Towards rational and evidence-based crime policy

Rational crime policy constitutes a basic goal for society. If, however, evidence-based, cost-efficient crime prevention is the standard, there is little indication that current policies—including programs, laws, and court decisions—are rational. To support that assessment, this article uses an evaluation research perspective to highlight five prominent problems with extant crime policies: (1) a lack of empirical assessment of the need for them; (2) a range of design issues, including gaps between crime theory and policy, and, most notably, the pursuit of silver bullet solutions; (3) a range of implementation issues, including disjunctures between ideal and actual practice; (4) the lack of rigorous impact evaluations and the sometimes misplaced emphasis on them; and (5) a scarcity of cost-efficiency analyses for guiding investment decisions. It then discusses the implications of these problems and suggests steps that can be taken to place crime policy on a more evidence-based foundation.     

Delinquency theory and prevention: A radical alternative

Twentieth century America has seen several delinquency prevention programs come into vogue and then collapse under the pressure of ever increasing rates of delinquency; pressuring policy makers to continue their search for new and better programs. Yet, new prevention programs are not pulled out of a hat. Because these programs are based on certain assumptions about human behavior they are, for the most part, derived from theories of crime and delinquency causation. Pursuing this relationship between theory and practice, this paper grounds the emergence of delinquency prevention with the development of positivist criminology, identifies the conceptual and practical deficiencies of positivist theories of crime and subsequent prevention strategies and presents the prevention directive of contemporary Marxist “Critical Criminology.”     

Evaluation of Efficiency in Crime Control and Crime Prevention Programs

The purpose of the study is to evaluate and compare the efficiency of crime control and crime prevention programs. The focus on efficiency adds knowledge about quality of performance in criminal justice programs. The case study covers twelve-year implementation process of two juvenile justice programs in a local law enforcement agency. A Truancy Reduction Program (TRP) represents the crime control approach. A School Resource Officer Program (SROP) represents the crime prevention approach. The evaluation shows that the SROP produced far more efficient results than the TRP. The SROP demonstrates gradual improvement and efficient implementation. The TRP appears inefficient and, therefore, should have been revised in the midst of the implementation period. The study draws policy implications for designing more efficient crime control and crime prevention programs. The implications can be useful for law enforcement agencies that contemplate or implement such programs     

预防性犯罪化立法:路径、功能、弊端与完善

预防性犯罪化立法作为我国近年来刑法立法的重要实践,在预防犯罪方面发挥了极其重要的作用。我国预防性犯罪化立法主要有预备行为犯罪化、持有行为犯罪化、煽动行为犯罪化、抽象危险犯这四种实践方式,具有抵御日益积聚的刑事风险、实现刑罚双面预防目的、贯彻宽严相济刑事政策的重要刑法功能。然而,预防性犯罪化立法又存在着引发刑法工具主义滥觞、冲击谦抑主义刑法精神的弊端。随着风险社会的到来,预防性犯罪化立法还将呈现扩张趋势,探索预防性犯罪化立法的科学有效路径势在必行。就未来的预防性犯罪化立法而言,必须以宪法为引领,以刑法的基本原则为遵循,并采取多轨制的刑法立法模式。     

Community Safety and Social Policy

This article examines community safety policy. In many countries community safety has become a replacement discourse for situational crime prevention, although in some countries such as the UK, it too is threatened with replacement by the narrower concerns of crime reduction. Community safety represents the apparent merging of the concerns of criminal justice and social policy, specifically over questions of social inclusion and exclusion. Focusing in the main upon UK policy, but also drawing upon experience elsewhere, this article scrutinises the policy of community safety, arguing that while it offers an inclusionary vision of crime control, its practice may be something rather different. More specifically, and in common with the trajectory of much advanced liberal social policy, in practice community safety may have an exclusionary effect. Thus, while community safety may represent the convergence of social and criminal justice policies, it does so on neoliberal rather than welfare liberal terms. It also means that community safety has a closer connection to policies of punitive sovereignty – particularly sentencing policies of mass incarceration – than might often be assumed.     

A Disruptive Influence? “Prevent‐ing” Problems and Countering Violent Extremism Policy in Practice

This article describes how disrupting the activities of suspected violent extremists has become an increasingly significant construct in the policy and practice of the Prevent strand of UK Counter‐Terrorism. Informed by empirical data collected during semi‐structured interviews with police officers involved in conducting disruptions and members of the communities where these occurred, blended with a limited amount of field observation, the analysis documents how and why a logic of disruption has assumed increasing prominence in counter terrorism work. In respect of police interventions in particular, implementing disruptions, rather than pursuing fully‐fledged prosecutions, represents a pragmatic way of reconciling increasing demand with limited resources, as well as managing some of the difficulties of translating intelligence into legal evidence. Conceptualized in this way, the analysis positions disruption as a distinctive mode of crime prevention; one premised upon logics of near‐event interdiction. As such, it is understood as rather different in its operations and functions to other forms of “early intervention” that are increasingly prominent in much contemporary crime prevention policy. By focusing upon how specific Prevent interventions are implemented and performed this analysis makes a particular contribution to our knowledge of counter terrorism work. This reflects the fact that most previous studies of Prevent and other countering violent extremism programs have provided analyses of community perceptions and reactions to policing and the policy frame, rather than the configuration of the interventions themselves.     

Crime prevention through mass media: Prospects and problems

This article examines some social scientific issues relating to the operation and evaluation of crime prevention through mass media programs. It is argued that the efficacy of such programs is dependent upon the successful application of several empirically based communication principles. In addition, the attempt is made to analyze several general problems concerning the meaning and measurement of program success. Issues relating to both the operation and the evaluation of crime prevention through mass media programs are discussed in terms of their practical implications for public policy.     

Social Science and the Governance of Crime: Crime Prevention Policy Making during the 1980s

As with much else in Britain, the 1980s marked a watershed in the politics of crime control. This article traces the role of criminological research, developed and articulated by governmental social scientists, in the evolution of penal policy around the (then) innovative idea of engaging the community in the prevention of crime. Its central theme is that although the raison d'être for crime prevention policy and practice, then as now, can be found in a concern about the deficiencies of the statutory police in addressing crime, shifting the locus of social control towards the institutions of civil society was, and remains, a contested project.     

‘Rolling back the state’: Mrs. Thatcher's criminological legacy

Of late, there has been a growing interest in understanding the social, economic and cultural changes that have taken place since the 1950s and the experience of crime in the UK since the 1970s. Key amongst these texts have been those respectively by Garland and Young. My aim in this essay is to seek to understand the role of New Right government policies in bringing the UK to the point where it is now, and how these policies have shaped crime and some people's experiences of it since. This account stands in contrast to that offered by Garland which makes little reference to specific administrations or their policies. My aim is to show that changes in government policy can (and did) have quite dramatic effects on people's experiences of crime. This essay stands as a counter to one of Garland's central claims that structural patterns cannot be rendered visible in case studies.     

School Violence Prevention: Current Status and Policy Recommendations

The purpose of this article is to identify an array of strategies that are available to schools to address concerns school violence and to identify some of the potential school or school district policy options related to those choices. We illustrate that many promising options are available to schools to address violence and other inappropriate behavior of students. The very breadth and diversity of these options may pose a problem in attempting to develop a comprehensive local policy on this topic. While many schools have chosen increasingly punitive zero‐tolerance policies as their primary strategy of violence prevention, there is little or no research evidence documenting that such an approach can contribute to school safety. Rather, effective school violence prevention requires comprehensive planning involving documented best‐practice programs, preventive strategies, and effective responses to any violence that may occur. Since research documenting the effects of violence prevention strategies is inconsistent, it is incumbent upon schools to consider carefully which programs best meet the needs of their local situation, and to monitor the effectiveness of new programs in improving school safety and reducing disruption and incivility.     

Biosocial criminology and modern crime prevention

Objective

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, criminological efforts to prevent or reduce crime were centered on addressing presumed biological causes of crime. Most of these strategies involved calls for eugenics—proposals that today are considered unethical and morally reprehensible. Biologically-oriented criminology and crime control policies have re-emerged with new sophistication and attention to the importance of social context. Additionally, developmental crime prevention, with a special focus on biological/physiological risk factors in the early life course, has become influential in criminology. This paper examines the relevance of biology to modern day crime prevention.

Materials and methods

Narrative review of the theoretical and empirical literature of biology and developmental crime prevention.

Results

There are a growing number of developmental crime prevention programs that address biological risk factors for delinquency and later criminal offending. These programs are found in the family, school, and community domains. Evidence suggests that these programs can reduce crime.

Conclusions

While “biological crime prevention” as a separate field has not yet emerged, findings show that crime prevention programs can and do address biology in a sociologically sensitive manner—and these programs have shown significant impacts on crime.     

Evaluating a natural experiment in alcohol policy

Research Summary
This study examines the effects of a dramatic change in alcohol licensing policy on the practice of liquor retailing across a metropolitan urban region. The policy was enacted to remove fixed closing times and to install staggered closing times across regions where it potentially would reduce violent crime and disorder. We found great variation in the extent to which the provisions of the policies were installed as intended.
Policy Implications
The findings suggest that prior consideration for how policy interventions will be applied to real-world settings is important to the validity of research evaluations. Understanding and monitoring variation in the implementation of an intervention is a vital prerequisite to the evaluation of outcomes. Without knowledge of the real-world application of an intervention, researchers risk attributing causal effects to a prevention initiative that might have been absent or only partially received.     

Nordic Cooperation in Criminal Policy and Crime Prevention

The Nordic crime prevention councils have tried to articulate their common ideology as the ‘Nordic model’. However, Nordic crime prevention is neither theoretically nor methodologically particularly original. Its common characteristics are best understood against the background of a long‐standing Nordic cooperation in criminal policy and criminology and on the basis of cross‐national influences between historically interrelated and culturally relatively similar countries. The present study describes how crime prevention has developed and is organized in the Nordic countries. It describes cooperation between the national crime prevention councils and their common knowledge and value base. The Nordic countries can offer examples of successful crime prevention, but the fact that these societies with low repression are safe and perceived as safe can hardly be attributed solely to the activities of Nordic crime prevention.     

Exploring Definitions of Serious Crime in EU Policy Documents and Academic Publications: A Content Analysis and Policy Implications

In recent years the term “serious crime” has gained prominence in EU policy on internal security. This article analyzes how the EU policy and scientific communities have conceptualized and operationalized the term. Through a content analysis, it evaluates the articulation and use of “serious crime” in EU policy documents published from 1995–2013 and scientific articles published from 2004–13 that include the term (n?=?93 and n?=?104, respectively). The analysis demonstrates deficits of conceptualization and operationalization and a correspondingly weak foundation for policy. While the EU’s increasing emphasis on serious crime could represent an opportunity to improve the accountability of EU crime control policies, it is up to academics and policy-makers to address these deficits.     

Citizen crime prevention: Domains and participation

Attempts to engender citizens' participation in crime-prevention activities have met with varied degrees of success. Indeed, studies find great differences in participants. Part of the reason may be that different types of crime prevention are considered in the various programs and analyses. The present study uses the National Crime Survey: Victims Risk Supplement to uncover different domains of crime prevention activity and to investigate who participates in crime prevention. Five distinct types of crime-preventive behavior are isolated in the analysis. Further, path analytic techniques reveal that different demographic and crime related factors influence participation in the various crime-prevention activities. These results suggest that participation in crime prevention is complex and that we need more knowledge about who participates in different crime-prevention programs in order to promote such participation more effectively.     

Crime-minimizing drug policy

Objective

To identify changes in drug abuse control measures that would reduce non-drug crime.

Method

Policy analysis.

Results

Expanding current anti-drug efforts in the conventional triad of enforcement, prevention, and treatment (including drug courts) holds out little hope of reducing non-drug crime. Routine drug law enforcement risks increasing crime by raising drug prices and creating incentives for violence among dealers. Low-arrest crackdowns to break up flagrant markets promise better results.Even good prevention programs have modest effect sizes, and most prevention programs are not based on proven models.The overlap between the population of heavy illicit drug users and the population of frequent non-drug offenders presents a problem and a policy opportunity that current programs largely fail to grasp.Drug treatment, except for opiate substitution, has difficulty recruiting and retaining clients, and weak sanctions systems render treatment mandates largely nominal. Abstinence-mandate programs such as HOPE and Sobriety 24/7 have shown superior results in reducing re-offending and incarceration.Raising alcohol taxes reduces heavy alcohol use and crime due to intoxication without generating any offsetting criminogenic effects.

Conclusion

Current drug policies are not optimally designed for the control of non-drug crime. Improvements are within relatively easy reach.     

The Market for Scientific Crime Prevention: A Comparative Study of Canada and Venezuela

Crime prevention is an activity that, sooner or later, requires the concourse of science. But the dictates of science may not mesh well with the social, institutional and political considerations that are persistent and powerful determinants of collective action. To the extent that they are ignored, crime prevention is less scientific and more pragmatic. Using a marketing metaphor, this paper examines selected aspects of the supply of and demand for scientific crime prevention in Canada and Venezuela from 1949 to the present. In both countries, academic entrepreneurs are revealed to be a necessary factor in the sale of crime prevention to government. On the demand side, governments adopt and adapt crime prevention policies in relation to their broader perspective on social problems and social change. However, rising crime rates and climates of urgency reduce the attractiveness of crime prevention. Scientific crime prevention is easier to sell when crime rates are stable or declining.     

Race,Crime, and Criminal Justice

Fifty years ago, the U.S. President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice under President Johnson did not frequently mention race and ethnicity in its discussion of and recommendations for the criminal justice system, but it did have a lot to say about race and crime. Through the use of arrest rates to measure racial differentials in criminal involvement, the Commission concluded that Blacks commit more crime as a consequence of Black people living in greater numbers in criminogenic “slum” conditions. To address racial differences, the Commission favored the Great Society programs of Johnson's War on Poverty. Contemporary criminologists continue to debate the racial distribution of crime, the causes of crimes, and the best policies to reduce crime and racial differentials. The Commission did not anticipate the current debate among scholars regarding how much racial disproportionality exists in the criminal justice system and its causes and consequences. The policies that led to mass incarceration have been significant drivers of continued criminal justice racial disparity. Those policies are inconsistent with the recommendation in The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (1967), upending the pursuit of a more fair and just system.     

Dealing with the Aftermath of Japan’s Triple Disaster: Building Social Capital Through Crime Prevention

After the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster that struck Japan in March 2011, overall rates of reported crime, already low in international comparative terms, went further down. A relative absence of crime was accompanied, however, by a great awareness of the possibility of crime—as illustrated by emergency policies and numerous crime prevention initiatives and activities by both the police and groups of (local) volunteers. This article will show that the large scale and persistence of crime prevention campaigns and activities can be understood against the background of more general, persistent preoccupations with, and concerns about crime. Based on statistics, media reports, and interviews with (former) inhabitants of the struck Tōhoku area as well as members of NGO’s, it will furthermore show that crime prevention activities, that up until now have received hardly any scholarly attention, were purposely employed to strengthen community ties, as well as to bring about ties between members of communities torn apart by the disasters. Focusing on crime and crime prevention activities after March 11, 2011 in Miyagi prefecture and specifically the town of Ishinomaki, this article will show that amidst overwhelming loss and uncertainty crime constituted and constitutes an opportunity for the (re-)building of social capital.