Crime Prevention
Definition
Strategies and interventions aimed at reducing the incidence or severity of crime before it occurs. Includes situational prevention (modifying environments to reduce opportunity), social prevention (addressing risk factors in families and communities), and deterrence-based approaches.
- Approach 1
- Situational prevention: modifying environments
- Approach 2
- Social prevention: addressing family and community risk factors
- Approach 3
- Deterrence-based approaches
- Goal
- Reduce incidence or severity of crime before it occurs
Common questions
How does situational prevention differ from social prevention in practice?+
Situational prevention changes the immediate physical or procedural environment, such as lighting or access control, to reduce the opportunity for a specific crime, while social prevention addresses underlying risk factors like poverty or family instability that make offending more likely over the longer term.
Is deterrence considered as effective as situational or social prevention?+
Its effectiveness is more contested in the research, since deterrence depends on offenders accurately perceiving the certainty and severity of punishment, which does not hold uniformly across offence types or offender populations.
Related terms
- Criminology
- The scientific study of crime, its causes and distribution across populations, the operation of criminal justice institutions, and strategies for prevention and...
- Dark Figure of Crime
- The gap between the actual volume of crime and the amount recorded in official statistics. Crimes go unrecorded when victims do not...
- Deviance
- Behaviour that violates social norms, whether or not it is also illegal. Criminology studies deviance as well as crime because the boundary...
- Penology
- The branch of criminology concerned with the theory and practice of punishment and imprisonment. It examines the aims of punishment (retribution, deterrence,...
- Victimology
- The sub-field of criminology that studies crime victims: their characteristics, the victim-offender relationship, the impacts of victimisation, and the adequacy of legal...