Using Material from Item a and Elsewhere, Assess Sociological Views of Crime Reduction Strategies.

Using material from item A and elsewhere, assess sociological views of abuse decrement st investgies. (21 marks). There ar numerous different types of strategies for crime reduction. These include crime legal profession tactics which be suitable for whole societies, and also forms of punishment which atomic number 18 suitable for individuals. Crime prevention strategies include situational crime prevention, environmental crime prevention, and social and community crime prevention. Ron Clark describes situational crime prevention as a pre-emptive barbel that relies, not on improving society or its institutions, but simple on reducing opportunities for crime.He identifies three features of measures aimed at situational crime prevention, firstly that they are directed at specific crimes, that they involve managing or altering the immediate environment of the crime and lastly that they aim at increasing the effort and risks of committing crime and reducing the rewards. For example , target hardening measures such as increased surveillance in shops via CCTV or security guards increases the effort a shoplifter needs to make. vestigial situation crime prevention approaches is an rational choice theory.This is the view that criminals act rationally, weighing up the costs and benefits of a crime opportunity before decision making whether to commit it. This contrasts with theories that stress root causes such as capitalist exploitation. Clarke argues that most theories offer no realistic declarations to crime. The most obvious things to do, he argues, is to focus on the immediate crime situation, since this is where possibility for prevention is greatest. Most crime is opportunistic, so we need to reduce the opportunities.One criticism of situation crime prevention measures is that they do not reduce crime, they simply displace it. For example, Chaiken et al found that a crackdown on subway robberies in tender York merely displaced them to the streets above. Al though displacement can be in several forms, spatial, temporal, target, tactical and functional. However other than the criticism of displacement, situation crime prevention methods are also criticised as it tends to focus on opportunistic superficial street crimes. It ignores white collar, corporate and state crime, which are costly and harmful.Environmental crime prevention is based on the phase of broken windows, Wilson and Kelling use this point to floor for all the various signs of disorder and lack of concern for others that are found in some neighbourhoods. They argue that leaving broken windows unrepaired sends out a signal that no one cares. In these neighbourhoods, there is an absence of both formal social control and informal control. The police are only pertain with heavy crime and turn a blind eye to petty nuisance behaviour, while respectable members of the community feel intimidated and powerless. Without curative action, the worry deteriorates.As item A shows t his causes families and respectable people to move out and the area becomes a magnet for deviants. Wilson and Kellings key idea is that disorder and the absence of controls leads to crime. Their solution is to crack down on any disorder using a twofold strategy. First an environmental improvement strategy that any broken window must be repaired immediately, otherwise more will follow and the neighbourhood will be on the slide. Secondly the police must adopt a zero perimeter policing strategy. Instead of merely reacting to crime, the must proactively tackle even the slightest sign of disorder, even if it is not criminal.This would halt neighbourhood decline and prevent serious crime taking root. Great success has been claimed for zero tolerance policing, especially in New York. Programs that were set up to tackle subway graffiti, fare dodging, do drugs dealing and begging proved successful, from this in New York there was a significant fall in crime. However, it is not clear how far zero tolerance was the cause of the improvements, as the NYPD previously benefited from 7000 extra officers as well as there was also a general decline in the crime rate in major US cities at the time, including ones where police did not adopt a zero tolerance policy.Nonetheless, zero tolerance has been very influential globally, including the UK, where it has influenced New Labours anti-social behaviour policies. In contrast to Wilson and Kellings approach, social and community prevention strategies place the emphasis firmly on the potential wrongdoer and their social context. The aim of these strategies is to remove the conditions that predispose individuals to crime in the first place. These are longer-term strategies, since they attempt to tackle the root causes of offending, rather than simply removing opportunities for crime.Because the causes of crime are often rotted in social conditions such as poverty, more general social reform programmes addressing these issues may hav e a crime prevention role, even if this is not their main focus. All three approaches discussed above take for granted the nature and definition of crime. They generally focus on fairly low-altitude and/or interpersonal crimes of violence. This disregards the crimes of the powerful and environmental crimes. The definition of the crime problem reflects the priorities of politicians and agencies tasked with crime prevention.