Reading summary #2 short assignment

Crime Prevention

Theoretical Approaches

1

What is crime prevention?

• To answer, must first discuss punishment

• Some punishment, historically and today, intends to prevent crime –But another view of crime prevention is that

it operates outside the CJ system • I.e., prevention without punishment

Prevention or punishment? • Retribution

– Punishment aims to provide “just deserts”

• Deterrence – General deterrence

• Punishment prevents public from committing crime

– Specific deterrence • Punishment prevents offender from committing future crimes

• Incapacitation – Punishment aims to prevent crime for duration of incapacitation

• Rehabilitation – Punishment aims to prevent offender from committing future

crimes through treatment

Deterrence: Prevention through punishment?

• General deterrence theory – The likelihood of future crime in general population diminishes as:

• Severity of punishment • Certainty of punishment • Celerity of punishment

– Assumes a “rational choice” mechanism

• Specific deterrence theory – The likelihood of recidivism (by specific offender) diminishes as…

• …the severity of punishment increases – Assumes a differential reinforcement mechanism

• Incapacitation – Crime is reduced to the extent that criminals are incapacitated and cannot

re-offend while incapacitated • Assumes that crime in community is not perfectly replaced by others

Rehabilitation: Prevention through treatment?

• The “medical model of crime” –Crime is a social disease and criminals are

victims of various social pathologies • E.g., drug addiction (drug counseling),

unemployment (work training programs), inability to self-regulate (cognitive-behavior therapy)

–Mechanism is that causes of crime can be “treated” as an illness might be treated

General deterrence • Three mechanisms

– Severity • More severe punishments are more likely to deter people

– Certainty • More certain punishments are more likely to deter people

– Celerity • More swift punishments are more likely to deter people

• Impact of severity of sanctions on crime – Evidence suggests little or no connection between sanction severity and

general crime rates • E.g., death penalty does not lead to lower homicide rates

• Impact of certainty of sanctions on crime – Some evidence suggests that certainty of punishment decreases crime

• E.g., more police does lead to lower crime rates, especially crime that is not spontaneous – This appears related to the effect of perceptions of risk of apprehension

Specific deterrence • Imprisonment

– Most research has looked at the effects of imprisonment on recidivism • Little evidence that imprisonment reduces subsequent offending

– Criminogenic effect may outweigh any specific deterrence effects • I.e., imprisonment actually makes people more likely to offend by exposing them to

criminal peers – Still, difficult to study because we cannot randomly assign punishment

• I.e., how do we know whether a person “would have” re-offended without punishment? – This is called a “counter-factual”

• Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment – Random experiment testing specific deterrence!

• Officers were randomly assigned to arrest or not arrest (e.g., citation, warning) at scene of domestic violence incident.

• Results showed that arrests were strongly associated with lower recidivism – Replications have failed to find the same deterrent effect, however

• Original experiment may have been flawed (e.g., officers volunteered in study, did not always follow experimental protocol, and only followed up on about half of cases)

Incapacitation • Collective incapacitation of imprisonment

– This is the overall effect on crime due to criminals being incapacitated (and not on the street)

– Incapacitation effects are real, but small compared to costs • E.g., a 10 percent reduction in index crime rate might require 30 to 300 percent increase in

imprisonment (depends on state; Mississippi and Massachusetts, respectively)

• Selective incapacitation – Focusing imprisonment on high-risk individuals

• This might be a much more effective strategy than just “imprisoning more” – Evidence is mixed, however

• Greenwood (1982) suggested that by increasing time served for high-risk offenders and decreasing time served for low- and medium-risk offenders, CA could reduce robbery by 15 percent and decrease prison population by 5 percent – This is compared to collective incapacitation, which would require 25 percent increase in prison

population to achieve the same 15 percent reduction in robbery • Others have found that selective incapacitation effects are quite small, however

• Electronic monitoring (EM) – Incapacitation without imprisonment

• Evidence suggests that EM helps reduce reoffending as well as prison/jail overcrowding – Low rate of technical violations and recidivism for offenders under EM

Rehabilitation • Early research suggested that rehabilitation did not reduce recidivism

– “Nothing works” report (Martinson, 1974) • Reviewed 231 studies from 1945–1967

– Concluded that “with few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism”

– Other reviews reached similar conclusions • Wright & Dixon (1976) reviewed 96 studies from 1965–1974 • Gensheimer et al. (1986) reviewed 44 studies from 1967–1983 • Lab & Whitehead (1988) reviewed 55 studies from 1975–1984

• Others suggested rehabilitation might still work – Lipsey & Wilson (1998)

• Reviewed 200 studies and found average 12% reduction in recidivism – Andrews et al. (1990)

• Found clinically “appropriate” programs were more effective than “inappropriate” – Also, rehabilitation may have other positive outcomes

• E.g., academic achievement, psychological adjustment – Still, these are just secondary positive effects…reducing recidivism is the main goal

Rehabilitation • More recent evidence suggests that rehabilitation can “work” under right conditions

– Debate is not “never works” versus “always works” • Instead, question is: “when does it work?

– Programs are more effective when follow “risk, need, responsivity” model (RNR) • Risk = target high-risk offenders • Need = target offender needs (not “one size fits all”) • Responsivity = high treatment fidelity (i.e., the program is implemented properly)

• Aggregate versus individual evaluations – Aggregate-level studies look at whether recidivism levels are lower across large groups of subjects

• Tends to find little-to-no evidence of effectiveness – Individual-level studies look at individuals who participate in programs versus those who do not

• These tend to find more evidence of change, especially with targeted programs with high treatment fidelity

• Cognitive-behavioral interventions – Most promising evidence of effectiveness involves programs that fall under heading of cognitive-behavioral therapies

(CBT) • Multisystemic therapy (MST) is a community-based intervention that attempts to address family, peer, school and community risk

factors – Intensive services delivered by team of trained therapists

• Cognitive Thinking Skills Program (CTSP) focuses on identifying inappropriate decision-making, such as impulsivity and egocentric behavior

– Highly trained staff deliver 70 hours of training to clients • Functional Family Therapy (FFT) involves family therapy sessions with major focus on parent-child relationships

– Delivered over three months in up to 30 one-hour therapy sessions

• Overall, then, does rehabilitation work? – It can work, but often does not

• Part of the problem is that the population of interest are offenders, who have notoriously high recidivism rates – “Tertiary crime prevention can be achieved only in a limited way”

CRIME PREVENTION: AN ALTERNATIVE TO PUNISHMENT

Crime Prevention • Prevention versus control – “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” (Lejins, 1967)

• Four pillars of crime reduction: – Police – Courts – Corrections – Crime prevention

Modern crime prevention Control (Reactive) • Maintain existing level of

criminal behavior – Crime will always exist, so

best society can do is maintain certain level

• CJ system should respond to crime events – Crime control is performed

by the government • Punish those who commit

crime on behalf of public

Prevention (Proactive) • Attempt to eliminate or

mitigate causes of crime – Address distal causes (“root causes”)

or proximate causes (“situational precipitators”) of crime

• Crime prevention largely occurs outside the CJ system – Prevent crime from happening

before the CJ system needs to get involved • Some prevention may also occur

through punishment (e.g., rehabilitation) or preventative police practices (e.g. community policing)

Crime prevention classification: “Public health model”

• Primary prevention – “actions taken to avoid the initial development of the disease or

problem” • E.g., parent training, street lighting, neighborhood watch

• Secondary prevention – “focuses on individuals and situations that exhibit early signs of

disease” • School violence reduction, community policing, drug treatment

• Tertiary prevention – “the disease or problem has already manifested itself ”

• E.g., rehabilitation, specific deterrence, incapacitation (i.e., punishment)

Crime prevention classification: Levels of focus

• Micro-level prevention – “targets individuals, small groups, small areas, or small

businesses”

• Meso-level prevention – “looks at larger communities or neighborhoods, or larger

groups of individuals or businesses”

• Macro-level prevention – “looks at large communities, society as a whole, or other

very large collectives”

Crime prevention classification: Theory driven

• Development crime prevention (DCP) – Addresses developmental causes of crime

• Community crime prevention (CCP) – Addresses community causes of crime

• Situational crime prevention (SCP) – Addresses situational causes of crime

• Criminal justice prevention – Police, courts, and corrections also attempt to prevent future

crime, but often only after some crime has been committed

Why does theory matter? • Why do we want to know the causes of crime? – We might think of crime prevention as the applied arm

of criminological theory

• If crime prevention program fails to reduce crime, two major explanations: – Implementation failure

• The program was poorly implemented – E.g., small anger management program proves effective, but cannot

be successfully “scaled up” to a larger setting

– Theory failure • The program was not based on sound theoretical assumptions

regarding the causes of crime and delinquency – E.g., “Scared Straight”

Developmental crime prevention (DCP) • Individual risk-focused prevention – “Interventions designed to prevent the development of

criminal potential in individuals, especially those targeting risk and protective factors discovered in studies of human development”

• Motivated by developmental (i.e., psycho-social) theories of crime – E.g., self-control theory, social learning theory, multiple pathways

model, cumulative effects model

• Major challenges – What risk factors are causes of crime versus mere correlates?

Community crime prevention (CCP) • Social structural-focused prevention – “Interventions designed to change the social conditions and

institutions (e.g., families, peers, social norms, clubs, organizations) that influence offending in residential communities”

• Motivated by sociological theories of crime – E.g., social disorganization theory, community disorder theory, strain

theory, differential opportunity theory

• Major challenges – What causes community violence? Does change come from without

or within? • Vertical versus horizontal community crime prevention

Situational crime prevention (SCP) • Opportunity-focused prevention – “Interventions designed to prevent the occurrence of crimes

by reducing opportunities and increasing the risk and difficulty of offending”

• Motivated by economic theories of crime – E.g., rational choice theory, routine activities theory, crime pattern

theory (i.e., opportunity theories) • Focuses on the event, not the offender

• Major challenges – Does not address root causes of crime

• “efforts to change the dispositional (or motivational) characteristics of offenders do not belong within the SCP theoretical framework”

Crime Prevention

Developmental Crime Prevention -social learning theory -social control theory -cumulative effect model -life course theories

Community Crime Prevention

-social disorganization theory -strain theory -community disorder theory -community empowerment theory

Situational Crime Prevention

-rational choice perspective -routine activities theory -crime pattern theory