Crime Prevention

Theory, Policy And Practice

Daniel Gilling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135364502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kriminologie

First published in 1997.This work summarizes and synthesizes the substantial crime prevention literature to provide an approachable and comprehensive text for students. It sets out a critical analysis in the context of the politics of criminal justice policy.

CHAPTER 1

The concept of prevention

Introduction

It can hardly have escaped the attention of those with a professional or academic interest in crime that there has been a great deal more attention devoted to the concept of crime prevention in recent years, although any criminologist with a sense of history would rightfully question the extent to which the phenomenon is indeed a recent one. There may be more talk about the prevention of crime today, with the concept being used as a contrast with more traditional criminal justice system approaches to crime control, but as a principle and objective crime prevention has always lain at the heart of criminal justice policy in the modern period, and the practice itself is much older. Hence, as Reith (1956) points out, the prevention of crime has been “the principal object” of the police since their establishment on a permanent footing in England in 1829, while the codification of the criminal law in the nineteenth century, the rationalization of penal policy around the central institution of the prison, and the eventual extension of penal discourses and practices into the community in the early twentieth century have all been similarly justified in the name of crime prevention.

Consequently, the modern use of the term to refer to contemporary developments in crime control, sometimes complementary and some times in opposition to more traditional institutional responses (police, probation and prisons), is in fact somewhat misleading, and fails to capture the essence of the changes currently taking place in crime control policies both in England and Wales, and across much of the world. Crime prevention, then, is too vague and broad a term on which to hang a study such as this, and requires further elaboration, for as it stands it has a catch-all nature that defies disciplining, enabling it to embrace a range of areas that would by themselves be worthy of study in their own right. Crime prevention incorporates not only the practices of the entire criminal justice system, but also those of many other social and public policies, as well as those of private citizens and private enterprise. The situation is further complicated when one considers that the prevention of crime is often not the primary rationale for practices that do, nevertheless, have a crime preventive effect.

If we were to unpack the concept of crime prevention, we would immediately recognize that crime itself is by no means a precise term, covering a host of qualitatively and quantitatively different acts that, as befits social constructs, vary across time and space. But the real problem lies with the word prevention, which Billis (1981:368) succinctly and accurately describes as “slippery”, and certainly difficult to contain. Freeman (1992) explores the reasons for this by breaking the word down into two constituent parts, namely prediction and intervention. That is to say that in order to prevent the occurrence of something one must first be able to predict where it is likely to occur, and then apply appropriate intervention at this predicted point. Prediction is, however, literally a risky business. It depends upon a theory of causality, and when applied to social constructs such as crime and criminality it is very uncertain, drawing as it does upon social scientific knowledge and understanding that has historically proved to be “more successful at predicting the experience of populations than of individuals.” (Freeman 1992:36). Social science, as Graham (1990:11) observes, “is not an exact science. It deals largely with probabilities and correlates rather than certainties and causes.”

The prediction of crime and criminality is mainly the province of criminology, a multidisciplinary domain comprising a broad church drawn mainly from other social sciences, principally sociology, psychology, politics and economics, with some geography, philosophy and biology thrown in for good measure. A diverse array of theories of causality and prediction emanate from this scientific melting pot, some focusing upon specific categories of crime (for example, expres-sive or acquisitive crimes), others focusing upon specific types of criminal, or simply criminality in general (Eysenck 1977). Such theoretical diversity spawns equally diverse preventive prognoses, none of which when applied in practice has proved to be spectacularly successful in turning the tide of generally and universally rising rates of officially recorded crime in the post-war period.

This is where intervention, the second constituent element of prevention, comes in. Different theories imply different modes of intervention, relying on different agents (such as criminal justice professionals, or the general public) and different techniques, applied at different stages in the genesis of crime, and at different sites. Even in the unlikely event that the theoretical prognoses were wholly accurate, moreover, it does not follow automatically that the correct form of intervention would be selected, or even if it were, that it would work. This is because the gap between prediction and intervention is filled by the very human process of implementation, in which the politics of policy-making is encountered, where intended and unintended consequences collide, and where unanticipated barriers manifest themselves. Invariably this is very rough terrain, although in a more optimistic scenario it is equally possible to envisage interventions working without actually knowing the reasons why, more a consequence of chance than design.

Typologies of prevention

Prevention is an uncertain business, then, and through its sheer diversity an extraordinarily unhelpful word. Brantingham & Faust do not overstep the mark when they describe crime prevention as “probably the most overworked and least understood concept in contemporary criminology” (1976:284), although some progress has been made since they wrote these words, and a number of attempts have been made to make the term more manageable and useful by fitting it into a conceptual framework that discriminates between forms of prevention. One such approach is that of the National Crime Prevention Institute (1986) in the USA, which distinguishes between direct crime prevention controls, which proactively address opportunities for crime, and indirect controls, which are supposed to cover everything else. In contrast, Johnson (1987) refers to a distinction between correc-tive prevention, which seeks to address the causes of crime, and punitive prevention, which seeks to deter through the force of the criminal justice system. Elsewhere, Forrester and his colleagues (1988) distinguish victim-focused crime prevention from its offender-focused equivalent.

These distinctions all serve to illustrate points of difference between approaches to crime prevention, reflecting differences in forms of intervention, techniques (correction or deterrence), developmental stages (proactive or reactive) and sites (offenders or victims). While in some ways useful, however, they are by no means conceptually watertight, principally because one finds an inevitable grey area between such binary distinctions, and because some approaches can be made to fit different categories, so that, for example, many offender-focused interventions are also victim-focused in so far as they perform a surveillance or incapacitation function for them. Such distinctions, therefore, often fail to allow for the difference between intention and outcome. Moreover, given that crime prevention covers such a vast area of activities, a binary distinction is never likely to serve as a major feat of elucidation.

An alternative, and by far the most commonly employed approach is that which borrows from the literature on medical epidemiology in making a three-way distinction between primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention. The distinction is ultimately attributable to Brantingham & Faust (1976), who identified the site of primary prevention as the general public or environment; the site of secondary prevention as those regarded as being “at risk” of offending or criminal victimization; and the site of tertiary prevention as those who have already succumbed to either criminality or criminal victimization. Primary interventions are regarded by Brantingham & Faust as “the ideal objective” (ibid.: 292) in so far as they seek to secure the elimination of criminogenic conditions in society, thus being truly proactive, while tertiary interventions are the least satisfactory, but conversely constitute the main business of the criminal justice system and its correctional interventions into offenders’ lives. Secondary interventions, meanwhile, absorb the main energies of scientific criminological research in the identification and treatment of those who might be predicted to be “at risk” of crime. This may have been so in the mid-1970s, but is less true today, notwithstanding the contribution of criminal career researchers (Farrington 1992).

This primary to tertiary distinction represents an advance upon binary approaches, if only because it increases the number of categories within a typology from two to six, given that at each of the three stages there is a further distinction between victim- and offender-focused initiatives. There are still difficulties, however, for the same approaches can still be placed in different categories: correctional practices, for example, are both individually deterrent (tertiary prevention), and generally deterrent (primary prevention) in their exemplary status. Consequently, while at least this distinction separates out the different developmental stages and sites of intervention, it is hard to disagree with Graham’s (1990:11) warning that crime prevention risks being a broad and potentially “meaningless phrase”.

In the last decade or so another distinction has emerged and claimed a common currency within the crime prevention literature, although it too suffers the same shortcomings mentioned above. This is the distinction between situational crime prevention (sometimes referred to as opportunity reduction, or designing out crime), and social crime prevention (sometimes labelled the social problem approach). South (1987:42) proffers the following definition of situational crime prevention:

Situational crime prevention focuses on the management, design and manipulation of the built physical environment, in order to reduce the opportunity to commit crime and increase the risk of detection if deterrence fails.

The key words here are probably opportunity and physical environment: it seeks to change the structure of criminal opportunities that are perceived to lie in phenomena located within the physical environment. It aims to do this principally either by physical security measures, which rely to a great extent upon technology supported by publicity and incentives to use it; or by measures which increase the costs of crime (by increasing the risk of apprehension) and reduce the benefits (for example, by property-marking) (Graham 1990).

By contrast, social crime prevention seeks to change criminal motivations, which are perceived to lie in people rather than things, in the social environment. As Sutton (1994:10) says, “social prevention now embraces almost any program that can claim to affect the pattern of behaviour, values and the self-disciplines of groups seen as having potential to offend”. It seeks to achieve this via social policy-type measures such as housing policies; health treatment and education in respect of drugs and alcohol; family and educational policy; youth work; and employment policy (Graham 1990). This covers a very broad range of interventions, but children and youth are the principal focus, closely followed by some other politically and economically marginalized groups. In part because of this breadth, Tonry & Farrington (1995) prefer to subdivide social crime prevention into developmental crime prevention, which seeks to prevent the development of criminal potential within individuals, and community crime prevention (discussed below), which seeks to do likewise in residential communities by changing their social conditions.

Given that there are so many different possible forms or distinctions of crime prevention, used across an international stage, it is not surprising to find occasional confusion in the use of the terminology, and the reader is urged to beware of this. For example, some writers (e.g. Harris 1992) have taken the term social crime prevention to refer to collective means of crime prevention, as distinct from individual means of prevention, and as such these social approaches can focus upon either motivations or opportunities. Furthermore, as van Dijk (1990) reports, the Dutch tend to use the term social crime prevention to refer to approaches that depend not on the actions of criminal justice agencies, but rather on the actions of the general public or other public officials, which again might be focused on opportunities or motivations. There is nothing essentially wrong with the use of the label social crime prevention to cover these activities, but such a usage of the term does not correspond to the sense in which it is normally and widely used, certainly in England and among most practitioners, and thus it is not the sense in which social crime prevention will be used throughout this book.

In a definitive typology drawn up for the benefit of the United Nations, Graham (1990) offers a different label for what van Dijk calls social crime prevention, namely community crime prevention. This essentially comprises a mix of social and situational approaches, pursued either by individuals or groups. Its distinctiveness stems from the fact that it is developed by agencies outside of the traditional criminal justice system: the community element comes from the fact that it is very much a bottom-up, participatory approach, relying upon partnership across a range of non-criminal justice agencies and groups (Rosenbaum 1988).

Graham and Rosenbaum, however, are both guilty of exceeding the boundaries of their definitions of community crime prevention, for both ultimately include community policing within its purview. This shows how hard it is to fix definitional boundaries and exclude moments of arbitrariness: no typology is watertight. In this case, including community policing clearly breaks the rule about the exclusion of criminal justice agencies, but such an infraction appears justified since community policing employs crime prevention techniques that rely heavily upon localism and community participation, while simultaneously conjuring up the same rosy ideological image. However, once the definitional rules are broken the floodgates may be opened, and if community policing is included, then why not also community probation, or community punishments, and virtually anything else with the community prefix that distinguishes it from erstwhile forbears of, presumably, noncommunity crime prevention?

Graham argues that community crime prevention may constitute both social and situational crime prevention, but in doing so it “creates a whole greater than the sum of its two parts” (1990:2). Yet he does not clarify exactly how this is so, and thus risks falling for the ideological appeal of community, which is often more presentational than practical. Nevertheless, the term has become popularized in recent years, and in England in the 1990s it has now become further refined as simply “community safety” (Home Office 1991).

The various attempts that have been made to provide a typology for crime prevention, or to distinguish one form from another, ultimately fail to achieve what they set out to do, and their scientific inexactitude does little to challenge the claim that it is still “a rather vague and ill-defined concept” (Graham 1990:10), or as Sutton (1994:7) observes, “a diffuse set of theories and practices.” There is no common currency to which all theories or practices are ultimately reducible, and hence the definitional difficulties should be fully expected. Nevertheless, what the distinctions do manage to achieve is a demonstration of the broad nature of paradigmatic shifts that have occurred in crime prevention, thereby qualifying our perception of the growth of interest in crime prevention in recent years. That is to say that it is not so much that crime prevention is new, but rather that its character has changed by means of the paradigmatic shifts picked up in the definitions discussed above.

Crime prevention, then, is a constant with a changing character. Once mainly the responsibility of private citizens, in the last two centuries it has gradually been taken over by the criminal justice system, but since the 1970s there has been a discernible shift of emphasis and responsibility from this system to those outside of it, either the general public, or other public and private agencies. This shift has become so marked now that van Dijk (1990:205) feels justified in defining crime prevention as

the total of all policies, measures and techniques, outside the boundaries of the criminal justice, aiming at the reduction of the various kinds of damage caused by acts defined as criminal by the state.

By the same token, while Graham (1990) recognizes that the criminal justice system does have a crime preventive role, principally in terms of tertiary prevention, he nevertheless elects to exclude tertiary prevention, and thus the main business of the criminal justice system, from his definitive crime prevention guide. This is a largely pragmatic decision, taken to make the subject matter altogether more discrete and manageable. But something else lies behind the decision too, and it is this that alerts us to the wider significance of crime prevention as a label worth fighting for.

Crime prevention is nothing if not a good idea: as Freeman says of the concept in general, being for prevention is akin to being against sin, and “the rhetorical power of prevention is felt across the political spectrum” (1992:40). Crime prevention is a worthy end to aspire to, and anything that can be so labelled by implication carries a good deal of favour. Because of this, however, it is also a label that may be jealously guarded: many practices may aspire to being crime preventive, but not all are necessarily regarded as such. This is the vital difference between the objective meaning of crime prevention, which applies to a vast array of practices, and the subjective reality, where the label is effectively reserved for those practices that have had their causes championed within the political arena, and have gained their rewards in the shape of considerable public investment. This point will become clearer as the story of crime prevention is gradually unfolded in this and subsequent chapters.

For now, the important point is that the acts of selective interpreta-tion of crime prevention discussed above may be partly pragmatic, but they are also inherently political. Van Dijk’s definition, for example, could be read as inferring an expressed preference for activities that take place outside of the criminal justice system, and so could Graham’s. Similarly, having bemoaned the fact that “the phrase crime prevention has been loosely applied to any kind of effort aimed at controlling criminal behaviour”, the National Crime Prevention Institute (1986:2) goes on to highlight the preferability of what it calls direct crime prevention, as a “pragmatic, scientifically-based management approach to before-the-fact crime reduction” (ibid.: 11). The implication is that direct crime prevention is better because it is direct—before-the-fact rather than after-the-fact, proactive rather than reactive. This is a distinction that has a weak scientific basis, however, for as Tuck (1987:5) points out, “No clear analytic distinction can be made between future orientated and past orientated actions against crime.” Direct crime prevention may be preferred, then, but it is not necessarily any more scientific, and indeed any criminological claim to a pure scientific status rests on shaky foundations. The point is that the question of whether one approach is more crime preventive, or more deserving of the title, than another will always be politically contentious, at least in part.

Nevertheless, the fact that crime prevention lends itself to this sort of politics is itself of considerable interest, and points to an important quality of the concept that merits further inquiry.

The political appeal of prevention and preventionism

As the previous section has made apparent, prevention as a concept possesses something of an elastic quality that enables it to cover a broad range of theoretical premisses and practical interventions. This breadth renders the term scientifically problematic, but what is scientifically problematic may conversely be politically useful, for the concept can serve as an empty vessel into which may be poured any potent brew intended to satisfy thirsts that extend well beyond the pragmatic or technical.

The promise to prevent a social problem such as crime is likely to attract considerable popular support, and is thus a means by which those who aspire to govern in democratic states may stake a claim to legitimacy: that is why crime is a hot political issue, as the British Labour Party found to its cost in 1979 as the Conservatives fought and won the general election of that year in large part because of the law and order platform they adopted. The flexibility of the concept of prevention, moreover, means that it can be cut to the cloths of either political constituency: as Freeman (1992) observes, prevention can equally fit left wing ambitions of benign interventionist social engineering or right wing ambitions of market solutions and individual responsibility. The fact that prevention can be used in this way, even if the term itself is not explicit, infers that it is an instrumental part of the process by which social problems are socially constructed for ends that are as much political or ideological as practical.

Manning (1985), who takes this constructionist view of social problems, suggests that if things are going to be accepted as social problems that require some sort of institutional response, they must needs be discrete, moral and technical. That is to say that they must be worthy of public attention, and they must be seen as something about which something can actually be done—again, a conception that relies as much upon ideology as science. The concept of prevention is a means by which this can be achieved, and thus one may read the development of criminal justice policy not so much as a series of scientific innovations, but rather as the development of a series of assertions and counterassertions about the ways in which crime can be prevented.

However, because of the breadth of the concept, and the weakness of criminology and other theorizing about crime as pure science (see Ch. 2), all of these assertions or counter-assertions are likely to have some claim to theoretical plausibility, no matter how bizarre they may appear to be—and many criminological theories and control programmes have been very bizarre. It is clearly not possible to invest in all these programmes, and thus what is in vogue at any one time is largely a matter of the combination of such fact...