations of controversial problems in the judicial field. Criminology & Public Policy centers on judicial policies and their implementation. CiteScore is based on the citations recorded in the Scopus database rather than in JCR, and those citations are collected for articles published in the preceding four years instead of two or five. Using the CiteScore of Scopus to rank journals, we found that Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and Criminology were ranked first and second, respectively. Either g -index or CiteScore provide researchers with a measure of the journal, and it will be referenced.
The top 20 most influential journals.
g-Index | Journal | g-Index | h-Index | CiteScore | Active Years | Total Papers | Papers after 2000 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Ranking | |||||||
1 | 40 | 23 | 5.0 | 1989~2020 | 48 | 75 | |
2 | 24 | 12 | 4 | 2009~2019 | 30 | 30 | |
3 | 23 | 13 | 2.3 | 2008~2020 | 79 | 79 | |
4 | 23 | 12 | 4.8 | 1993~2020 | 22 | 23 | |
5 | 23 | 11 | 5.6 | 2010~2020 | 29 | 29 | |
6 | 21 | 13 | 6.8 | 1996~2019 | 17 | 21 | |
7 | 21 | 9 | 8.1 | 1989~2018 | 14 | 21 | |
8 | 20 | 10 | 4.4 | 1989~2020 | 20 | 25 | |
9 | 19 | 11 | 6.3 | 2002~2019 | 19 | 19 | |
10 | 19 | 10 | 5.2 | 1992~2019 | 27 | 31 | |
11 | 18 | 10 | 3.0 | 2008~2019 | 32 | 32 | |
12 | 18 | 9 | 2.7 | 1989~2020 | 28 | 36 | |
13 | 17 | 8 | 5.2 | 1994~2020 | 16 | 22 | |
14 | 16 | 9 | 1.5 | 2005~2019 | 28 | 28 | |
15 | 15 | 10 | 2.5 | 1999~2019 | 24 | 25 | |
16 | 14 | 12 | 7.3 | 1997~2019 | 13 | 14 | |
17 | 14 | 9 | 3.7 | 2009~2020 | 17 | 17 | |
18 | 14 | 9 | 4.2 | 2000~2020 | 14 | 14 | |
19 | 13 | 8 | 3.2 | 1991~2019 | 12 | 13 | |
20 | 11 | 6 | 0.3 | 1993~2009 | 9 | 12 | |
Total | 498 | 566 |
This study used the g-index to identify the top 20 authors in crime prevention. Authors with the same g-index score were ranked on the basis of their h-index scores ( Table 2 ). The top six authors were Welsh, BC; Farrington, DP; Weisburd, D; Braga, AA; Johnson, SD; and Piza, EL.
The top 20 most influential authors.
g-Index | Author | g-Index | h-Index | 1st Authors | Active Years | Total Papers |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Ranking | ||||||
1 | Welsh, BC | 31 | 19 | 26 | 1997–2020 | 40 |
2 | Farrington, DP | 28 | 15 | 7 | 1996–2020 | 29 |
3 | Weisburd, D | 16 | 12 | 11 | 1997–2019 | 16 |
4 | Braga, AA | 16 | 10 | 12 | 2001–2019 | 16 |
5 | Johnson, SD | 12 | 8 | 5 | 1998–2020 | 12 |
6 | Piza, EL | 11 | 8 | 10 | 2014–2020 | 15 |
7 | Leclerc, B | 11 | 7 | 6 | 2007–2019 | 11 |
8 | Pease, K | 11 | 6 | 4 | 1989–2011 | 11 |
9 | Eck, JE | 10 | 6 | 2 | 2006–2020 | 10 |
10 | Groff, ER | 9 | 8 | 3 | 2007–2019 | 9 |
11 | Losel, F | 9 | 8 | 3 | 2006–2019 | 9 |
12 | Reynald, DM | 9 | 7 | 4 | 2009–2019 | 9 |
13 | Farrell, G | 9 | 6 | 4 | 1994–2018 | 9 |
14 | Casteel, C | 9 | 5 | 4 | 2000–2016 | 9 |
15 | Andresen, MA | 8 | 6 | 3 | 2014–2020 | 8 |
16 | Beauregard, E | 8 | 6 | 3 | 2007–2018 | 8 |
17 | Bowers, K | 8 | 6 | 1 | 2010–2019 | 8 |
18 | Ekblom, P | 8 | 6 | 7 | 1995–2016 | 8 |
19 | Sherman, LW | 8 | 6 | 6 | 1993–2019 | 8 |
20 | Guerette, RT | 7 | 4 | 3 | 2009–2019 | 7 |
Total | 252 |
BC Welsh is a professor in the Northeastern University Criminology and Criminal Justice Program and serves as the director of the Cambridge Somerville Youth Study. Welsh’s main field of research is crime prevention, and he has served as an advisor for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the United Kingdom Home Office, and the Canadian National Police Service. Six of the 18 studies in the global main path, accounting for one-third, were written by Welsh, indicating his contributions to the field.
DP Farrington is a British criminologist, forensic psychologist, and emeritus professor of psychological criminology at the University of Cambridge, where he also serves as a Leverhulme Trust Emeritus Fellow. He is renowned for his research on the development of criminal behavior. In 2003, Farrington was appointed an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for his contributions to the field of criminology. The same year, he received the Stockholm Prize in Criminology for his contributions to crime prevention programs.
D Weisburd is an Israeli criminologist and Distinguished Professor of Criminology, Law, and Society at George Mason University. Weisburd’s main fields of research are public security and white-collar crime. In 2010, he received the Stockholm Prize in Criminology and Israel’s Rothschild Prize in social sciences.
AA Braga is a distinguished professor of criminology and criminal justice. He is renowned as a leading researcher in crime prevention and has published various influential papers in Criminology , Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency , Justice Quarterly , and Journal of Quantitative Criminology .
SD Johnson is the Director of the Dawes Center for Future Crime at University College London. He works in criminology and forensic psychology, and his research focuses on how new technologies affect crime.
Elis Piza is an Associate Professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. He has conducted research on geographic information systems and spatial analysis. He also published six of the studies in the global main path, which is a similar contribution to that of Welsh.
The main path analysis revealed the global main path of crime prevention in the academic field. In Figure 3 , the green and blue nodes represent the source and sink points, respectively. Each node represents a study. The arrows connecting the nodes indicate the direction of knowledge flow. Each node was labeled with a serial code corresponding to the last name of the first author, the other authors’ initials, and the year of publication. If two studies had the same serial code, a lowercase letter was added to the end of the code to indicate which study was first alphabetically.
Main path analysis of crime prevention (Top to bottom). Exploring the effects of CCTV on crime rates. Exploring the effects of the combination of foot patrol and CCTV. Exploring the effects of CCTV on crime prevention. Exploring the effects of physical infrastructure and crime reports on crime rates. Evaluating the costs and benefits of crime prevention strategies. Proposing prevention strategies for various types of crime.
Figure 3 depicts the global main path of crime prevention in the academic field. The main path of the citation network had the highest total weight and consisted of 18 nodes, each representing a study. Pennell et al. [ 23 ] assessed the effects of the Guardian Angels Program (i.e., volunteers patrolling the streets and subways) on crime and citizens’ attitude toward crime; order maintenance policing helped prevent crime and made citizens feel safe. Bennett and Lavrakas [ 24 ] proposed a community-based crime prevention program to eliminate the fear of crime and other problems but did not observe any changes in crimes or perceived quality of life. Mulvey et al. [ 25 ] reported that interventions must be broadly based and assessed more comprehensively to deter juvenile delinquency. Graham and Bennett [ 26 ] explored situational and community crime prevention programs in Europe and North America and their implementation effects.
Some scholars have assessed the economic efficiency of crime prevention programs. Welsh and Farrington [ 27 ] evaluated the feasibility and economic efficiency of a developmental and situational crime prevention program and explored its ability to reduce crime. Welsh and Farrington [ 28 ] proposed a cost–benefit analysis method to determine the optimal approach to crime prevention. The focus for most scholars of crime prevention has shifted to the effects of crime reports on crime rates. Painter and Farrington [ 29 ] indicated that increasing street lighting reduced crime rates on the basis of a self-report survey of young people. Farrington and Welsh [ 30 ] recommended that studies measured crime rates by using police records, surveys of victims, and accounts of offenses by perpetrators.
The widespread use and popularity of closed-circuit television (CCTV) have prompted scholars to explore the effects of surveillance cameras on crime. Welsh and Farrington [ 31 ] reported that CCTV reduces crimes in parking lots considerably but does not affect violent crime. Welsh and Farrington [ 32 ] evaluated the effects of CCTV as an intervention for crimes and revealed that it was more effective in the United Kingdom than in the United States; however, the effect was limited to crimes in parking lots. On the basis of survey results, Piza et al. [ 33 ] reported that CCTV should be placed in areas with high crime rates to discourage crimes. When installing CCTV, factors such as criminals and the presence of ground obstacles should be considered.
Piza and O’Hara [ 34 ] introduced a project that combined CCTV and foot patrols. Although the number of murders and shootings decreased in areas with foot patrol, the number of robberies exhibited temporal and spatial displacement. Piza et al. [ 35 ] indicated that multiple interventions should be implemented simultaneously to prevent crime, especially street crime. Piza et al. [ 36 ] presented an intervention combining CCTV monitoring with directed patrolling that successfully reduced crime rates.
Piza [ 37 ] used propensity score matching to explore the effects of CCTV on auto thefts, auto parts thefts, and violent crimes and found that CCTV only deterred auto thefts. Welsh et al. [ 38 ] noted that private CCTV systems are more effective in preventing crimes than are police CCTV systems or the combination of police CCTV systems and security personnel. Khan et al. [ 39 ] proposed adding blockchain to surveillance systems to ensure video evidence cannot be compromised. Most early studies focused on planning and assessing crime prevention strategies involving physical infrastructure; only in 2003 did studies appear related to CCTV.
4.1. development trajectory of crime prevention and clusters.
The key-route main path comprised 23 studies. A comparison between Figure 3 and Figure 4 indicated that the key-route main path contained all 18 studies in the global main path; thus, the studies in the global main path are crucial in the academic field of crime prevention. The key-route main path also contained five studies not in the global main path. Polvi et al. [ 40 ] explored the risks of being burglarized a second time and revealed that homes burglarized once in 1987 had a four times greater risk of being burglarized again in the same year. Trickett et al. [ 41 ] analyzed the differences between areas with high and low crime rates and revealed that vulnerability determined the risks of crimes; thus, crime prevention strategies should focus on the most vulnerable populations and places. Farrell and Pease [ 42 ] performed predictable seasonal variation analyses by using police calls to domestic disputes and residential burglary in a 3-year period, and they found that larger predictable seasonal variations may provide deeper insight into the problems in question and directions for crime prevention. Farrington [ 43 ] categorized criminology research into five categories, namely measurement, explanations or correlates, police or crime prevention, sentencing, and correctional treatment, and they suggested that long-term research on the causes of crime is warranted. Guerette and Bowers [ 44 ] evaluated situational crime prevention projects and reported that crime displacement entailed the diffusion of the benefits of an intervention; this indicates that certain interventions prevent crimes.
Key-route main path analysis of crime prevention (top to bottom). Exploring the effects of CCTV on crimes. Exploring the effects of interventions combining foot patrol and CCTV on crime rates. Exploring the effects of CCTV on crime prevention. Exploring the effects of physical infrastructure and crime reports on crime rates. Evaluating the costs and benefits of crime prevention strategies. Proposing prevention strategies for various types of crime.
An edge-betweenness cluster analysis yielded 20 clusters, and studies in the top 5 clusters, namely the effects of crime displacement control on crime prevention, the effects of crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED), the effects of developmental programs on crime prevention, the effects of communalism on crime prevention, and the effects of childhood sexual abuse on crimes, were input into Wordle to identify keywords. Figure 5 presents the themes, number of studies, keywords, and word clouds for these clusters. Keywords were ranked by their frequency (numbers in parentheses) in titles; for example, “crime” appeared an average 0.33 times in the first cluster. The studies in each cluster were analyzed to determine the main path of each cluster and the research direction of each main path ( Figure 6 , Figure 7 , Figure 8 , Figure 9 and Figure 10 ). The literature growth trend charts revealed that the number of studies in the literature increased in all five clusters.
Top 5 clusters of crime prevention-related academic literature.
Global main path analysis of first cluster. (Top to bottom). Assessing crime displacement control and other programs; the effects of focused police action programs on crime displacement control.
Global main path analysis of second cluster. (Top to bottom). The effects of CPTED; relationship between environmental characteristics and social disorder.
Global main path of third cluster. (Top to bottom). Evaluating the effects of developmental crime prevention; relationship between policy and crime prevention.
Global main path analysis of fourth cluster. (Top to bottom). The effects of communalism on crime prevention; exploring the essence of crime prevention.
Global main path analysis of fifth cluster (Top to bottom). Strategies for preventing childhood sexual abuse; analysis of childhood sexual abuse.
Figure 5 translation: (top row, left to right): research theme; first cluster (122 studies): the effects of crime displacement control on crime prevention; second cluster (104 studies): the effects of crime prevention through environmental design; third cluster (83 studies): the effects of developmental programs on crime prevention; fourth cluster (59 studies): the effects of communalism on crime prevention; fifth cluster (53 studies): the effects of childhood sexual abuse on crimes. (Bottom left, top to bottom): number of studies; word clouds.
The first cluster contained 122 studies on crime displacement control ( Figure 6 ), and the main path contained 11 studies on crime displacement control from 1990 to 2020, demonstrating the effects of crime displacement control on crime prevention.
Gabor [ 45 ] indicated that citizens value community-based crime prevention programs and public participation. Braga [ 46 ] suggested that focused police actions can prevent crimes and disorder in crime hot spots. Weisburd et al. [ 47 ] indicated that focused crime prevention efforts at target sites improve nearby areas. Braga and Bond [ 48 ] reported that situational prevention strategies are more effective than misdemeanor arrests in preventing crime. Durlauf and Nagin [ 49 ] stated that the certainty of punishment deters criminals.
Johnson et al. [ 50 ] proposed the EMMIE framework, which involves collecting primary data on crime prevention and synthesizing knowledge through systematic reviews. Santos and Santos [ 51 ] explored police- and family-oriented interventions and discovered that their effects on crime were nonsignificant. Braga et al. [ 52 ] found that the effects of focused police crime prevention interventions in crime hot spots result in a diffusion of crime control benefits; the results showed that hot spots policing diffused crime control benefits into proximate areas. Piza et al. [ 53 ] reported that police substations reduce the number of thefts and scooter thefts in target areas considerably.
The second cluster consisted of 104 studies on CPTED, which involves the relationship between environmental characteristics and crimes ( Figure 7 ). Taylor [ 54 ] maintained that involvement in the community encourages residents to coordinate their efforts against unrest and ensure social stability. Loukaitou-Sideris [ 55 ] explored bus stop crimes and analyzed the environmental attributes that determine safety for bus drivers. The study also developed a crime prevention strategy for bus stops based on environmental attributes. Loukaitou-Sideris and Eck [ 56 ] investigated whether crimes are a barrier to active living and developed a theoretical model comprising situational characteristics, crime and disorder, fear of crime or disorder, and physical activity.
Marzbali et al. [ 57 ] proposed CPTED and explored its effects on burglary rates. Marzbali et al. [ 58 ] explored the effects of CPTED on victims and fear of crime. Abdullah et al. [ 59 ] reported that elderly individuals perceive higher levels of neighborhood cohesion than do younger individuals. Marzbali et al. [ 60 ] examined the effects of CPTED on residential burglary rates, and they concluded that CPTED was associated with low victimization rates. Chen et al. [ 61 ] analyzed the effects of floating populations on residential burglary; floating populations from a single province do not strongly affect residential burglary rates in most parts of the city, whereas those from multiple provinces significantly and positively affect residential burglary rates. Cho and Jung [ 62 ] reported that CPTED is an effective tool for preventing sexual harassment and that although crime displacement occurs, its effects are outweighed by the positive effects of new policies in target zones. He et al. [ 63 ] analyzed factors affecting the safety of traditional settlements and revealed that safety is spiritual, physical, and behavioral. Kim and Park [ 64 ] investigated three groups’ awareness of wall removal projects. The first group consisted of burglars stationed at houses without walls, the second group consisted of residents who were stationed at houses with walls, and the third group consisted of residents who were stationed at houses without walls. The first group perceived houses without walls as easier targets, whereas the second and third groups reported that wall removal increased their fear of crimes. Most of the residents indicated that the walls protected them from external threats and ensured their environment was safe.
The third cluster consisted of 83 studies on developmental crime prevention ( Figure 8 ). Mackenzie [ 65 ] used rigorous science scores to assess crime prevention strategies. Welsh and Farrington [ 66 ] commented that the effectiveness of correctional strategies should be evaluated and that the results of the evaluations should be incorporated into policies and practices. Manning et al. [ 67 ] encouraged policymakers to make rational decisions and incorporate research evidence into policies.
Crowley [ 68 ] encouraged policymakers to consider their regional planning and implementation capacity when investing in crime prevention programs. Farrington [ 69 ] applied a universal index to juvenile crime to identify suitable strategies for preventing each type of crime and revealed that family interventions and preschool courses can reduce juvenile crimes. Weisburd et al. [ 70 ] performed a systematic review of crime prevention strategies and suggested that studies perform cost–benefit analyses and explore the effectiveness of each strategy. Spasic and Simonovic [ 71 ] compared police officers’ and police educators’ receptivity to evidence-based policing. Farrington et al. [ 72 ] invited six leading criminologists to discuss instability in social systems, the importance of systematic reviews, heterogeneity among studies’ conclusions, replicating experiments in procedural justice, and enthusiasm bias in criminal justice experiments. Picasso and Cohen [ 73 ] employed a survey methodology previously used in studies on the environment, health, and safety economics to estimate the costs of violent crimes and homicide and demonstrated the feasibility of the methodology.
The fourth cluster consisted of 59 studies on crime prevention and communalism ( Figure 9 ). King [ 74 ] detailed the relationship between France’s crime prevention strategies and antisocial behavior. Omalley [ 75 ] reported that the rise of neoconservatism discouraged the development of programs based on risk models and examined situational crime prevention in relation to neoconservatism. Omalley [ 76 ] defined crime prevention as a key responsibility, advocated for the causes of crime to be studied, and indicated that criminals should take responsibility for their crimes. The study also proposed strengthening the law to enhance its punitive function.
Omalley et al. [ 77 ] believed that overly political governmentality may impede policy implementation and advocated for public discussion of this notion. Carson [ 78 ] explored the effects of communalism on crime prevention strategies. Hughes [ 79 ] examined community crime prevention, the instability of community governance, and strangers’ effects on community safety. Carson [ 80 ] expanded on Carson [ 80 ] by continuing to explore communalism as well as feasible crime prevention strategies. Selmini [ 81 ] explored crime prevention and social reassurance in Italy, which are strongly affected by conflict and negotiations between Italy’s national and local governments. Hughes [ 82 ] combined international, national, and local strategies to address changing governance in a society attempting to regulate migration and ensure community safety.
The fifth cluster consisted of 53 studies on crime prevention and childhood sexual abuse ( Figure 10 ). Beauregard et al. [ 83 ] identified three hunting process scripts in serial sex crimes, namely coercive scripts, manipulative scripts, and nonpersuasive scripts. LeclercPB2009 [ 84 ] analyzed the victims of various crimes to identify specific characteristics in potential victims. Leclerc et al. [ 85 ] proposed a script model for child sex offenses.
Leclerc et al. [ 86 ] examined the effects of guardians on the severity of childhood sexual abuse; the presence of a guardian decreases the duration of sexual abuse by 86%, suggesting that guardians are crucial in preventing sexual crimes. Leclerc et al. [ 87 ] reported that environmental criminology contributes to the development of strategies to prevent childhood sexual violence. The study collected information related to sexual crimes through questions posed by criminologists and environmental criminologists and offered directions for further research. Guerzoni [ 88 ] evaluated the feasibility of clergy’s child safety practices to minimize impropriety and protect children from sexual crimes.
From 2007 to 2011, most studies focused on childhood sexual abuse; after 2015, the research focus shifted to strategies for preventing such crimes ( Figure 10 ).
The sample comprised 2678 scholars in the academic field of crime prevention. A growth curve analysis was performed to identify the period of maturity in the research on crime prevention. The dotted line in Figure 11 represents the estimated number of papers in the field; the line overlaid with dots represents the actual number of papers. The inflection point of the growth curve was estimated to be 2017, and the field is expected to reach maturity by 2047. By then, the total number of papers is expected to be 2546. At the date of writing, the crime prevention field has passed the inflection point and is expected to slowly enter the maturity period.
Studies on crime prevention. A growth curve analysis was performed to identify the period of maturity in the research on crime prevention as blue dots.
This study collected 1554 studies on crime prevention, which is a field expected to reach maturity by 2047, at which point 2546 studies are expected to have been published. This study performed path analyses to identify the path with the highest total weight and examined it with respect to the key-route main path. Early studies focused on strategies to prevent various types of crime, middle-stage studies centered on cost–benefit analyses of crime prevention strategies, and late-stage studies explored the effects of physical infrastructure on crime rates. The following are three periods.
This study also performed a cluster analysis and data mining and identified the following five clusters, which were used to further analyze the evolution of the literature:
The global main path analysis, key-route main path analysis, and cluster analysis revealed that the field of crime prevention contains various interrelated themes. The following six major topics all appeared on the global main path and key-route main path, but only three topics appeared in the five groups.
The research framework established by this research and the analysis method chosen are an integrated research method, which is very suitable for application in exploring the technological development trend of a certain topic and expounding the key implications of field management.
SONG-CHIA HSU: College of Management Ph.D. Candidate, National Taipei University of Technology. KAI-YING CHEN: Professor of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, National Taipei University of Technology. He focuses on the fields of Manufacturing Automation and Electronic Business, Manufacturing Execution System, and Application of Radio Frequency Identification. CHIH-PING LIN: Professor of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, National Taipei University of Technology. He focuses on the fields of Database Management, Engineering Economics, and Learning Productivity. WEI-HAO SU: He graduated with a Ph.D. in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, National Taipei University of Technology. He focuses on Technology and Innovation Management, Management of Technology, Managing Innovation in Organizations, and New Venture Creation.
This research received no external funding.
Final approval of the manuscript: all authors. Conceptualization, W.-H.S. and S.-C.H.; methodology, S.-C.H.; software, S.-C.H.; validation, W.-H.S., K.-Y.C. and C.-P.L.; formal analysis, W.-H.S.; investigation, S.-C.H.; resources, C.-P.L.; data curation, W.-H.S.; writing—original draft preparation, S.-C.H.; writing—review and editing, W.-H.S.; visualization, W.-H.S. and C.-P.L.; project administration, W.-H.S. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
The study was conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the Institutional Review Board. Ethical review and approval were waived for this study.
Not applicable.
Conflicts of interest.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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This report presents findings from a congressionally mandated evaluation of State and local crime prevention programs funded by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Deciding what works in the prevention of crime called for applying rigorous means for determining which programs have had a demonstrated impact on the reduction of crime and delinquency. The study concluded that very few operational crime prevention programs have been evaluated by using scientifically recognized standards and methodologies, including repeated tests under similar and different social settings. Based on a review of more than 500 prevention program evaluations that met minimum scientific standards, the report further concluded that there was minimally adequate evidence to establish a provisional list of what works, what doesn't, and what is promising. For infants, frequent home visits by nurses and other professionals are apparently helpful. For preschoolers, classes with weekly home visits by preschool teachers are useful; and for delinquent and at-risk preadolescents, family therapy and parent training have proven promising. Effective school programs encompass organizational development for innovation; the communication and reinforcement of clear, consistent norms; the teaching of social competency skills; and the coaching of high-risk youth in "thinking skills." Vocational training helps older male ex- offenders, and the use of rental housing for drug dealing can be countered with nuisance abatement action on landlords. Extra police patrols are effective for high-crime hot spots, and incarceration and monitoring by specialized police unit can reduce crime by high-risk repeat offenders. Also effective are on-scene arrests for domestic abusers who are employed, rehabilitation programs with risk-focused treatments for convicted offenders, and therapeutic community treatment programs for drug-using offenders in prison. This report summary also describes what types of programs do not work and what programs hold promise.
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Crime prevention, in truth, is preventing crime before it happens. So, this method is one of the most appropriate to save environment, fund and time which in turn, will improve the quality of ...
scientific evaluations of crime prevention practices. This Research in Brief summa-rizes the research methods and conclu-sions found in that report. In 1996, a Federal law required the U.S. Attorney General to provide Con-gress with an independent review of the Many crime prevention programs work. Others don't. Most programs have not yet
Each, importantly, takes place outside of the formal criminal justice system, representing an alternative, perhaps even socially progressive way to reduce crime. This comprehensive publication reviews up-to-date research on crime prevention. Bringing together top scholars in criminology, public policy, psychology, and sociology, the volume ...
The notion that crime can be prevented by improving physical space inspired an entire branch of research known as Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, or CPTED (Cozens et al. 2005). Broadly, CPTED builds on Jane Jacob's idea that the physical design of streets and public spaces can encourage the active guardianship of those spaces ...
When it was originally proposed, situational prevention was criticized as a superficial response to crime without a theoretical base. In fact, it was informed by social learning theory (Bandura, 1976; Mischel, 1968) and had grown out of an extensive Home Office research program conducted in the 1960s and early 1970s on the effectiveness of residential treatments for delinquency (Sinclair ...
An evaluation of the effectiveness of crime prevention programs concluded that some prevention programs work and some do not and that the effectiveness of United States Department of Justice (DOJ) funding for crime prevention depends heavily on whether it is directed to the urban neighborhoods where youth violence is highly concentrated.
An abundance of research has called into question the relative effectiveness of this crime prevention approach, although it has demonstrated the greater effectiveness of a focused-deterrence approach (Braga and Weisburd, 2012). Although Kelly and Mears don't summarize the research on the crime-prevention limitations of the standard model of ...
Analysis of future research trends in crime prevention through environmental design. The theoretical foundation of environmental design for crime prevention originated in the 1970s in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has undergone several self-revisions and adjustments since its inception, evolving into a mature theoretical ...
Taylor (2002) in his chapter entitled "Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED); Yes, No, Maybe, Unknowable, and All of the above," analyzed the evidence on whether modifications to the built environment reduced crime, finding the research was varied and largely inconclusive. He reported some studies indicated CPTED had reduced ...
University, Churchill Hall, . Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA . Email: [email protected]. Abstract. Research Summary: This article reports on an updated. systematic review and meta-analysis ...
Findings are discussed in terms of their implications on future research, and strategies for developing crime prevention and fear reduction programs that maximise the positive effects on attitudes towards crime, while minimising their unintended consequences, are also offered. ... Crime Prevention Studies Vol. 20, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, pp ...
Published in Police Practice and Research: An International Journal (Vol. 18, No. 4, 2017)
Situational crime prevention can be characterized as comprising measures (1) directed at highly specific forms of crime (2) that involve the management, design, or manipulation of the immediate environment in as systematic and permanent a way as possible (3) so as to reduce the opportunities for crime and increase its risks as perceived by a wide range of offenders. These measures include ...
Summary. Situational crime prevention (SCP) is a criminological perspective that calls for expanding the crime-reduction role well beyond the justice system. SCP sees criminal law in a more restrictive sense, as only part of the anticrime effort in governance. It calls for minutely analyzing specific crime types (or problems) to uncover the ...
Abstract. Crime Prevention: Approaches, Practices, and Evaluations, 9th Edition, meets the needs of students and instructors for engaging, evidence-based, impartial coverage of the origins of ...
Regarding the second question, there is a need for additional research and development on a wide range of critical issues that pertain to the effectiveness of developmental and situational crime prevention strategies. The study identifies gaps in knowledge related to the effectiveness of developmental and situational crime prevention strategies.
Founded upon opportunity theories of crime (i.e., environmental criminology) and leveraging effective practices for crime prevention (e.g. problem solving, situational crime prevention), place-based investigations represent a promising practice for the reduction of urban violence. Further research with rigorous evaluation is needed, however, to
Given the large body of research that has shown the ineffectiveness of many police crime prevention efforts (Visher & Weisburd, 1998), the overall crime reduction impact generated by DMI programs is still noteworthy. However, the smaller crime control benefits suggested by our meta-analysis are different from effectiveness claims made from ...
It studies four main crime prevention strategies, namely developmental prevention, community prevention, situational prevention, and criminal justice prevention. It provides an overview of the key theories that support these strategies and notes some relevant research on effectiveness. This article also considers the development of crime ...
Research Summary. We report on the findings of an updated systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance cameras on crime. The findings show that CCTV is associated with a significant and modest decrease in crime. The largest and most consistent effects of CCTV were observed in car parks.
Welsh's main field of research is crime prevention, and he has served as an advisor for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the United Kingdom Home Office, and the Canadian National Police Service. Six of the 18 studies in the global main path, accounting for one-third, were written by Welsh, indicating his contributions to the field.
Deciding what works in the prevention of crime called for applying rigorous means for determining which programs have had a demonstrated impact on the reduction of crime and delinquency. The study concluded that very few operational crime prevention programs have been evaluated by using scientifically recognized standards and methodologies ...