Law – Criminal Short assignment

Punishment & Society

15(5) 534–553

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DOI: 10.1177/1462474513504798

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Article

Reclaiming crime prevention in an age of punishment: An American history

Brandon C Welsh Northeastern University, USA and Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law

Enforcement, The Netherlands

Rebecca D Pfeffer University of Houston–Downtown, USA

Abstract

Crime prevention has long figured prominently in the scholarly and applied traditions of

criminology. Using a socio-historical approach, this article examines the developments

of and influences on the concept of crime prevention in the USA over the last century.

We argue that crime prevention is a unique social and environmental strategy for

reducing crime and is distinct from crime control or punishment. Prevention’s main

characteristics include a focus on intervening in the first instance – before a crime has

been committed – and operating outside of the formal justice system. The historical

record of the scholarship and practice of crime prevention in the USA embraces this

view. A more current perspective sees crime prevention as the full range of techniques,

from prenatal home visits to prison sentences, defined more by its outcome – the

prevention of a future criminal event – than its character or approach. A return to

the original meaning of prevention is considered.

Keywords

crime policy, crime prevention, criminological theory, history of criminology,

punishment

Corresponding author:

Brandon C Welsh, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Northeastern University, Churchill Hall, 360

Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA.

Email: [email protected]

In one of the first scholarly attempts to differentiate crime prevention from crime control or punishment, Peter Lejins (1967: 2) espoused the following: ‘If societal action is motivated by an offense that has already taken place, we are dealing with control; if the offense is only anticipated, we are dealing with prevention.’ What Lejins was after was the notion of a ‘pure’ prevention, a view that had long existed in the scholarship and practice of US criminology, but was becoming confused with the use of the term ‘delinquency prevention’ within the juvenile justice system. Joseph Weis and David Hawkins (1981: 2) put it more bluntly: ‘Historically, what has been passed off as delinquency prevention within the juvenile justice system is basically delinquency ‘‘control,’’ simply because it has been implemented after the illegal behavior and even after a juvenile justice system reaction has occurred.’

Weis and Hawkins (1981) went on to differentiate between corrective prevention and preclusive prevention. The former was largely made up of system-level efforts designed to treat offenders so as to prevent them from committing further criminal acts. Preclusive prevention was considered the ‘purest type of prevention’, with the aim to ‘‘‘preclude’’ the initial occurrence of delinquency, primarily at the organ- izational, institutional, social structure, and cultural levels of intervention’ (1981: 3). Like Lejins, they too were trying to reclaim the original meaning of prevention by drawing a distinction between prevention – efforts designed to prevent crime from occurring in the first place – and control, or efforts aimed at preventing the recurrence of offending.

A more current perspective sees crime prevention as the full range of techniques, from prenatal home visits to prison sentences, defined more by its outcome – the prevention of a future criminal act – than its character or approach (e.g. Sherman et al., 1997, 2006). Here, programs and policies may include a police arrest as part of an operation to deal with gang problems, a court sanction to a correctional facility, or, in the extreme case, a death penalty sentence. These measures are more correctly referred to as crime control or punishment.

It is our thesis that crime prevention is best understood and utilized as a unique social and environmental strategy for reducing crime, one that is distinct from crime control or punishment. It is not the outcome (the prevention of crime), but the approach taken that characterizes crime prevention. In this article, crime prevention refers to efforts to prevent crime or criminal offending in the first instance – before the act has been committed. Crime prevention and crime control share a common goal of trying to prevent the occurrence of a future criminal act, but what further distinguishes them is that prevention originates outside of the formal justice system.1 Crime prevention necessarily takes place outside of the justice system because one of its goals is to prevent young people from coming in contact with the formal justice system. In this respect, prevention is considered the fourth pillar of crime reduction, alongside the institutions of police, courts, and corrections (Waller, 2006).

This distinction draws attention to crime prevention as an alternative approach to the more traditional responses to crime. Broadly, three main types of crime

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prevention can be delineated. Developmental prevention refers to interventions designed to prevent the development of criminal potential in individuals, especially those targeting risk and protective factors discovered in studies of human devel- opment (Tremblay and Craig, 1995). Community prevention refers to interventions designed to change the social conditions and institutions (e.g. families, peers, social norms, clubs, organizations) that influence offending in residential communities (Hope, 1995). Situational prevention refers to interventions designed to prevent the occurrence of crimes by reducing opportunities for offending and increasing its risk and difficulty (Clarke, 2009).

To explore our thesis we have written about the history of crime prevention in the USA, a history that is largely unknown. We believe this to be important because crime prevention has long figured prominently in the scholarly and applied traditions of criminology. This contributes to the history of criminology as a dis- cipline of which there is a robust body of scholarship (see, for example, Beirne, 1993; Laub, 1983; Laub and Sampson, 1991; Rafter, 2010; Rock, 2004; Schlossman, 2012).

Many of these important writings draw upon our discipline’s early and famous pioneers, as well as sometimes the ‘half-forgotten and misunderstood’ (Rafter, 2004: 735) and the completely ‘forgotten’ (Sherman, 2005) figures, in an effort to situate their scholarly or applied influences during a particular period of time in the advancement of criminological knowledge or its lineage to the modern era. This makes for undoubtedly rich analysis and engaging reading. Less common are histories of criminological concepts or sub-areas of the discipline that are not framed around the biographical accounts of storied figures, men and women alike. This makes for no less penetrating analysis, but it does have the effect of introducing a wider cast of characters whose biographical details are sometimes left out of the narrative. Broadly speaking, this is our approach here.

In the tradition of the social-historical approach, this article examines the devel- opments of and influences on the concept of crime prevention in the USA over a period spanning almost a full century. It is through this approach that we are able to situate our subject in the political landscape of the day and among the institu- tional influences that have come to shape criminological knowledge more generally (Savelsberg and Flood, 2004).

We begin by documenting the early conceptions of crime prevention in the USA, from the early 1930s to the 1960s. This is followed with analysis of the presidential crime commissions of the 1960s, the associated loss of faith in the criminal justice response to crime, the emergence of situational crime prevention, and the develop- ment of a new generation of early childhood prevention studies. Next, we examine a truly memorable development in the annals of US crime and justice: the 1994 federal crime bill. One of our interests here is in the debate, oftentimes vitriolic, that occurred between proponents of prevention and punishment, and how prevention came to be understood in the public discourse on crime. The modern movements of prevention science and evidence-based policy complete our coverage of the history of crime prevention in the USA.

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Early conceptions of crime prevention

Historically, responses to crime in the United States have been influenced by the- ories and strategies developed in Europe, with a particularly strong influence from Britain. The history of crime prevention as a unique social concept in the USA can be traced back to the early 1930s, with Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay’s (1942) Chicago Area Project (CAP). The idea that crime prevention could take place outside of the formal justice system may have already been considered due to earlier influences, but the CAP was the first documented initiative in the United States that measured crime prevention. The CAP was designed to produce social change in communities that suffered from high delinquency rates and gang activity. As part of the project, local civic leaders coordinated social service centers that promoted community solidarity and counteracted social disorganization. More than 20 different programs were developed for youths, featuring discussion groups, counseling services, hobby groups, school-related activities, and recre- ation.2 There is still some question of whether these programs had a positive influ- ence on the delinquency rate. Some evaluations indicated desirable results, but others showed that the CAP efforts did little to reduce juvenile delinquency (see Schlossman and Sedlak, 1983).

Another well-known program came to define the next period in the history of the concept of crime prevention. The program was the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study, which was implemented in 1937 in these Boston-area towns (Powers and Witmer, 1951). Six hundred and fifty boys (325 matched pairs), who were on average 10 years old, were randomly allocated to an experimental group or a control group. The focus of this program was more on improving individuals than their surroundings. The experimental group boys received regular friendly attention from counselors and whatever medical and educational services were needed. The counselors talked to the boys, took them on trips and to recre- ational activities, tutored them in reading and arithmetic, encouraged them to participate in the YMCA and summer camps, played games with them at the project’s center, encouraged them to attend church, and visited their families to give advice and general support (McCord and McCord, 1959). The program lasted for five years. It was to have continued for another five years, but when the USA became involved in the Second World War, many of the adult counselors were drafted (Lundman, 2001).

The program seemed to have undesirable effects. Joan McCord’s (1978) long- term follow-up of the program, when the participants were about 45 years old, found that slightly more from the experimental group were convicted of serious crimes as adults (19 percent compared with 17 percent), and significantly more experimental group offenders than control offenders committed two or more crimes. More from the experimental group died early, had stress-related diseases, or showed symptoms of alcoholism, and fewer of them were married. At the time, McCord (1978) speculated that the program might have caused high expectations and dependency, so that there were negative effects when it was withdrawn. A more recent explanation for these iatrogenic results was that the program was carried out

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in group settings. The group format was thought to have resulted in minor delin- quents being influenced by more involved or serious delinquents (Dishion et al., 1999; McCord, 2003).

The 1950s and 1960s ushered in a heightened interest in the prevention of juven- ile delinquency. The first federal funding for research on delinquency prevention was provided by the Eisenhower administration (Sherman, 2005). Much of this interest was in programs based on social structure theories. This approach seemed quite compatible with the rehabilitative policies of the Kennedy (New Frontier) and Johnson (Great Society and War on Poverty) administrations. Delinquency prevention programs received a great deal of federal funding. The most ambitious of these was the New York City-based Mobilization for Youth (MOBY). Funded by more than $50 million, MOBY attempted an integrated approach to community development (Short, 1974). Based on Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin’s (1960) concept of providing opportunities for legitimate success, MOBY created employ- ment opportunities in the community, coordinated social services, and sponsored social action groups such as tenants’ committees, legal action services, and voter registration. Unfortunately, the program was never evaluated to assess its impact on delinquency.

Improving the socialization of disadvantaged children to reduce their potential for future delinquency was also an important focus of other federally funded pro- grams during the 1960s. The largest and best known of these programs was Head Start, a national preschool program that continues to this day.

Presidential commissions of the 1960s

Crime and crime prevention became notable political issues in 1964, when both Democrats and Republicans began to voice concern about ‘law and order’ (Walker, 1978). As a response, in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson estab- lished the first presidential commission to confront crime in the USA. The commis- sion’s report, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, clearly made the case for a shift from focusing on punishment to prevention, arguing that prevention does not necessarily need to take place within the confines of the criminal justice system:

Many Americans think controlling crime is solely the task of the police, the courts,

and corrections agencies. In fact, as the Commission’s report makes clear, crime

cannot be controlled without the interest and participation of schools, businesses,

social agencies, private groups and individual citizens. (President’s Commission on

Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, 1967: 38)

Although there was some academic support for the report’s conclusions about restructuring our collective conception of crime prevention and control, it was ill- received by many (Morris, 1968). Interestingly, for the next decade the report served as a basic reference work on the US criminal justice system and was widely used as a college textbook (Walker, 1978). However, the advice within

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was ignored by policymakers to an extent that led Norval Morris (1968: 282) to conclude that ‘the political authorities in America do not wish to reduce crime in this country’.

Against the backdrop of social unrest and violence in the streets, President Johnson, in 1968, formed another commission, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (1969: xiii), to ‘determine the causes of violence in the United States and to recommend methods of prevention’. The Commission’s final report carried over some of the sentiments of the Johnsonian Great Society, in that it urged the new Nixon administration to increase federal funds allocated to general welfare in the USA, pinpointing underlying social challenges that were believed to be at the root of crime.

Only a few years later, the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals (1973) sought to reaffirm the role of community in preventing crime. Operating outside of the purview of the justice system, crime prevention was viewed as an alternative means to reducing crime.

A loss of faith

The modern day history of crime prevention in the USA is closely linked with a loss of faith in the criminal justice system that occurred in the wake of the dramatic increase in crime rates in the 1960s. This loss of faith was due to a confluence of factors, including declining public support for the criminal justice system, increas- ing levels of fear of crime, and criminological research that demonstrated that many of the traditional modes of crime control were ineffective and inefficient in reducing crime and improving the safety of communities (Curtis, 1987). For exam- ple, research studies on motorized preventive patrol, rapid response, and criminal investigations – the staples of law enforcement – showed that they had little to no effect on crime (Visher and Weisburd, 1998). It was becoming readily apparent among researchers and public officials alike that a criminal justice response on its own was insufficient for the task of reducing crime. This was not limited to law enforcement, but also included the courts and prisons (Tonry and Farrington, 1995). Interestingly, this loss of faith in the justice system was not unique to the USA. Similar experiences were taking place in Canada, the United Kingdom, and other Western European countries, and for some of the same reasons (Bennett, 1998; Waller, 1990). Writing in the mid-1980s, the observations of Paul Lavrakas (1985: 110, emphases in original) capture this need to move beyond a sole reliance on the criminal justice system:

Until we change the emphasis of our public policies away from considering the police,

courts, and prisons to be the primary mechanisms for reducing crime, I believe that we

will continue to experience the tragic levels of victimization with which our citizens

now live. These criminal justice agencies are our means of reacting to crime – they

should not be expected to prevent it by themselves.

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Further contributing to the loss of faith in the criminal justice response to crime was a growing realization that the USA’s steadily rising prison population was doing little to reduce the nation’s crime rate. A number of expert panels, including the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice (1967), the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Research on Deterrent and Incapacitative Effects (Blumstein et al., 1978), and (later on) the National Academy of Sciences Panel on the Understanding and Control of Violent Behavior (Reiss and Roth, 1993), agreed that prisons were not having any appre- ciable effect on crime rates or community safety. While these scholarly findings and public sentiments of the day would do little to curtail the prison expansion that was on the horizon, in a small way they had the effect of illuminating the need to move beyond a sole reliance on the crime control model.

Closely related was Robert Martinson’s (1974) claim that nothing works in prison rehabilitation. That this assertion would somehow be associated with a renewed interest in crime prevention may seem a bit far fetched. Yet, it was acknowledged that more needed to be done to keep people from engaging in crim- inal behavior and ending up in prison (Visher and Weisburd, 1998).

The realization that the era’s crime control efforts were ineffective, coupled with recommendations of the presidential crime commissions, ushered in an era of innovation of alternative approaches to addressing crime. A focus on neighbor- hood, family, and employment was at the heart of this new approach to addressing crime, with a special emphasis on the most impoverished inner-city communities. Non-profit organizations were the main vehicle used to deliver programs in these substantive areas. A number of environmental or opportunity-reducing measures were also implemented to ensure the immediate safety of residents. Some of these programs included neighborhood patrols and block watches (Curtis, 1987: 11). By some accounts, this urban crime prevention and reconstruction movement pro- duced a number of models of success and many more promising programs (see Curtis, 1985, 1987).

This mode of crime prevention also came to be known as community-based crime prevention, an amalgam of social and situational measures (see Rosenbaum, 1986, 1988). This approach was popularized with a number of large-scale, multi-site programs referred to today as comprehensive community initiatives (Hope, 1995). The roots of this comprehensive approach – on the social side at least – go as far back as Shaw and McKay’s Chicago Area Project in the early 1930s. Although a few large-scale initiatives came to represent com- munity crime prevention during this time (e.g. Neighborhood Watch, Operation Identification), thousands of prevention programs were implemented, ranging in size from small groups of concerned neighbors to city-wide campaigns. Notably, a great many of these programs received federal funding, primarily through the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (Hope, 1995). This increase in funding of crime prevention programs, many of which operated outside of the formal justice system, was seen as a milestone development in US crime prevention (Gest, 2001), the likes of which we have not seen since.

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Situational crime prevention

Environmental or opportunity-reducing measures were also emerging during this period of time. Particularly influential were the works of Jane Jacobs (1961), who drew attention to the role of good visibility combined with natural surveillance as deterrents to crime, Oscar Newman (1972) on defensible space, and C. Ray Jeffrey (1971) on crime prevention through environmental design. The latter two physical redesign concepts would become instrumental to the intellectual development of situational crime prevention, which can be traced back to the work of Ronald Clarke and others at the British Home Office in the 1970s (Clarke, 1992).

Also important to the intellectual as well as practical development of situational crime prevention, although occurring somewhat later, was problem-oriented policing (Clarke, 1992). Developed by Herman Goldstein (1979, 1990), problem- oriented policing represented a new mode of policing that relied on a problem- solving process that was directed at the problems that lie behind crime incidents rather than the incidents themselves. For Goldstein (1979: 236) the process required the following elements:

identifying these problems in more precise terms, researching each problem, docu-

menting the nature of the current police response, assessing its adequacy and the

adequacy of existing authority and resources, engaging in a broad exploration of

alternatives to present responses, weighing the merits of these alternatives, and choos-

ing from among them.

Later iterations popularized the problem-solving model as a four-step approach known as SARA – for scanning, analysis, response, and assessment (Moore, 1992).

Situational crime prevention stands apart from the other crime prevention stra- tegies by its special focus on the setting or place in which criminal acts take place as well as its crime-specific focus. No less important is situational prevention’s con- cern with products (e.g. installation of immobilizers on new cars in some parts of Europe, action taken to eliminate cell phone cloning in the USA) and large-scale systems such as improvements in the banking system to reduce money laundering (Clarke, 2009). It has been defined as a ‘preventive approach that relies, not upon improving society or its institutions, but simply upon reducing opportunities for crime’ (Clarke, 1992: 3). Reducing opportunities for crime is achieved essentially through some modification or manipulation of the physical environment in order to directly affect offenders’ perceptions of increased risks and effort and decreased rewards, provocations, and excuses (Cornish and Clarke, 2003). These different approaches serve as the basis of the highly detailed taxonomy of situational pre- vention, which can further be divided into 25 separate techniques each with any number of examples of programs (Cornish and Clarke, 2003).

The theoretical origins of situational crime prevention are wide-ranging (see Clarke, 2009; Newman et al., 1997), but it is largely informed by opportunity theory. This theory holds that the offender is ‘heavily influenced by environmental inducements and opportunities and as being highly adaptable to changes in the

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situation’ (Clarke, 1995a: 57). Opportunity theory is made up of several more specific theories, including the rational choice perspective, routine activity theory, and crime pattern theory.

Interestingly, situational prevention did not immediately take hold in the USA. Some scholars argue that situational crime prevention did not fit well with the sociological traditions of US criminology (Laycock and Clarke, 2001). Another related argument is that US criminologists were less willing to embrace a paradigm shift from focusing on criminal actors to criminogenic places (Clarke, 1995b). There have also been concerns raised about social harms associated with situ- ational prevention (Garland, 1996; von Hirsch et al., 2000). Recent developments on research and policy fronts suggest that progress has been made in attending to some of these concerns (see Clarke, 2009; Welsh and Farrington, 2009). Theoretical and empirical advancements in the study of crime at place have served as key building blocks to these developments. Importantly, evidence-based policing stra- tegies like ‘hot spots’ policing and problem-oriented policing more generally have incorporated situational measures with much success (Braga and Weisburd, 2010). The Internet-based Center for Problem-Oriented Policing (www.popcenter.org) plays a major role in furnishing the law enforcement community and crime pre- vention practitioners in general with information and guidance on developing and implementing effective situational crime prevention practices.

Early childhood studies

Around the same time that crime prevention was experiencing a surge in political and policy interest in the USA, owing largely to the presidential commissions and the loss of faith in criminal justice, a somewhat serendipitous development was taking place in the broadly defined field of early childhood development. This development was a decision by early childhood researchers to begin to measure crime outcomes as part of long-term follow-ups of intervention studies.

These studies proved all the more important when they started to show some rather impressive effects on delinquency and criminal offending. While the preven- tion of crime was considered a spin-off benefit of these early studies, they quickly became associated with crime prevention (Tremblay and Craig, 1995). Key studies of the day included the Yale Child Welfare Research program (Seitz et al., 1985) and the Syracuse University Family Development Research project (Lally et al., 1988).

The most famous of them all is the Perry Preschool project carried out in Ypsilanti, Michigan, by Lawrence Schweinhart and David Weikart (1980). The project has become synonymous with early crime prevention (Farrington and Welsh, 2007). Perry was essentially a Head Start program for disadvantaged African American children. A sample of 123 children was allocated (approximately at random) to experimental and control groups. The experimental children attended a daily preschool program delivered by professional teachers, backed up by weekly home visits, usually lasting two years (covering ages three to four).

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The educational approach focused on supporting the development of the children’s cognitive and social skills through individualized teaching and learning.

In 1980, the High/Scope education company published the findings of its age 15 follow-up of the Perry Preschool project (Schweinhart and Weikart, 1980). It showed that the experimental group members, compared to the controls, had sig- nificantly better school achievement and classroom behavior and lower rates of delinquency. Further follow-ups at ages 19 and 27 showed that the program had lasting benefits. By age 40, the most recent follow-up, which included 91 percent of the original sample (112 out of 123), program group members, compared to their control counterparts, had significantly fewer lifetime arrests for violent, property, and drug crimes, and were significantly less likely to be arrested five or more times (Schweinhart et al., 2005). Improvements were also recorded in many other import- ant life-course outcomes.

Despite these impressive results, Perry was just one study based on a rather modest sample size and conducted under laboratory-like conditions. That there were only a handful of early childhood studies that measured offending outcomes has been lamented by many (see Greenwood, 2006; Tremblay and Craig, 1995). But the effects on crime showed by Perry along with the other studies further solidified the view of crime prevention of the day. In many respects, these studies came to signify the notion of a pure prevention advocated by Lejins (1967). There were of course many more missed opportunities. Farrington (1996) reminds us of the 10 Head Start projects that were followed up by the Consortium for Longitudinal Studies (1983); not one of them measured offending.

In subsequent years, a number of other important early childhood studies were initiated and have shown impressive crime prevention benefits, including the Seattle Social Development Project (Hawkins et al., 2008) and the Nurse–Family Partnership program (Eckenrode et al., 2010). While each of these studies is rele- vant to their own discipline (i.e. social work and public health), they, like their predecessors, have become an important part of the history of crime prevention in the USA. Tellingly, the crime prevention opportunities of these studies have also become embedded in these other disciplines.

Midnight basketball and the 1994 crime bill

The 1990s marked the time when prevention and punishment were arguably most at odds in US history. It should come as no surprise that this was associated with the height of the ‘tough on crime’ movement. Public opinion was interpreted as calling for harsher and more emotionally driven crime policies, which certainly did not include preventive measures, and politicians responded. As Michael Tonry (2004: 3) notes, ‘‘‘soft on crime’’ was a label few politicians dared risk during the 1970s through the 1990s, and many supported policies they believed unwise or unjust rather than risk losing an election’. The purposeful polarization of punish- ment and prevention laid the groundwork for a massive and expensive crime bill that was being deliberated.

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The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 is by far the most voluminous and expansive crime bill in US history. It greatly expanded the federal death penalty, provided funding for 100,000 new police officers, added $9.7 billion for new prisons, and provided $2.6 billion in additional funding for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and various Justice Department agencies. In addition, the crime bill dedicated $6.1 billion for preven- tion programs. This bill, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, brought crime prevention into the national spotlight, but it was not well received by all.

From the bill’s inception, crime prevention, and especially programs for at-risk youth, was heavily criticized. One error may have been that neither President Clinton nor any other crime prevention advocate ever explained how these meas- ures could work in tandem with more punitive measures. In the end, although well intentioned, these measures, and in particular midnight basketball, became a scape- goat for critics who wanted to oppose crime prevention measures. These programs, they argued, were soft on crime. Prevention, then, was characterized as a waste of taxpayer dollars. This reception had a substantial effect on crime prevention and the way it was understood following the 1994 act. That is, although it received a good amount of money under the bill, crime prevention was sidelined in the public discourse and the public understanding on crime (Mendel, 1995). Critics ‘indicted delinquency prevention as a wasteful, even ridiculous, response to youthful vio- lence’ (Mendel, 1995: 13), and these criticisms seemed to resonate with voters. No better was this expressed than in a statement by the Republican Texas Representative Lamar Smith:

Over $9 billion is included to finance such stringent anticrime measures as arts and

crafts, self-esteem enhancement, and midnight basketball. All this on the theory that

the person who stole your car, robbed your house, and assaulted your family was no

more than a disgruntled artist or a would-be NBA star. (as cited in Mendel, 1995: 13)

Proponents and politicians lauded those bill components that were ‘tough on crime’, but experts understood that the punitive nature emphasized at the expense of more moderate approaches would be detrimental to crime control and to the USA’s collective understanding of crime in general. In a critique of the act, Elliot Currie (1994: 118) wrote that, ‘the worst feature of the bill. . . is the stunning imbalance between punishment and prevention’. He describes the act’s preeminent focus on strengthening our prison system, and makes a case for this approach’s cost in terms of prevention programs.

With a large amount allocated to increase the size and complexity of the US prison system, Currie (1994: 119) points out that, ‘in contrast to the hastily con- ceived giveaways to the correctional establishment, the bill’s provisions for any- thing resembling crime prevention are slim to the vanishing point’. He explains that although there are a few promising crime prevention ideas mentioned in the bill, they are largely buried under other law-enforcement measures. The brief proposal

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for an ‘Ounce of Prevention’ fund, which would support different youth-related activities, was buried in the community-policing section and slated to receive just $75 million out of the $9 billion designated for new police officers. Currie (1994: 121) concludes, ‘Prisons, our most spectacularly failed social experiment, get a free lunch; prevention gets the shaft, forced again to fight for every penny year after year, even though we know it can work.’

From a theoretical and conceptual perspective, the lasting legacy of the 1994 crime bill is that it further solidified the contrast between prevention and punish- ment. Whether it is in the language in the bill itself or Currie’s scathing critique, there is no mistaking that crime prevention is distinct from crime control or pun- ishment. Though disregarded and defunded at the time for being ‘soft on crime’, prevention was still articulated as a unique strategy for reducing crime.

Prevention science and evidence-based policy

Prevention science and evidence-based policy are two contemporary developments that have further shaped the concept of crime prevention in the United States. Both are best understood as frameworks that can be applied across a wide range of contexts, settings, and populations. At their core, each is concerned that the highest standards of science are used to advance knowledge and improve public policy.

Prevention science has its roots in public health, and begins with a commitment to prevention that is grounded in the developmental epidemiology of specific health or social problems. In the case of youth violence prevention, for example, preven- tion science provides a ‘bridge between an understanding of how chronic violence develops and how prevention programs can interrupt that development’ (Dodge, 2001: 63). The idea of an alternative, non-criminal justice response to the preven- tion of delinquency and offending is a crucial element to prevention science’s mis- sion. Its influence on crime prevention can be found in its adherence to the highest scientific standards, its effort to link prevention to epidemiology, and its focus on the process of taking prevention programs to scale and how to mitigate attenuation of program effects (Welsh et al., 2010).

An evidence-based approach to crime policy embraces prevention science’s com- mitment to the use of the most scientifically valid methods to evaluate programs. What it adds is the utilization of accumulated research evidence on effectiveness. It seeks to increase the influence of research on policy or, in a manner of speaking, put systematic research evidence at center stage in the policy-making process. Of course, it is recognized that the linkages between research and policy are sometimes less than clear, with evaluation influence on policy taking a number of different routes (Mears, 2010; Weiss al., 2008).

The US interest, as well as the interest of many other western countries, in an evidence-based approach to crime policy was advanced with the release of Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn’t, What’s Promising, by Lawrence Sherman and his colleagues (1997). This report was commissioned by the US Congress as an independent, scientifically rigorous assessment of more than

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$4 billion worth of federally sponsored anti-crime programs. Using a scientific methods scale to rate more than 500 program evaluations combined with a vote- counting review method, conclusions were drawn about the effects of the full range of crime prevention and criminal justice measures in seven major settings: commu- nities; families; schools; labor markets; places (e.g. urban centers, homes); police agencies; and courts and corrections. The report concluded that there was sufficient scientific evidence to establish a provisional list of which program modalities worked, which did not, and which were inconclusive but showed promise in redu- cing crime. The report also called for more impact evaluations using high-quality designs to aid policymakers in arriving at scientifically informed decisions about crime prevention expenditures.

The evidence-based approach has had some interesting influences thus far on how crime prevention is viewed in the USA. The Preventing Crime report and its subsequent public and scholarly attention served to (ever so slightly) shift the debate away from the perception that support for crime prevention is tantamount to being soft on crime, which was at the heart of the opposition to the prevention spending in the 1994 crime bill. The report put the focus squarely on what scientific evidence had to say about effectiveness. It made no room for moralizing about crime or politicizing what works or does not work; it sought to make the facts – arrived at by scrupulous evaluation – the centerpiece of the policy-making process. Of course, it would be misleading to suggest that all viewed it and its follow-up studies in this favorable light (e.g. Haggerty, 2008; Pawson, 2006).

At the same time, the evidence-based approach with its singular focus on scien- tific evidence of effectiveness has had less to say about the distinction between crime prevention and crime control. Here, crime prevention is defined more by its outcome – the prevention of a future criminal event – than its character or approach. It is seen as a continuum of techniques, from prenatal home visits to prison sentences. It is important that a focus on the scientific evidence not obscure the distinct nature of crime prevention or its role as part of a larger effort to reduce crime in society.

Discussion and conclusions

In embarking on this project we were struck by how little has been written about the history of crime prevention in the USA. For sure, there are some rich studies on one component or period of time in crime prevention’s history (see Curtis, 1985; Liss and Schlossman, 1984; Schlossman and Sedlak, 1983) as well as the wider political context (see Gest, 2001). Beyond general interest to address this dearth of knowledge, our research was guided by several key issues that we believe underlie the importance of charting the history of crime prevention in the USA. One is a desire to address what has been coined as ‘presentism’ in the field of criminology (Laub, 2004: 1), or a tendency for change in the field to reflect only recent devel- opments rather than building upon the long and rich history of the discipline of criminology. Crime prevention’s history is an inexplicable part of the history

546 Punishment & Society 15(5)

of criminology. Closely related is that crime prevention is important to the schol- arly and applied traditions of US criminology. Also, it seems especially relevant – to the discipline and crime prevention itself – to develop an understanding of the social and political influences that have shaped the concept of crime prevention over time. This historic narrative illustrates that while our collective faith in crime prevention as a strategy for reducing crime has wavered throughout time, it has at least received consistent consideration alongside – and distinct from – other crime control strategies since the 1960s. Crime prevention plays a crucial role in modern US crime policy and viewing it in historical terms may contribute to a more informed dialogue about how best we should address crime.

A history of criminology would be remiss without paying due attention to the major criminological theories that have been advanced over the years. That the beginnings of crime prevention were founded upon some of these theories, includ- ing Shaw and McKay’s (1942) social disorganization theory and Cloward and Ohlin’s (1960) differential opportunity theory, draws attention to the shared history of crime prevention and criminology. More recent theoretical contributions, including the social development model (Catalano and Hawkins, 1996) and the rational choice perspective (Cornish and Clarke, 1986), which have also spawned any number of crime prevention models and programs, provides further support for this connection.

From its earliest conceptions, crime prevention was seen as clearly distinct from crime control or punishment. It is a unique social (and now also environmental) strategy that emphasizes prevention in the first instance and is distinct from the formal justice system. This view wavered somewhat over questions about the mean- ing of delinquency prevention as it was applied within the juvenile justice system. Scholarly writings of the day (i.e. Lejins, 1967; Weis and Hawkins, 1981) set out to reclaim the notion of a pure prevention.

Between the 1960s and 1990s, a number of key social and political developments took place that reaffirmed prevention as an alternative – in some cases as a socially progressive one – to the traditional criminal justice response. These included the landmark presidential commissions of the 1960s, the associated loss of faith in the criminal justice response to crime, and the passage of the 1994 federal crime bill. Other significant developments included the growth of situational crime prevention and the emergence of a new generation of early childhood prevention experiments that were beginning to show long-term desirable effects on criminal offending.

In more recent years, prevention science and evidence-based policy have helped to give further shape to the concept of crime prevention in the USA. While it is doubtful that we are past the days of calls for the next magic solution or panacea to our latest crime problem, there is a growing sense that facts rather than opinions, beliefs, or conjecture should be given greater weight in the formulation of crime policy. Rational crime policy needs to pay attention to the scientific evidence on effectiveness. It also needs to pay attention to the mix of strategies.

The matter here is not about a disagreement over the definition of crime prevention. Rather, there is a pressing issue facing the effectiveness of modern

Welsh and Pfeffer 547

crime policy: the need to strike a greater balance between prevention and punish- ment. This balance acknowledges the need to curtail the development of offenders and their subsequent flow into the system, strengthen communities and local social institutions, and reduce opportunities for crime. A real and sustained focus on the front end will also reinforce efforts to repeal punitive practices. Importantly, this pressing issue also captures instrumental and emotional/symbolic dimensions of responses to crime and punishment (Frieberg, 2001; Garland, 1990). How we respond to crime says a great deal about us.

A number of criminologists, economists, and other social scientists have written about the need to find the right mix of strategies in reducing crime and hence, striking a greater balance between crime prevention and punishment (see Cook et al., 2011; Donohue and Siegelman, 1998; Vila, 1997). Overcoming this imbalance will not come easily, and it will involve a number of key efforts. Building upon the evidence-based movement, one of these efforts involves making systematic research evidence central to the policy-making (and political) process. Also important will be the need to continue to challenge the view that a politician’s support for crime prevention is tantamount to being ‘soft on crime’. Encouragingly, the evidence- based movement may go some way toward breaking down this concern. Instead of emotions and opinions, facts and evidence are becoming the new currency in fed- eral, state, and local debates about crime policy (Greenwood, 2006).

Crime prevention, whether it is in the form of developmental, situational, com- munity, or some combination of these three approaches, is an important compo- nent of the needed mix of strategies in today’s crime policy. It is often pitted against punishment. This seems to be a fair and beneficial distinction, not to mention a historically accurate representation of crime prevention in the United States.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the editor and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

Notes

1. Crime prevention programs are not designed with the intention of excluding justice

personnel. Many types of prevention programs, especially those that focus on ado-

lescents, involve justice personnel such as police, prosecutors, or probation officers.

In these cases, justice personnel work in close collaboration with those from such

areas as education, health care, recreation, and social services (see, for example,

Wright et al., 2012).

2. See Laub (1983: Appendix B) for a rich accounting of the social and political events

leading to the development of the CAP and its crime prevention activities between

the 1930s and 1960s.

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Brandon C Welsh is a Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement in Amsterdam. His research interests focus on the prevention of delinquency and crime and evidence-based crime policy. He is an author or editor of 10 books, including The Oxford Handbook of Crime Prevention (Oxford University Press, 2012).

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Welsh and Pfeffer 553

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Justice Quarterly

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The Centrality of Theory in Modern Day Crime Prevention: Developments, Challenges, and Opportunities

Brandon C. Welsh, Gregory M. Zimmerman & Steven N. Zane

To cite this article: Brandon C. Welsh, Gregory M. Zimmerman & Steven N. Zane (2018) The Centrality of Theory in Modern Day Crime Prevention: Developments, Challenges, and Opportunities, Justice Quarterly, 35:1, 139-161, DOI: 10.1080/07418825.2017.1300312

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The Centrality of Theory in Modern Day Crime Prevention: Developments, Challenges, and Opportunities

Brandon C. Welsh, Gregory M. Zimmerman and Steven N. Zane

Theory matters in crime prevention. Indeed, but this is hardly the full story. Crime prevention is oftentimes viewed as atheoretical—not grounded in the etiology of crime and offending. Reasons abound for this view, and the recent interest in an evidence-based approach to policy-making has been at the forefront. This article reviews the role that theory plays in modern day crime prevention, with a special focus on the three main crime prevention strategies: developmental, community, and situational. The review identifies a number of key challenges and opportunities for making theory more central to crime prevention. It suggests that the classification system employed in situational crime prevention has allowed for a more

Brandon C. Welsh, PhD, is a Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University, the Director of the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Visiting Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement in Amsterdam. His research focuses on the prevention of delinquency and crime and evidence-based social policy. His latest book is Experimental Criminology: Prospects for Advancing Science and Public Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Gregory M. Zimmerman, PhD, is the Graduate Program director and an associate professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. His research interests focus on the person–context nexus, specifically on how exposure to crimino- genic conditions in various social contexts interacts to produce problem behaviors. He has recently been published in Criminology, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Social Science and Medicine, and Journal of Youth and Adolescence. Steven N. Zane is a doctoral student in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. He holds a JD from Boston College Law School. His research interests include juvenile justice, juvenile transfer policy, crime prevention, and evidence-based social policy. Recent articles have appeared in Criminology & Public Policy, Jus- tice Quarterly, British Journal of Criminology, and Journal of Criminal Justice. Correspondence to: Brandon C. Welsh, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Northeastern University, Churchill Hall, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

� 2017 Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences

Justice Quarterly, 2018 Vol. 35, No. 1, 139–161, https://doi.org/10.1080/07418825.2017.1300312

explicit connection between sound theory and prevention techniques, and may provide important lessons for developmental and community crime prevention.

Keywords: crime prevention; theory; theory failure; classification; public policy

Introduction

Over the last several decades, the high degree of emphasis that has been placed upon identifying “what works” and promoting an evidence-based

approach to policy-making has seemingly obscured the critical relevance of theory to crime prevention. Many scholars have raised this concern with

respect to the more general field of crime prevention (e.g. Sampson, Winship, & Knight, 2013; Wikström, 2012). Social constructions, valuing research meth-

ods in the natural sciences, as compared to theory and methods in the social and behavioral sciences, and political pressures also play a role in downplaying the import of theory in crime prevention. It could very well be that our need

for empiricism over explanation, as well as our need for immediate returns (politically and economically) over enduring effects, is compromising the

design and implementation of crime prevention programs that are grounded in sound theory. What was once seen as a vibrant interchange of the theoretical

and the pragmatic—think of Shaw and McKay’s (1942) Chicago Area Project and Cloward and Ohlin’s (1960) influence on New York City’s Mobilization for

Youth program—has become far more utilitarian, perhaps even approaching the likes of a managerial criminology (Garland, 1996).

How do we reconcile this state of affairs with continued calls for greater

understanding of the role of theory in the prevention of delinquency and crime (see Fagan, 2013; Fagan & Eisenberg, 2012; Long & Sullivan, 2016; Sullivan,

2013)? In prevention science, for example, there are explicit standards for this. The Society of Prevention Research’s updated “standards for evidence related

to research on prevention interventions” states (in the context of efficacy trials) that, “The causal theory of the intervention should be tested”

(Gottfredson et al., 2015, p. 902; emphasis in original). Of course, testing of the intervention theory is no small matter, and comes with its own set of

challenges. It just may be that Lewin’s (1943, p. 118) famous quote about the value of theory in psychology—“there is nothing as practical as a good theory”—is more important today than ever before.1

The main aim of this article is to review the role that theory plays in modern day crime prevention. A key question motivates our inquiry: What is

1. Fifty years later, using a similar title, Weiss (1995) explored the role of theory-based evaluation in the social and behavioral sciences.

140 WELSH ET AL.

the state of theoretical development of the major crime prevention strategies? Guided by the crime prevention literature, we focus exclusively on criminal

activities that are of a personal or household nature (e.g. robbery, assault, burglary, theft). Excluded are traffic, corporate, and state crimes. With

respect to theory, our coverage can be broadly categorized as scientific theories, which “make statements about the relationship between observable phenomena” and can be falsified (Bernard, Snipes, & Gerould, 2016, p. 4).

Crime Prevention in Context

This article adopts the view that crime prevention is best understood and uti-

lized as a unique social and environmental strategy for reducing crime, one that is distinct from crime control or punishment. It is argued that it is not the outcome (the prevention of crime), but the approach taken that characterizes

crime prevention. Here, crime prevention refers to efforts to prevent crime or criminal offending in the first instance—before the act has been committed.

Crime prevention and crime control share a common goal of trying to prevent the occurrence of a future criminal act. What further distinguishes them is

that prevention originates outside of the formal justice system,2 because one of its goals is to prevent young people from coming into contact with the for-

mal justice system.3 As noted by Waller (2006), prevention is considered the fourth pillar of crime reduction, alongside the institutions of police, courts,

and corrections. Here, crime prevention is viewed as an alternative approach to the more traditional responses to crime. Moreover, from a taxonomy per- spective, this view of crime prevention conforms somewhat to Foxcroft’s

(2014) proposed new prevention classification system, with its dual focus on form (i.e. universal and selected, but excluding indicated) and function (i.e.

situational and developmental, with the addition of community). In one of the first scholarly attempts to differentiate crime prevention from

crime control, Lejins (1967, p. 2) espoused the following: “If societal action is motivated by an offense that has already taken place, we are dealing with

control; if the offense is only anticipated, we are dealing with prevention.” What Lejins, along with others (e.g. Weis & Hawkins, 1981), was trying to indi- cate was the notion of “pure” prevention, a view that had long existed in the

2. Excluding justice personnel is not the intention of crime prevention programs. Many types of programs involve justice personnel such as police, prosecutors, or probation officers working in close collaboration with prevention practitioners in education, health care, recreation, and social services. For example, some elements of problem-oriented policing subscribe to this view. Later in the article we discuss problem-oriented policing in the context of situational crime prevention. 3. This derives from a long-standing concern over the effects of labeling, something that was cru- cial to the development of two of the earliest and most well-known delinquency prevention pro- grams: the Chicago Area Project (Shaw & McKay, 1942) and the Cambridge–Somerville Youth Study (McCord & McCord, 1959).

CRIME PREVENTION THEORY 141

scholarship and practice of criminology in the United States and in some other countries (Welsh & Pfeffer, 2013). While the approach taken—rather than the

outcome—is crucial to shaping this concept of prevention, it is important to acknowledge that there can be a series of outcomes, including reducing crime

or criminal activity; mitigating the damage of crime or lessening the severity of criminal activity; eliminating the crime or criminal behavior altogether; and displacing the crime or criminal activity.

Broadly, three main types of crime prevention can be delineated (Welsh & Farrington, 2012; see also Tonry & Farrington, 1995). Developmental preven-

tion involves interventions designed to prevent the development of criminal potential in individuals, especially those targeting risk and protective factors

discovered in studies of human development (Tremblay & Craig, 1995). Community prevention involves interventions designed to change the social

conditions and institutions (e.g. families, peers, social norms, organizations) that influence offending in residential communities (Hope, 1995). Situational

prevention involves interventions with a focus on preventing the occurrence of crimes by reducing opportunities and increasing the risk and difficulty of offending (Clarke, 1995a).

Sound Theory as a Starting Point for Effectiveness

The importance of theory to crime prevention can also be viewed through the

lens of evaluation research (see Long & Sullivan, 2016). When a crime prevention program fails to show a desirable effect, there is a good chance that it is due to implementation failure, under which sound theory is not prop-

erly executed (Ekblom & Pease, 1995; MacKenzie, 2006). Perhaps less well known is the next most common explanation for why a

crime prevention program fails to show a desirable effect: theory failure, or the “basic idea or mechanism of prevention was unsound” (Ekblom & Pease,

1995, p. 594). While the prevalence of theory failure is not known, serving as the next most important explanation suggests that theory is being given some

serious consideration in the practice of crime prevention. One element of good public policy is that it is based on sound theoretical

understanding of the phenomena it addresses. As Green (2000, p. 125) notes,

“empirical evidence alone is insufficient to direct practice, and that recourse to the explanatory and predictive capability of theory is essential to the design

of both programs and evaluations.” Indeed, the first step to planning an effec- tive prevention program involves a solid theoretical foundation on which to

base the preventive approach (Rossi, Lipsey, & Freeman, 2004). This should include a theory of program change: How will the preventive approach elicit

change in the treatment group compared to the control group? The importance of program theory has led to developments in the evaluation literature such as

logic models, which describe how a program works (or is supposed to work) in

142 WELSH ET AL.

terms of inputs, resources, activities, outputs, outcomes, and long-term impact (Mertens & Wilson, 2012).

In the absence of sound theory, social programs stand little to no chance to bring about social good and may even cause harm (i.e. have iatrogenic

effects). Here are Ekblom and Pease (1995, p. 596) commenting on the policy significance of both sound theory and implementation in evaluating crime pre- vention programs: “A close a priori linkage with theory, and the collection of

diagnostic information on implementation and the processes hypothesized to have been influenced by the intervention, serve as an insurance policy against

the hazard of negative findings.” Recent research on iatrogenic effects of crime prevention and crime control

programs identified a number of modalities that could be characterized by full or partial theory failure (Welsh & Rocque, 2014). Most of these modalities

were of a crime control orientation. For example, Scared Straight, which involves subjecting youths—some with no prior contact with the juvenile

justice system—to confrontations with violent, adult inmates and realistic and graphic depictions of prison life, is an example of full theory failure. Petrosino, Turpin-Petrosino, Hollis-Peel, and Lavenberg’s (2013) systematic

review and meta-analysis, which included nine high-quality studies, found evidence of an overall harmful effect. Here, theory failure was supported over

alternative plausible explanations (i.e. deviancy training, implementation failure, and measurement failure).

Partial theory failure may be best exemplified by correctional boot camps. According to MacKenzie (2006, p. 279), military-style boot camps in juvenile

and adult correctional settings “were not developed based on a coherent theoretical model.” With some ties to the social control perspective (i.e. skills training to help control impulsive behavior) and social learning theory (i.e.

learning basic life skills to help return to the community), the overriding consideration of boot camps is strict discipline and rigorous physical activities.

Wilson, MacKenzie, and Mitchell’s (2008) systematic review and meta-analysis, which included 32 high-quality studies, supported this view. It also found evi-

dence of an overall null effect on recidivism. Mixed effects across the studies, with the control condition receiving enhanced treatment in some cases, sug-

gested that there was more at work here than theory failure.

Crime Prevention Strategies and the Role of Theory

In this section we return to the key question that guides our substantive

inquiry: What is the state of theoretical development of the major crime pre- vention strategies? Figure 1 provides a simple illustration of the three main

crime prevention strategies and their key theoretical influences. To address this question, we use as a starting point the first volume that introduced these

crime prevention strategies and that is considered the leading scholarly work on the subject: Building a Safer Society: Strategic Approaches to Crime

CRIME PREVENTION THEORY 143

Prevention, by Tonry and Farrington (1995). Importantly, theory is featured

prominently in the volume. We also draw upon more recent works on theory as they relate to crime prevention. While striving for a high degree of coverage

of the relevant literatures was crucial to our approach, it is important to note that our review is by no means exhaustive; for example, we did not conduct a

systematic review of all scholarly work available in published as well as unpub- lished sources.

Developmental Crime Prevention

Background

Developmental crime prevention (DCP), also known as risk-focused prevention, is targeted on risk factors for and protective factors against delinquency and later criminal offending. It is informed generally by motiva-

tional or human development and life-course theories on criminal behavior, as well as by longitudinal studies on the development of offending (Farrington,

1995).

Theoretical developments and progress

Theory plays a central role in Tremblay and Craig’s (1995) expansive review of DCP. In addition to the usual assessment of what works, the authors were keen

Crime Prevention

Developmental Crime Prevention

– cumulative effect model

– life course theories – some elements of

early self-control theory (Cullen et al., 2012; Tremblay & Craig, 1995)

Community Crime Prevention

– social disorganization theory

– community disorder theory

– community empowerment theory (Bennett, 1998; Hope, 1995; Messner & Zimmerman, 2012)

Situational Crime Prevention

– rational choice perspective

– routine activities theory

– crime pattern theory (Clarke, 1995a; Smith & Clarke, 2012)

Figure 1 The three main crime prevention strategies and their key theoretical influences.

144 WELSH ET AL.

to “investigate how much support is provided for different models of antisocial behavior development” (p. 161). They focus their attention on three types of

developmental theories or models that had gained prominence at the time: (a) self-control theory, exemplified by Gottfredson and Hirschi’s (1990) general

theory of crime; (b) multiple pathways model, first introduced by Loeber (1990); and (c) the cumulative effect model (Yoshikawa, 1994).

Tremblay and Craig rightly note that each one of these theories serves as

the foundation for “somewhat different” developmental prevention modalities (p. 161). Behavioral parent training, with its focus on appropriate rewards and

punishments in order to nurture child self-control from an early age, is at the heart of self-control theory. For the pathways model, the authors propose a

range of interventions tailored to the different paths to delinquency, with a specific focus on age-graded risk and protective factors from early childhood

to mid-adolescence. In contrast, the cumulative effect model calls for a multi-modal approach that is focused on early childhood. Here, a combination

of interventions could be targeted at multiple risk factors in one or a number of different domains, including the individual (e.g. preschool intellectual enrichment, social skills training), family (e.g. parent training, home visita-

tion), and school (e.g. anti-bullying, instructional support) (Farrington & Welsh, 2007).

Tremblay and Craig found that there is a high level of influence of theory on DCP programs. However, the key test for the authors was the extent to which

this body of knowledge provided support for the three types of developmental theories. They found the following: modest support for self-control; no support

for multiple pathways (owing to no specific tests of the hypothesized sequence of events in each pathway); and substantial support for the cumulative effect model.

In a more recent review, Cullen, Benson, and Makarios (2012) provide insights on the major theories that contribute to a developmental view of

offending. On the matter of the advancement of developmental theories, Cullen et al. (2012) are generally optimistic, but they are also keenly aware of

the unevenness in how some of these theories have progressed over time. For example, empirical tests of self-control theory have by no means abated, while

research on cognitive transformation may benefit from a greater focus on qualitative studies. Moreover, these tests have proliferated despite the fact

that researchers have used different conceptual and operational definitions of self-control, and utilized different methodological approaches to study the effects of self-control. Nonetheless, an impressive empirical literature has

linked low self-control to an array of adverse youth developmental out- comes, and several meta-analyses have documented a robust relationship

between low self-control and crime and analogous behaviors (de Ridder, Lensvelt-Mulders, Finkenauer, Stok, & Baumeister, 2012; Miller & Lynam, 2001;

Pratt & Cullen, 2000). There is also evidence to suggest that modest advances have been made to

the findings reached by Tremblay and Craig (1995). For example, there is some

CRIME PREVENTION THEORY 145

empirical support for the role of early self-control improvement programs in preventing antisocial behavior and delinquency. A recent systematic review

and meta-analysis of 41 evaluation studies of early self-control improvement programs found some evidence of effectiveness in promoting self-control and

reducing delinquent behavior among children and adolescents (Piquero, Jennings, Farrington, Diamond, & Gonzalez, 2016). Variability in the type of intervention modality (e.g. social skills development, cognitive coping skills,

immediate/delayed rewards) seemingly complicates the aggregate findings for these self-control programs, including the need to disentangle the independent

effects of the multi-modal interventions. Empirical support for the cumulative effect model has only grown stronger

over the last two decades. In their review of preschool programs, Schindler and Yoshikawa (2012) found a sizeable body of evaluation studies that target

multiple risk factors in different domains and produce desirable effects on antisocial behavior and delinquency:

For example, social skills curricula that target both teachers and parents for change in preschool settings have proved successful in reducing aggressive behaviors. … Two-generation programs for families in poverty, targeting both parenting processes and child verbal ability, have shown promise in reducing childhood externalizing behaviors and even in some cases juvenile and adult crime. (p. 81)

The cumulative effect model also receives support from the evidence on the

effectiveness of early parent training and family-based programs more gener- ally (Fagan, 2013).

Disappointingly, less is known about the potential influence of the key path

models on DCP. This includes one by Loeber (1990) as well as Moffitt’s (1993) developmental taxonomy perspective, which identifies two distinct groups of

offenders that develop in different ways: adolescent-limited and life-course persistent.

Key challenges

For the academic community, the influence of theory on DCP also comes with

some clear challenges. In commenting on the path models, Tremblay and Craig (1995, p. 161) note that, “Preventive experiments to test these models, or

simply to use their conceptual framework, clearly need to be much more com- plex than those that start from the Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) model.”

Their simple linear model (poor child-rearing → low self-control → crime) is insufficient to deal with the multiple sequences of events over multiple path- ways for different offender types. In many respects, this highlights the differ-

ent needs between static and dynamic theories (Farrington, 2003). Yet another challenge concerns the cumulative effect model, specifically, the difficulty in

isolating the independent or interactive effects of the different components of

146 WELSH ET AL.

programs (Farrington, 2000). Future experiments are needed that attempt to disentangle the different elements of effective multi-modal programs. While

this holds scholarly interest, it also carries important implications for develop- ing and implementing the next generation of effective DCP programs built on

the cumulative effect model. More broadly, there are also the critiques that have been leveled at risk-focused prevention,4 which undergirds a range of developmental and life-course theories (see Haines & Case, 2008). A major

problem with this approach is to establish which risk factors are causes and which are merely markers or correlates. The difficulty of establishing causes,

not to mention the co-occurrence of risk factors, is a major impediment to understanding and replicating effective DCP programs.

Community Crime Prevention

Background

Community-based efforts to prevent crime are sometimes seen as a combina- tion of developmental and situational prevention (Bennett, 1998). Difficulties

in defining community crime prevention (CCP) and the types of programs that populate it come about because of two dominant perspectives that have informed this strategy. One is focused on the social conditions of crime and

the ability of the community to regulate them, and the other perspective holds that “it operates at the level of whole communities regardless of the types of

mechanisms involved” (Bennett, 1996, p. 169). Hope’s (1995) definition that CCP involves actions designed to change the social conditions and institutions

that influence offending in residential communities goes some way toward rec- onciling these views, and this is the definition we adopt here.

Theoretical developments and progress

Beginning with Rosenbaum’s (1988) and Hope’s (1995) classic reviews of CCP,

there has been for many years a real sense that programmatic efforts under this approach are largely atheoretical. This view is grounded, at least in part,

in the idea that there is disconnect “between [the] causes and cures” of com- munity violence (Sherman, 1997, chapt. 3, p. 2). Hope (1995) argues that this

disconnect results, at least in part, from the difference between vertical and horizontal CCP efforts. Horizontal prevention emphasizes the role of commu- nity residents in crime prevention, primarily via informal social control. Con-

versely, vertical prevention focuses on connecting the community to goods and

4. The basic idea of this approach involves identifying the key risk factors for offending and imple- menting prevention methods designed to counteract them.

CRIME PREVENTION THEORY 147

services provided by collectivities outside of the neighborhood. The difference is reflected in theoretical underpinnings about private, parochial, and public

control, as discussed in Bursik and Grasmick’s (1993) systemic model of crime. According to Hope (1995), horizontal CCP efforts designed to build and fortify

private and parochial control have not succeeded; and, vertical prevention approaches designed to address public control have been relatively limited, despite theory that has highlighted the importance of addressing social, eco-

nomic, and cultural isolation in lower-class communities (e.g. Wilson, 1996). In addressing the idea of a disconnect between the causes and cures of com-

munity offending, Sherman (1997) uses as a case in point the community pre- vention of gang violence. The traditional social intervention approach to

reducing gang violence comes in the form of street work, outreach, or crisis intervention (Spergel, 1995). But, research suggests that much of the “gang

proliferation problem is reflective of larger social ills.” Therefore, “merely addressing gang problems through gang intervention, be it street work or sup-

pression, won’t have much effect” (Klein, 1995, p. 205). Indeed, through the middle 1990s, evaluations of community gang prevention efforts were gener- ally negative, in part because most programs did not “address the underlying

community risk factors” associated with gang violence, thereby neglecting the- ory in program design and implementation (Sherman, 1997, chapt. 3, p. 18).

Messner and Zimmerman (2012) distinguish theories focusing on social struc- tures from those linking social processes to offending behavior in local neigh-

borhoods. Similarly, Leventhal and Brooks-Gunn (2000) developed three theoretical models for understanding the mechanisms through which neighbor-

hood effects operate: institutional resources, relationships, and norms/collec- tive efficacy. Linking these theoretical distinctions to CCP efforts, Hope (1995) and Bennett (1998) provide a useful system of categorization: community orga-

nization, community defense, and community development. The intellectual foundations upon which early community organization

efforts were based included criminological theories such as Shaw and McKay’s (1942) social disorganization theory and Cloward and Ohlin’s (1960) differential

opportunity theory. A more recent example includes the Cure Violence pro- gram, first started in Chicago and now operating in a number of developed and

developing countries across the world. One of the essential elements of Cure Violence is to mobilize the community to change norms inside-out, by engaging

community leaders and organizing the community through block clubs, tenant councils, and neighborhood associations. Promoting informal social control through community organization is a key concept of social disorganization

theory and notions of collective efficacy (David-Ferdon & Simon, 2014). Crime prevention efforts in the vein of community defense focus as much

on potential victims of crime as on potential offenders. Disorder policing, aris- ing in the 1980s and still popular today, is an example of community defense

prevention and is grounded squarely in broken windows theory. The theory pur- ports that physical disorder (e.g. graffiti) and social disorder (e.g. loitering)

provide visual cues that social control is weak, crime is tolerated, and

148 WELSH ET AL.

deterrence is minimal, thereby breeding an environment conducive to criminal activity (Wilson & Kelling, 1982). Key concerns include whether the relation-

ship between disorder and crime is context-dependent (see Sampson et al., 2013) as well as causality and endogeneity.

There are a number of types of community development efforts, including architectural improvement, community empowerment, socio-economic regen- eration, and housing allocation policies (see Bennett, 1998). In reference to

the latter, we consider the case of the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing (MTO) experiment of the late 1990s. MTO randomly assigned 4,600 low-income

families to two treatment groups—one receiving vouchers to relocate to low- poverty neighborhoods and one receiving these vouchers plus counseling—and

a no-treatment control group. The experiment was implemented in five cities across the US, and evaluations, which have revealed effect heterogeneity (see

Sampson et al., 2013), provide some evidence of effectiveness. The experi- ment was well-grounded in social isolation theory (Wilson, 1996), a widely

accepted theory about challenges to economic resources and opportunities and cultural and social isolation in poor, urban neighborhoods.

For some time, the extent to which community-level theories of crime have

contributed to CCP efforts has been understood to be quite limited (see Hope, 1995; Sherman, 1997). This view may be shifting somewhat. In the last two

decades there have been some programmatic examples in the literature that link the “cures” to the “causes,” not to mention some theoretical develop-

ments. For example, while early research on neighborhood effects focused primarily on social structures relevant to offending, more recent research has

identified theoretically relevant neighborhood mechanisms (e.g. social ties and cohesion, attenuated culture, and collective efficacy) linked to criminal offending (see Sampson, 2006; Warner, 2003). There is also a growing aware-

ness that individual and community causes of crime are interconnected, and progress has been made toward integrating levels of analysis theoretically as

well as methodologically via multilevel analyses (Messner & Zimmerman, 2012). Such theoretical and methodological advancements should be welcomed

by prevention scientists wishing to pursue theoretically grounded social inter- ventions.

Key challenges

The theoretical and methodological advancements discussed above are accom-

panied by some key challenges. Theoretically, CCP efforts should be cognizant of the linkages between individual- and community-level processes, rather

than “controlling out” individual-level variation in implementing community- based programs. Some research examining cross-level moderating effects has

made strides in this direction (see Wikström, 2006, 2010). Nevertheless, CCP scientists need to theorize more explicitly and comprehensively about how selection processes and neighborhood-level influences act in concert to

CRIME PREVENTION THEORY 149

structure the observed residential landscape of different communities. Methodologically, researchers should continue to embrace analytical programs

and techniques that make it possible to simultaneously examine the effects of CCP programs and individual change. Multilevel analysis is becoming more com-

monplace, but obstacles prevent it from becoming more widely used. Perhaps the most formidable impediment to methodological progress is the paucity of data collection procedures that take into account the naturally occurring hier-

archical social structure. Such procedures require information on individuals and the communities in which they are situated, in particular relational net-

works across neighborhoods.

Situational Crime Prevention

Background

Situational crime prevention (SCP) has been defined as “a preventive approach

that relies, not upon improving society or its institutions, but simply upon reducing opportunities for crime” (Clarke, 1992, p. 3). This is brought about by

modifying or manipulating the physical environment in order to directly affect offenders’ perceptions of increased risks and effort and decreased rewards, provocations, and excuses (Cornish & Clarke, 2003). These different

approaches serve as the basis of a highly detailed classification system of SCP techniques that has evolved over the years (as discussed below). This includes

a wide variety of techniques, including target-hardening, assisting natural surveillance, concealing or removing targets, avoiding disputes, and setting

rules or posting instructions (Smith & Clarke, 2012).

Theoretical developments and progress

Clarke’s (1995a) review of SCP makes clear that: (a) theory is integral to the practice of SCP, and (b) a classification system is fundamental to this strategy,

linking theoretical and empirical developments to advance scientific knowledge and inform policy and practice. As Figure 2 shows, the classification system,

which was started in the late 1970s, was rather simple, with eight crime- reducing techniques organized around two conceptual categories: (1) make it

more difficult to commit crime, and (2) manipulate the costs and benefits of crime (a 2 × 4 table; Hough, Clarke, & Mayhew, 1980). As the state of theoretical and empirical knowledge increased, Clarke (1992) expanded the

classification system to include 12 techniques within three categories: (1) increase the effort; (2) increase the risks; and (3) reduce the rewards

(a 3 × 4 table). A few years later, the classification scheme was again reformu- lated to include 16 distinct techniques within four categories, with the addi-

tional conceptual category oriented around removing excuses and inducing

150 WELSH ET AL.

shame or guilt (a 4 × 4 table; Clarke & Homel, 1997). The most recent itera-

tion now includes 25 techniques within five categories: (1) increase the effort; (2) increase the risks; (3) reduce the rewards; (4) reduce provocations; and (5) remove excuses (a 5 × 5 table; Cornish & Clarke, 2003). The formulation of

these newest two categories (points 4 and 5) was heavily influenced by the theory of “situational precipitators,” as outlined by Wortley (2001).

The evolution of the SCP classification system was greatly influenced by opportunity theory (Newman, Clarke, & Shoham, 1997; Smith & Clarke, 2012).

Unlike criminological theories focusing on distal causes of crime (e.g. disposi- tional and structural causes), opportunity theory takes these as background

factors and focuses instead on the proximate or situational cause of a crime event at a particular time and place (Newman, 1997). The theory holds that

the offender is “heavily influenced by environmental inducements and opportu- nities and as being highly adaptable to changes in the situation” (Clarke, 1995b, p. 57). Opportunity theory forms the basis of several more specific

theories, including the rational choice perspective (Cornish & Clarke, 1986), routine activities theory (Cohen & Felson, 1979), and crime pattern theory

(Brantingham & Brantingham, 1993). Rational choice is perhaps the clearest extension of opportunity theory,

positing that an agent’s “behavior is instrumentally organized to achieve a specific task” and that making the achievement of this task more difficult will

reduce its likelihood (Newman, 1997, p. 7). Rooted in an economic approach to thinking about crime (see Becker, 1968), the rational choice perspective

2 x 4 table (Hough et al., 1980)

1. Increase effort (4 techniques)

2. Manipulate costs/benefits (4 techniques)

3 x 4 table (Clarke, 1992)

1. Increase effort (4 techniques)

2. Increase risks (4 techniques)

3. Reduce rewards (4 techniques)

situational precipitators (Wortley, 2001)

5 x 5 table (Cornish & Clarke, 2003)

1. Increase effort (5 techniques)

2. Increase risks (5 techniques)

3. Reduce rewards (5 techniques)

4. Remove excuses (5 techniques)

5. Reduce provocations (5 techniques)

4 x 4 table (Clarke & Homel, 1997)

1. Increase effort (4 techniques)

2. Increase risks (4 techniques)

3. Reduce rewards (4 techniques)

4. Remove excuses (4 techniques)

peer influence and public shaming

moral commitment

neutralization theory

Figure 2 Evolution of SCP classification system.

CRIME PREVENTION THEORY 151

involves the insight that “crime is purposive behavior designed to meet the offender’s commonplace needs for such things as money, status, sex, and

excitement, and that meeting these needs involves the making of (sometimes quite rudimentary) decisions and choices, constrained as these are by limits of

time and ability and the availability of relevant information” (Clarke, 1995a, p. 98). Importantly, this decision-making process will differ based on the speci- fic type of crime, because different crimes involve different opportunities in

different settings (Cornish & Clarke, 1986). Rather than presenting an alternative to rational choice, routine activities

theory can be seen as a complementary framework of crime events in the aggregate (see Pease, 1997), describing the minimal necessary elements of a

situation in which a crime opportunity will be present: a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of capable guardians (Clarke & Felson, 1993;

Cohen & Felson, 1979). Likewise, rational choice takes the framework of rou- tine activities and “looks at the world through the eyes of the motivated

offender,” adding more detail about the nature of offender perception of opportunity, risks, and rewards (Pease, 1997, p. 237). Finally, crime pattern theory builds upon routine activities and attempts to explain why crime is not

evenly or randomly distributed across different places or settings, and to describe the logic of these regularities (Brantingham & Brantingham, 1993;

Clarke & Eck, 2005). SCP can be viewed as a practical extension of these theories: how to take

advantage of opportunity theories as a means of reducing crime. Since perception of opportunity to commit specific types of crime is a function of

environmental factors (e.g. risks and rewards) in the immediate setting of the criminal event, the theoretical development of SCP has largely been a develop- ment of conceptualizing this situational opportunity and how it can be effec-

tively reduced (Smith & Clarke, 2012). While a key insight of SCP is that the most effective approach to crime pre-

vention will occur outside the formal criminal justice system (see Newman, 1997, p. 19), there has been a parallel development in problem-oriented polic-

ing. This is a proactive strategy of responding not to criminal incidents but to the underlying problems that give rise to the incidents (Goldstein, 1979, 1990).

As Goldstein (1979, p. 242) observes, this approach involves the fundamental insight that the “police job requires that they deal with a wide range of behav-

ioral and social problems that arise in a community—that the end product of policing consists of dealing with these problems,” which are highly specific to community context. Like SCP more generally, such an approach shifts focus to

the problems in communities that may produce specific criminal opportunities —rather than the general (and distal) causes of criminal offending.

The theoretical development of SCP has consisted largely of improved understanding of situational opportunities, often by adding to or improving

upon existing typologies. The movement from the first to the most recent classification system is in part based on psychological insights about the proxi-

mate decision-making of a potential offender; specifically, that perception of

152 WELSH ET AL.

criminal opportunity is based not only on objective factors about the environment (e.g. risks, rewards, physical effort), but also on subjective fac-

tors such as provocation and excuse-making. Reducing provocations draws on Wortley’s (2001) discussion of learning theory and environmental psychology,

while reducing excuses draws upon “neutralization theory that distortions to moral reasoning provide excuses that facilitate involvement in crime” (Smith & Clarke, 2012, p. 304). These developments have incorporated a more sophisti-

cated understanding of human behavior, reflecting a modern psychological assessment of rationality as bounded or limited (Smith & Clarke, 2012).

Bernard et al. (2016) note that SCP, rather than directly test its underlying theoretical foundations, has largely influenced programs and policies based

loosely on those theories and then tested their effectiveness as evidence of the underlying theoretical mechanisms. For example, in a systematic review of

SCP programs, Guerette and Bowers (2009) found an equal likelihood for observing crime displacement and diffusion of crime prevention benefits. The

authors go on to say that “the findings support the notion of reasoning and rationality among offenders,” because offenders altered their behavior in pre- dictable ways (Guerette & Bowers, 2009, p. 1354). Similarly, their findings

support the premise (based on routine activities theory) that crime opportuni- ties can be reduced and are not infinitely available. If the rational choice per-

spective and routine activities theory were unfounded, Guerette and Bowers (2009) posit that there should be significantly more evidence of displacement

and less evidence of diffusion.

Key challenges

SCP may continue to advance by incorporating an increasingly sophisticated understanding of human behavior as well as situational opportunities, build-

ing upon the success of the SCP taxonomy and possibly suggesting alterna- tive conceptions (see e.g. Ekblom & Hirschfield, 2014). As Smith and Clarke

(2012) observe, however, advances within SCP (including to its classification system) face one overarching limitation: efforts to change the dispositional (or motivational) characteristics of offenders do not belong within the SCP

theoretical framework. This is not because SCP and its proponents deem such changes impossible, but because they are simply outside the scope of

the theory (see also Cornish & Clarke, 2003). This raises a fundamental obstacle for SCP: it stands in stark contrast to most criminological theory,

with SCP focused on the potential criminal event rather than the potential criminal offender (Freilich, 2015). Another obstacle to theoretical

development within mainstream criminology is that SCP has always been a highly policy-oriented approach to crime prevention. Because of this, SCP is

sometimes falsely criticized as neglecting a sound theoretical basis (see Clarke, 2005).

CRIME PREVENTION THEORY 153

Discussion and Conclusions

This article set out to review the role that theory plays in modern day crime

prevention, with a specific focus on the three main crime prevention strate- gies: developmental, community, and situational. We were not prompted to

investigate this topic because of some crisis in criminological theory or uphea- val in crime prevention research or practice. Instead, we were motivated to

understand just how much theory matters in crime prevention as well as to identify key challenges and opportunities for making theory more central to crime prevention.

Broadly speaking, it is our assessment that theory plays an influential role in crime prevention literature today, and seemingly has a more central role than

for which it is given credit. This is not meant to negate the astute critiques that have drawn attention to a range of problematic issues facing the prevention of

crime more generally (e.g. need for immediate results, valuing empiricism over explanation) as well as concerns about an over-emphasis on evidence-based

policy-making (Sampson et al., 2013; Wikström, 2012). But any suggestion of crime prevention writ-large being atheoretical is clearly off the mark.

A focus on theory with respect to each of the three main crime prevention strategies provides a somewhat more nuanced view on the development of theory. For SCP, it appears that theory is highly developed in the literature.

Moreover, theory has not only clearly contributed to the development of SCP, but has arguably done so in a more direct fashion than the other crime preven-

tion strategies. This has much to do with the early development and continued refinement of a classification system of SCP techniques. We do not think it is a

stretch to say that the classification system is the lifeblood of SCP. For DCP, it appears that theory is becoming more developed in the litera-

ture; empirical support for the cumulative effect model and some elements of early self-control are particularly telling. Our slightly tempered view of the theoretical development of DCP could be owing to a couple of factors. First,

with developmental theory originating from multiple fields of study, including psychology, sociology, social work, education, and public health, bringing

together the literature of these theoretical perspectives around the outcome of crime or offending has proven more elusive (compared to SCP and CCP).

Moreover, fewer evaluations of developmental prevention programs include a measure of crime and, when crime is measured, it may not be treated as a

primary outcome—meaning that less attention is given to it in the reporting of the evaluation findings. Second, there is no classification system of DCP

modalities. For CCP, it appears that theory is also well developed, yet its influence on

the programmatic literature is mixed at best. One partial explanation for its

limited influence may arise from CCP being less well defined than its counter- parts and thus, is far more difficult to operationalize (i.e. in connecting the

“cures” and the “causes”).

154 WELSH ET AL.

Limitations

The present review has some key limitations. First, our focus on theory within

the three main crime prevention strategies is quite broad. Rather than see this as an end in itself—and with no prior reviews on the topic—we view this broad

approach as a starting point. Future research should examine more closely the influence of theory with respect to different prevention modalities within the

three strategies (e.g. parent training as part of DCP, improved street lighting as part of SCP, mentoring as part of CCP) as well as how some theories have evolved over time and influenced multiple crime prevention modalities within

a strategy. For example, what has been the breadth of influence of routine activities theory on SCP techniques in practice? And, has this influence changed

as the theory has evolved over time? A second limitation is that the review is restricted to an inquiry of theoretical

developments as they pertain to the scholarly literature on crime prevention. In no way can we suggest that the evaluation studies reviewed here are representa-

tive of the practice of crime prevention. These studies are more likely to be effi- cacy trials compared to effectiveness trials or broad-scale dissemination, with

the former expected to produce larger effect sizes (Fagan, 2013). As Sampson et al. (2013) note, isolating causal effects does not necessarily translate into successful policy intervention in the context of complex systems. Assessing the

potential influence of theory on crime prevention practice should be a priority for future research. It could begin with SCP, perhaps as a way to assess some of

the claims about the influence of theory on practice.

Advancing Theory

The challenges noted above, as well as others discussed throughout the article,

provide a good number of opportunities for future theoretical and empirical research to help further advance the influence of theory on crime prevention.

For instance, could DCP benefit from a classification system? We ask this ques- tion in recognition of the apparent benefits that have accrued to SCP theory

and practice in light of its robust classification system. By linking theoretical developments and empirical results, a classification system serves both schol-

arly and applied purposes. Smith and Clarke (2012, p. 299) provide a useful overview of its key purposes:

A classification system is a useful way of organizing crime-prevention techniques since it frames the discussion of individual measures in terms of the shared gen- eral, and more specific, mechanisms by which each operates to limit crime opportunities. In doing so, it systematizes knowledge in the area, clarifies links between theory and prevention practice, and can highlight gaps in the case stud- ies of particular techniques. It also provides a checklist for practitioners dealing with new problems. They can use it to consider measures set out in the classifica- tion scheme that might be usefully applied to their situation.

CRIME PREVENTION THEORY 155

With some changes to the wording, it is not difficult to imagine how these details could be adopted for the development of a classification system of DCP

programs. Important to this system is the need to consider the different life- course stages that different modalities focus on as well as the targeting of

proximal or distal risk factors. These points speak to the time-scale of effects on criminal behavior (i.e. short-, medium-, and long-term). Consideration should also be given to the risk-level of the targeted population and the

presence of protective factors against offending (Fagan & Eisenberg, 2012). Turning our attention to CCP, it may be the case that this strategy could

benefit from a more robust classification system. Hope (1995) and Bennett (1998) offer a useful system, distinguishing among community organization,

community defense, and community development measures. Are there other elements that need to be added to this classification system to better link the-

oretical and empirical developments? The starting point for a more refined classification system may be a greater

explication of CCP. As noted above, community-based efforts to prevent crime are sometimes thought to be a combination of developmental and situational prevention. Another key question facing CCP is: Can progress on the program-

matic front keep up with its rich theoretical progress? One way to facilitate this is for researchers to test CCP modalities that are identified as promising. These

are programs for which the level of certainty from the available scientific evi- dence is too low to support generalizable conclusions, but where there is some

empirical basis for predicting that further research could support such conclu- sions (Farrington, Gottfredson, Sherman, & Welsh, 2006). After-school programs

and community-based gang violence prevention are just two examples of such promising CCP programs. As with DCP, there is no shortage of opportunities for future research to help advance the influence of theory on CCP.

More generally, evaluation research in criminology could benefit from fol- lowing the Society of Prevention Research’s “standards for evidence related to

research on prevention interventions” (Gottfredson et al., 2015). This begins with a detailed description of the theory connecting the intervention’s core

components and the outcomes (see Olds, Kitzman, Cole, & Robinson, 1997). The standards also call for further theoretical precision by way of testing, in

that the intervention theory is made up of two types: action theory and con- ceptual theory. The former pertains to “how the treatment will affect media-

tors” and the latter pertains to “how the mediators are related to the outcome variables” (Gottfredson et al., 2015, p. 903). Regardless of the crime prevention strategy, describing and testing the intervention theory should

become routine practice.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their especially helpful comments.

156 WELSH ET AL.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Steven N. Zane http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9329-5236

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CRIME PREVENTION THEORY 161

284

A Conceptual Model of Crime Prevention

PAUL J. BRANTINGHAM Associate Professor, School of Criminology, Florida State University

FREDERIC L. FAUST

Associate Professor, School of Criminology, Florida State University

Crime prevention is the professed mission o f every agency found within the American criminal justice system. In prac- tice, the term "prevention" seems to be applied confusingly to a wide array of contradictory activities. This confusion can be avoided through the use of a conceptual model that defines three levels of prevention: (1) primary prevention, directed at modification of criminogenic conditions in the physical and social environment at large; (2) secondary prevention, directed at early identification and intervention in the lives of individuals or groups in criminogenic circumstances; and (3) tertiary prevention, directed at prevention of recidivism. The use of such a conceptual model helps to clarify current crime prevention efforts, suggests fruitful directions for future research by identifying current lacunae in practice and in the research literature, and may ultimately prove helpful in ad- dressing the seemingly endless debate between advocates of "punishment

"

and advocates of "treatment."

pREVENTION, probably the most

overworked and least understood

concept in contemporary criminol- ogy, might be defined simply as any activity, by an individual or a group, public or private, that precludes the incidence of one or more criminal acts. But caution is warranted here, for the simplicity is deceptive. Can crime prevention be logically con- ceived to encompass such divergent actions as long-term incarceration and pretrial diversion from the jus- tice system? Solitary confinement and remedial reading instruction? The improvement of automotive antitheft devices and the develop- ment of neighborhood recreation centers? Or psychosurgeiy and the levying of fines? Considering the

goal definition of crime prevention, the answer might well be &dquo;yes.&dquo; But where means are concerned, the matter is heavily clouded by definitional ambiguity and theo- retical contradiction. The purpose of the following dis-

cussion, then, is threefold: (1) to examine briefly the philosophical roots and related definitional issues of crime prevention; (2) to outline a conceptual framework that will

provide a more useful understand-

ing of crime prevention; and (3) to specify the most fruitful direction for the development of theory, re- search, and programing in crime

prevention. Considering the present state of competing and contradic- tory views on the prevention of

285

criminal behavior, we judge this to he a timely endeavor.

Punishment, Treatment, and Crime Prevention

Punishment is a persistent prob- lem for social theorists: its definition is elusive and its justification is debat~ible.1 Nevertheless, a defini- tion of the standard case of punish- ment, roughly acceptable to utili-

tarians, seems to have evolved from the work of Antony Flew.’ Under this definition, punishment is (1) a painful or unpleasant consequence (2) intentionally imposed by other persons (3) upon an offender (4) for his offense against legal rules (5) under authority of the legal system against which the offense was com- mitted.3 The paramount utilitarian justification for the imposition of punishment has been that it will

prevent crime.’

Recent scholarship has shown, however, that the ethical issues in- volved in the application of painful or unpleasant consequences to in- dividual men by agents of legal systems cannot properly be circum- scribed by the concept of punish- ment. Troublesome children, re-

tarded people, madmen, and drug abusers are all currently subject to treatment through legal process at the hands of what Kittrie has called the &dquo;therapeutic state. &dquo;S The actual consequences accruing to people being treated differ very little from the consequences accruing to people being punished. Herbert Packer has observed that

punishment and treatment can be distinguished primarily by the put- pose for which the consequence is

imposed: crime prevention or retri- bution, or both, in the case of

punishment; social protection or in- dividual betterment, or both, in the case of treatment.6 But that distinc- tion blurs when social protection is equated with prevention of social harms (including crimes) in the more aggressive literature of deter- ministic cr iminology.’ This blurring of a weak distinction increases in

many legislative formulations. &dquo;Pre- vention of harm to self or others,&dquo; for instance, is the seventh most

frequently mandated ground for ex- ercise of juvenile court jurisdiction

1. Recent collections which probe the debate between utilitarians and retributionists include

Jeffrie G. Murphy, Punishment and Responsibil- ity (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1973): Ru-

dolph J. Gerber and Patrick D. McAnany, Con- temporary Punishment (South Bend, Ind.: Uni- versity of Notre Dame Press, 1972); Stanley E. Grupp, Theories of Punishment (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1971).

2. Antony Flew, "The Justification of Punish- ment," Philosophy, October 1954, pp. 291 et seq. Those who have adopted Flew’s position in- clude H. L. A. Hart, Punishment and Responsi- bility (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), and Herbert L. Packer, The Limits of the Criminal Sanction (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1968).

3. Packer attempted to make the definition workable for both utilitarians and retributionists

by adding a sixth condition to the standard case adduced by Flew: "That it be imposed for the dominant purpose of preventing offenses against legal rules or of exacting retribution from of- fenders, or both." Packer, op. cit. supra note 2, p. 31.

4. Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punish- ments, Henry Paolucci, trans. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), pp. 42, 93-94; Jeremy

Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York: Haffner, 1948); Packer, op. cit. supra note 2, p. 31. 5. Nicholas N. Kittrie, The Right to Be Dif-

ferent : Deviance and Enforced Therapy (Balti- more, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).

6. Packer, op. cit. supra note 2, pp. 25-30. 7. Barbara A. Wootton, Crime and the Crim-

inal Law (London: Stevens, 1963); Marc Ancel, Social Defence (New York: Schocken, 1966); Karl Menninger, The Crime of Punishment (New York: Viking’1968).

286

in American juvenile court legisla- tion.&dquo; The British N’lental Health Act of 1959 provides for compul- sory hospital commitment of the retarded, psychopathic, or mentally ill person in the interest of his health or safety, or for the protec- tion of others.9 9

Though punishment and treat-

ment t are generally regarded as

closely related concepts, one com- mon conceptual tie has not been

developed. Both the general justifi- cation of punishment and treatment and the specific justification of

particular forms of punishment and treatment, as well as hybrid peno- therapeutic practices such as proba- tion and halfway house confine- ment, are considered to be crime

prevention. We suggest that analysis of this common conceptual goal- crime prevention-may be the key to a better understanding of the definitional and ethical distinctions between punishment and treatment. One of the more striking features

of the Anglo-American system of criminal justice is a divergence be- tween systemic activity and systemic ideology. The system lOin action deals in post hoc assessment, of f culpability and assignment of pun- ishment. Police arrest offenders after the offense occurs; courts

adjudicate offenders after the of- fense occurs; prisons punish offend-

ers after the offense occurs.11 I Yet each major element of the criminal justice system professes a special calling to prevent crime. Thus, says the American Bar Association, &dquo;Police administrators…character- ize prevention as their primary 1

goal. &dquo;1 z The President’s Crime Commission pointed out that &dquo;It is

generally assumed that police have a pr eventive…role as well. &dquo;’ 3 And the recent report by the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals defined the primary goal of police as crime prevention According to the American Law

Institute, the prime purpose of a

penal code is &dquo;to forbid and pre- vent&dquo; crimes, and the principal purpose of sentencing and treat-

ment t of offenders is &dquo;to prevent the commission of offenses.&dquo;1 S

8. From a list of thirty-four such grounds compiled in Frederick B. Sussman and Frederic S. Baum, Law of Juvenile Delinquency, 3rd. ed. (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana, 1968), p. 12.

9. Mental Health Act 1959 § 26; cf. § § 60, 61, permitting commitment of retarded, psycho- pathic, or mentally ill convicts to the same men- tal hospitals in lieu of sentence.

10. It is a "system" in the formal sense—a set of elements which interact in some significant way. We do not imply that the interaction is

necessarily smooth or efficient. The criminal

justice system is amazingly inefficient.

11. The juvenile justice system, compulsory narcotics addict commitment schemes, eugenic sterilization laws, and sexual psychopath laws have all tried to deal with potential offenders before any offense has been committed. All have been under serious attack of late as distri-

butively unjust. 12. American Bar Association Project on

Standards for Criminal Justice, Standards Relat- ing to the Urban Police Function, approved draft (Chicago: American Bar Association, 1973), p. 56. The standards also point out that the first commissioner of the London Metropol- itan Police set crime prevention as the first priority for the new police—ahead of apprehen- sion and prosecution of offenders. Id., pp. 55- 56. The standards themselves, however, reverse that order, giving apprehension first priority and prevention second priority out of a ranked list of eleven priorities. Id., § 2.2.

13. President’s Commission on Law Enforce- ment and Administration of Justice, Task Force Report: The Police (Washington, D. C.: U. S.

Govt. Printing Office, 1967), p. 13. 14. National Advisory Commission on Crim-

inal Justice Standards and Goals, A National Strategy to Reduce Crime (Washington, D. C.: U. S. Govt. Printing Office, 1973), pp. 103-05.

15. American Law Institute, Model Penal

Code, Proposed Official Draft (Philadelphia: American Law Intitute), § § 1.02, pp. 2-3.

287

Since courts necessarily make con- tact with suspected actual offenders and convicted offenders rather than

potential offenders, prevention takes two forms: general deterrence through exemplary sentencing and special deterrence through selective sentencing involving combinations of punishment and treatment. The goal of sentencing courts is crime

prevention.16 6 The preventive purpose of correc-

tional agencies is less directly ex-

pressed than that of police or courts but appears strongly in the Ameri- can Correctional Association’s equa- tion of modern penology with &dquo;rehabilitation&dquo;-the reform or con- trol of offenders so that they will not commit new crimes when re-

lcascd from custody or super- B-Ision.&dquo; Of course, the historical

penitentiary was designed to

serve general and special deterrence purposes. The goal of the correc-

tional subsystem, then, is to pre- vent recidivism. Outside of the criminal justice

system, many community organiza- tions and agencies engage in activ- ities of which crime prevention is at least one of the major purposes. These include such diverse programs as parent education, mental health services, recreational activities, voca- tional education and employment counseling, drug abuse treatment

services, remedial academic classes, public information programs on

protection of self and property, crisis intervention telephone ser-

vices, school programs on youth and the law, and so forth. Every public reference to crime preven- tion is coupled with a proposal for some form of further community involvement in reducing the op- portunity for, deterring, or treating criminality.

Clearly, with each of the major crimina justice subsystems as well as several noncriminal justice sys- tems being committed to crime

prevention, the concept must have wide temporal and behavioral scope -so wide, in fact, that it is of dubious value without definitional refinement.

A Paradigm for Analysis of Crime Prevention

A legitimate argument may be made that each of the subsystems referred to above poaches on the crime prevention functions of the others-business organizations en-

gage in security and law enforce- ment activities, community agencies provide services to probationers and parolees, police engage in adjudica- tion and correctional activities

through informal probation and

cautioning schemes, prosecutors and probation officers become in- volved in detective work, and cor- rectional officers investigate and

adjudicate rule violations by in-

custody offenders. Most of the time, however, the preventive activities of noncriminal justice programs, po- lice, courts, and correction are sub- stantially different. The points of distinction may be identified most

clearly by the level or stage in the development of crimina behavior at which intervening activity is

implemented. Since it is similarly conceived as intervention at dif-

16. R. M. Jackson, Enforcing the Law, rev.

ed. (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1971), pp.311-30. 17. American Correctional Association, Man-

ual of Correctional Standards, 3rd ed. (College Park, Md.: American Correctional Association, 1966), pp. 6-12. See also the ACA’s statement on objectives of the correctional system: "Sim- ply stated, the basic goal of a correctional sys- tem is to provide public protection by aiding in the prevention of crime." Id., p. 1.

288

ferent developmental levels, the

public heath model of disease pre- vention is analogous and useful.’ 8 The public health model posits

three levels of activity.’9 9 Primacy prevention identifies disease-creat-

ing general conditions of the en-

vironment and seeks to abate those conditions (e.g., sewage treatment, mosquito extermination, small-pox vaccination, job-safety engineering, personal hygiene education). Sec-

ondar~~ prevention identifies groups or individuals who have a high risk of developing disease or who have incipient cases of disease and inter- venes in their lives with special treatments designed to prevent the risk from materializing or the incip- ient case from growing worse (e.g., chest x-rays in poor neighborhoods, special diets for overweight execu- tives, rubella vaccinations for pro- spective but not-yet-expectant mothers, dental examinations). 7~r- trary prevention identifies individ- uals with advanced cases of disease and intervenes with treatment to

prevent death or permanent disabil- ity (e.g., stomach pumping for

poisoning, open-heart surgery for defective heart valves, radiation

therapy for some forms of cancer), provides rehabilitation services for

those persons who must live under the constraints of permanent dis-

ability (e.g., Braille training for the blind, prosthetic limbs for ampu- tees), and provides a measure of f relief from pain and suffering for individuals with incurable diseases (e.g., opiate therapy for terminal cancer patients, leper colonies ).20 Tertiary prevention, then, aims at three forms of prevention: (1) pre- vention of death or disability; (2) prevention of a decline to a less

adequate level of social, economic, and physical activity; (3) preven- tion of more physical and social

pain than necessary in an inevitable demise. Crime prevention can be con-

ceptualized as operating at these same three levels.2’ (See Figure 1).

18. We recognize the risk inherent in borrow- ing a conceptual model from medicine. Crimi- nology is only just beginning to recover from the damage done by the Positivist School’s use of the medical analogy of crime as disease. In

borrowing from public health concepts here, we have modified the public health model to fit the criminological situation rather than vice versa.

19. Hugh R. Leavell and E. Gurney Clark, Preventive Medicine for the Doctor in His Com- munity : An Epidemiological Approach, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), pp. 19-28. We are indebted to Jack Wright, of the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Ser-

vices, for bringing the public health paradigm to our attention.

20. We have modified the groups of activity within the primary, secondary, and tertiary classifications described above to facilitate their use for criminological purposes. See Leavell and Clark, op. cit. supra note 19, pp. 20-21. For an argument that an unmodified public health mo- del is not useful to criminological thinking, even in the drug abuse area, see Richard Brot- man and Frederic Suffet, "The Concept of Pre- vention and Its Limitations," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social

Science, January 1975, pp. 55-56. 21. Lejins has developed a tripartite classifi-

cation of crime prevention which cuts orthogon- ally across our model. Thus, he describes (1) punitive prevention (a primary and tertiary form), (2) corrective prevention (a primary and secondary form), and (3) mechanical preven- tion (a primary and tertiary form). Peter Lejins, "The Field of Prevention," Delinquency Preven- tion : Theory and Practice, William Amos and Charles Wellford, eds. (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), pp. 1-21. Wolfgang’s tri-

partite categorization of prevention appears to be a breakdown of secondary and tertiary forms of prevention. Marvin E. Wolfgang, "Urban

Crime," The Metropolitan Enigma, James Q. Wilson, ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 1970), p. 299. The Florida State Bureau of Criminal

Justice Planning has developed a typology of crime prevention programs which also cuts a-

cross our model. It defines programs of preven- tion aimed at (1) the initiating conditions of

289

290

Primary crime prevention identifies conditions of the physical and social environment that provide oppor- tunities for or precipitate criminal acts. Here the objective of interven- tion is to alter those conditions so that crimes cannot occur. Secoll- dary crime prevention engages in

early identification of potential of- fenders and seeks to intervene in their lives in such a way that they never commit criminal violation. Tertiary crime prevention deals with actual offenders and involves intervention in their lives in such a fashion that they will not commit further offenses. With this classifi- cation in view, let us examine the

relationship of these levels of crime prevention to contemporary issues in criminal justice. For the purpose of analysis, we will consider the three levels of crime prevention in reverse order.

Application of the Nlodel The correctional subsystem with-

in the criminal justice system is

charged with tertiary prevention. The optimistic-perhaps heroic-

assumption is made that, through effective intervention, the offender will be fully restored to a perma- nent, functional level of socially acceptable behavior. For those of- fenders whose behavior is not amen- able to modification through known forms of punishment or

treatment, tertiary prevention aims to provide such control of the of- fender’s behavior as is necessary to protect society and elicit the high- est and most sustained level of con-

forming behavior possible.22 2 The

preventive aspect of intervention at this level may be found in the no- tion that such intervention keeps society from being placed at in- creased risk, keeps the offender from being placed at greater risk for his own harmful behavior and from the excessive retaliation of others,2 3 and keeps conditions from occur-

ring which offer no opportunity and encouragement for whatever higher level of conforming behavior the offender might be capable of

achieving at some future time. For offenders whose criminal be-

havior is not amenable to correction

through known forms of punish- ment and treatment and who are

seen as potentially dangerous to

society, the traditional societal re-

action has been incapacitation-the imposition of lifetime or long-term confinement t in a secure setting. This confinement has been justified as societal protection.24 4 Theoreti-

cally, it is assumed that the behavior of offenders in this category might improve to some degree but not

crime (primary prevention) and (2) the sustain- ing conditions of crime (secondary prevention). Florida Bureau of Criminal Justice Planning and Assistance, The Florida Annual Action Plan for 1974 (Tallahassee, Fla., 1974), pp. 1-21.

22. Capital punishment does not fall within this conceptual model without straining the an- alogy considerably since the legal and ethical tenets of public health medicine do not include the intentional infliction of death, regardless of the patient’s medical threat to the health of others. If we do strain the analogy, however, the death penalty might be viewed as the most extreme form of tertiary prevention, with gen- eral deterrence feedback to the primary preven- tion level.

23. Canadian Committee on Correction, The Basic Principles and Purposes of Criminal Justice (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1969).

24. Capital punishment is excluded from con- sideration here and is not treated seriously with- in the general model of crime prevention, since the principal justification for imposition of the death penalty is retribution rather than any utilitarian judgment that the offender is not amenable to reform or rehabilitation and is too dangerous for less final methods of incapa- citation.

291

sufficiently to warrant their release from custody in the near future. But still, any behavioral improve- ment is desirable. Toward this end, the President’s Crime Commission recommended that offenders of this type be transferred to special institutions that would &dquo;encourage the development of more imagina- tive programs for long-term pris- oners-special industries, perhaps greater independence and self-suf-

ficiency within the confines of a

secure institution. &dquo;2 S For those offenders who are not seen as

potentially serious threats to so-

ciety, the correctional system com- bines rehabilitation and reform to elicit more conforming behavior. The hope is that the behavioral im- provements for these prisoners will be sufficient to inhibit further illegal activities.

Effective tertiary prevention is the primary goal of the correctional subsystem. It is also one of the

goals of the courts and the proba- tion and parole service as these sub- systems interact and interlink with correction. Effective tertiary pre- vention is, and always has been, more idea than actual. But the

justification of particular forms of both punishment and treatment is

grounded on their efficacy in

achieving this level of prevention. As a result, corporal punishment has been generally abolished be- cause it fails to prevent recidivism rather than because it is inhumane, even though a case can be made for it on retributive grounds. Other forms of punishment such as im-

prisonment and other forms of

treatment such as castration of sex- ual offenders are currently under attack because they fail to reduce recidivism below the levels attained

by cheaper and less drastic methods. On the other hand, forms of punish- ment such as fines and forms of treatment such as psychosurgery, which promise improved tertiary prevention, are currently fashion- able even though retributive and humanitarian problems are raised.26 6 Secondary prevention is the level

at which crime prevention is most

fervently pursued in research and

program funding. Courts, probation and parole services, general social

services, educational institutions, planners, private citizens, and police all engage in secondary prevention. It is argued that poverty, low edu- cational level, lack of vocational skills, minority status, and poor physical and mental health are all associated with criminal activity. The assumption is that these social and physical problems are causally related to crime, although most cur- rent research rejects the causal link. Without question, the great bulk

of intervention activities labeled &dquo;crime prevention&dquo; must be catego- rized as secondary prcvention-i.e., early identification of potential of- fenders, followed by action de-

signed to reduce the risk of future involvement in more serious forms of antisocial behavior, particularly

25. President’s Commission on Law Enforce- ment and Administration of Justice, Task Force Report: Corrections (Washington, D. C.: U. S. Govt. Printing Office, 1967), p. 58. (Our italics.)

26. See generally, Alan R. Mabe, ed., New Techniques and Strategies for Social Control: Ethical and Practical Limits, a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist, May-June 1975, for a group of articles probing state-of-the-art issues in behavioral control. Note that the ethi- cal and legal issues surrounding such modes of behavioral control make them politically vulner- able as secondary and tertiary prevention tech- niques. See, e. g., "Clockwork Orange Projects Banned," Crime & Delinquency, July 1974, pp. 314-15.

292

criminal behavior. For example, during the 1960’s, massive federal, state, and local programs wcrc

mounted to identify and deal with problems nl’ school drop-outs, voca- tionally untrained and economical- ly disadvantaged youth, physically and mentally handicapped individu- als, minority group members, etc., with the assumption that such inter- vention would curb and reverse the

incrcasing crime rates. 2 7 While these endeavors have been launched toward laudable objectives, they have frequently rested on thc false

assumption that they were striking at the root &dquo;cause&dquo; of crime and

delinquency whcn, instead, they werc dealing only with observable symptoms.28 R Primary prevention-identifica-

tion of those conditions of the

physical and social environment that provide opportunities for or

precipitate criminal behavior and the alteration of those conditions so that no crimes occur-is clearly the ideal objective. In fact this is the objective that is posited as the justification for most secondary prevention activities, but obviously the identification of incipient cases implies that the opportunity for

primary prevention (in those in- stances at least) has already passed. With a few notable exceptions, there has been little systematic study of primary prevention of criminal behavior.29 9 The work ac-

complished at this level has been

largely pursued along one of three lines: (1) psychological immuniza- tion from certain types of be- havioral icl7dencies, (2) prcclusion of criminal activity by 1’CdCSlgll of the physical environment, and (3) general &dquo;dCtel’1’C17CC&dquo; of criminal

activity by exemplary sentences

and the presence of correctional facilities. The first two directions of inquiry have raised serious ethical and lcgal questions, to say nothing of the problem of resource alloca- tion for implementation on a scale large enough to affect crime rates

significantly.

Directions for Crime Prevention

Using the three-part model we can classify criminal justice system activities and noncriminal justice system activities designed to prevent t crime. As can be seen by examining Figures 2 and 3, most crime preven- tion activity has occurred in secon- dary and tertiary prevention. Less effort has becn spent on primary prevention. Tertiary prevention, currently,

consists mostly of efforts to &dquo;treat&dquo; offenders, but this &dquo;treatment&dquo; is

given in the absence of knowledge and competence to permanently &dquo;reform&dquo; tendencies toward illegal behavior. Most of what is done in the name of &dquo;treatment&dquo; is, in reality, little morc than an effort to help offenders cope and to control them through externally imposed pressures. If this fact were more

widely recognized in contemporary correction and the widespread myth of available effective treat-

ment were dispelled until human behavior is more fully understood, then resources could be more

appropriately allocated between

27. Peter Marris and Martin Rein, Dilemmas of Social Reform, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Aldine, 1973); Daniel P. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding (New York: Free Press, 1968). 28. C. Ray Jeffery, Crime Prevention through

Environmental Design (Beverly Hills, Calif.:

Sage, 1971 ). 29. Ibid.; Oscar Newman, Defensible Space

(New York: Macmillan, 1972).

293

control activities and much I7ccdcd hehavioral research. For example, probation and parole officers recog- nise that their job has dimensions of both control and treatment-i.e., on the one hand, surveillance and serving as a source of information and, on the other, some type of therapeutic counseling. The type of training that probation and parole personnel generally receive, how- ever, places great emphasis on the treatment function and virtually ignores control technology. As a

result, these persons frequently spcnd the largcst share of their time and effort attempting to accom-

plish an unrealistic therapeutic task and resist the performance of less interesting and soften routine control activities which could produce more effective results. Further, the control relationship between cor-

rcctional personnel generally and offenders and their families might t be considerably strengthened if the delusion of effective treatment, and the subsequent disillusionment of failure, were removed. This leads to the conclusion, then,

that the rhetoric of effective treat- ment should be dropped, except for those few activities where the con-

sequences of therapeutic interven- tion have been rigorously tested and the outcome can be predicted with confidence (e.g., the con-

trolled use of chemotherapy in certain cases of aggressive behavior, or brain surgery where tumors are determined to be the cause of acts of violence). Such a narrowing of the operational definition of treat- ment is quite consistent with legal arguments and recent court de- cisions relating to the &dquo;right to

treatment&dquo; and would help to put the justification for coerced loss of liberty into proper perspective.3 0

Clearly differentiating between re-

habilitative control and treatment in tertiary prevention may spare many offenders imprisonment for nonexistent therapy, in favor of more humane and economical re-

habilitative programing. Research is also needed in the other forms of

tertiary prevention; e.g., special deterrence, postadjudicative diver- sion, and the deterrent effect of arrest and prosecution. At the level of secondary pre-

vention, there is certainly a need for continued research that will lead to the development of more accurate diagnostic lnSt1-L1I11eI1tS for the early identification of potential offenders and more effective inter- vention approaches. At present, however, the inadequate state of

knowledge precludes such diagnosis and intervention, except in rather rare instances, and suggests that

premature and inappropriate assign- ment of the &dquo;potential offender&dquo; label contributes to the crime prob- lein.~ ~ Thus, as with tertiary pre- vention, effective intervention at

the secondary level will have to

await the scientific achievement of a more complete understanding of human behavior in general and criminal behavior in particular and careful evaluation of existing secon- dary prevention schemes. On the basis of the foregoing dis-

cussion, it should come as no sur-

prise that primary prevention is viewed as the most fruitful direc- tion for the future development of 30. Kittrie, op. cit. supra note 5; Beverly G.

Toomey, Clifford E. Simonsen, and Harry E.

Allen, "Right to Treatment: Issues and Pros-

pects," Proceedings of the 20th Annual South- ern Conference on Corrections (Tallahassee, Fla.: Florida State University, 1975). 31. Frederic L. Faust, "Delinquency Label-

ing—Its Consequences and Implications," Crime & Delinquency, January 1973, pp. 41-48.

294

295

296

theory, research, and programing insofar as preventing criminal be- havior is concerned. Perhaps the most cogent argument in support of this position is that presented by C. Ray Jeffery in his Crimo Prevrn i ion t Izrollglz Environ mental l Design. 3 2 The logic that crime can most effec- tively be curbed by altering con- ditions that precipitate or provide opportunities for criminal behavior can hardly be challenged. The prob- lems of implementation, however, are staggering-not just problems of f required resources and legal and ethical considerations (these have

always been major challenges to the advancement of science), but more significantly the necessary shift in

public policy from almost total commitment to crisis intervention to an equally strong commitment to long-range behavioral research. Such a shift is by no means im-

possible, but under the most ad-

vantagcous conditions it would be

ponderously slow in taking place and the question of how to deal with the crime problem in the interim is legitimately raised. The answer, of course, is that we

cannot turn our backs on the prob- lem while we work to influence

public policy toward basic be- havioral research and wait for the

products of that research. Rather, we can place greater emphasis on more effective rehabilitative control, on the one hand, and basic research in primary prevention (involving limited pilot and demonstration

projects), on the other, using a

significant share of the resources

currently being expended on in- effective secondary and tertiary prevention programs. We entertain no illusions about the problems to be confronted in this endeavor. It is certainly an ambitious goal, but it holds promise for ultimately pre- venting much, if not most, criminal behavior before rather than after it has occurred.32. Jeffery, op. cit. supra note 28.

CCJ 4938: Crime Prevention

Professor Steven Zane, Ph.D., J.D.

HISTORY OF CRIME CONTROL AND CRIME PREVENTION

Early history of crime control • Lex talionis (1900 BC) – Retributive punishment = “an eye for an eye”

• Formal systems of crime control largely nonexistent prior to modern era – Military kept order – State would punish certain high crimes

• Crime control was local – Members of public community largely responsible for crime

control and punishment • Religious institutions provided moral discipline for “misdemeanors”

– Forms of citizen “self-help” evolved over time 3

Premodern crime control • Obligatory policing (~1066 AD) in England

– Male citizens had formal obligation to band together in groups and police themselves

• “Watch and ward” systems (~1285 AD) – Rotated responsibility for keeping watch over town, village, or

other area • “Hue and cry”

– Men rotate watching over town at night, raising alarm if threat identified • “Assize of arms”

– All freemen required to have weapons available to assist if needed • Constable

– Unpaid position to organize “watch and ward” systems » Not a patrolman, usually investigate complaints if victim could pay

• “Vigilante movements” arose on frontiers (e.g., United States) – A group of men—a “posse”—would be organized when an offender needed to be

apprehended and punished 4

Early organized approaches • Early paid private police forces

– Parochial police forces hired to protect homes and property of wealthy • Often involved private polices forces for industries, e.g.,

– Merchant Police of England (16th century) established to protect the wool industry – Thames River Police established in 1798 by West Indian merchants in response to dockland

crime (i.e., thefts from ships and warehouses)

• “Thief takers” – Professional bounty hunters also emerged

• E.g., Highwayman Act of 1692 (England)

• Early detectives – Bow Street Runners (1749–1839) were private detectives

who would investigate and detect crimes • Private, but paid by (and attached to) local magistrate 5

Modern policing • Early attempts in 17th–18th century – Often militarized patrols staffed by ex-soldiers

• Prussian royal police officers emerged in 1750s, Viennese police officers created in 1753 • The Lieutenant Général de Police de Paris (1667) managed a semi-militarized city guard to patrol the city

– By 1791, the Gendarmerie Nationale patrolled provincial and rural communities as well

• Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 – Established the first professional state-organized police force

(in London), funded through local taxes • Hierarchical command structure: superintendents, inspectors, sergeants

– Unlike patrols in Europe, not military (sometimes even unarmed) • Focus was on prevention of crime through systematic patrolling

– Evolution of watchmen system (“old police”) to patrol beats (“new police”)

• By early 20th century, government-organized police forces became the norm in large, urban centers

CRIME PREVENTION IN THE 20TH CENTURY

EARLY CRIME PREVENTION

Juvenile court (1899) • Guided by a parens patriae philosophy

– Parens patriae = “father of the country” • English common law doctrine that the King is the supreme ruler and guardian over his people

– Jurisdiction over delinquency, dependency, and status offenses • Status offenses are non-crimes such as smoking, curfew violation, incorrigibility, and truancy

• Juvenile courts were premised on the idea that they could treat juvenile delinquents by attending to the causes of their delinquency – Here we see the idea of preventing crime before it occurred

• Poverty, lack of education, and poor parenting among lower classes seen as major causes of juvenile crime

• Juvenile courts were influenced by positivist criminology, a scientific approach to studying crime being caused by identifiable factors (i.e., determinism) – In late 19th century, list of possible factors included:

• Low IQ (“feeblemindedness”) • Low self-control (“moral intemperance”) • Poverty • Unemployment • Lack of education 9

Chicago Area Project (1931) • First documented initiative in the United States that

measured crime prevention – Implemented by sociologists Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay at

the University of Chicago • Established “social disorganization” theory

• Early community project aimed at preventing crime caused by social disorganization – Sought to improve sense of pride and community in socially

disorganized neighborhoods in Chicago suffering from high delinquency rates and gang activity • Included >20 programs developed for youth

– e.g., counseling, hobby groups, school activities, recreation

– Unclear whether it was effective, but it marks the beginning of the modern era of crime prevention 10

Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study (1939) • First delinquency prevention experiment

– Created by Richard C. Cabot, Harvard professor of clinical medicine and social ethics

– “Friendly mentoring” by adult role models

• 650 boys (average age = 10) placed in 325 matched pairs and randomly allocated to experimental or control group – Experimental group boys received monthly visits from counselors who

acted as positive role models • Counselors talked to the boys, took them on trips and to recreational activities, tutored

them in reading and arithmetic, encouraged them to participate in the YMCA and summer camps, played games with them at the project’s center, encouraged them to attend church, and visited their families to give advice and general support

– Lasted 1939–1945 11

Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study (1939) • Follow-ups revealed null effects (in 1949) and iatrogenic

effects (in 1978) – Why did it fail?

• Many competing hypotheses – Theory failure = mentoring not effective – Implementation failure = intervention not well focused

» Deviancy training hypothesis = deviant peers bonded during summer camps

– Without rigorous scientific design, these negative intervention effects would not have been discovered • In later interviews, treatment group men reported that the

program had helped them 12

FEDERAL SUPPORT FOR CRIME PREVENTION

Federal funding • Federal funding for delinquency prevention began

in the 1950s with Eisenhower administration

• Early programs based on social structure theories, aimed at community-level prevention – E.g., NYC-based Mobilization for Youth (MOBY)

• Integrated approach to community development, based on Cloward & Olsen (1960) different opportunity theory – Funding began in 1961 under Kennedy administration

– E.g., Head Start • National preschool program begun in 1965 under Johnson

administration 14

Presidential commissions of 1960s • President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice produced

report, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (1967) – “Many Americans think controlling crime is solely the task of the police, the courts, and corrections

agencies. In fact, as the Commission’s report makes clear, crime cannot be controlled without the interest and participation of schools, businesses, social agencies, private groups and individual citizens.”

• National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (1969) – Established task forces on how best to prevent crime and violence – Major conclusion was that host of criminogenic risk factors “pulled” toward crime:

• “To be a young, poor male; to be undereducated and without means of escape from an oppressive urban environment; to want what the society claims is available (but mostly to others); to see around oneself illegitimate and often violent methods being used to achieve material success; and to observe others using these means with impunity – all this is to be burdened with an enormous set of influences that pull many toward crime and delinquency.”

• National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals (1973) – Funded with $1.75 million, first formulations of national criminal justice standards and goals for crime

reduction and prevention at the State and local level – Issued six reports with “best practices” authored by task forces on major topics, building on prior

reports • (1) A National Strategy to Reduce Crime • (2) Criminal Justice System • (3) Police • (4) Courts • (5) Corrections • (6) Community Crime Prevention

15

“Tough on crime” era • Crime began to rise during 1960s, and continued

to rise dramatically through 1990s – Research on crime control efforts by the CJ system generally

showed little effect – Martinson (1974) report concluded that “nothing works” in prison

rehabilitation

– Growing prison population not accompanied by reductions in crime and violence

• Overt politicization of crime in the 1980s – Political suicide to be perceived as “soft on crime”

– Crime prevention (as opposed to punishment) became seen as “soft”

Violent crime trends (UCR)

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012 2017 2019

Violent index crimes (per 100K)

Property crime trends (UCR)

0

1000

2000

3000

4000

5000

6000

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012 2017 2019

Property index crimes (per 100K)

Violent crime trends (NCVS)

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018

Personal victimizations (per1000)

Property crime trends (NCVS)

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

400

1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018

Household victimizations (per 1000)

The 1994 crime bill • Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of

1994 – Passed under Clinton administration, largely written by Senator Joe

Biden (Delaware)

• Largest crime bill in US history – Provided $10.8 billion funding for 100K new state and local

police officers, $9.7 billion for new prisons, $2.6 billion for FBI/DEA, and $6.1 billion for prevention programs

• Prevention funding was controversial – Created a rift between crime control—“tough on crime”—and crime

prevention—“soft on crime” • E.g., preventing juvenile delinquency through “midnight basketball”

became a running joke

Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn’t, What’s Promising (1997)

• Report commissioned by Congress to evaluate more than 500 crime prevention programs – > $4 billion of federal funding spend on the evaluated

programs • “The Preventing Crime report and its subsequent public and scholarly

attention served to . . . shift the debate away from the perception that support for crime prevention is tantamount to being soft on crime . . . . – “The report put the focus squarely on what scientific evidence had to say about

effectiveness. It made no room for moralizing about crime or politicizing what works or does not work; it sought to make the facts – arrived at by scrupulous evaluation – the centerpiece of the policy-making process.” (Welsh & Pfeffer, 2013, p. 546)

22

Evidence-based crime prevention • The 21st century has seen growing interest in an

evidence-based approach to crime policy – Embraces prevention science’s commitment to the use of the

most scientifically valid methods to evaluate programs • “What it adds is the utilization of accumulated research

evidence on effectiveness. It seeks to increase the influence of research on policy or, in a manner of speaking, put systematic research evidence at center stage in the policy- making process” (Welsh & Pfeffer, 2013, p. 545)

23

Journal of Criminal Justice 40 (2012) 128–133

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

Journal of Criminal Justice

Science, politics, and crime prevention: Toward a new crime policy

Brandon C. Welsh a,b,⁎, David P. Farrington c

a School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115 b Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1008 BH c Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, United Kingdom, CB3 9DA

⁎ Corresponding author at: School of Criminology and University, Churchill Hall, 360 Huntington Avenue, Bost

E-mail address: [email protected] (B.C. Welsh).

0047-2352/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All doi:10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2012.01.008

a b s t r a c t

a r t i c l e i n f o

Available online 6 March 2012

Objective: Crime prevention has entered a new, more robust phase of research activity and holds greater relevance to policy and practice today than ever before. It stands as an important component of an overall strategy to reduce crime. This paper sets out a modest proposal for a new crime policy to help build a

safer, more sustainable society. Materials and methods: Narrative meta-review of the crime prevention literature. Results: The central features include: ensuring that the highest quality scientific research is at center stage in the policy-making process; overcoming the “short-termism” politics of the day; and striking a greater bal- ance between crime prevention and crime control. Both simulation studies and experiences in Washington State show that early prevention can reduce crime, save money, and reduce the need for costly incarceration. Conclusions: Quality criminological research should be used to strike a policy balance between crime prevention and crime control.

© 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Crime prevention in the United States and in other Western na- tions has come a long way as an alternative approach to the dominant crime control model (Visher & Weisburd, 1998; Waller, 2006). It is not an overstatement to say that crime prevention is an important component of an overall strategy to reduce crime (Clarke, 2009; Welsh, 2011). There is a growing body of research on the effective- ness of crime prevention, covering a wide range of prevention modal- ities and program types, and spanning the full spectrum of prevention strategies: developmental, situational, and community (Welsh & Farrington, 2012). Support for crime prevention also comes from many other bodies of research, including public opinion (Cullen et al., 2007; Roberts & Hastings, 2012) and economic analysis (Drake, Aos, & Miller, 2009), not to mention an important body of work on the undesirable consequences of mass incarceration and other punitive policies (Clear, 2007; Tonry, 2004). This work has had the effect of drawing greater attention to the need for prevention.

Crime prevention refers to efforts to prevent crime or criminal offending in the first instance – before the act has been committed. It often takes place or is initiated outside of the formal justice system. In

Criminal Justice, Northeastern on, MA 02115.

rights reserved.

this respect, prevention is considered the fourth pillar of crime reduc- tion, alongside the crime-control institutions of police, courts, and cor- rections (Waller, 2006). This distinction views crime prevention as an alternative approach to these more traditional responses to crime.

An influential classification system distinguishes three alternative crime prevention strategies (Tonry & Farrington, 1995). Develop- mental prevention refers to interventions designed to prevent the development of criminal potential in individuals, especially those targeting risk and protective factors discovered in studies of human development (Tremblay & Craig, 1995; Farrington & Welsh, 2007). Situational prevention refers to interventions designed to prevent the occurrence of crimes by reducing opportunities and increasing the risk and difficulty of offending (Clarke, 2009; Cornish & Clarke, 2003). Community prevention refers to interventions designed to change the social conditions and institutions (e.g., families, peers, so- cial norms, clubs, and organizations) that influence offending in resi- dential communities (Hope, 1995).

This paper takes as its starting point the growing and wide- ranging research on the benefits of crime prevention. It also acknowl- edges that crime prevention is no panacea; it does not work for every- one or in every context. Indeed, there are gaps in knowledge and more attention needs to be paid to how crime prevention programs are implemented and disseminated for wider public use (Homel & Homel, 2012). But, as The Oxford Handbook of Crime Prevention (Welsh & Farrington, 2012) shows, crime prevention is at an especial- ly healthy stage of development and it is important to begin to wrestle with how crime prevention can further contribute to local,

129B.C. Welsh, D.P. Farrington / Journal of Criminal Justice 40 (2012) 128–133

state, and national efforts to reduce crime most effectively and cost- effectively.

This paper sets out a modest proposal for a new crime policy to help build a safer, more sustainable society. The central features in- clude: ensuring that the highest quality scientific research is at center stage in the policy-making process; overcoming the “short-termism”

politics of the day; and striking a greater balance between crime prevention and crime control.

Prevention science and evidence-based policy

Prevention science and evidence-based policy are two contempo- rary developments that have strengthened crime prevention. Both are best understood as frameworks that can be applied across a wide range of contexts, settings, and populations. At their core, each is concerned that the highest standards of science should be used to advance knowledge and improve public policy.

Prevention science has its roots in public health, and begins with a commitment to prevention that is grounded in the developmental ep- idemiology of specific health or social problems. In the case of youth violence prevention, for example, “Prevention science has provided a bridge between an understanding of how chronic violence develops and how prevention programs can interrupt that development” (Dodge, 2001, p. 63). Only the highest quality methods of scientific investigation are employed. Prospective longitudinal studies are used to identify the most important risk factors for offending. Ran- domized experimental and rigorous quasi-experimental designs are used to evaluate the efficacy and effectiveness of prevention pro- grams designed to tackle these factors. Prevention science is also characterized by a number of “logically sequential stages in the gen- eral development of prevention programs” (Dodge, 2001, p. 64).

The idea of an alternative, non-punitive response to the preven- tion of delinquency and offending is a crucial element in prevention science's mission. Its influence on crime prevention can be found in its adherence to the highest scientific standards, its effort to base prevention on epidemiology, and its focus on the process of taking prevention programs to scale and studying how to mitigate the prob- lem of attenuation of program effects (Welsh, Sullivan, & Olds, 2010).

An evidence-based approach to crime policy embraces prevention science's commitment to the use of the most scientifically valid stud- ies to evaluate programs. What it adds is the utilization of accumulat- ed scientific research evidence on effectiveness. It seeks to increase the influence of research on policy.

At the heart of the evidence-based model is the notion that “we are all entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts” (Sherman, 1998, p. 4). Use of opinions instead of facts to guide crime policy may cause iatrogenic effects (McCord, 2003), may lead to the implementation of programs that do not work at all, may waste scarce public resources (Drake et al., 2009), and may divert policy attention from the most important crime priorities of the day (Mears, 2007, 2010).

Support for an evidence-based approach to crime policy in the U.S. and elsewhere is growing (Welsh & Farrington, 2011). This growth has been fostered by a number of recent developments, including a movement toward an evidence-based approach in other disciplines such as medicine, education, and the social sciences more generally (Sherman, 2003); large-scale reviews of “what works” in crime pre- vention and criminal justice (Sherman et al., 1997, 2006; Welsh & Farrington, 2012); and, most recently, the establishment of the Camp- bell Collaboration and its Crime and Justice Group, which aims to carry out and disseminate reviews of the effectiveness of criminolog- ical interventions (Farrington, Weisburd, & Gill, 2011).

The U.S. interest, as well as the interest of many other Western countries, in an evidence-based approach to crime policy was advanced with the release of Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising, by Sherman and his colleagues (1997).2

This report was commissioned by the U.S. Congress as an indepen- dent, scientifically rigorous assessment of more than $4 billion worth of federally-sponsored anti-crime programs. Using a scientific methods scale to rate program evaluations combined with a vote- counting review method, conclusions were drawn about the effects of the full range of crime prevention and criminal justice measures.

The evidence-based approach has had some interesting influences thus far on how crime prevention is viewed in the U.S. The Preventing Crime report and its subsequent public and scholarly attention served to shift the debate away from the perception that support for crime prevention is tantamount to being soft on crime, which was at the heart of the opposition to the prevention spending in the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (see Currie, 1998). The report put the focus squarely on what scientific evidence had to say about effectiveness. It left no room for moralizing about crime or politicizing what works or does not work; it sought to make the facts – arrived at by scrupulous evaluation – the centerpiece of the policy-making process. Of course, it would be misleading to suggest that everyone viewed the report and its follow-up studies in this fa- vorable light (e.g., Haggerty, 2008; Pawson, 2006).

Political challenges and some remedies

Integral to the evidence-based paradigm, whether in the context of crime prevention, policing, sentencing, or correctional treatment, is the notion that decision-makers are rational actors who will take account of the best available information in making public policy. This is not to suggest that, after the release of new scientific evidence, showing that a crime reduction policy works, does not work, or causes harm, government or political leaders will immediately em- brace the evidence and change policies wholesale. It is of course wholly naïve to think that the evidence base on the effectiveness of a particular program or strategy will be the sole influence on policy. There are many considerations involved in the policy-making pro- cess, from more global issues to do with the relative importance of crime in society to particular views or biases held about one approach compared with another.

What is really at issue here is the need to increase the influence of research on policy or, in a manner of speaking, put systematic re- search evidence at center stage in the policy-making (and political) process. In addition to the above considerations, we must also be mindful that the linkages between research and policy are sometimes less than clear, with evaluation influence on policy taking a number of different routes. This is a central finding from the research utilization literature (Tonry & Green, 2003).

As part of this literature, Weiss and her colleagues (2005) have delineated a number of ways that evaluation research can exert influence on policy decisions. The one that is most applicable to evidence-based policy is what the authors refer to as “imposed use.” In this case, state or federal government agencies mandate that for any local program to receive funding it first needs to be evidence- based, which usually comes in the form of a list of best practices that are put together and approved by the agency. One example is the “list of exemplary and promising prevention programs” of the U.S. Department of Education's Safe and Drug-Free Schools program. Programs not on this list are not eligible for government funding. Other research by Weiss et al. (2008) on the application of this list with respect to DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) and other school-based substance abuse prevention programs showed some ad- vantages and shortcomings. In concluding that the imposed use of evaluation is in need of some tinkering, the researchers were also clear in asserting that, “giving evaluation more clout is a worthwhile way to increase the rationality of decision making” (Weiss et al., 2008, p. 29).

This last point is further support for our contention that the move- ment toward rational and evidence-based crime policy is here to stay.

130 B.C. Welsh, D.P. Farrington / Journal of Criminal Justice 40 (2012) 128–133

It does not appear to be yet another fad or fleeting idea in the annals of crime policy. While there remains much to be done to elevate sys- tematic evidence into center stage in the policy-making process, the good news is that this movement is well under way. In England and Wales, there is a correctional services accreditation panel that spec- ifies accredited programs that can be used in prison and probation settings (see Lösel, in press).

As mentioned, one challenge that confronts crime prevention is the worry by politicians that they may be perceived as soft on crime by supporting prevention instead of law and order measures. As Tonry (2011, pp. 139–140) reminds us this view has persisted despite two decades of declining crime rates and increasing imprisonment rates, and is shared by Republicans and Democrats alike. It is rooted in a number of belief systems. One of these involves entrenched, mor- alistic views about crime. Here, crime is seen as evil, with redemption only achievable through extreme state-sanctioned deprivations of liberty, sometimes including even the death penalty. There is no room for prevention. It is held that the general deterrent effect of harsh sanctions will be sufficient to persuade others from embarking on a life of crime.

The most widespread justification for the concern about being seen as soft on crime is that politicians think that citizens are punishment-oriented. Politicians who support “get tough” responses to crime (and rebuke prevention) have long claimed to have the full backing of the general public, and say that it is indeed the public that demands more punitive sanctions such as military-style boot camps, mandatory minimum sentences, and three strikes laws. To be sure, there is public support for “get tough” responses to crime, es- pecially for violent acts. But this support does not reach the levels often claimed and, more importantly, is not as high when punishment is compared to alternatives such as rehabilitation or treatment for offenders or early childhood or youth prevention programs (Cullen et al., 2007). This exaggeration of the punitiveness of the general pub- lic on the part of politicians and others has become known as the “mythical punitive public” (Roberts, 2004). Indeed, new research pro- vides evidence to substantiate that the “punitive public” is mythical rather than actual – that is, citizens are highly supportive of crime prevention and are even willing to pay more in taxes to support these programs compared to other responses (Roberts & Hastings, 2012).

Encouragingly, the evidence-based movement may go some way toward breaking down or tempering the soft-on-crime concern. In- stead of emotions and opinions, facts and evidence are becoming the new currency in federal, state, and local debates about crime policy (Greenwood, 2006). There is an emphasis on taking account of financial costs and benefits in formulating public policies. This is happening for many reasons, including a renewed commitment to science in the U.S. and the dedicated work of various international and national groups, such as the Campbell Collaboration, the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, and the Association for the Advancement of Evidence Based Practice. It may take some time but the slogan “get tough on crime” may one day be replaced with “get smart on crime,” or “reduce crime in the most cost-effective way.” The public should demand that their tax dollars are invested more efficiently.

Yet another challenge that confronts crime prevention, especially developmental and sometimes community approaches, is that the benefits from reduced crime may not be apparent for a number of years – at least until children reach adolescence. This can conflict with the short time horizons of politicians; that is, programs that show results only in the longer term can be unappealing to those who have to face reelection every few years. One potential remedy to this situation is to educate politicians about the many other desirable effects that these prevention programs can produce in the short-term. For example, preschool intellectual enrichment, child skills training, and parent training programs show improvements in school readiness and school performance on the part of the children,

greater employment and educational opportunities for parents, and increased family stability (Farrington & Welsh, 2007; see also Schindler & Yoshikawa, 2012). These short-term benefits alone can translate into substantial cost savings for government (Ludwig & Phillips, 2008).

The problem of the short time horizons of politicians is not restricted to crime policy. Ludwig (2012) suggests applying ideas from other policy areas to crime prevention. For example, in the area of government budgeting, this same problem has led to calls for “‘intergenerational accounting’ – the idea that we should think about government expenditure and revenues as flows over long pe- riods of time, and make clear to the public the impact that different policy decisions will have on these long-term flows” (p. 37). Another suggestion is to expand the definition of Gross Domestic Product in order to take account of non-monetary considerations, such as the “value of a country's stock of environmental quality” (p. 37). When people invest, they are not necessarily looking for quick results but for long-term benefits. Government policymakers should also be able to defer gratification, plan for the future, and think about what legacy they are leaving to the next generation.

A new crime policy

In a recent thought experiment, Durlauf and Nagin (2011) argue that a reduction in the use of imprisonment can lead to a reduction in crime rates. This is possible, they contend, if the cost savings from this policy change are allocated to hot spots policing and other effective policing strategies (see Braga & Weisburd, 2010; Skogan & Frydl, 2004). This is an important piece of scholarship and it has great relevance to U.S. crime policy. For sure, policing and corrections are the two most dominant crime reduction approaches in this coun- try, accounting for $168 billion (in 2006 dollars) or almost four-fifths of annual criminal justice spending (Perry, 2008). Completely absent, however, is any consideration of the benefit that crime prevention holds for lowering crime rates and reducing government spending on criminal justice.

To be fair, the authors make passing reference to the effectiveness of early childhood development programs in reducing criminality (e.g., Piquero et al., 2009). Nonetheless, what makes this an important omission from their study is that what is really needed is a crime pol- icy that strikes a greater balance between prevention and control. Policing may indeed represent a better alternative than the present practice of mass incarceration in the U.S., but it is often another form of crime control, dealing with offenders after the fact. In some respects these arguments are analogous to shifting resources from increasing incarceration rates to correctional treatment without any plan to stop the development of offenders and their subsequent flow into the system. There also needs to be a focus on the front end, without which we surely are just playing at the margins.

Some studies have compared the effectiveness of crime preven- tion and crime control strategies. The most well-known of these was conducted by the RAND Corporation (Greenwood et al., 1998). It assessed the cost-effectiveness (i.e., serious crimes prevented per $1 million spent, using 1993 dollars) of California's three strikes law compared with four prevention and intervention strategies with demonstrated efficacy in reducing crime: a combination of home vis- iting and day care; parent training; graduation incentives; and moni- toring and supervising delinquent youths. Each of these alternatives was based on well-known experiments with small to moderately large sample sizes.

The first step in the modeling process was the estimation of pro- gram costs and crime reduction effectiveness of the four alternative interventions. In order to conduct fair comparisons among these in- terventions and with the three strikes law, three main “penalties” were assigned to the former. These were: (a) targeting: the propor- tion of the population targeted by the program who are likely to

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become involved in criminal behavior (e.g., children of low income, teenage mothers for the home visiting/day care program); (b) decay: the loss of effectiveness after treatment ends; and (c) scale-up: the decrease in program effects when a program is expand- ed statewide (Greenwood et al., 1998, p. 16).

The study found that parent training and graduation incentives were the most cost-effective of the five programs, while home visit- ing/day care was the least cost-effective. The number of serious crimes prevented per $1 million was estimated at: 258 for graduation incentives, 157 for parent training, 72 for delinquent supervision, 60 for the three strikes law, and 11 for home visiting/day care.3 It is important to comment briefly on the poor showing of the home visit- ing/day care program. The small number of crimes prevented per $1 million is attributable to two key factors (a third factor is discussed below): first, the long-term delay in realizing an impact on crime and, second, the high cost of delivering the services, particularly the day care component, which was estimated at $6,000 per child per year over a four-year period.

The other major study – a thought experiment like Durlauf and Nagin's (2011) – was carried out by Donohue and Siegelman (1998). The authors set out to investigate if the “social resources that will be expended a decade or more from now on incarcerating today's youngsters could instead generate roughly comparable levels of crime prevention if they were spent today on the most promising social programs” (1998, p. 31, emphasis in original). These included a range of early prevention programs and the national Job Corps pro- gram, and most of the estimates were based on well-known experi- ments or quasi-experiments with small to large sample sizes.

The first step involved estimating the crime reduction and cost as- sociated with a continuation of the U.S. prison policy of the day. On the basis of a 50% increase in the prison population over a 15-year pe- riod (assumed from the level in December 1993 and trends at the time), it was estimated that this policy would cost $5.6 to $8 billion (in 1993 dollars) and result in a 5% to 15% reduction in crime. This recognizes the incapacitative effect of prisons on active offenders (see DeLisi, 2005). The next steps involved estimating the percentage of the cohort of 3-year-olds who could be served by allocating the saved prison costs (the $5.6 to $8 billion) to the different social pro- grams and then estimating the crime reduction benefits that could be achieved by selected programs under a range of targeting condi- tions (i.e., the worst 6% of delinquents, males only, and young black males only). Two early developmental prevention programs were se- lected: the Perry Preschool project (Schweinhart, Barnes, & Weikart, 1993) and the Syracuse University Family Development Research program (Lally, Mangione, & Honig, 1988). It is at this stage that the authors applied a scaling-up penalty of 50% to each program. This had the result of lowering Perry's crime reduction effectiveness from 40% to 20% and Syracuse's effectiveness from 70% to 35%.

In the final analysis it was found that both prevention programs could achieve reductions in crime that were within the range of what was expected from a continuation of the prison policy of the day (5% to 15%) even if they were allocated the lower bound amount that would have been spent on prisons ($5.6 billion). This was consid- ered the worst case scenario. In the best case scenario, which did not include the scaling-up penalty and allocated the upper bound amount of prison spending ($8 billion), the Perry and Syracuse programs pro- duced crime reductions of 21% and 26%, respectively – better than in- creasing the prison population.

Interestingly, Nagin (2001) reexamined these two studies. While he praised their innovative methods, one of his main concerns was that they failed to consider the full potential benefits of the early pre- vention programs. By its very nature, developmental crime preven- tion is designed to improve individual functioning across multiple domains. Indeed, this is precisely what extant evaluations of the in- cluded programs have shown. But Greenwood et al. and Donohue and Siegelman only considered the benefits following from lower

rates of delinquent and criminal activity. Educational, employment, family, health, and other important benefits were not taken into ac- count, which had the effect of greatly reducing the true economic re- turn to society of these programs. A more recent benefit-cost analysis by Donohue (2009) embraces this view; he concludes that “there is reason to believe that alternatives to incarceration might well be more socially attractive than our current reliance on incarceration as the predominant crime-fighting strategy” (p. 308).

Early crime prevention programs can also reduce serious crimes such as homicide. Ebel, Rivara, Loeber, and Pardini estimated the extent to which the U.S. homicide rate might be reduced by imple- menting early childhood programs on a national basis (see Loeber & Farrington, 2011). They especially focused on the Nurse-Family Partnership (Eckenrode et al., 2010), the Perry Preschool Project (Schweinhart et al., 2005), and Multisystemic Therapy (Sawyer & Borduin, 2011). They estimated the effects of these programs on arrests for violence, combined this information with data from the Pittsburgh Youth Study on the probability of violence being followed by a homicide conviction, and scaled up to national U.S. homicide figures. The effectiveness of the programs was scaled down by half to allow for attenuation of effects from a demonstration project to national implementation (see Welsh et al., 2010).

Based on 2002 figures, it was estimated that these three early in- tervention programs, implemented nationally and consecutively, could prevent one-third of all homicides in the United States. The pro- grams might save 4,200 lives and nearly 80,000 years of potential life lost. Furthermore, they might save almost 225,000 person-years of in- carceration and over $5 billion per year. Therefore, there is great scope for early intervention to prevent not only common crimes but also the most serious and uncommon crimes such as murder. Impor- tantly, these cost savings can be tremendously influential with fiscal conservatives (Greenwood, 2006).

These studies make a strong case for the need to strike a greater balance between crime prevention and crime control. But perhaps the strongest case for a balanced portfolio of prevention and control comes from the real-life policy experiment that is underway in Washington State. In the mid-1990s, the legislature commissioned the Washington State Institute for Public Policy to assess the effec- tiveness and economic efficiency of a range of crime prevention and criminal justice programs that could be implemented in the state (Drake et al., 2009). The researchers referred to their methodological approach as “bottom line” financial analysis, which they considered to parallel the approach used by investors who study rates of return on financial investments. The research began with a literature review of high quality programs. A five-step analytical model was then used to estimate each program's economic contribution.4

What started out as a highly rigorous yet fairly modest policy re- search initiative soon turned into the most comprehensive approach to develop evidence-based crime policy in the U.S. and one revered by other states and even countries (Aldhous, 2007; Greenwood, 2006). Following the institute's first set of reports the legislature au- thorized a number of system-level randomized controlled trials of the most effective and cost-beneficial juvenile and adult intervention programs. The results of these trials helped to refine local practice and service delivery. By 2006, the institute had systematically reviewed and analyzed 571 of the highest-quality evaluations of crime preven- tion and criminal justice programs, estimated the benefits and costs of effective programs, and “projected the degree to which alternative ‘portfolios’ of these programs could affect future prison construction needs, criminal justice costs, and crime rates in Washington” (Aos, Miller, & Drake, 2006, p. 1). This most recent work was commissioned by the legislature to address the projected need for two new state prisons by 2020 and possibly a third by 2030. Based on a moderate- to-aggressive portfolio of evidence-based programs (i.e., $63- $171 million expenditure in the first year), it was found that a signif- icant amount of future prison construction costs could be avoided,

132 B.C. Welsh, D.P. Farrington / Journal of Criminal Justice 40 (2012) 128–133

about $2 billion saved by taxpayers, and crime rates lowered slightly (Aos et al., 2006, p. 16).

In 2007, the Washington State legislature abandoned plans to build one of these two prisons and in its place approved a sizeable spending package ($48 million) on evidence-based crime prevention and intervention programs (Drake et al., 2009). What makes this ini- tiative even more important is that it was a political decision that was made on the basis of scientific research. This research showed that other strategies were more effective than prison and would generate substantial financial savings to theWashington State government and taxpayers.

Building a safer, more sustainable society will require using the best available research evidence, overcoming political barriers, and striking a greater balance between crime prevention and crime con- trol. This is within our reach and the work has already begun. In the most optimistic scenario, what Washington State is doing today, the world will be doing tomorrow. But let us be clear, without a sound focus on crime prevention, any crime policy will not be worth the paper it is written on.

Notes

1. Crime prevention programs are not designed with the intention of excluding justice personnel. Many types of prevention programs, especially those that focus on adolescents, involve justice personnel such as district attorneys, police, or probation of- ficers (see Farrington, in press). In these cases, justice personnel work in close collab- oration with personnel from such areas as education, health care, recreation, and social services.

2. This report was later updated by Sherman et al. (2006). 3. Crimes prevented were not calculated on a per annum basis. Instead they repre-

sent the predicted total effect produced by each program on each California birth co- hort (an estimated 150,000 at-risk children born in California every year).

4. The first step of the model involves estimating each program's effectiveness. Step two looks at whether previously measured program results can be replicated in the state. Step three involves an assessment of program costs, estimated on the basis of what it would cost the Washington State government to implement a similar pro- gram (if the program was not already operating in the state). Step four involves mon- etizing each program's effects on crime. Savings to the criminal justice system and crime victims are estimated. The final step involves calculating the economic contribu- tion of the program, expressed as a benefit-to-cost ratio. Based on this, programs can be judged on their independent and comparative monetary value.

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