national crime prevention essay

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1 Crime Prevention and Public Policy

Brandon C. Welsh is a Professor of Criminology at Northeastern University, 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 and a Steering Committee member of the Campbell Collaboration Crime and Justice Group.

David P. Farrington is Emeritus Professor of Psychological Criminology in the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, England.

• Published: 18 September 2012
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This article introduces crime prevention, which often refers to the attempts to prevent crime or criminal offending before the actual act has been committed. It studies four main crime prevention strategies, namely developmental prevention , community prevention , situational prevention , and criminal justice prevention . It provides an overview of the key theories that support these strategies and notes some relevant research on effectiveness. This article also considers the development of crime prevention in the United States and identifies several key issues that challenge the prevention of crime.

Crime prevention has come to mean many different things to many different people. Programs and policies designed to prevent crime can include the police making an arrest as part of an operation to deal with gang problems, a court sanction to a secure correctional facility, or, in the extreme, a death penalty sentence. These measures are more correctly referred to as crime control or repression. More often, though, crime prevention refers to efforts to prevent crime or criminal offending in the first instance—before the act has been committed. Both forms of crime prevention share a common goal of trying to prevent the occurrence of a future criminal act, but what further distinguishes crime prevention from crime control is that prevention takes place outside of the confines of the formal justice system. 1 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 these more traditional responses to crime.

In one of the first scholarly attempts to differentiate crime prevention from crime control, Peter 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 was trying to indicate was the notion of “pure” prevention, a view that had long existed in the scholarship and practice of American criminology (Welsh and Pfeffer 2011 ). It is this notion of crime prevention that is the chief concern of this volume.

There are many possible ways of classifying crime prevention programs. 2 An influential scheme distinguishes four major strategies (Tonry and Farrington 1995 b ). 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 development (Tremblay and Craig 1995 ; Farrington and Welsh 2007 ). 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 and increasing the risk and difficulty of offending (Clarke 1995 b ; Cornish and Clarke 2003 ). Criminal justice prevention refers to traditional deterrent, incapacitative, and rehabilitative strategies operated by law enforcement and agencies of the criminal justice system (Blumstein, Cohen, and Nagin 1978 ; MacKenzie 2006 ).

In Building a Safer Society: Strategic Approaches to Crime Prevention , Michael Tonry and David Farrington ( 1995 a ) purposely did not address criminal justice prevention in any substantial fashion. This was because this strategy had been adequately addressed in many other scholarly books and, more importantly, there was a growing consensus for the need for governments to strike a greater balance between these emerging and promising alternative forms of crime prevention and some of the more traditional responses to crime. Also important in their decision to focus exclusively on developmental, community, and situational prevention is the shared focus of the three strategies on addressing the underlying causes or motivations that lead to a criminal event or a life of crime. Crucially, each strategy operates outside of the criminal justice system, representing an alternative, perhaps even a socially progressive, way to reduce crime. For these same reasons, we have adopted a similar approach in this volume.

A chief aim of this essay is to provide some background on this view of crime prevention. It also serves as an overview of the key theories that support these three main crime-prevention strategies, important research on effectiveness, and key issues that challenge the prevention of crime. Several observations and conclusions emerge:

Crime prevention is best viewed as an alternative approach to reducing crime, operating outside of the formal justice system. Developmental, community, and situational strategies define its scope.

Developmental prevention has emerged as an important strategy to improve children’s life chances and prevent them from embarking on a life of crime. The theoretical support for this approach is considerable and there is growing evidence based on the effectiveness of a range of intervention modalities.

Community crime prevention benefits from a sound theoretical base. It seemingly holds much promise for preventing crime, but less is known about its effectiveness. Advancing knowledge on this front is a top priority. Nevertheless, there are a wide range of effective models in community-based substance-use prevention and school-based crime prevention.

The theoretical origins of situational crime prevention are wide ranging and robust. The strategy boasts a growing evidence base of effective programs and many more that are promising. There is also evidence that crime displacement is a rare occurrence.

Crime prevention is an important component of an overall strategy to reduce crime and is widely supported by the public over place and time. A special focus on implementation science and higher quality evaluation designs will further advance crime-prevention knowledge and practice. Striking a greater balance between crime prevention and crime control will go a long way toward building a safer, more sustainable society.

The organization of this essay is as follows. Section I looks at key historical events that have influenced the development of crime prevention in America. Sections II, III, and IV introduce, respectively, the major crime-prevention strategies of developmental, community, and situational prevention. Section V discusses a number of important cross-cutting issues.

I. A Short History of Crime Prevention in America

The modern-day history of crime prevention in America 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 caused by a confluence of factors, including declining public support for the criminal justice system, increasing 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 example, research studies on motorized preventive patrol, rapid response, and criminal investigations—the staples of law enforcement—showed that they had little or 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 observation applied not only to law enforcement but also to the courts and prisons (Tonry and Farrington 1995 b ). Interestingly, this loss of faith in the justice system was not unique to the United States. Similar developments were taking place in Canada, the United Kingdom, and other Western European countries, and for some of the same reasons (Waller 1990 ; Bennett 1998 ).

writing in the mid-1980s, the observations of American urban affairs scholar Paul Lavrakas perhaps best captures this need to move beyond the 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. (1985, p. 110, emphasis in original)

These events, coupled with recommendations of presidential crime commissions of the day—the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice ( 1967 ), chaired by Nicholas Katzenbach, and the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence ( 1969 ), chaired by Milton S. Eisenhower—ushered in an era of innovation of alternative approaches to addressing crime. A few years later, the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals ( 1973 ) sought to reaffirm the role of the community in preventing crime. Operating outside of the purview of the justice system, crime prevention came to be defined as an alternative, non–criminal justice means of reducing crime.

A focus on neighborhood, 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. Nonprofit organizations were the main vehicle used to deliver programs in these substantive areas. A number of situational 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 , p. 11). By some accounts, this urban crime-prevention and reconstruction movement produced 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 ). The approach was popularized with a number of large-scale, multisite programs referred to as comprehensive community initiatives (Hope 1995 ; Rosenbaum, Lurigio, and Davis 1998 ). Examples included T-CAP (Texas City Action Plan to Prevent Crime) and PACT (Pulling America’s Communities Together).

The roots of this comprehensive approach—on the social side, at least—go as far back as the early 1930s, with Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay’s Chicago Area Project (CAP; Shaw and McKay 1942 ). The CAP was designed to produce social change in communities that suffered from high delinquency rates and gang activity. Local civic leaders coordinated social service centers that promoted community solidarity and counteracted social disorganization, and they developed other programs for youths, including school-related activities and recreation. Some evaluations indicated desirable results, but others showed that CAP efforts did little to reduce delinquency (see Schlossman and Sedlak 1983 ).

The New York City–based Mobilization for Youth (MOBY) program of the 1960s is another example of this type of crime-prevention initiative. 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 employment opportunities in the community, coordinated social services, and sponsored social-action groups such as tenants’ committees, legal-action services, and voter registration. But the program ended for lack of funding amid questions about its utility and use of funds.

A newer generation of these programs, which includes the well-established Communities That Care (CTC) strategy developed by David Hawkins and Richard Catalano ( 1992 ), incorporates principles of public health and prevention science—identifying key risk factors for offending and implementing evidence-based prevention methods designed to counteract them. The CTC has become the best developed and tested of these prevention systems.

By the early 1990s, crime prevention found itself in the national spotlight, although not always to the liking of its supporters. This came about during the lead up to and subsequent passage of the federal crime bill of 1994—the most expensive initiative in history (Donziger 1996 ). Known officially as the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, it ultimately became famous for its authorization of funding to put 100,000 new police officers on the streets, as well as infamous for making 60 more federal crimes eligible for the death penalty and authorizing $10 billion for new prison construction. Crime-prevention programs (in the broadest sense) were allocated a sizable $7 billion, but most of this was used on existing federal programs like Head Start in order to keep them afloat (Gest 2001 ).

From the beginning of the bill’s debate on Capitol Hill and across the country, crime prevention—especially programs for at-risk youth—was heavily criticized. The growing political thirst to get tough on juvenile and adult criminals alike, with an array of punitive measures, sought to paint prevention and its supporters as soft on crime. Midnight basketball became their scapegoat. Prevention was characterized as nothing more than pork-barreling—wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars. The end result of all of this was mixed: crime prevention had received substantial funding, but it had been relegated to the margins in the public discourse on crime (Mendel 1995 ).

In more recent years, crime prevention has emerged as an important component of an overall strategy to reduce crime. One reason for this is the widely held view of the need to strike a greater balance between prevention and punishment (Waller 2006 ). Another key reason has to do with a growing body of scientific evidence showing that many different types of crime-prevention programs are effective (Sherman et al. 1997 , 2006 ; Welsh and Farrington 2006 ) and many of these programs save money (Drake, Aos, and Miller 2009 ). Not surprisingly, the economic argument for prevention has attracted a great deal of interest from policymakers and political leaders (Greenwood 2006 ; Mears 2010 ). The recent evidence-based movement (see Welsh and Farrington 2011 ) has figured prominently in these developments in raising the profile of crime prevention.

II. Developmental Crime Prevention

The developmental perspective postulates that criminal offending in adolescence and adulthood is influenced by “behavioral and attitudinal patterns that have been learned during an individual’s development” (Tremblay and Craig 1995 , p. 151). The early years of the life course are most influential in shaping later experiences. As Greg Duncan and Katherine Magnuson ( 2004 , p. 101) note: “Principles of developmental science suggest that although beneficial changes are possible at any point in life, interventions early on may be more effective at promoting well-being and competencies compared with interventions undertaken later in life.” They further state that: “early childhood may provide an unusual window of opportunity for interventions because young children are uniquely receptive to enriching and supportive environments…. As individuals age, they gain the independence and ability to shape their environments, rendering intervention efforts more complicated and costly” (pp. 102–103).

Developmental prevention is informed generally by motivational or human development and life-course theories on criminal behavior, as well as by longitudinal studies that follow samples of young persons from their early childhood experiences to the peak of their involvement with crime in their teens and twenties. Developmental prevention aims to influence the scientifically identified risk factors or “root causes” of delinquency and later criminal offending.

The theoretical foundation of developmental prevention is robust, and is the subject of the two opening essays of this volume. Frank Cullen, Michael Benson, and Matthew Makarios overview the major developmental and life-course theories of offending, with a special interest in how the theories explain why some individuals “are placed on a pathway, or trajectory, toward a life in antisocial conduct and crime.” David Farrington, Rolf Loeber, and Maria Ttofi summarize the most important risk and protective factors for offending. They conclude that impulsiveness, school achievement, child-rearing methods, young mothers, child abuse, parental conflict, disrupted families, poverty, delinquent peers, and deprived neighborhoods are the most important factors that should be targeted in intervention research.

Richard Tremblay and Wendy Craig’s ( 1995 ) classic, sweeping review of developmental crime prevention documented its importance as a major strategy in preventing delinquency and later offending. It also identified three key characteristics of effective developmental prevention programs: (1) they lasted for a sufficient duration—at least one year; (2) they were multimodal, meaning that multiple risk factors were targeted with different interventions; and (3) they were implemented before adolescence. Since then, many other reviews have been carried out to assess the effectiveness of developmental prevention, often focusing on a specific intervention modality. This is the approach taken in the next three essays.

Holly Schindler and Hirokazu Yoshikawa review the evidence on preschool intellectual enrichment programs. They find that preschool interventions focused specifically on child-relevant processes (i.e., cognitive skills, behavior problems, or executive functioning) have shown impressive results. Equally desirable effects on long-term behavioral outcomes, including crime, have been demonstrated by what they call “two-generation” preschool programs, which also include a focus on parenting skills or offer comprehensive family services.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of parent training for children up to age five years, by Alex Piquero and Wesley Jennings, shows that this intervention is effective in reducing antisocial behavior and delinquency. The authors also find that parent-training programs produce a wide range of other important benefits for families, including improved school readiness and school performance on the part of children and greater employment and educational opportunities for parents. Training in child social skills, also known as social competence, is the subject of another systematic review and meta-analysis by Friedrich Lösel and Doris Bender. This type of intervention generally targets the risk factors of impulsivity, low empathy, and egocentrism. The authors find that the overall effect of skills training is desirable and that the most effective programs used a cognitive-behavioral approach and were implemented with older children and higher risk groups who were already exhibiting some behavioral problems.

In the final essay in this section, Deborah Gorman-Smith and Alana Vivolo take on the much broader subject of the prevention of female offending through a developmental approach. This is important because little is known about what may work for this population. Their review of prevention programs confirms that most studies continue to focus on male offending; the mostly poor evaluation designs of existing programs for girls and adolescent females prohibit a valid assessment of effectiveness, and a gendered analysis of mixed programs is often lacking.

III. Community Crime Prevention

More often than not, community-based efforts to prevent crime are thought to be some combination of developmental and situational prevention. Unlike these two crime-prevention strategies, there is little agreement in the academic literature on the definition of community prevention and the types of programs that fall within it. This stems from its early conceptions, with one view focused on the social conditions of crime and the ability of the community to regulate them, and another that “it operates at the level of whole communities regardless of the types of mechanisms involved” (Bennett 1996 , p. 169).

Tim Hope’s ( 1995 ) definition that community crime prevention involves actions designed to change the social conditions and institutions that influence offending in residential communities is by far the most informative. This is not just because it distinguishes community prevention from developmental and situational prevention, but also because it highlights the strength of the community to address the sometimes intractable social problems that lead to crime and violence. This focus on the social factors leaves aside physical redesign concepts, including Oscar Newman’s ( 1972 ) defensible space and C. Ray Jeffery’s ( 1971 ) crime prevention through environmental design. Ron Clarke ( 1992 , 1995 b ) describes how these important concepts are more correctly viewed as contributing to the early development of situational crime prevention.

Numerous theories have been advanced over the years to explain community-level influences on crime and offending and that serve as the basis of community crime-prevention programs (for excellent reviews, see Reiss and Tonry 1986 ; Farrington 1993 ; Sampson and Lauritsen 1994 ; Wikström 1998 ). Steven Messner and Gregory Zimmerman’s essay makes a unique contribution to this body of knowledge. Through a macro-sociological lens, the authors elucidate the distinguishing features and evolution of the community–crime link. In a separate essay, Wesley Skogan expounds on the nature of disorderly behavior and its relevance to crime, communities, and prevention. Of particular importance is the role that disorder may play in the destabilization and decline of neighborhoods.

While there is a rich theoretical and empirical literature on communities and crime, up until recently less was known about the effectiveness of community crime-prevention programs. Review after review on this subject—going back to Rosenbaum’s ( 1988 ) and Hope’s ( 1995 ) classics—have consistently reported that there are no program types with proven effectiveness in preventing crime. Importantly, this was not a claim that nothing works and that community crime prevention should be abandoned (Sherman 1997 ; Welsh and Hoshi 2006 ). Some program types were judged to be promising. 3

More recent research finds that some community-based programs can make a difference in preventing crime. Jens Ludwig and Julia Burdick-Will report on the effects of the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program, which gave vouchers to low-socioeconomic status (often, minority) families to enable them to move to better areas. The large-scale experimental test of the program, which involved 4,600 families in five cities across the country, showed that it was particularly effective in reducing violent crime by youths. The authors also discuss another similar poverty-deconcentration experiment in Chicago that was equally effective.

Christopher Sullivan and Darrick Jolliffe review the effectiveness of two well-known community-based crime-prevention modalities: peer influence and mentoring. They find that programs designed to influence peer risk factors for delinquency are somewhat promising, while mentoring, where the evaluation research is more extensive and robust, can be effective in preventing delinquency. In one systematic review and meta-analysis it was found that mentoring was more effective in reducing offending when the average duration of each contact between mentor and mentee was greater, in smaller scale studies, and when mentoring was combined with other interventions.

Important to all forms of crime prevention, but implicit in community prevention, is the element of partnerships among stakeholder agencies and individuals. Dennis Rosenbaum and Amie Schuck review and assess the literature on comprehensive community partnerships in the context of community crime prevention. They offer several key conclusions, including that these partnerships have wide public appeal, can be difficult to implement because of their complexity, and are most effective when there is a commitment to prevention science and evidence-based practice.

The next two essays diverge slightly from our focus on communities and the prevention of crime, but their importance to the field and this volume cannot be overstated. Abigail Fagan and David Hawkins review the evidence of the effectiveness of community-based substance-use prevention initiatives, while Denise Gottfredson, Philip Cook, and Chongmin Na summarize the evidence of the effectiveness of school-based crime-prevention programs. In both cases, the authors report on a number of successful preventive interventions for youths.

IV. Situational Crime Prevention

Situational prevention stands apart from the other crime-prevention strategies 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 concern with products (e.g., installation of immobilizers on new cars in some parts of Europe, action taken to eliminate cellphone cloning in the United States) and on large-scale systems such as improvements in the banking system to reduce money laundering (Clarke 2009 ).

Situational crime prevention 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). Reducing opportunities for crime is achieved essentially through some modification or manipulation of the physical environment, products, or systems 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 a highly detailed classification system of situational crime prevention, which can further be divided into 25 separate techniques, each with any number of examples of programs (Cornish and Clarke 2003 ). Part of Martha Smith and Ron Clarke’s essay is devoted to an overview of the current classification scheme, as well as the theoretical and practical developments that led to its present form.

The theoretical origins of situational crime prevention are wide-ranging (see Newman, Clarke, and Shoham 1997 ; Garland 2000 ), 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 situation” (Clarke 1995 a , p. 57). Opportunity theory is made up of several more specific theories, including the rational-choice perspective, the routine-activity approach, and crime-pattern theory. According to Smith and Clarke, these three theories have had the greatest influence on the research and practice of situational crime prevention, and they are described in detail in their essay.

Also important to the theoretical basis and the practical utility of situational prevention is the widely held finding that crime is not randomly distributed across a city or community but is, instead, highly concentrated at certain places known as crime “hot spots” (Sherman, Gartin, and Buerger 1989 ). For example, it is estimated that across the United States, 10 percent of the places are sites for around 60 percent of the crimes (Eck 2006 , p. 242). In the same way that individuals can have criminal careers, there are criminal careers for places (Sherman 1995 ). The essay by Anthony Braga reviews the empirical and theoretical evidence on the concentration of crime at places, times, and among offenders.

Fairly or unfairly, situational crime prevention often raises concerns over the displacement of crime. This is the notion that offenders simply move around the corner or resort to different methods to commit crimes once a crime-prevention project has been introduced. 4 Thirty years ago, Thomas Reppetto ( 1976 ) identified five different forms of displacement: temporal (change in time), tactical (change in method), target (change in victim), territorial (change in place), and functional (change in type of crime).

What Clarke ( 1995b ) and many others (e.g., Gabor 1990 ; Hesseling 1995 ) have found and rightly note is that displacement is never 100 percent. Furthermore, a growing body of research has shown that situational measures may instead result in a diffusion of crime-prevention benefits or the “complete reverse” of displacement (Clarke and Weisburd 1994 ). Instead of a crime-prevention project displacing crime, the project’s crime-prevention benefits are diffused to the surrounding area, for example. The essay by Shane Johnson, Rob Guerette, and Kate Bowers, which reports on a meta-analysis of displacement and diffusion, provides confirmatory evidence for these general points. They also find that a “diffusion of benefit is at least as likely as crime displacement.”

Like the other crime-prevention strategies, numerous reviews have been carried out over the years to assess the effectiveness of situational crime-prevention programs. By far the most comprehensive reviews have been conducted by John Eck ( 1997 , 2006 ). They focused on the full range of place-based situational measures implemented in both public and private settings. In keeping with their evidence-based approach, the reviews included only the highest quality evaluations in arriving at conclusions about what works, what does not work, and what is promising. This had the effect of excluding many situational measures with demonstrated preventive effects—including steering-column locks, redesigned credit cards, and exact-change policies (see Clarke 1997 ). Some of these first-generation situational prevention measures were assessed in weak evaluations that could not convincingly support the assertion that the program produced the reported effect.

John Eck and Rob Guerette’s esssay presents an updated and slightly modified review of place-based crime prevention. They assess the evidence for the effectiveness of various situational measures implemented in five common types of places: residences, outside/public, retail, transportation, and recreation. They find a range of situational measures that are effective in preventing different crimes in each of these settings.

Two other essays review the effectiveness of situational measures applied in other contexts. Paul Ekblom looks at the role of the private sector in designing products that work against crime. A number of successful programs are profiled and critical issues discussed in what the author calls the “arms race” between preventers and offenders. Louise Grove and Graham Farrell review the effectiveness of situational measures designed to prevent repeat victimization of residential and commercial burglary and domestic and sexual violence. The authors find that a number of different measures are effective in preventing repeat victimization, especially of residential and commercial burglary.

V. Advancing Knowledge and Building a Safer Society

The final section of this volume looks at a number of key issues that cut across the three crime-prevention strategies. The first of these concerns implementation. Ross Homel and Peter Homel cover the complexities and challenges of implementing crime-prevention programs, as well as the process of moving from small-scale projects to large-scale dissemination and how to mitigate the attenuation of program effects. As with the science of the effectiveness of crime prevention, the authors call for a science of implementation that conforms with principles of good governance.

The second of these key issues concerns evaluation. An evaluation of a crime-prevention program is considered to be rigorous if it possesses a high degree of internal, construct, and statistical conclusion validity 5 (Cook and Campbell 1979 ; Shadish, Cook, and Campbell 2002 ). Put another way, we can have a great deal of confidence in the observed effects of an intervention if it has been evaluated using a design that controls for the major threats to these forms of validity. Experimental and quasi-experimental research methods are the types of designs that can best achieve this, and the randomized controlled experiment is the most convincing method of evaluating crime-prevention programs. This is the subject of David Weisburd and Joshua Hinkle’s essay. Among the many benefits of randomized experiments, the authors note that randomization is the only method of assignment that controls for unknown and unmeasured confounders, as well as those that are known and measured. They also note that the randomized experiment is no panacea and may not be feasible in every instance, and in these cases other high-quality evaluation designs should be employed.

The next essay by Doris MacKenzie, on the effectiveness of correctional treatment, represents a departure from our focus on alternative, non–criminal justice approaches to preventing crime. Its inclusion in this volume is meant to be an important reminder of a key policy conclusion in our field: it is never too early and never too late to effectively intervene to reduce criminal offending (Loeber and Farrington 1998 , forthcoming). While we maintain that it is far more socially worthwhile and just as well as sustainable to intervene before harm is inflicted on a victim and the offender is under the supervision of the justice system, it is important to recognize that this is not always possible; prevention programs are by no means foolproof.

Public opinion on crime prevention is also important to its future development and practice. Encouragingly, there appears to be a great deal of public support for the kinds of crime prevention covered here. Traditional and economic-based opinion polls consistently show that the public supports government spending on crime prevention rather than on more punitive responses, including building more prisons (Cullen et al. 2007 ), and that the public is willing to pay more in taxes if people know that the money will be directed toward crime prevention rather than crime control (Cohen, Rust, and Steen 2006 ; Nagin et al. 2006 ). These and other important findings are at the center of Julian Roberts and Ross Hastings’s review of international trends in public opinion concerning crime prevention.

In the final essay of the volume we set out our modest proposal for a new crime-prevention policy to help build a safer, more sustainable society. Among its central features are the need to overcome the “short-termism” politics of the day; to ensure that the highest quality scientific research is at center stage in political and policy decisions; and to strike a greater balance between crime prevention and crime control.

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 police 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.

Among the most well known classification schemes include those by Brantingham and Faust ( 1976 ), van Dijk and de Waard ( 1991 ), and Ekblom ( 1994 ).

Promising programs are those where the level of certainty from the available scientific evidence is too low to support generalizable conclusions, but where there is some empirical basis for predicting that further research could support such conclusions (Farrington et al. 2006 ).

See Barr and Pease ( 1990 ) for a discussion of “benign” or desirable effects of displacement.

Internal validity refers to how well the study unambiguously demonstrates that an intervention had an effect on an outcome. Construct validity refers to the adequacy of the operational definition and measurement of the theoretical constructs that underlie the intervention and the outcome. Statistical conclusion validity is concerned with whether the presumed cause (the intervention) and the presumed effect (the outcome) are related.

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Wikström, Per-Olof H. 1998 . “Communities and Crime.” In The Handbook of Crime and Punishment , edited by Michael Tonry. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Proactive Policing - Effects on Crime, Communities, and Civil Liberties in the United States

This study reviewed the evidence on: (1) the effects of different forms of proactive policing on crime; (2) whether these approaches are applied in a discriminatory manner; (3) whether these approaches are being used in a legal fashion; and (4) community reaction.

Publications

Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities

Proactive policing, as a strategic approach used by police agencies to prevent crime, is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. It developed from a crisis in confidence in policing that began to emerge in the 1960s because of social unrest, rising crime rates, and growing skepticism regarding the effectiveness of standard approaches to policing. In response, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, innovative police practices and policies that took a more proactive approach began to develop. This report uses the term "proactive policing" to refer to all policing strategies that have as one of their goals the prevention or reduction of crime and disorder and that are not reactive in terms of focusing primarily on uncovering ongoing crime or on investigating or responding to crimes once they have occurred.

Proactive policing is distinguished from the everyday decisions of police officers to be proactive in specific situations and instead refers to a strategic decision by police agencies to use proactive police responses in a programmatic way to reduce crime. Today, proactive policing strategies are used widely in the United States. They are not isolated programs used by a select group of agencies but rather a set of ideas that have spread across the landscape of policing.

Proactive Policing reviews the evidence and discusses the data and methodological gaps on: (1) the effects of different forms of proactive policing on crime; (2) whether they are applied in a discriminatory manner; (3) whether they are being used in a legal fashion; and (4) community reaction. This report offers a comprehensive evaluation of proactive policing that includes not only its crime prevention impacts but also its broader implications for justice and U.S. communities.

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• Report Brief
• Highlights for Police Executives
• Proactive Policing and Racial Bias
• Press Release

Description

An ad hoc committee under the auspices of the Committee on Law and Justice will review the evidence on: (1) the effects of different forms of proactive policing on crime; (2) whether these approaches are applied in a discriminatory manner; (3) whether these approaches are being used in a legal fashion; and (4) community reaction. The committee's review of the literature and the subsequent report will include a thorough discussion of data and methodological gaps in the research.

• Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education
• Committee on Law and Justice

Consensus Study

• Behavioral and Social Sciences
• Policy for Science and Technology

Geographic Region

North America

Contact the Public Access Records Office to make an inquiry, request a list of the public access file materials, or obtain a copy of the materials found in the file.

Committee Membership Roster Comments

Committee members approved on 10/21/2015 and posted to CPS on 10/26/2015.

Past Events

Multiday Event | February 7-8, 2017

[Closed] Proactive Policing - Effects on Crime, Communities, and Civil Liberties in the United States

Multiday Event | November 3-4, 2016

Multiday Event | June 27-28, 2016

12:00AM - 12:00AM (ET)

June 24, 2016

Proactive Policing Webinar: Community Perspectives on Proactive Policing - Black Lives Matter (Part 2)

June 22, 2016

Proactive Policing Webinar: Community Perspectives on Proactive Policing - Black Lives Matter (Part 1)

Leticia Green

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• Malay Majmundar  

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• Leticia Green  

The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (2014)

Chapter: 5 the crime prevention effects of incarceration.

5 The Crime Prevention Effects of Incarceration 1

As discussed in previous chapters, the growth in U.S. incarceration rates over the past 40 years was propelled by changes in sentencing and penal policies that were intended, in part, to improve public safety and reduce crime. A key task for this committee was to review the evidence and determine whether and by how much the high rates of incarceration documented in Chapter 2 have reduced crime rates. In assessing the research on the impact of prison on crime, we paid particular attention to policy changes that fueled the growth of the U.S. prison population—longer prison sentences, mandatory minimum sentences, and the expanded use of prison in the nation’s drug law enforcement strategies.

We are mindful of the public interest in questions regarding the relationship between incarceration and crime. Indeed, as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 , the assertion that putting more people in prison would reduce crime was crucial to the political dynamic that fueled the growth in incarceration rates in the United States. In recent years, policy initiatives to reduce state prison populations often have met objections that public safety would be reduced. There is of course a plausibility to the belief that putting many more convicted felons behind bars would reduce crime. Yet even a cursory examination of the data on crime and imprisonment rates makes clear the complexity of measuring the crime prevention effect of incarceration. Violent crime rates have been declining steadily over the past two decades, which suggests a crime prevention effect of rising incarceration rates. For

_________________

1 This chapter draws substantially on Durlauf and Nagin (2011a, 2011b) and Nagin (2013a, 2013b).

the first two decades of rising incarceration rates, however, there was no clear trend in the violent crime rate—it rose, then fell, and then rose again.

There are many explanations for the lack of correspondence between rates of incarceration and rates of violent crime and crime rates more generally. However, one explanation deserves special emphasis: the rate of incarceration, properly understood, is not a policy variable per se; rather, it is the outcome of policies affecting who is sent to prison and for how long (Durlauf and Nagin, 2011a, 2011b). The effect of these policies on crime rates is not uniform—some policies may have very large effects if, for example, they are directed at high-rate offenders, while others may be ineffective. Thus, the committee’s charge was to dig below the surface and review the research evidence on the impact of the specific drivers of the rise in U.S. incarceration rates on crime in the hope that this evidence would inform the larger policy discourse. In this regard, one of our most important conclusions is that the incremental deterrent effect of increases in lengthy prison sentences is modest at best. Also, because recidivism rates decline markedly with age and prisoners necessarily age as they serve their prison sentence, lengthy prison sentences are an inefficient approach to preventing crime by incapacitation unless the longer sentences are specifically targeted at very high-rate or extremely dangerous offenders.

A large body of research has studied the effects of incarceration and other criminal penalties on crime. Much of this research is guided by the hypothesis that incarceration reduces crime through incapacitation and deterrence. Incapacitation refers to the crimes averted by the physical isolation of convicted offenders during the period of their incarceration. Theories of deterrence distinguish between general and specific behavioral responses. General deterrence refers to the crime prevention effects of the threat of punishment, while specific deterrence concerns the aftermath of the failure of general deterrence—that is, the effect on reoffending that might result from the experience of actually being punished. Most of this research studies the relationship between criminal sanctions and crimes other than drug offenses. 2 A related literature focuses specifically on enforcement of drug laws and the relationship between those criminal sanctions and the outcomes of drug use and drug prices.

This chapter presents the results of the committee’s examination of the crime prevention effects of imprisonment through deterrence or incapacitation. The first section provides an overview of deterrence and reviews

2 Drug sales, use, and possession are, of course, widely criminalized. While there are some long-standing national data collections on drug use and a few national surveys have asked about drug sales, there are no national time series on overall levels of drug crime. Thus, analyses of the relationship of imprisonment rates to crime rates provide no insight into impacts on drug crimes.

evidence on the deterrent effect of incarceration. The second section describes the theory of incapacitation and summarizes empirical research on incapacitation’s effects. We then review panel studies examining the association between rates of incarceration and crime rates across states and over time. These studies do not distinguish between deterrence and incapacitation and might be viewed as estimating a total effect of incarceration on crime. The fourth section summarizes research on specific deterrence and recidivism. This is followed by a review of research on the effects of incarceration for drug crimes on drug prices and drug use. We then offer observations regarding gaps in knowledge about the crime prevention effects of incarceration.

DETERRENCE: THEORY AND EMPIRICAL FINDINGS

In the classical theory of deterrence, crime is averted when the expected costs of punishment exceed the benefits of offending. Much of the empirical research on the deterrent power of criminal penalties has studied sentence enhancements and other shifts in penal policy.

Most modern theories of deterrence can be traced to the Enlightenment-era legal philosophers Cesare Beccaria (2007) and Jeremy Bentham (1988). Their work was motivated by a mutual abhorrence of the administration of punishment without constructive purpose. For them that constructive purpose was crime prevention. As Beccaria observed, “It is better to prevent crimes than punish them” (1986, p. 93). Beccaria and Bentham argued that the deterrence process has three key ingredients—the severity, certainty, and celerity of punishment. These concepts, particularly the severity and certainty of punishment, form the foundation of nearly all contemporary theories of deterrence. The idea is that if state-imposed sanctions are sufficiently severe, criminal activity will be discouraged, at least for some. Severity alone, however, cannot deter; there must also be some probability that the sanction will be incurred if the crime is committed. Indeed, Beccaria believed that the probability of punishment, not its severity, is the more potent component of the deterrence process: “One of the greatest curbs on crime is not the cruelty of punishments, but their infallibility…. The certainty of punishment even if moderate will always make a stronger impression …” (1986, p. 58).

In contemporary society, the certainty of punishment depends on the probability of arrest given a criminal offense and the probability of punishment given an arrest. For a formal sanction to be imposed, the crime must be brought to official attention, typically by victim report, and the offender

must then be apprehended, usually by the police. 3 The offender must next be charged, successfully prosecuted, and finally sentenced by the courts. Successful passage through all of these stages is far from certain. The first step in the process—reporting of the crime—is critical, yet national surveys of victims have consistently demonstrated that only half of all crimes are brought to the attention of the police. Once the crime has been reported, the police are the most important factors affecting certainty—absent detection and apprehension, there is no possibility of conviction or punishment. Yet arrests ensue for only a small fraction of all reported crimes. Blumstein and Beck (1999) find that robberies reported to police outnumber robbery arrests by about four to one and that the offense-to-arrest ratio is about five to one for burglaries. These ratios have remained stable since 1980. The next step in the process is criminal prosecution, following which the court must decide whether to impose a prison sentence. In light of the obstacles to successful apprehension and prosecution, the probability of conviction is quite low, even for felony offenses (although it has increased since 1980). Moreover, because the majority of felony convictions already result in imprisonment, policies designed to increase the certainty of incarceration for those convicted—through mandatory prison sentences, for example—will have only a limited effect on the overall certainty of punishment.

The third component of the theory of deterrence advanced by Bentham and Beccaria, and the least studied, is the swiftness, or “celerity,” of punishment. The theoretical basis for its impact on deterrence is ambiguous, as is the empirical evidence on its effectiveness. Even Beccaria appears to have based his case for celerity more on normative considerations of just punishment than on its role in the effectiveness of deterrence. He observed: “the more promptly and the more closely punishment follows upon the commission of a crime, the more just and useful will it be. I say more just, because the criminal is thereby spared the useless and cruel torments of uncertainty, which increase with the vigor of imagination and with the sense of personal weakness …” (Beccaria, 1986, p. 36).

Deterrence theory is underpinned by a rationalistic view of crime. In this view, an individual considering commission of a crime weighs the benefits of offending against the costs of punishment. Much offending, however, departs from the strict decision calculus of the rationalistic model. Robinson and Darley (2004) review the limits of deterrence through harsh punishment. They report that offenders must have some knowledge of criminal penalties to be deterred from committing a crime, but in practice often do not. Furthermore, suddenly induced rages, feelings of threat and paranoia, a desire for revenge and retaliation, and self-perceptions of

3 Crime may also be sanctioned entirely outside of the criminal justice system through retaliation by the victim or by others on the victim’s behalf.

brilliance in the grandiose phase of manic-depressive illness all can limit a potential offender’s ability to exercise self-control. Also playing a role are personality traits and the pervasive influence of drugs and alcohol: in one study, 32 percent of state prison inmates reported being high on drugs at the time of their crime, and 17 percent committed their crime to get money to buy drugs (Mumola and Karberg, 2006). The influence of crime-involved peers who downplay the long-term consequences of punishment is relevant as well.

Taken together, these factors mean that, even if they knew the penalties that could be imposed under the law, a significant fraction of offenders still might not be able to make the calculation to avoid crime. Because many crimes may not be rationally motivated with a view to the expected costs of punishment, and because offenders may respond differently to the severity, certainty, and swiftness of punishment, the magnitude of deterrent effects is fundamentally an empirical question. Furthermore, deterrent effects may depend on the type of sanction and its severity. Sanctions may be effective in some circumstances for some people but ineffective in other circumstances or for others.

Empirical Findings

Empirical studies of deterrence have focused primarily on sentence enhancements that introduce additional prison time for aggravating circumstances related to the crime or the defendant’s criminal history. The earliest attempts after the 1970s to measure the effects of severity examined the deterrent effects of sentence enhancements for gun crimes. A series of studies (Loftin and McDowell, 1981, 1984; Loftin et al., 1983) considered whether sentence enhancements for use of a gun when engaged in another type of crime (such as robbery) deter gun use in the commission of a crime. While this research yielded mixed findings, it generally failed to uncover clear evidence of a deterrent effect (but see McDowall et al. [1992] for evidence of reductions in homicides). 4

There is, however, an important caveat to keep in mind when extrapolating from these studies to understand the link between severity and deterrence: studies that failed to find a deterrent effect for sentence enhancements for use of a gun in committing a crime also found that the sentences ultimately imposed in these cases were in fact not increased.

4 Pooling city-specific results to obtain a combined estimate of the impact of mandatory sentence enhancements for gun crimes, McDowall and colleagues (1992, p. 379) suggest that “the mandatory sentencing laws substantially reduced the number of homicides; however, any effects on assault and robbery are not conclusive because they cannot be separated from imprecision and random error in the data.”

Thus, criminals may not have been deterred from using a gun because the real incentives were not changed. This observation is a reminder of Tonry’s (2009b) commentary on the inconsistent administration of mandatory minimum sentencing.

Kessler and Levitt (1999) examine the deterrent impact of California’s Proposition 8, passed in 1982. Proposition 8 anticipated the three strikes laws passed by many states, including California, in the 1990s, which substantially increased sentences for repeat commission of specified felonies. Kessler and Levitt estimate a 4 percent decline in crime attributable to deterrence in the first year after the proposition’s enactment. Within 5 to 7 years, the effect grew to a 20 percent reduction, although the authors acknowledge that this longer-term estimate includes incapacitation effects.

The findings of Kessler and Levitt (1999) are challenged by Webster and colleagues (2006). They point out that Kessler and Levitt’s findings are based on data from alternate years. Using data from all years, Webster and colleagues find that crime rates in the relevant categories started to fall before Proposition 8 was enacted and that the slope of this trend remained constant during the proposition’s implementation. 5 (See Levitt [2006] 6 for a response and Raphael [2006] for analysis that supports Webster and colleagues [2006].)

One exception to the paucity of studies on the crime prevention effects of sentence enhancements concerns analyses of the deterrent effect of California’s “Three Strikes and You’re Out” law, which mandated a minimum sentence of 25 years upon conviction for a third strikeable offense. 7 Zimring and colleagues (2001) conclude that the law reduced the felony crime rate by at most 2 percent and that this reduction was limited to those individuals with two strikeable offenses. Other authors (Stolzenberg and D’Alessio, 1997; Greenwood and Hawken, 2002), who, like Zimring and colleagues (2001), examine before-and-after trends, conclude that the law’s crime prevention effects were negligible. The most persuasive study of California’s three strikes law is that of Helland and Tabarrok (2007). As discussed below, this study finds an effect but concludes that it is small.

5 In other words, the drop in crime after the passage of Proposition 8 “may simply be the result of a preexisting decline over time,” consistent with the possibility that “by the time that legislative change is enacted, levels of crime have often already begun to drop for reasons not tied to variations in threatened punishment” (Webster et al., 2006, p. 441).

6 According to Levitt (2006, p. 451), the arguments made by Kessler and Levitt (1999) “were based on the fact that after Proposition 8, eligible crimes fell more in California than noneligible crimes, and most importantly, the relative movements of eligible and noneligible crimes in California systematically differed from those in the rest of the United States after Proposition 8, but not before.”

7 Strikeable offenses include murder, robbery, drug sales to minors, and a variety of sexual offenses, felony assaults, other crimes against persons, property crimes, and weapons offenses (Clark et al., 1997).

One challenge for research on sentence enhancements is that because entire jurisdictions are affected by a sentencing reform, the “treated” defendants are necessarily compared with those in other times or places who are likely to differ in unmeasured ways. Six recent studies present particularly convincing evidence on the deterrent effect of incarceration by constructing credible comparisons of treatment and control groups, and they also nicely illustrate heterogeneity in the deterrence response to the threat of imprisonment. Weisburd and colleagues (2008) and Hawken and Kleiman (2009) studied the use of imprisonment to enforce payment of fines and conditions of probation, respectively, and found substantial deterrent effects. Helland and Tabarrok (2007) analyzed the deterrent effect of California’s third-strike provision and found only a modest deterrent effect. Ludwig and Raphael (2003) examined the deterrent effect of prison sentence enhancements for gun crimes and found no effect. Finally, Lee and McCrary (2009) and Hjalmarsson (2009) examined the heightened threat of imprisonment that attends coming under the jurisdiction of the adult courts at the age of majority and found no deterrent effect. These studies are described further below.

Weisburd and colleagues (2008) present findings of a randomized field trial of different approaches to encouraging payment of court-ordered fines. Their most salient finding involves the “miracle of the cells”—that the imminent threat of incarceration provides a powerful incentive to pay delinquent fines, even when the incarceration is only for a short period. This finding supports the notion, discussed earlier, that the certainty rather the severity of punishment is the more powerful deterrent. It is true that in this study, there was a high certainty of imprisonment for failing to pay the fine among the treatment group. Nonetheless, the term used by Weisburd and colleagues—the “miracle of the cells” and not the “miracle of certainty”—emphasizes that certainty is a deterrent only if the punishment is perceived as costly enough.

This point is further illustrated by Project HOPE (Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement). In this randomized experiment, the treatment group of probationers underwent regular drug testing (including random testing). The punishment for a positive test or other violation of conditions of probation was certain but brief (1-2 days) confinement. The intervention group had far fewer positive tests and missed appointments and significantly lower rates of arrest and imprisonment (Kleinman, 2009; Hawken and Kleiman, 2009; Hawken, 2010). 8

8 The success of Project HOPE has brought it considerable attention in the media and in policy circles. Its strong evaluation design—a randomized experiment—puts its findings on a sound scientific footing and is among the reasons why its results are highlighted in this report. Still, there are several reasons for caution in assessing the significance of the results.

Helland and Tabarrok (2007) examine the deterrent effect of California’s “Three Strikes and You’re Out” law among those convicted of strikeable offenses. They compare the future offending of those convicted of two previous strikeable offenses and those convicted of one strikeable offense who also had been tried for a second strikeable offense but were convicted of a nonstrikeable offense. The two groups had a number of common characteristics, such as age, race, and time spent in prison. The authors find an approximately 20 percent lower arrest rate among those convicted of two strikeable offenses and attribute this to the much more severe sentence that would have been imposed for a third strikeable offense.

Ludwig and Raphael (2003) examine the deterrent effect of sentence enhancements for gun crimes that formed the basis for a much-publicized federal intervention called Project Exile in Richmond, Virginia. Perpetrators of gun crimes, especially those with a felony record, were the targets of federal prosecution, which provided for far more severe sanctions for weapon use than those imposed by Virginia state law. The authors conducted a careful and thorough analysis involving comparison of adult and juvenile homicide arrest rates in Richmond and comparison of the gun homicide rates of Richmond and other cities with comparable preintervention homicide rates. They conclude that the threat of enhanced sentences had no apparent deterrent effect.

The shift in jurisdiction from juvenile to adult court that occurs when individuals reach the age of majority is accompanied by increased certainty and severity of punishment for most crimes. Lee and McCrary (2009) conducted a meticulous analysis of individual-level crime histories in Florida to see whether felony offending declined sharply at age 18—the age of majority in that state. They report an immediate decline in crime, as predicted, but it was very small and not statistically significant. 9

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As of this writing, the results have yet to be replicated outside of rural Hawaii. This is also a complex intervention, and the mechanisms by which compliance with conditions of probation is achieved are not certain. Specifically, a competing interpretation to deterrence for the observed effects is that probationers were responding to an authoritative figure. Nevertheless, the interpretation that certain but nondraconian punishment can be an effective deterrent is consistent with decades of research on deterrence (Nagin, 1998, 2013b). That such an effect appears to have been found in a population in which deterrence has previously been ineffective in averting crime makes the finding potentially very important. Thus, as discussed later in this chapter, research on the deterrent effectiveness of short sentences with high celerity and certainty should be a priority, particularly among crime-prone populations.

9 The finding that the young fail to respond to changes in penalties associated with the age of majority is not uniform across studies. An earlier analysis by Levitt (1998) finds a large drop in the offending of young adults when they reach the age of jurisdiction for adult courts. For several reasons, Durlauf and Nagin (2011a, 2011b) judge the null effect finding of Lee and McCrary to be more persuasive in terms of understanding deterrence. First, Levitt (1998) focuses on differences in age measured at annual frequencies, whereas Lee and McCrary mea-

In another analysis of the effect, if any, of moving from the jurisdiction of juvenile to adult courts, Hjalmarsson (2009) uses the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine whether young males’ perception of incarceration risk changed at the age of criminal majority. Youth were asked, “Suppose you were arrested for stealing a car, what is the percentage chance that you would serve time in jail?” The author found that subjective probabilities of being sent to jail increased discontinuously on average by 5.2 percentage points when youth reached the age of majority in their state of residence. While youth perceived an increase in incarceration risk, Hjalmarsson found no convincing evidence of an effect on their self-reported criminal behavior.

In combination, the above six studies demonstrate that debates about the deterrent effect of legal sanctions can be framed in terms argued by Beccaria and Bentham more than two centuries ago: Does the specific sanction deter or not, and if it does, are the crime reduction benefits sufficient to justify the costs of imposing the sanction? The Helland and Tabarrok (2007) study is an exemplar of this type of analysis. It concludes that California’s third-strike provision does indeed have a deterrent effect, a point conceded even by Zimring and colleagues (2001). However, Helland and Tabarrok (2007) also conclude, based on a cost-benefit analysis, that the crime-saving benefits are so small relative to the increased costs of incarceration that the lengthy prison sentences mandated by the third-strike provision cannot be justified on the basis of their effectiveness in preventing crime.

The above six studies suggest several important sources of the heterogeneity of the deterrent effect of imprisonment. One source relates to the length of the sentence. Figure 5-1 shows two different forms of the response function that relates crime rate and sentence length. A downward slope is seen for both, reflecting the deterrence effect of increased severity. Both curves have the same crime rate, C 1 , at the status quo sentence length, S 1 . Because the two curves are drawn to predict the same crime rate for a zero sanction level, the absolute deterrent effect of the status quo sanction level is the same for both. But because the two curves have different shapes, they also imply different responses to an incremental increase in sentence length to S 2 . The linear curve (A) is meant to depict a response function in which there is a sizable deterrent effect accompanying the increase to S 2 , whereas the nonlinear curve (B) is

sure age in days or weeks. At annual frequencies, the estimated effect is more likely to reflect both deterrence and incapacitation; hence Levitt’s results may be driven by incapacitation effects rather than deterrence per se. Second, the analysis by Lee and McCrary is based on individual-level data and therefore avoids the problems that can arise because of aggregation (Durlauf et al., 2008, 2010). The individual-level data studied by Lee and McCrary also are unusually informative on their own terms because they contain information on the exact age of arrestees, which allows for the calculation of very short-run effects of the discontinuity in sentence severity (e.g., effects within 30 days of turning 18).

FIGURE 5-1 Marginal versus absolute deterrent effects. SOURCE: Nagin (2013a).

meant to depict a small crime reduction response due to diminishing deterrent returns to increasing sentence length. In curve B in Figure 5-1 , the largest reductions in crime will be obtained with small increases in short sentences.

The evidence on the deterrent effect of sentence length suggests that the relationship between crime rate and sentence length more closely resembles curve B in Figure 5-1 than curve A. Ludwig and Raphael (2003) find no deterrent effect of enhanced sentences for gun crimes; Lee and McCrary (2009) and Hjalmarsson (2009) find no evidence that the more severe penalties that attend moving from the juvenile to the adult justice system deter offending; and Helland and Tabarrok (2007) find only a small deterrent effect of the third strike of California’s three strikes law. As a consequence, the deterrent return to increasing already long sentences is modest at best.

The fine payment (Weisburd et al., 2008) and Project HOPE (Kleiman, 2009; Hawken and Kleiman, 2009; Hawken, 2010) experiments also suggest that that curve B, not curve A, more closely resembles the dose-response relationship between crime and sentence length. Although these programs were designed to achieve behavioral changes other than simple crime prevention (payment of criminal fines and cessation of drug use, respectively), in both cases the subjects of the program demonstrated increased compliance with court orders, an important justice system goal. In the case of Project HOPE, subjects also showed substantially reduced levels of criminal offending. The results of these studies suggest that, unlike increments to long sentences, short sentences do have a material deterrent effect on a crime-prone population.

The conclusion that increasing already long sentences has no material deterrent effect also has implications for mandatory minimum sentencing. Mandatory minimum sentence statutes have two distinct properties. One is that they typically increase already long sentences, which we have concluded is not an effective deterrent. Second, by mandating incarceration, they also increase the certainty of imprisonment given conviction . Because, as discussed earlier, the certainty of conviction even following commission of a felony is typically small, the effect of mandatory minimum sentencing on certainty of punishment is greatly diminished. Furthermore, as discussed at length by Nagin (2013a, 2013b), all of the evidence on the deterrent effect of certainty of punishment pertains to the deterrent effect of the certainty of apprehension, not to the certainty of postarrest outcomes (including certainty of imprisonment given conviction). Thus, there is no evidence one way or the other on the deterrent effect of the second distinguishing characteristic of mandatory minimum sentencing (Nagin, 2013a, 2013b).

INCAPACITATION

Crime prevention by incapacitation has an appealing directness—the incarceration of criminally active individuals will prevent crime through their physical separation from the rest of society. In contrast with crime prevention based on deterrence or rehabilitation, no assumptions about human behavior appear to be required to avert the social cost of crime.

Despite the apparent directness and simplicity of incapacitation, estimates of the size of its effects vary substantially. Most estimates are reported in terms of an elasticity—the percentage change in the crime rate in response to a 1 percent increase in the imprisonment rate. Spelman (1994) distinguishes between two types of incapacitation studies—simulation and econometric studies. Simulation studies are based on the model of Avi-Itzhak and Schinnar (1973), described below. The earliest simulation-based estimates are reported by Cohen (1978). Her elasticity estimates range from –0.05 to –0.70, meaning each 1 percent increase in imprisonment rates would result in a crime reduction of 0.05 to 0.7 percent. Later estimates by DiIulio and Piehl (1991), Piehl and DiIulio (1995), and Spelman (1994) fall within a narrower but still large range of about –0.10 to –0.30—a 0.1 to 0.3 percent crime reduction for a 1 percent increase in imprisonment.

Econometric studies also examine the overall relationship between the crime rate and the imprisonment rate. These studies are discussed in greater detail in the next section. The range of elasticity estimates from these studies is similarly large—from no reduction in crime (Marvell and Moody, 1994; Useem and Piehl, 2008; Besci, 1999) to a reduction of about –0.4 or more (Levitt, 1996). These divergent findings are one of the key reasons the

committee concludes that we cannot arrive at a precise estimate, or even a modest range of estimates, of the magnitude of the effect of incarceration on crime rates.

Many factors contribute to the large differences in estimates of the crimes averted by incapacitation. These factors include whether the data used to estimate crimes averted pertain to people in prison, people in jail, or nonincarcerated individuals with criminal histories; the geographic region from which the data are derived; the types of crimes included in the accounting of crimes averted; and a host of technical issues related to the measurement and modeling of key dimensions of the criminal career (National Research Council, 1986; Cohen, 1986; Visher, 1986; Piquero and Blumstein, 2007). Here we focus on two issues that are particularly important to estimating and interpreting incapacitation effects: the estimate of the rate of offending of active offenders and the constancy of that rate over the course of the criminal career.

Research on incapacitation effects derives from what has come to be called the “criminal career” model first laid out in a seminal paper by Avi-Itzhak and Schinnar (1973). These authors assume that active offenders commit crimes at a mean annual rate (denoted by λ) over their criminal career (averaging ô years in length). 10 The extent of punishment is described by the probability of arrest, conviction, and incarceration for a given crime and the length of time spent in prison.

At the level of the population, this framework yields an accounting model that calculates the hypothetical level of crime in society in the absence of incarceration and the fraction of that level prevented by incarceration as a function of the probability of incarceration and the average length of the sentence served. The theory, as already noted, is appealingly simple. The model has no behavioral component. It views the prevention of crime not as a behavioral response to punishment, as in deterrence, but as the result of the simple physical isolation of offenders. We return to the implications of these behavioral assumptions below, but first consider two other key assumptions of the Azi-Itzhak and Shinnar framework that has been so influential in research on incapacitation. The first concerns the assumption that λ is constant across offenders, and the second is that it remains unchanged over the duration of the criminal career.

Constancy of λ Across the Population

The most influential source of data for calculating λ—or the average rate at which active offenders commit crimes—has been the RAND Second

10 It is further assumed that, while the offenders were active, they committed crimes according to a Poisson process and that career length was exponentially distributed.

Inmate Survey, for which a sample of 2,190 incarcerated respondents in California, Michigan, and Texas was interviewed in the 1970s. The survey recorded respondents’ criminal involvement in the 3 years before their current incarceration (Petersilia et al., 1978). The most important finding of this survey was that λ is far from being constant across inmates; to the contrary, it is highly skewed. Table 5-1 is taken from Visher’s (1986) reanalysis of the RAND data. For robbery, the mean to median ratio is 8.3, 12.6, and 5.2 for California, Michigan, and Texas, respectively. For burglary, these respective ratios are 15.9, 17.2, and 11.0. The difference between the median and the 90th percentile is even more dramatic. With the exception of robbery in Texas, that ratio always exceeds 20 to 1. The skewness of the offending rate distribution has crucial implications for the calculation of incapacitation effects: as a matter of accounting, the estimated size of incapacitation effects will be highly sensitive to whether the mean, median, or some other statistic is used to summarize the offending rate distribution.

Skewness in the offending rate distribution also has important implications for projecting the marginal incapacitation effect of changes in the size of the prison population. This is due to the important concept of “stochastic selectivity” (Canela-Cacho et al., 1997). Stochastic selectivity formalizes the observation that unless high-rate offenders are extremely skillful in avoiding apprehension, they will be represented in prison disproportionately relative to their representation in the population of nonincarcerated

TABLE 5-1 Differences in Distributions of λ for Inmates Who Reported Committing Robbery or Burglary, by State

NOTE: Data were computed as part of the reanalysis. SOURCE: Visher (1986).

offenders. This is the case because they put themselves at risk of apprehension so much more frequently than lower-rate offenders.

Thus, surveys of offending among the incarcerated will overstate the crime prevention benefits of further increases in the imprisonment rate. The basis for this conclusion is straightforward: because most of the high-rate offenders will already have been apprehended and incarcerated, there will be relatively few of them at large to be incapacitated by further expansion of the prison population. The implication is that the crime control benefits of incapacitation will decrease with the scale of imprisonment. Canela-Cacho and colleagues (1997) use the RAND Second Inmate Survey to estimate the actual magnitude of the model’s prediction. Their findings are dramatic—they conclude that offending rates of the incarcerated are on average 10 to 50 times larger than those of the nonincarcerated. Figure 5-2 compares projections of the distribution of robbery offense rates for offenders who are and are not incarcerated. The distributions are starkly different—few high-rate robbers are at large because most have already been apprehended and represent a large share of the prison population.

Direct evidence of stochastic selectivity is reported by Vollaard (2012), who studied the introduction of repeat-offender sentence enhancements in the Netherlands. These enhancements increased sentences from 2 months to 2 years for offenders with 10 or more prior convictions—mainly older men with histories of substance abuse who were involved in shoplifting and other property crimes. The sentence enhancements initially had a large crime-reducing effect, but the effect declined as they were administered to less serious offenders with fewer prior convictions. Recent work by Johnson and Raphael (2012) on the crime prevention effect of imprisonment also suggests that the size of the effect diminishes with the scale of imprisonment. They estimate substantial declines in the number of crimes averted per prisoner over the period 1991 to 2004 compared with 1978 to 1990. This finding also is consistent with the results of an earlier analysis by Useem and Piehl (2008), who conclude that crime reduction benefits decline with the scale of imprisonment, and with Owens’ (2009) finding of modest incapacitation effects based on her analysis of 2003 data from Maryland.

Constancy of λ Over the Criminal Career

The criminal career model assumes that the offending rate is constant over the course of the criminal career. However, large percentages of crimes are committed by young people, with rates peaking in the midteenage years for property offenses and the late teenage years for violent offenses, followed by rapid declines (e.g., Farrington, 1986; Sweeten et al., 2013); in an application of group-based trajectory modeling (Nagin, 2005), Laub and Sampson (2003) show that the offending trajectories of all identified groups

decline sharply with age. The implication is that estimates of offending rates of prison inmates based on self-reports or arrest data for the period immediately prior to their incarceration will tend to substantially overstate what their future offending rate will be, especially in their middle age and beyond. This conclusion is reinforced by the criminal desistance research of Blumstein and Nakamura (2009), Bushway and colleagues (2011), and Kurlychek and colleagues (2006). Blumstein and Nakamura (2009), for example, find that offending rates among the formerly arrested are statistically indistinguishable from those of the general population after 7 to 10 years of remaining crime free. 11

Other Considerations

Beyond the constancy of the offending rate across offenders and over the criminal career, several other assumptions relate to the effectiveness of imprisonment as a public safety strategy. Three assumptions are particularly relevant here.

The first has to do with the phenomenon of replacement, as discussed in Box 5-1 . From the inception of research on incapacitation, it has been recognized that incarceration of drug dealers is ineffective in preventing drug distribution through incapacitation because dealers are easily replaced. Miles and Ludwig (2007) argue that analogous market mechanisms may result in replacement for other types of crime.

Second, the criminal career model assumes that the experience of incarceration has no impact, positive or negative, on the intensity and duration of postrelease offending. As discussed later in this chapter, evidence of this effect is generally poor, but there is reason to suspect that the experiences of imprisonment may exacerbate postrelease offending.

Third, the criminal career model assumes away co-offending, a phenomenon that is particularly common among juveniles and young adults. In so doing, the model implicitly assumes that incapacitation of one of the co-offenders will avert the offense in its entirety—a dubious assumption. Indeed, Marvell and Moody (1994) conclude that failure to account for co-offending may inflate incapacitation estimates by more than a third. 12

11 Most active career offenders also desist from crime at relatively early ages—typically in their 30s (Farrington, 2003). The “age-crime curve” and the short residual lengths of criminal careers are among the principal reasons why it can be difficult to implement ideas about “selective incapacitation” of high-rate offenders—it is easy to identify high-rate serious offenders retrospectively but not prospectively.

12 We also note that in their reanalysis of the RAND data, Marvell and Moody make further adjustments for many of the other factors already discussed. The adjustments result in a 77 percent reduction in their estimate of the incapacitation effect compared with the RAND estimate.

FIGURE 5-2 Distribution of offense rates (λ) among free offenders and resident inmates. SOURCE: Canela-Cacho et al. (1997).

BOX 5-1 Replacement Effects and Drug Arrests

For several categories of offenders, an incapacitation strategy of crime prevention can misfire because most or all of those sent to prison are rapidly replaced in the criminal networks in which they participate. Street-level drug trafficking is the paradigm case. Drug dealing is part of a complex illegal market with low barriers to entry. Net earnings are low, and probabilities of eventual arrest and imprisonment are high (Levitt and Venkatesh, 2000; Caulkins and Reuter, 2010; Reuter, 2013). Drug policy research has nonetheless shown consistently that arrested dealers are quickly replaced by new recruits (Dills et al., 2008; MacCoun and Martin, 2009). At the corner of Ninth and Concordia in Milwaukee in the mid-1990s, for example, 94 drug arrests were made within a 3-month period. “These arrests, [the police officer] pointed out, were easy to prosecute to conviction. But … the drug market continued to thrive at the intersection” (Smith and Dickey, 1999, p. 8).

Despite the risks of drug dealing and the low average profits, many young disadvantaged people with little social capital and limited life chances choose to sell drugs on street corners because it appears to present opportunities not otherwise available. However, such people tend to overestimate the benefits of that activity and underestimate the risks (Reuter et al., 1990; Kleiman, 1997). This perception is compounded by peer influences, social pressures, and deviant role models provided by successful dealers who live affluent lives and manage to avoid arrest. Similar analyses apply to many members of deviant youth groups and gangs: as members and even leaders are arrested and removed from circulation, others take their place. Arrests and imprisonments of easily replaceable offenders create illicit “opportunities” for others.

ESTIMATING THE TOTAL EFFECT OF INCARCERATION ON CRIME

Instead of studying policy changes in specific jurisdictions or asking offenders about their levels of criminal involvement, another commonly used design analyzes the relationship between imprisonment rates and crime rates across states and over time. The usual specification regresses the logarithm of the crime rate on the logarithm of the incarceration rate, yielding an elasticity of the crime rate with respect to incarceration. This elasticity measures the expected percentage change in the crime rate for a 1 percent increase in the incarceration rate. Because the estimated elasticity does not distinguish between the effects of incapacitation and the effects of deterrence, researchers in this domain interpret it as estimating a “total effect” of incarceration on crime.

A key challenge for studies in this research tradition is the problem of endogeneity—crime rates may affect incarceration rates even as

incarceration rates affect crime rates because an increase in crime may increase the numbers of arrests and prison admissions. Under these conditions, a coefficient from a regression of crime rates on imprisonment rates will reflect both the reductions in crime due to incapacitation and deterrence and the increase in incarceration due to increased crime. Estimates of the negative incarceration effect that do not adjust for this endogeneity will thus be biased toward zero, underestimating the degree to which imprisonment reduces crime.

Adjustment for endogeneity of this kind usually involves instrumental variables. In this problem context, an instrumental variable is a variable that (1) is not affected by the crime rate but (2) does affect the incarceration rate, and (3) has no effect on the crime rate separate from its effect on the incarceration rate. Although instrumental variables generally are difficult to find, researchers have argued that some policy changes meet these three conditions. Such policy changes may thus be useful instruments for identifying the causal effect of incarceration on crime, purged of the influence of crime on incarceration. We discuss these studies below.

A review by Donohue (2007) identifies eight studies of the relationship of crime rates to incarceration rates. Six of the eight studies use data from all or nearly all of the 50 states for varying time periods from the 1970s to 2000, and the remaining two use the RAND inmate surveys and county-level data from Texas. All find statistically significant negative associations between crime rates and incarceration rates, implying a crime prevention effect of imprisonment. However, the magnitudes of the estimates of this effect vary widely, from nil for a study allowing for the possibility that prevention effects decline as the scale of incarceration increases (Liedka et al., 2006) to –0.4 percent for each 1 percent increase in the incarceration rate (Spelman, 2000). Apel and Nagin (2011), Durlauf and Nagin (2011a, 2011b), and Donohue (2007) discuss the main limitations of these studies.

Western (2006) performed a Bayesian sensitivity analysis that adjusted regressions not accounting for endogeneity according to different beliefs about the effect of crime on incarceration. In an analysis of 48 states for the period 1971 to 2001, the assumption that crime had no effect on incarceration yielded an elasticity of the index crime rate to state incarceration rates of –0.07. Assuming strong endogeneity—that a 1 percent increase in crime produced a 0.15 percent increase in incarceration—yielded an elasticity of –0.18 that was more than twice as large, although this estimate was statistically insignificant. In short, the estimated elasticity of crime with respect to incarceration is acutely sensitive to beliefs about the dependence of incarceration on crime. The highest estimates of crime-incarceration elasticity imply that crime has a large effect on incarceration rates.

Explicit adjustment for endogeneity with instrumental variables is provided by Levitt (1996), Spelman (2000), and Johnson and Raphael (2012).

Levitt (1996) uses court-ordered prison releases and indicators for overcrowding litigation to form a set of instrumental variables. (Spelman [2000] uses the same instruments applied to a slightly longer time series.) Levitt argues that such court orders meet the test for providing a valid estimate of the effect of the incarceration rate on the crime rate. The orders are not affected by and have no direct effect on the crime rate, affecting it only insofar as they affect the imprisonment rate. Levitt’s instrumental variables-based point elasticity estimates vary by specification and crime type, but some are as large as –0.4.

Even if one accepts Levitt’s arguments about the validity of the prison overcrowding instrument, the estimated effects have only limited policy value. The instrument, by its construction, likely is measuring the effect on crime of the early release of selected prisoners, probably those nearing the end of their sentenced terms. It may also reflect the effect of diverting individuals convicted of less serious crimes to either local jails or community supervision. In either case, the estimates are not informative about the crime prevention effects, whether by deterrence or incapacitation, of sentence enhancements related to the manner in which a crime is committed (e.g., weapon use), to the characteristics of the perpetrator (e.g., prior record), or to policies affecting the likelihood of incarceration. More generally, the uncertainty about what is actually being measured inherently limits the value of the estimated effects for both policy and social science purposes.

A more recent instrumental variables-based study by Johnson and Raphael (2012) specifies a particular functional dependence of prison admissions on crime and uses this information to identify the incarceration effect. Identification is based on the assumption that prison populations do not change instantaneously in response to changes in the size of the criminal population. As in the non-instrumental variables-based analysis of Liedka and colleagues (2006), Johnson and Raphael conclude that the crime prevention effect of imprisonment has diminished with the scale of imprisonment, which was rising steadily over the period of their analysis (1978 to 2004). Their conclusion also is consistent with previously discussed findings of Canala-Cacho and colleagues (1997), Vollaard (2012), and Owens (2009).

In light of the incapacitation studies, evidence reported by Johnson and Raphael (2012) that the crime-incarceration elasticity is smaller at higher incarceration rates suggests that relatively low-rate offenders are detained by additional incarceration when the incarceration rate is high. However, even the incapacitation interpretation is cast in doubt by the aging of the U.S. prison population. Between 1991 and 2010, the percentage of prisoners in state and federal prisons over age 45 nearly tripled, from 10.6 percent to 27.4 percent (Beck and Mumola, 1999; Guerino et al., 2011). Thus, the apparent decline in the incapacitative effectiveness of incarceration with

scale may simply be reflecting the aging of the prison population (regardless of whether this is attributable to longer sentences), which coincided with rising imprisonment rates. Further complicating the decreasing returns interpretation is the changing composition of the prison population with respect to the types of offenses for which prisoners have been convicted. For more than four decades, the percentage of prisoners incarcerated for non-Part I Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) index crimes 13 has increased substantially (Blumstein and Beck, 1999, 2005). Thus, the reduction in crime prevention effectiveness may be due to the types of prisoners incarcerated rather than the high rate of incarceration itself.

All of these studies, whether instrumental variables-based or not, also suffer from an important conceptual flaw that limits their usefulness in understanding deterrence and devising crime control policy. Prison population is not a policy variable per se; rather, it is an outcome of sanction policies dictating who goes to prison and for how long—the certainty and severity of punishment. In all incentive-based theories of criminal behavior in the tradition of Bentham and Beccaria, the deterrence response to sanction threats is posed in terms of the certainty and severity of punishment, not the incarceration rate. Therefore, to predict how changes in certainty and severity might affect the crime rate requires knowledge of the relationship of the crime rate to certainty and severity as separate entities. This knowledge is not provided by the literature that analyzes the relationship of the crime rate to the incarceration rate.

These studies also were conducted at an overly global level. Nagin (1998) discusses two dimensions of sanction policies that affect incarceration rates. The first—“type”—encompasses three categories of policies: those that determine the certainty of punishment, such as by requiring mandatory imprisonment; those that affect sentence length, such as determinate sentencing laws; and those that regulate parole powers. The second dimension—“scope”—distinguishes policies with a broad scope, such as increased penalties for a wide range of crimes, from policies focused on particular crimes (e.g., drug offenses) or criminals (e.g., repeat offenders).

The 5-fold growth in incarceration rates over the past four decades is attributable to a combination of policies belonging to all cells of this matrix. As described in Chapter 3 , parole powers have been greatly curtailed and sentence lengths increased, both in general and for particular crimes (e.g., drug dealing), and judicial discretion to impose nonincarcerative sanctions has been reduced (Tonry, 1996; Blumstein and Beck, 1999, 2005; Raphael and Stoll, 2009). Consequently, any impact of the increase in prison population

13 Part I index crimes are homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny/theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson.

on the crime rate reflects the effect of an amalgam of potentially interacting factors.

There are good reasons for predicting differences in the crime reduction effects of different types of sanctions (e.g., mandatory minimum sentences for repeat offenders versus prison diversion programs for first-time offenders). Obvious sources of heterogeneity in offender response include such factors as prior contact with the criminal justice system, demographic characteristics, and the mechanism by which sanction threats are communicated to their intended audience.

THE CRIMINAL INVOLVEMENT OF THE FORMERLY INCARCERATED

Research on incapacitation and deterrence focuses largely on the contemporaneous effect of incarceration—the crime prevented now by today’s incarceration. 14 However, today’s incarceration may also affect the level of crime in the future. In studying the lagged effects of incarceration on crime, researchers generally have focused on the criminal involvement of people who have been incarcerated. Two competing hypotheses appear plausible. On the one hand, people who have served time in prison may be less likely to be involved in crime because the experience of incarceration has deterred them or because they have been involved in rehabilitative programs. On the other hand, the formerly incarcerated may be more involved in crime after prison because incarceration has damaged them psychologically in ways that make them more rather than less crime prone, has brought them into contact with criminally involved peers, has exposed them to violent or other risky contexts, or has placed them at risk of crime because of imprisonment’s negative social effects on earnings and family life (discussed in Chapters 8 and 9 , respectively). A recent review of the literature on imprisonment and reoffending by Nagin and colleagues (2009) concludes that there is little evidence of a specific deterrent or rehabilitative effect of incarceration, and that all evidence on the effect of imprisonment on reoffending points to either no effect or a criminogenic effect. 15

14 The committee is not aware of any research estimating the lagged effects of incapacitation on crime.

15 It is important to distinguish the effect of imprisonment on recidivism from the effect of aging on recidivism. Studies of the effect of aging on recidivism examine how rates of recidivism change with age, whereas studies of the effect of imprisonment on recidivism examine how imprisonment affects recidivism compared with a noncustodial sanction such as probation. Thus, the conclusion that rates of recidivism tend to decline with age does not contradict the conclusion that imprisonment, compared with a noncustodial sanction, may be associated with higher rates of recidivism.

Whatever the effects of incarceration on those who have served time, research on recidivism offers a clear picture of crime among the formerly incarcerated. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has published two multistate studies estimating recidivism among state prisoners. Both take an annual cohort of prison releases and use state and federal criminal record databases to estimate rates of rearrest, reconviction, and resentencing to prison. Beck and Shipley (1989) examine criminal records for a 1983 cohort of released prisoners in 11 states, while Langan and Levin (2002) analyze a 1994 cohort in the 11 original states plus 4 others. Although the incarceration rate had roughly doubled between 1983 and 1994, the results of the two studies are strikingly similar: the 3-year rearrest rate for state prisoners was around two-thirds in both cohorts (67.5 percent in 1994 and 62.5 percent in 1983).

Research on recidivism recently has been augmented by studies of “redemption”—the chances of criminal involvement among offenders who have remained crime free (Blumstein and Nakamura, 2009; Kurlychek et al., 2006, 2007; Soothill and Francis, 2009). Although none of these studies examines desistance among the formerly incarcerated, their findings are suggestive and point to the need for research on long-term patterns of desistance among those who have served prison time. Using a variety of cohorts in the United States and the United Kingdom, this research finds that the offending rate of the formerly arrested or those with prior criminal convictions converges toward the (age-specific) offending rate of the general population, conditional on having been crime free for the previous 7 to 10 years. The redemption studies also show that the rate of convergence of the formerly incarcerated tends to be slower if ex-offenders are younger or if they have a long criminal history.

Rehabilitative programming has been the main method for reducing crime among the incarcerated. Such programming dates back to Progressive-era reforms in criminal justice that also produced a separate juvenile justice system for children involved in crime, indeterminate sentencing laws with discretionary parole release, and agencies for parole and probation supervision. For much of the twentieth century, rehabilitation occupied a central place in the official philosophy—if not the practice—of U.S. corrections. This philosophy was significantly challenged in the 1970s when a variety of reviews found that many rehabilitative programs yielded few reductions in crime (Martinson, 1974; National Research Council, 1978a). By the late 1990s, consensus had begun to swing back in favor of rehabilitative programs. Gaes and colleagues (1999) report, with little controversy, that well-designed programs can achieve significant reductions in recidivism, and that community-based programs and programs for juveniles tend to be more successful than programs applied in custody and with adult clients. Gaes and colleagues also point to the special value

of cognitive-behavioral therapies that help offenders manage conflict and aggressive and impulsive behaviors.

Since the review of Gaes and colleagues, there have been several important evaluations of transitional employment and community supervision programs (Hawken and Kleiman, 2009; Redcross et al., 2012). Results for transitional employment among parole populations have been mixed. Over a 3-year follow-up period, prison and jail incarceration was significantly reduced by a 6-week period of transitional employment, but arrests and convictions were unaffected. Parole and probation reforms involving both sanctions that are swift and certain but mild and sanctions that are graduated have been shown to reduce violations and revocations. Because evaluation of such programs is ongoing, information about other postprogram effects is not yet available.

Researchers and policy makers often have claimed that prison is a “school for criminals,” immersing those with little criminal history with others who are heavily involved in serious crime. Indeed, this view motivated a variety of policies intended to minimize social interaction among the incarcerated in the early nineteenth-century penitentiary. Much of the research reported in Chapters 6 through 9 on the individual-level effects of incarceration suggests plausible pathways by which prison time may adversely affect criminal desistance. Research suggests the importance of steady employment and stable family relationships for desisting from crime (Sampson and Laub, 1993; Laub and Sampson, 2003). To the extent that incarceration diminishes job stability and disrupts family relationships, it may also be associated with continuing involvement in crime. As previously indicated, Nagin and colleagues (2009) found that a substantial number of studies report evidence of a criminogenic effect of imprisonment, although they also conclude that most of these studies were based on weak research designs.

EFFECTS OF INCARCERATION FOR DRUG OFFENSES ON DRUG PRICES AND DRUG USE

As discussed in Chapter 2 , a large portion of the growth in state and federal imprisonment is due to the increased number of arrests for drug offenses and the increased number of prison commitments per drug arrest. Law enforcement efforts targeting drug offenses expanded greatly after the 1970s, with the arrest rate for drugs increasing from about 200 per 100,000 adults in 1980 to more than 400 per 100,000 in 2009 (Snyder, 2011). Sentencing for drug offenses also became more punitive, as mandatory prison time for these offenses was widely adopted by the states through the 1980s and incorporated in the Federal Sentencing Guidelines in 1986. Expanded enforcement and the growing use of custodial sentences for drug

offenses also produced a large increase in the incarceration rate for these offenses. From 1980 to 2010, the state incarceration rate for drug offenses grew from 15 per 100,000 to more than 140 per 100,000, a faster rate of increase than for any other offense category. State prison admissions for drug offenses grew most rapidly in the 1980s, increasing from about 10,000 in 1980 to about 116,000 by 1990 and peaking at 157,000 in 2006 (Beck and Blumstein, 2012, Figures 12 and 13).

As discussed in Chapter 4 , successive iterations of the war on drugs, announced by the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush administrations, focused drug control policy on both the supply side and the demand side of the illegal drug market. The intensified law enforcement efforts not only were aimed chiefly at reducing the supply of drugs, but also were intended to reduce the demand for drugs. On the supply side, the specific expectation of policy makers has been that, by taking dealers off the streets and raising the risks associated with selling drugs, these enforcement strategies and more severe punishments would reduce the supply of illegal drugs and raise prices, thereby reducing drug consumption. On the demand side, penalties for possession became harsher as well, and criminal justice agencies became actively involved in reducing demand through the arrest and prosecution of drug users. As a result of this twin focus on supply and demand, incarceration rates for drug possession increased in roughly similar proportion to incarceration rates for drug trafficking (Caulkins and Chandler, 2006).

Much of the research on drug control policy—and specifically, on the effectiveness of law enforcement and criminal justice strategies in carrying out those policies—is summarized in two reports of the National Research Council (2001, 2011). On the supply side of the drug market, the 2001 report finds that “there appears to be nearly unanimous support for the idea that the current policy enforcing prohibition of drug use substantially raises the prices of illegal drugs relative to what they would be otherwise” (p. 153). However, the combined effect of both supply-and demand-side enforcement on price is uncertain (Kleiman, 1997; Kleiman et al., 2011; Reuter, 2013) because effective demand-suppression policies will tend to decrease rather than increase price. Thus, the well-documented reduction in the price of most drugs since the early 1980s (Reuter, 2013) may, in principle, be partly a reflection of success in demand suppression. 16 Nevertheless,

16 National data on drug price trends come from the System to Retrieve Information from Drug Evidence (STRIDE), which combines information on acquisitions of illegal drugs by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Metropolitan Police of the District of Columbia (MPDC). The underlying reporting base from DEA field offices is very sparse, and earlier National Research Council reports warn of the acute limitations of the STRIDE data. The data show large declines in the prices of cocaine and heroin since the early 1980s, and prices have largely been fluctuating around a historically low level over the past two decades. A typical estimate records a decline in the price of a pure gram of powder cocaine from $400

the ultimate objective of both supply-and demand-side enforcement efforts is to reduce the consumption of illicit drugs, and there is little evidence that enforcement efforts have been successful in this regard. The National Research Council (2001, p. 193) concludes: “In summary, existing research seems to indicate that there is little apparent relationship between severity of sanctions prescribed for drug use and prevalence or frequency of use, and that perceived legal risk explains very little in the variance of individual drug use.” Although data often are incomplete and of poor quality, the best empirical evidence suggests that the successive iterations of the war on drugs—through a substantial public policy effort—are unlikely to have markedly or clearly reduced drug crime over the past three decades.

KNOWLEDGE GAPS

We offer the following observations regarding gaps in knowledge of the crime prevention effects of incarceration and research to address those gaps.

Deterrence and Sentence Length

The deterrent effect of lengthy sentences is modest at best. We have pointed to evidence from the Project HOPE experiment (Kleiman, 2009; Hawken and Kleiman, 2009; Hawken, 2010) and a fine enforcement experiment (Weisburd et al., 2008) suggesting that the deterrent effect of sentence length may be subject to decreasing returns. Research on the relationship between sentence length and the magnitude of the deterrent effect is therefore a high priority. Related research is needed to establish whether other components of the certainty of punishment beyond the certainty of apprehension, such as the probability of imprisonment given conviction, are effective deterrents.

Sentencing Data by State

A National Research Council report on the deterrent effect of the death penalty (National Research Council, 2012a) describes large gaps in state-level data on the types of noncapital sanctions legally available for the punishment of murder and on their actual utilization. Comparable gaps exist for other serious crimes that are not subject to capital punishment. As a consequence, it is not possible to compare postconviction sentencing practices across the 50 states. Development of a comprehensive database

in 1981 to under $100 in 2007 (Fries et al., 2008). Similar price declines are found for heroin and crack cocaine.

that would allow for such cross-state comparisons over time is therefore a high priority.

Many studies have attempted to estimate the combined incapacitation and deterrence effects of incarceration on crime using panel data at the state level from the 1970s to the 1990s and 2000s. Most studies estimate the crime-reducing effect of incarceration to be small and some report that the size of the effect diminishes with the scale of incarceration. Where adjustments are made for the direct dependence of incarceration rates on crime rates, the crime-reducing effects of incarceration are found to be larger. Thus, the degree of dependence of the incarceration rate on the crime rate is crucial to the interpretation of these studies. Several studies influential for the committee’s conclusions in Chapters 3 and 4 find that the direct dependence of the incarceration rate on the crime rate is modest, lending credence to a small crime-reduction effect on incarceration. However, research in this area is not unanimous and the historical and legal analysis is hard to quantify. If the trend in the incarceration rate depended strongly on the trend in crime, then a larger effect of incarceration on crime would be more credible. On balance, panel data studies support the conclusion that the growth in incarceration rates reduced crime, but the magnitude of the crime reduction remains highly uncertain and the evidence suggests it was unlikely to have been large.

Whatever the estimated average effect of the incarceration rate on the crime rate, the available studies on imprisonment and crime have limited utility for policy. The incarceration rate is the outcome of policies affecting who goes to prison and for how long and of policies affecting parole revocation. Not all policies can be expected to be equally effective in preventing crime. Thus, it is inaccurate to speak of the crime prevention effect of incarceration in the singular. Policies that effectively target the incarceration of highly dangerous and frequent offenders can have large crime prevention benefits, whereas other policies will have a small prevention effect or, even worse, increase crime in the long run if they have the effect of increasing postrelease criminality.

Evidence is limited on the crime prevention effects of most of the policies that contributed to the post-1973 increase in incarceration rates. Nevertheless, the evidence base demonstrates that lengthy prison sentences are ineffective as a crime control measure. Specifically, the incremental deterrent effect of increases in lengthy prison sentences is modest at best. Also, because recidivism rates decline markedly with age and prisoners necessarily age as they serve their prison sentence, lengthy prison sentences are an inefficient approach to preventing crime by incapacitation unless they

are specifically targeted at very high-rate or extremely dangerous offenders. For these reasons, statutes mandating lengthy prison sentences cannot be justified on the basis of their effectiveness in preventing crime.

Finally, although the body of credible evidence on the effect of the experience of imprisonment on recidivism is small, that evidence consistently points either to no effect or to an increase rather than a decrease in recidivism. Thus, there is no credible evidence of a specific deterrent effect of the experience of incarceration.

Our review of the evidence in this chapter reaffirms the theories of deterrence first articulated by the Enlightenment philosophers Beccaria and Bentham. In their view, the overarching purpose of punishment is to deter crime. For state-imposed sanctions to deter crime, they theorized, requires three ingredients—severity, certainty, and celerity of punishment. But they also posited that severity alone would not deter crime. Our review of the evidence has confirmed both the enduring power of their theories and the modern relevance of their cautionary observation about overreliance on the severity of punishment as a crime prevention policy.

After decades of stability from the 1920s to the early 1970s, the rate of imprisonment in the United States more than quadrupled during the last four decades. The U.S. penal population of 2.2 million adults is by far the largest in the world. Just under one-quarter of the world's prisoners are held in American prisons. The U.S. rate of incarceration, with nearly 1 out of every 100 adults in prison or jail, is 5 to 10 times higher than the rates in Western Europe and other democracies. The U.S. prison population is largely drawn from the most disadvantaged part of the nation's population: mostly men under age 40, disproportionately minority, and poorly educated. Prisoners often carry additional deficits of drug and alcohol addictions, mental and physical illnesses, and lack of work preparation or experience. The growth of incarceration in the United States during four decades has prompted numerous critiques and a growing body of scientific knowledge about what prompted the rise and what its consequences have been for the people imprisoned, their families and communities, and for U.S. society.

The Growth of Incarceration in the United States examines research and analysis of the dramatic rise of incarceration rates and its affects. This study makes the case that the United States has gone far past the point where the numbers of people in prison can be justified by social benefits and has reached a level where these high rates of incarceration themselves constitute a source of injustice and social harm.

The Growth of Incarceration in the United States recommends changes in sentencing policy, prison policy, and social policy to reduce the nation's reliance on incarceration. The report also identifies important research questions that must be answered to provide a firmer basis for policy. The study assesses the evidence and its implications for public policy to inform an extensive and thoughtful public debate about and reconsideration of policies.

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United Nations

Office on drugs and crime.

• Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice

Crime Prevention

• Communities

"Crime Prevention   comprises strategies and measures that seek to reduce the risk of crimes occurring, and their potential harmful effects on individuals and society, including fear of crime, by intervening to influence their multiple causes."   the Prevention of Crime ECOSOC Resolution 2002/13, Annex .

Well-planned crime prevention strategies not only prevent crime and victimization, but also contribute to sustainable development. Prevention is key to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 16 in terms of reducing violence, crime and injustice, as well as for creating safe and resilient cities (SDG 11) and for eliminating all form of violence against women and girls (SDG 5).

Effective prevention requires actors in the justice system to collaborate with those in other sectors to address the root causes of disputes and avert conflict, violence and human rights abuses. In relation to crime and violence, this means that it is necessary to move from punitive measures to evidence-based prevention that reduces levels of violence, in particular against women, children, and vulnerable groups. It also means that sectors that interact with offenders and victims, such as social workers, prosecution authorities and defence attorneys, should be included in the implementation of prevention programmes, to ensure that communication is effective and that referrals of individual cases to appropriate service providers run smoothly and are in the best interest of the concerned individuals.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) assists requesting Member States to enhance the capacity of key crime prevention actors and systems to operate more effectively and in accordance with human rights with a view to reduce crime, violence and victimization.

Further to the relevant United Nations standards and norms on crime prevention, UNODC provides advisory services to requesting Member States seeking to develop local or national strategies, policies and programmes to prevent crime and victimization.

The technical assistance that the Office provides focuses on several key areas:

1) Data collection and analysis; 

2) Policy development and advice;

3) Capacity building;

4) Partnerships

Strengthening the resilience of at-risk youth in Senegal through Sport

Strengthening youth participation in public policy making and decision-making

NY Discussion Forum on Community-based Crime Prevention

Locally-based crime prevention initiative in the Niger Delta, Nigeria:

https://www.unodc.org/nigeria/en/building-youth-resilience-to-violence-and-crime-through-social-developmental-approaches-to-crime-prevention.html

https://www.unodc.org/nigeria/en/bayelsa-state-governor-and-unodc-launch-project-to-support-community-based-crime-prevention-strategies-in-the-niger-delta-region.html

High-level event on mainstreaming youth considerations in crime prevention, General Assembly, New York

Report on the “Outcome of the expert group meeting on integrating sport into youth crime prevention and criminal justice strategies”

Strengthening prevention efforts in addressing drivers of violent extremism and radicalization among young people, UNODC launches new Guide on Preventing Violent Extremism through Sport

UNODC Crime Prevention Brochure 'Evidence-based policies for improved community safety in Latin American and African cities'

For more News and Events please visit Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice  and Crime Prevention through Sports

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The New Policing, Crime Control, and Harm Reduction

by Anthony A. Braga | July 2017

The “new policing,” as described by Professor Fagan, captures a concerning element of the slow drift of the police profession away from community problem-solving models of policing popularized during the 1980s and 1990s and towards more aggressive enforcement strategies over the last two decades. It is important to note here that the so-called new policing also has desirable elements that better position police departments to enhance public safety and security. The police should embrace an analytical approach to understanding crime patterns and trends. Crime is highly concentrated in small high-risk places, and committed by and against a small number of people who are at high-risk of being the victim of a crime or party to it (Braga, 2012). Police managers should also be held accountable for their performance in detecting and addressing these identifiable risks.

The new policing model unfortunately emphasizes increased law enforcement action over more nuanced prevention strategies that engage the community. One-dimensional and overly-broad police surveillance and enforcement strategies do little to change the underlying dynamics that drive serious urban violence and have generally not been found to be effective in controlling crime (e.g., see Braga et al., 2015). Indiscriminate police enforcement actions also contribute to mass incarceration problems that harm disadvantaged neighborhoods (Young and Petersilia, 2016). This is particularly true when such an approach is coupled with a “crime numbers game” managerial mindset that promotes yearly increases in arrest, summons, and investigatory stop actions as key performance measures (Eterno and Silverman, 2012). Indeed, Professor Fagan makes a strong case that aggressive enforcement strategies in the new policing may heighten racial and economic disparities and possibly reinforce segregation.

Fagan’s essay, however, does not focus on the kinds of crime control strategies that police executives could pursue in the new policing model that would help reduce harmful consequences on poor and disadvantaged neighborhoods. As suggested by former President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing (2015), police strategies that unintentionally violate civil rights, compromise police legitimacy, or undermine trust are counterproductive. This is precisely why they recommended that law enforcement agencies develop and adopt policies and strategies that reinforce the importance of community engagement in managing public safety. While community policing programs have not been found to be effective in reducing crime, they have been found to generate positive effects on citizen satisfaction, perceptions of disorder, and police legitimacy (Gill et al., 2014). Moreover, community engagement strategies implemented as part of community policing programs can provide important input to help focus problem-oriented policing, hot spots policing, and focused deterrence approaches, which do seem to reduce crime (Weisburd et al., 2010; Braga et al., 2014; Braga and Weisburd, 2012).

Developing close relationships with community members helps the police gather information about crime and disorder problems, understand the nature of these problems, and solve specific crimes. Community members can also help police prevent crime by contributing to improvements to the physical environment and through informal social control of high-risk people. In this way, police strategies focusing on high-risk people and high-risk places would cease to be a form of profiling and become a generator of community engagement projects (Braga, 2016). Indeed, a central idea in community policing is to engage residents so they can exert more control over dynamics that contribute to their own potential for victimization and, by doing so, influence neighborhood levels of crime (Skogan and Hartnett, 1997). Preventing crime by addressing underlying crime-producing situations reduces harm to potential victims as well as harm to would-be offenders by not relying solely on arrest and prosecution actions.

Community engagement in developing appropriately focused strategies would help to safeguard against indiscriminate and overly aggressive enforcement tactics and other inappropriate policing activities, which in turn erode the community’s trust and confidence in the police and inhibit cooperation. Collaborative partnerships between police and community members improve the transparency of law enforcement actions and provide residents with a much-needed voice in crime prevention work. Ongoing conversations with the community can ensure that day-to-day police-citizen interactions are conducted in a procedurally just manner that enhances community trust and compliance with the law (Tyler, 2006).

Community problem-solving strategies, rather than aggressive enforcement, should be the last prong of the new policing model. In the context of racial and economic segregation, the positive impacts of such a policy change could be profound. Reduced mobility driven by fears of undue police attention, financial burdens imposed by fines and other criminal justice system costs, employment and education limitations associated with criminal records, and other negative externalities experienced by residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods would diminish. Effective police-community partnerships could improve the connection of local residents with a range of government and non-profit resources that promote public safety by improving neighborhood conditions. Safer neighborhoods are more attractive to private businesses who can provide jobs and much needed goods and services to local residents. In this way, police departments could be key initiators of longer-lasting social and economic changes that undo the harms associated with racial and economic segregation.

The ideals of community policing have been around for a long time. Unfortunately, many police departments do not seem to be embracing these approaches with fidelity to the original principles (National Research Council, 2004). It is perhaps not surprising that even though community policing has been widely adopted, at least in principle, substantial conflict between police and the communities they serve continues to occur. It is high time that police departments reinvest in implementing community policing with a much more meaningful commitment to problem-solving and prevention-oriented approaches that emphasize the role of the public in helping set police priorities. By doing so, “new policing” strategies can be oriented towards reducing harm while controlling crime.

Braga, Anthony A. 2012. “High Crime Places, Times, and Offenders.” In The Oxford Handbook on Crime Prevention , edited by Brandon C. Welsh and David P. Farrington. New York: Oxford University Press.

Braga, Anthony A. 2016. “Better Policing Can Improve Legitimacy and Reduce Mass Incarceration.” Harvard Law Review Forum , 129 (7): 233 – 241.

Braga, Anthony A., Andrew V. Papachristos, and David M. Hureau. 2014. “The Effects of Hot Spots Policing on Crime: An Updated Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Justice Quarterly , 31 (4): 633 – 663.

Braga, Anthony A. and David L. Weisburd. 2012. “The Effects of Focused Deterrence Strategies on Crime: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Empirical Evidence.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency , 49 (3): 323 – 358.

Braga, Anthony A., Brandon C. Welsh, and Cory Schnell. 2015. “Can Policing Disorder Reduce Crime? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency , 52 (4): 567 – 588.

Eterno, John and Eli Silverman. 2012. The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation . New York: CRC Press.

Gill, Charlotte, David L. Weisburd, Cody Telep, Zoe Vitter and Trevor Bennett. 2014. “Community-Oriented Policing to Reduce Crime, Disorder and Fear and Increase Satisfaction and Legitimacy Among Citizens: A Systematic Review.” Journal of Experimental Criminology , 10 (4): 399–428.

National Research Council. 2004. Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing: The Evidence. Committee to Review Research on Police Policy Practices . Washington, DC: National Academies Press.

President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. 2015. Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.

Skogan, Wesley and Susan Hartnett. 1997. Community Policing , Chicago Style. New York: Oxford University Press.

Tyler, Tom R. 2006. Why People Obey the Law: Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and Compliance (rev. ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Weisburd, David L., Cody Telep, Joshua Hinkle, and John Eck. 2010. “Is Problem Oriented Policing Effective in Reducing Crime and Disorder?” Criminology & Public Policy , 9 (1): 139–172.

Young, Kathryne M. and Joan Petersilia. 2016. “Keeping Track: Surveillance, Control, and the Expansion of the Carceral State.” Harvard Law Review , 129 (7): 1318 – 1360.

Anthony A. Braga is Distinguished Professor and Director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities. 

More in Discussion 24: Policing and Segregation

Policing and Segregation

by Jeffrey A. Fagan

The Dynamics of Policing and Segregation by Race and Class

by Monica Bell

The New Policing, Crime Control, and Harm Reduction

by Anthony A. Braga

High Volume Stops and Violence Prevention

by Philip J. Cook

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National Crime Prevention Strategy: Summary

1. why a national crime prevention strategy, 2. the aims of the national crime prevention strategy, 3. the roots of the current crime situation, 4. approach of the national crime prevention strategy, 5. what the ncps builds on - current actions against crime, 6. the four pillar approach to crime prevention - a strategic framework, 7. national programmes to prevent crime, pillar 1: national programmes - the criminal justice process, pillar 2: reducing crime through environmental design, pillar 3: public values and education, pillar 4: transnational crime, 8. implementing the ncps: national, provincial and local roles and responsibilities, 9. conclusion, this is a short version of the strategy document prepared by an inter-departmental strategy team comprising of the departments of correctional services, defence, intelligence, justice, safety and security and welfare. the full document is available on request from the department for safety and security..

High levels of crime pose a serious threat to our emergent democracy. Violent crime often leads to a tragic loss of life and injury, and the loss of possessions and livelihood due to crime is incalculable. Crime results in the deprivation of the rights and dignity of citizens, and poses a threat to peaceful resolution of differences and rightful participation of all in the democratic process.

Crime casts fear into the hearts of South Africans from all walks of life and prevents them from taking their rightful place in the development and growth of our country. It inhibits our citizens from communicating with one another freely, from engaging in economic activity and prevents entrepreneurs and investors from taking advantage of the opportunities which our country offers.

The rights and freedoms which the constitution entrenches are threatened every time a citizen becomes a victim of crime.

For these reasons, the Government regards the prevention of crime as a national priority. This applies not only to the Cabinet, and the departments concerned with security and justice, but also to all other national departments which are able to make a contribution to a reduction in crime levels. Provincial governments will work together with us to implement the NCPS.

We accept that some of the causes of crime are deeprooted and related to the history and socioeconomic realities of our society. For this reason, a comprehensive strategy must go beyond providing only effective policing. It must also provide for mobilisation and participation of civil society in assisting to address crime.

To effectively reduce crime, it is necessary to transform and reorganise government and facilitate real community participation. We need to weave a new social fabric, robust enough to withstand the stresses of rapid change in a new-born society. To expect this to happen too quickly is to sabotage proper planning and solid construction of a new criminal justice machinery.

Most fundamentally this strategy requires that government moves beyond a mode of crisis management and reaction. Government must ensure that effective planning and sustainable success in reducing crime will reach well into the next century.

The National Crime Prevention Strategy was initiated by the Cabinet in March 1995. The strategy is the result of an extensive process of research and analysis and has drawn on international experiences. Both Business Against Crime and NGO' s concerned with crime prevention have made a substantial contribution to this strategy.

The NCPS has the following objectives:

• The establishment of a comprehensive policy framework which will enable government to address crime in a coordinated and focused manner which draws on the resources of all government agencies, as well as civil society.
• The promotion of a shared understanding and common vision of how we, as a nation, are going to tackle crime. This vision should also inform and stimulate initiatives at provincial and local level.
• The development of a set of national programmes which serve to kick start and focus the efforts of various government departments in delivering quality service aimed at solving the problems leading to high crime levels.
• The maximisation of civil society's participation in mobilising and sustaining crime prevention initiatives.
• Creation of a dedicated and integrated crime prevention capacity which can conduct ongoing research and evaluation of departmental and public campaigns as well as facilitating effective crime prevention programmes at provincial and local level.

This National Crime Prevention Strategy is based on a fundamentally new approach by government. In particular, it requires the development of wider responsibility for crime prevention and a shift in emphasis from reactive "crime control" ; which deploys most resources towards responding after crimes have already been committed, towards proactive "crime prevention" aimed at preventing crime from occurring at all.

The strategy focuses on a number of challenges. In particular,:

• Existing crime data is very unreliable and can be misleading. This places a priority on gathering reliable crime information so as to facilitate effective deployment of resources and dynamic strategic planning.
• Media representations of crime are very influential in shaping public perceptions. These are however, often disproportionately responsive to audible interest groups in society, rather than to less obvious, but important, crime issues. An effective communications strategy, based on reliable information, is important in properly informing public opinion in the fight against crime.

This strategy concentrates on National Programmes and on developing a conceptual framework for crime prevention at all levels. Although committed to the programmes contained herein, the government sees this document as representing a working strategy, which should be refined, changed and improved on the basis of feedback and experience. In particular, provincial summits will be held to develop civil society and provincial government responses to this strategy.

This strategy is based on a comprehensive analysis of the present crime situation. In particular, the NCPS strategy team has conducted an in-depth study of the causes of crime. This is based on comparative international research and pays attention to the particular South African factors which underlie high crime levels.

Crime levels in South Africa are affected by many of the same universal factors which manifest themselves in other countries. Our unique situation and history have however contributed to a range of factors specific to our situation. Some of these factors are outlined below:

• Comparative research, from countries such as the former Soviet Union and Northern Ireland, suggests that all forms of crime increase during periods of political transition. Our own rapid transition had the unintended consequences of breaking down the existing (and illegitimate) mechanisms of social control without immediately replacing them with legitimate and credible alternatives. This weakness has been exacerbated by the historical breakdown of other vehicles of social authority, such as schools, the family and traditional communities.
• The Government of National Unity inherited, intact, the entire public service, including a raciallybased, disproportionate distribution of Criminal Justice resources. Insufficient and illequipped personnel, combined with outdated systems, and fragmented departments, have contributed to a system that has been unable to cope with the demands created by the need to provide services to all the people of South Africa.
• The political transition also generated substantial material expectations many of which were largely beyond the immediate delivery capacity of the new government. This has generated frustrated expectations. The very high, and often unrealised, expectations associated with transition have contributed to the justification of crime. In addition, the legitimation of violence associated with political causes has served to decriminalise certain categories of crime related to intergroup conflict or political rivalries. Historical criminalisation of political activity and protest has also contributed to a blurring between legitimate forms of protest and criminal activity.
• South Africa's violent history has left us with a "culture of violence", which contributes to the high levels of violence associated with criminal activity in South Africa. Violence in South Africa has come to be regarded as an acceptable means of resolving social, political and even domestic conflicts.
• Historically shaped, poverty and underdevelopment provide key contextual factors in understanding increasing crime levels. Although poverty does not directly lead to higher crime levels, together with a range of other sociopolitical and cultural factors, it contributes to conditions for an increase in crime and the growth of criminal syndicates and gangs.
• The historic marginalisation of the youth, combined with the slow growth in the job market, has contributed to the creation of a large pool of "at risk"; young people.
• While economic growth and development are crucial in addressing the factors which lead to crime, poorly managed development can itself contribute to increased crime rates.
• The problem of rising crime levels has become something of a "political football". The tendency of political parties to use the issue as a vote catcher has resulted in the generation of single-factor causes and solutions to crime and violence. It is vital that the NCPS be seen as both a multi-agency and multi-party approach, and that the widest possible consensus is forged in the approach we adopt to crime.
• The absence of services to victims of crime means that the negative impact of crime on individual, family and community is largely ignored. Not only does this contribute to the incidence of repeat victimisation, but may lead to retributive violence, or the perpetration of other crimes displaced into the social or domestic arena.
• The number and easy accessibility of fire-arms is a major contributor to violent crime. The fact that a large proportion of the citizenry is armed serves to escalate the levels of violence associated with robbery, rape and car theft.
• Gender inequality, both in terms of popular attitudes and the inadequate service offered buy the criminal justice system to women, contributes to the high levels of violence perpetrated against women.

It is important to recognise that there is no single cause of crime in South Africa. The search for single causes will merely lead to simplistic and therefore ineffective solutions. At the same time, different types of crime have different root causes, and hence require different approaches to prevention. The National Crime Prevention Strategy is based on the principle of separate examination of each form of crime. This principle of "dis-aggregation" runs through the NCPS and means that we deal with car hijacking in a way which is quite distinct from corruption, murder or child abuse.

This dis-aggregated examination of different crime types leads to the inevitable conclusion that sustainable prevention can only be achieved through a multi-faceted approach. Crime needs to be tackled in a comprehensive way, which means going beyond an exclusive focus on policing and the Justice system. It means problem-solving to address the causal factors which provide opportunities for crime and limit the likelihood of detection. The framework outlined in this strategy brings a far wider range of solutions to bear on specific crimes, as well as creating roles for a broader range of participants.

In one sense all crime is related, in that the proliferation of petty offences creates a sense of lawlessness, within which the community is more likely to turn a blind eye to much more serious offences. On the other hand it is necessary to focus limited resources on the most important crimes. For this reason we have prioritised seven key crime categories. These crimes currently pose the greatest threat to our citizens and to the prosperity of the country. This prioritisation must be understood in the context of provincial and local differences and should not be cast in stone. Nevertheless, it provides a critical starting point for the more effective utilization of police, prosecutors and limited prison capacity.

The crime categories of particular concern are:

• Crimes involving fire-arms which have significantly increased the level of violence associated with crime, thereby increasing physical and psychological costs of crime to society.
• Organised Crime, including the organised smuggling of illegal immigrants and narcotics, and gangsterism, serve to generate higher levels of criminality and violence. Since the advent of democracy and the re-integration of South Africa into the international community, we have seen a rapid growth in this form of crime.
• White Collar Crime places a burden on the economy and contributes to the prevailing sense of lawlessness
• Gender Violence and crimes against children are not only highly prevalent but have a profoundly negative impact on the rights and future well-being of women and children.
• Violence associated with inter-group conflict, such as political conflicts, taxi violence and land disputes are unacceptably common in South Africa and pose a threat to democratic tolerance and orderly co-existence.
• Vehicle Theft and Hijacking has increased substantially and has contributed to increased levels of fear and insecurity.
• Corruption within criminal justice system, contributes to a general climate of lawlessness, and serves to undermine the legitimacy and effectiveness of the criminal justice system.

For all of these categories of crime, immediate prioritisation of departmental resources has already been implemented. These priority crimes are also the focus of the core national programmes which are described in section 6. An outline of some of the most important ongoing actions is presented in section 5 below.

The National Crime Prevention Strategy is primarily a long-term programme aimed at creating conditions in which the opportunities and motivation for crime will be reduced, as well as transforming the capacity of the criminal justice system to deal with crime. The National Crime Prevention Strategy is, however, based on an ongoing programme of action which is being implemented by a range of departments.

Current and ongoing actions involve the SAPS, SANDF, National Intelligence Co-ordination Committee and the Departments of Justice, Correctional Services and Welfare. Each of these entities has their own ongoing programme to address crime. The departmental activities are centred on the priority crimes already listed. Some of the actions which are presently underway include:

• Addressing Crimes involving firearms through an interagency effort to improve the legislative controls of firearms, track smuggling routes and syndicates, cooperate with neighbouring states, tighten controls on state-owned weapons and restrict illegal importation of firearms. In addition, special efforts have been launched to curb the possession of illegal firearms and increase deterrence in dealing with persons charged with firearm related crimes.
• Organised crime is being targeted through focused intelligence gathering efforts related to organised crime syndicates. Such syndicates are involved in a range of different crime forms and close co-operation between departmental entities working on different facets of organised crime has been prioritised. Activities around specific issues related to organised crime include the implementation of a new approach, based on community collaboration. Strategies have also been developed to deal with gangsterism in certain communities plagued by gangs.
• White collar crime is being addressed through a multifaceted approach which includes legislation to curb money laundering, special co-operation efforts between police and business as well as a programme by business to develop codes of conduct within the private sector
• Gender violence and crimes against children are receiving special attention through the establishment of specialised police units to investigate crimes against children and the creation of victim aid centres at which interdisciplinary services are offered to victims of these crimes. In addition, special court facilities which protect young witnesses have been established around the country, and are supported in some areas by prosecutors specialising in these cases. A number of governmental and non-governmental education and awareness programmes exist to educate children to deal with abuse and to raise awareness of gender crimes and crimes against children.
• Violence associated with inter-group conflict is being addressed through a Presidential task team to address violence in KwaZulu Natal. This team is co-ordinating all intelligence gathering efforts and identifying solutions in areas particularly affected by violence. Operational strategies based on sector policing are aimed at maximising police deployment in affected areas. In addition an intelligence task team is supporting the Cabinet Committee on Taxi Violence and special police units are addressing this issue.
• Short term strategies to deal with Vehicle theft and hijacking are focused on introducing tracking systems to detect vehicles, partnerships to mobilise the community to assist in locating stolen vehicles and partnerships with civil society which support law enforcement efforts. In addition, a Border Control Unit to address the movement of cars out of the country has been set up and is being supported by additional deployment of SANDF resources in support of roadblocks and cordon and search operations.
• Corruption within the Criminal Justice System is being addressed by the establishment of police anti-corruption units at National and Provincial level. An Independent Complaints Directorate is being established and will receive and process complaints from the public. Control measures are being implemented to prevent the theft of police dockets in the Justice sector and investigations into corruption are underway in the Department of Welfare. These efforts are being complemented by intelligence projects aimed at uncovering corruption within government more widely.

The government has adopted the four pillar approach as a model which sets out the different areas in which crime prevention should be developed. This model is intended to provide a basis for the development of crime prevention initiatives at provincial and municipal levels, as well as through civil society initiatives.

Pillar 1: The Criminal Justice Process aims to make the criminal justice system more efficient and effective. It must provide a sure and clear deterrent for criminals and reduce the risks of re-offending.

Pillar 2: Reducing Crime through Environmental Design focuses on designing systems to reduce the opportunity for crime and increase the ease of detection and identification of criminals.

Pillar 3: Public Values and Education concern initiatives aimed at changing the way communities react to crime and violence. It involves programmes which utilise public education and information in facilitating meaningful citizen participation in crime prevention.

Pillar 4: Trans-national crime programmes aim at improving the controls over cross border traffic related to crime and reducing the refuge which the region offenders to international criminal syndicates.

Pillar 1: National programmes - the criminal justice process

An effective and legitimate criminal justice system is a vital foundation for crime prevention and the protection of human rights. This pillar will be addressed at a national level by 8 key programmes designed to revamp and energise the criminal justice system as a whole. The key aims of programmes in this pillar are:

• To increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the criminal justice system as a deterrent to crime and as a source of relief and support to victims.
• To improve the access of dis-empowered groups to the criminal justice process. These include women, children and victims in general.
• To focus the resources of the criminal justice system on priority crimes.
• To forge inter-departmental integration of policy and management, in the interests of co-ordinated planning, coherent action and the effective use of resources.
• To improve the service delivered by the criminal justice process to victims, through increasing accessibility to victims and sensitivity to their needs.

1.1 Re-engineering of criminal justice process

This programme is aimed at increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the criminal justice process, thus increasing the probability of successful investigation, prosecution and punishment for priority crimes. It aims to reduce the time period which elapses between the reporting of a crime and sentencing, hence improving the deterrent quality of the criminal justice system, as well as enhancing public confidence.

Consultants are busy identifying the most important problem areas and a Cross-cutting Task Group is working to integrate policy and management between police, courts, prisons, and welfare agencies.

Lead agency: Justice, assisted by Safety and Security, Correctional Services, Welfare, private sector and NGO's.

Key actions:

• Unblock blockages in process between investigation, arrest, prosecution and conviction.
• Strengthen weak points through designing new systems, training personnel and funding critical leverage points.

1.2 Criminal justice information management

The criminal justice system is essentially information driven. However, existing information systems are outdated, fragmented and sometimes require arduous manual search and retrieval of data. Quality information is essential for investigation, prosecution and sentencing and is crucial in deciding how best to use limited resources. Improved quality and effective use of information are critical factors in enhancing the efficiency of the criminal justice system as a whole and are the objects of this programme.

Lead agency : Safety and Security assisted by Justice, Correctional Services, Welfare, private sector and NGO's.

• Create networks between departments for data concerning cases, suspects and convicts which will enable shared use of systems, cost saving and improvements in efficiency.
• Design of data programmes to assist in assessing the effectiveness of different functions within the criminal justice process. This will support better decision-making, resource allocation and strategic planning.

1.3 Crime information and intelligence

Adequate crime information is vital, not only for the effective investigation and prosecution of organised crime syndicates, but as a key resource in developing preventive strategies under pillars 2, 3 and 4. This programme involves focusing resources and improve co-ordination and analysis at all levels. It also involves making more effective use of existing "intelligence".

Lead agency : NICOC (National Intelligence Coordinating Committee), assisted by Justice, Defence, Safety and Security, Correctional Services, Welfare, the South African Secret Service, academic analysts and NGO's who focus on crime trends and syndicates.

• Increase the analysis of strategic information for crime- prevention purposes.
• Greater integration of crime data gathered at station level into a comprehensive strategic analysis of criminal trends.
• Integration of public sources of information and analysis with "intelligence" gathered by other means, and making certain crime intelligence more widely available to facilitate local initiatives and community empowerment.

1.4 Prosecutorial Policy

The investigative and prosecutorial priority placed on different offences, is a key factor in the effective use of resources. In order to optimise investigative and court capacity, as well as to build public confidence, a clear prosecutorial policy is required. This policy will rest with the Attorneys General (AG's) and it is vital that this programme should not impinge on the independence of the Judiciary.

Lead agency : Justice, in collaboration with AG's, Law Commission and the Department of Safety and Security.

• Establishment of guidelines to place more emphasis on priority crimes and ensure that the needs of special interest groups are met.
• Improvement and control of linkages between police and prosecutors to improve efficiency, within the bounds of police impartiality and judicial independence.

1.5 Appropriate community sentencing

Available correctional resources must be used in a targeted way to deal more effectively with serious offenders. The imposition of prison sentences on minor offenders reduces the likelihood of re-integration into society and further burdens the criminal justice system. lncreasing the availability of community sentencing options on conviction increases humane treatment of minor offenders and will improve the effectiveness of corrections more widely by reducing the burden on the correctional services department. This will also reduce recidivism within this sector.

Lead agency : Correctional Services, assisted by Welfare, the Department of Safety and Security, Justice, the Law commission and NGO's involved with offender rehabilitation.

• Development of criteria in line with the priority crimes described above and guidelines for sentencing which are canvassed with the Judiciary.
• Review and upgrade existing community sentencing options and examine the potential roles of community service providers in this regard.

1.6 Diversion programme for minor offenders

The criminal justice system is enormously costly and often inappropriate for dealing with petty offenders, particularly juveniles, where stigmatisation can pose an intolerable burden on the normal developmental path to responsible adult citizenship. This programme aims to divert petty offenders and juveniles out of the criminal justice system.

Lead agency : Welfare, assisted by the departments of Correctional Services, Justice, Defence, Safety and Security and non-governmental organisations concerned with child welfare and the rehabilitation of offenders.

Key Actions:

• Extend existing capacity for diversion on the basis of agreed national guidelines and criteria.
• Develop standardised referral system, in consultation with Attorneys General and South African Police Service.

1.7 Secure care for juveniles

Youthful offenders suspected of serious offences should not be held in standard prison or police cells. They do, however, need to be held securely, in an environment which limits unnecessary trauma and strengthens the likelihood of eventual re-integration into society. This requires the creation of special secure care facilities for young suspects and convicts.

Lead agency : Welfare, through the interministerial committee on Young People at Risk, which includes the department of Justice, Safety and Security and Correctional Services. This team will be assisted by other key departments such as Public Works, NGO's and the Private Sector.

• Speed up the completion or conversion of necessary buildings .for Secure Care Facilities for juveniles.
• Implement legislative steps and social programmes to discourage the exploitation of juveniles by criminal syndicates.

1.8 Rationalisation of legislation

In the past, legislation which relates to crime prevention has not been co-ordinated in a coherent programme. This programme is aimed at improving and streamlining the development of legislation required to improve crime prevention. It is aimed at ensuring that legislation address the protection of special interest groups, including women and children.

Lead agency : Justice, supported by Safety and Security the South African Law Commission, the relevant portfolio committees of the National Assembly.

• Review the progress of all legislation promoted by a departments which will contribute to crime prevention.
• Speed up the preparation of key legislation which is necessary in supporting crime prevention efforts.

1.9 Victim Empowerment Programme

Recognition of the role and rights of victims are vital in addressing the effects of crime and creating crime-resistant communities. This programme is aimed at making the criminal justice process more victim-friendly minimising the negative effects of crime on its victims. This empowerment of victims is aimed at creating a greater role for victims in the criminal justice process, as well as providing protection against repeat victimisation.

Lead agency : Welfare, supported by Health, Safety & Security, Justice, Local Health authorities and service groups.

• Extend training to police and justice officials which introduces greater victim sensitivity, as well as referral to other service providers to address the effects of crime.
• Implement a victim support programme, based on surveys of victims' experiences of the criminal justice system.
• Provide basic information to complainants and victims regarding the progress of all cases, as well as key information which enables victims to lay complaints more easily.

The high incidence of many forms of crime is due to an environment which provides ample opportunities for crime, and where risks of detection, or prosecution are low. This pillar will extend the development of security-based design of residential areas buildings and shopping centres. Ultimately the objective of this pillar is to ensure that safety and crime prevention considerations are applied in the development of all new structures and systems, and in the re-design and upgrading of old areas.

The objectives of this pillar are:

• To encourage awareness of the possibilities of environmental design in reducing and preventing crime.
• To promote the use of environmental designs in new areas including in the design of delivery systems, the organisation of industries and accounting systems.

The four initial national programmes covered here exist in areas where the needs are well established. These are by no means exhaustive and it is envisaged that other programmes will be initiated in the near future, at national, provincial and at local level.

2.1 Environmental design and maintenance

While environmental design to reduce crime is not new, no integrated policy has existed on this matter. Active support is required for the development of greater awareness and capacity in the field of environmental crime prevention. The importance of maintaining of existing infrastructure and services in high risk areas must also be strengthened through incentives and policy direction from all levels of government.

Lead agency : Safety and Security, supported by Sport and Recreation, Trade and Industry, Home Affairs, Justice, Health, Welfare, Provincial and Local Government and professional associations such as architects, town planners and the security industry, as well as development agencies and non-governmental organisations.

• Establish institutional capacity to research, advise and monitor environmental design within the private sector and to develop an environmental design policy for government.
• Examine the need for greater regulation of business sectors involving high-value commodities which fuel the development of crime.

2.2 Identification system

The existence of a functional system of citizen identification is an important. enabling condition for effective governance. It also provides an important underlying resource for regulation and law enforcement. The effectiveness of the new ID system in crime prevention applications requires both that service providers utilise the national ID system as a safety check, and that clear guidelines are developed to prevent abuse of the system from impinging on the rights of citizens.

Lead agency : Home Affairs, supported by Safety and Security, Justice, Transport, Service Providers and the Private Sector.

• Establish mechanisms for law enforcement agencies to access the National ID system where required.
• Speed up the Implementation of a new ID system which utilises an Automated Fingerprint Identification System, as well as the implementation of a network which allows "on-line"checking of ID validity.
• Facilitate education and publicity on the applications of this ID system for private and public service providers.

2.3 Motor vehicle regulation

High levels of motor vehicle theft are linked to the ease with which stolen vehicles can be sold for parts, or re-registered as new vehicles. In support of police action, it is vital to reduce the ease with which this commodity is recycled into cash. This could be achieved through the introduction of a universal Motor Vehicle Parts marking system, as wall as an improved licensing system, and through other measures which have yet to be assessed.

Lead agency : Safety and Security, supported by Transport, Trade and Industry, Provincial and Local Traffic Authorities. Civil Society bodies such as the Automobile Association and Business Against Crime the Taxi Industry and the panelbeating industry also have a key role to play.

• Establish consensus with role players on major prevention initiatives in respect of vehicle crime.
• Speed up the Implementation of a new Licensing System.
• Improve the co-ordination and co-operation between all role-players involved in the Motor Vehicle sector.

2.4 Corruption and commercial crime

White collar crime, corruption within government, and serious economic offences involve huge resources and impose a great burden on government and business. Extensive white collar crime complements organised crime and helps to promote a sense of lawlessness. This programme involves initiatives to strengthen internal regulations and control, and steps to uncover hidden crime the public and private sector.

Lead agency : Safety and Security, supported by Justice, the Independent Complaints Directorate, Intelligence agencies, the Departments of Finance, Trade and Industry, The Public Service Commission and Public Protector, Private Sector, Professional and Consumer bodies and the Committee on Harmful Business Practises.

• Establish consensus on codes of conduct for business and government, with regard to white collar crime and corruption.
• Speed up the implementation of legislation to restrict money laundering.
• Provide a government/civil society resource on trends and information required to address corruption.

The prevailing moral climate within communities, attitudes towards crime, and the willingness of citizens and communities to take responsibility for crime are critical factors in reducing tolerance towards crime, and hence reducing crime levels. This pillar covers strategies aimed at intervening in the way in which society engages with and responds to crime and conflict. Given fiscal constraints, it is vital to improve public information and harness greater citizen responsibility and involvement in crime prevention.

This pillar aims to:

• Improve public understanding of the Criminal Justice System, to enable fuller participation
• Enhance crime awareness to underpin the development of strong community values and social pressure against criminality.
• To promote nonviolent conflict resolution, awareness of gender issues and the empowerment of sectors prone to victimisation.

3.1 Public education programme

Public awareness of the causes and implications of crime, including the purchase of stolen property is a key factor in crime prevention. This programme involves the development of a focused, needs-based public education programme, which aims to alter public attitudes and responses to crime and to activities which support crime. It is also vital in forging a national vision around crime prevention.

Lead agency : Safety and Security, supported by the South African Communication Service, Justice, Welfare, Correctional Services, Health, Business Against Crime, Organised Labour, Religious Groups and NGO's. Provincial and Local government and local community groups are also key role-players in this area.

• The launch of a National Public Education programme on crime.
• Liaison with provinces to initiate provincial and local public education programmes.
• A comprehensive internal education programme for officials within various government departments, in order to provide a basis for the dynamic implementation of the NCPS as a whole.

3.2 School-based education against crime

The school is a key arena in which attitudes, values and life skills are developed. Formal schooling provides an opportunity for the creation of responsible and empowered citizenship at an early age. By providing a basic grounding in the workings of the criminal justice system as well as key life skills which build confidence and provide ammunition to deal with victimisation, this programme aims eventually to create new relations between citizens and to facilitate the administration of justice.

Lead agency : Education, Correctional Services, Justice, Welfare (Youth at Risk Committee), Safety and Security, Home Affairs, Health, Provincial Education authorities and NGO's

• The development of a pilot schools curriculum and the selection of pilot schools across the country.
• The production of materials for teacher training and classroom facilitation.

International and regional criminal syndicates have a large influence in promoting crime in South Africa. The movement of people and commodities across national borders poses a significant challenge to law enforcement in the region.

This Pillar aims to:

• Restrict the smuggling of commodities across borders through better regulation of ports of entry and border zones.
• Mobilise and coordinate border policing resources in Southern Africa.
• Improve coordination between South African agencies responsible for border regulation, the control of ports of entry, the implementation of immigration policy.
• Prioritise the deployment of intelligence capacity, to focus on regional movements and methods employed by crime syndicates.

The emphasis on trans-national crime must be complemented by an integrated regional development strategy which aims to reduce the huge disparities in income in the region.

4.1 Transnational organised crime

The bulk of trans-national crime involves organised syndicates which are a major contributor to the increase in general crime levels. South Africa has become a recent target for organised crime, because of its relative affluence and the relative weakness of regulation of movement of people and goods across regional borders. This programme will focus both South African and regional law enforcement and intelligence resources on trans-national organised crime.

Lead agency : Safety and Security, Trade and Industry, Foreign Affairs, Defence, National Intelligence Co-ordinating Committee, Justice, Inter-state Defence and Security Committee(lSDSC), South African Secret Service, Home Affairs and the South African Revenue Service (SARS) .

• Activation of the structures of the ISDSC to provide for regional intelligence and security co-ordination.
• Forge tight co-operation between agencies working with cross-border transactions and tariffs.

4.2 Border control and ports of entry

Inadequate regulation of land and sea borders and national air space, combined with poorly regulated ports of entry, create easy opportunities for criminal activity. Large-scale illegal immigration has received the most public attention, although its contribution to crime levels is probably overrated. Nevertheless it warrants closer attention through this programme which aims to improve controls over cross border movements of persons and goods to enable detection of cross-border crime.

Lead agency : Safety and Security, Defence, Trade and Industry, Justice, Foreign Affairs, National Intelligence Coordinating Committee, South African Secret Service, Home Affairs and the South African Revenue Service (SARS).

• Integrate the workings of the five agencies involved with regulation of ports of entry.
• Manage the effective implementation of the Aliens Control Act of 1995. Activation of the structures of the ISDSC to provide for regional intelligence and security co-ordination.

This NCPS strategy document provides sufficient detail to underpin the implementation of the NCPS as a part of the Growth and Development Strategy.

Implementation will be on the basis of the following principles:

• Crime prevention cannot be tackled by government alone, or by one sector of government alone. It requires an integrated, multi-agency approach where all relevant departments view crime prevention as a shared responsibility and collective priority;
• Substantially increased expenditure on security is not possible. Rather, the strategy should comprise distinct, effectively driven, critical programmes that focus on removing blockages, boosting the system, and synergising departmental contributions. This requires a new, more integrated approach from government and several of the national programmes are designed to give effect to closer co-ordination;
• Developing effective prevention strategies requires the identification and analysis of the range of factors that give rise to each crime problem;
• Primary responsibilities for the implementation of the strategy rests with line departments at various levels of government. In this regard, existing capacity within line departments must be prioritised to meet the overall objectives of the NCPS. This may require the development of new capacity and the use of outside resources and expertise;
• Consultation with civil society around crime prevention should aim to give effect to the contribution that can potentially be made from civil society.

8.1 National roles and responsibilities

The Ministry for Safety and Security has been tasked with ensuring the success of the NCPS. Several mechanisms, which involve the Directors General of national departments, appropriate Ministers, as well as support structures, are being established to review departmental plans in order to ensure that the necessary planning, budgeting and the redirection of resources takes place in support of the NCPS.

The Directors General will also be responsible for monitoring implementation of the various aspects of the NCPS and reporting progress to their Ministers.

The NCPS Co-ordinating mechanism will be responsible for communicating the NCPS, both within government and publicly. Such communication is vital if all the role-players are to play their roles in this vital project.

8.2 Provincial roles

It is the view of the National Government that Provincial Government has a key role to play, both in the development of provincial crime prevention strategies, as well as in the mobilising of multi-agency and citizen resources in aid of crime prevention efforts.

Provincial Summits are being organised in each province, and will provide an anchor point both for the development of considered feedback on the NCPS, and the development of integrated provincial plans based on the National Strategy.

Close co-ordination and joint planning is necessary between the national mechanisms and the provinces. These will be co-ordinated through the Inter-Governmental Forum as well as through various MINMEC fora.

8.3 Local government roles

Recognising that local authorities, especially those in urban areas, have a central role to play in crime prevention, local governments will be encouraged both to review and refine this NCPS, and to implement local crime prevention programmes.

The exact strategies and mechanisms that local governments adopt should be based on local crime prevention priorities and should preferably fit within the four pillar framework set out in this document.

It is vital that local government structures acquire the necessary skills to engage with crime prevention issues and develop the required capacity to drive crime prevention projects.

The National Crime Prevention Strategy represents a turning point in the battle against crime. This strategy is a truly South African product, which is rooted in the reality of our society. For it to fully succeed it requires the support of all South Africans who no longer wish to be victims or to live in fear.

The strategy is based on the view that we need to build a new society, rather than simply normalise something which was never normal. The magnitude of the challenge should not be under-estimated. It requires commitment, clarity of vision and leadership from within all national government institutions, provincial and local government, and participation by civil society.

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Research Will Shape the Future of Proactive Policing

Proactive policing — strategies and tools for stopping crime before it occurs — appears to be here to stay, but important challenges persist. Some relate to constructing more reliable measures of effectiveness — for instance, how to measure a strategy’s impact on crime when residents are reluctant to report it. Others are inherent in the approach, such as how to harmonize preventive strategies with community interests and protection of residents’ legal rights.

Research already in hand has persuaded leading criminologists that certain types of proactive policing, such as aspects of hot spots policing, can curb crime, especially in the near term and in targeted areas. Particularly in larger cities, law enforcement is leveraging powerful computer-based algorithms that analyze big data to isolate crime breeding grounds (place-based policing) and to pinpoint those likely to commit future offenses (person-based policing).

Where proactive policing theory and practice will lead law enforcement in coming years, researchers note, will depend in part on efforts to address research-related concerns such as:

• A need for wider use of more exacting research designs, such as randomized controlled trials (RCTs), to better evaluate the merits and replicability of promising policing methods.
• A need for more accurate measures of program success or failure, given recognition of the insufficiency of conventional measures. (For example, a low rate of calls for police service could reflect residents’ reluctance to report crime, rather than low crime.)
• Continued progress in convincing law enforcement leaders to advance high-utility research by executing protocols with fidelity to the model and adopting scientifically sound best practices.

At the same time, proactive policing approaches face the challenge of maintaining or strengthening law enforcement’s connections with the community — by continually building trust and working to institutionalize respect for residents’ legal rights while targeting persons who commit violent offenses. One concern related to community interests is the potential for data analysis algorithms to skew proactive policing activities in communities.    

If past is prologue, NIJ will remain a principal driver of proactive policing research nationally by funding and managing empirical studies along the spectrum of proactive policing approaches. As NIJ Director David B. Muhlhausen observed in a January 2018 column, “The promise of proactive policing strategies makes it critical that we understand their effectiveness through rigorous and replicable research.” [1]

Muhlhausen acknowledged the impact of a recent comprehensive study of proactive policing by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, funded in part by NIJ. The November 2017 National Academies final report, Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities, concluded after scouring the field of research that certain proactive policing methods are succeeding at reducing crime. [2] At the same time, the National Academies pointed to extensive gaps in proactive policing research as well as evidence that certain once-promising proactive policing approaches have not proved to be effective.

Calling recent decades a “golden age” of policing research, the National Academies report urged intensified research assessing the promise of proactive policing. “Much has been learned over the past two decades about proactive policing practices,” the report states. “But, now that scientific support for these approaches has accumulated, it is time for greater investment in understanding what is cost effective, how such strategies can be maximized to improve the relationships between the police and the public, and how they can be applied in ways that do not lead to violations of the law by police.”

Defining Proactive Policing

The term “proactive policing” encompasses a number of methods designed to reduce crime by using prevention strategies. By definition, it stands in contrast to conventional “reactive” policing, which for the most part responds to crime that has occurred. The National Academies report underscored that the intended meaning of proactive policing is broad and inclusive: “This report uses the term ‘proactive policing’ to refer to all policing strategies that have as one of their goals the prevention or reduction of crime and disorder and that are not reactive in terms of focusing primarily on uncovering ongoing crime or on investigating or responding to crimes once they have occurred. Specifically, the elements of proactivity include an emphasis on prevention, mobilizing resources based on police initiative, and targeting the broader underlying forces at work that may be driving crime and disorder.”

The report identified four categories within proactive policing: place-based, person-focused, problem-oriented, and community-based. Exhibit 1 presents descriptions of these classifications and the primary policing strategies that fall under each.

Notes from Table

[table note 1] National Institute of Justice, “ How to Identify Hotspots and Read a Crime Map ,” May 2010.

[table note 2] National Institute of Justice, “ Predictive Policing ,” June 2014.

[table note 3] National Institute of Justice, CrimeSolutions, “ Practice Profile: Focused Deterrence Strategies .”

[table note 4] National Institute of Justice, CrimeSolutions, “ Program Profile: Stop, Question, and Frisk in New York City .”

[table note 5] National Institute of Justice, CrimeSolutions, “ Practice Profile: Problem-Oriented Policing .”

[table note 6] Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, Community Policing Defined (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, April 2009), 3.

[table note 7] Tom Tyler, “What Are Legitimacy and Procedural Justice in Policing? And Why Are They Becoming Key Elements of Police Leadership?” in Legitimacy and Procedural Justice: A New Element of Police Leadership, ed. Craig Fisher (Washington, DC: Police Executive Research Forum, 2014), 5, 9.

[table note 8] Tyler, “What Are Legitimacy and Procedural Justice in Policing?,” 9-10.

[table note 9] Robert J. Sampson and Stephen W. Raudenbush, Disorder in Urban Neighborhoods—Does It Lead to Crime ?, Research in Brief (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, February 2001), NCJ 186049; and George L. Kelling, “Broken Windows” and Police Discretion , Research Report (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, October 1999), NCJ 178259.

In the field, however, the lines between categories of proactive policing are often blurred. For example, William Ford, an NIJ physical scientist and senior science advisor, pointed out that a hot spots policing program — focusing resources on small, concentrated crime zones — may employ aspects of one or more other proactive policing approaches such as focused deterrence, community policing, or problem-oriented policing. That complexity can complicate evaluations of any one policing method.

History and NIJ’s Role

To discern NIJ’s role in proactive policing research going forward, Ford said, “Attention must be paid to the past, because we paved that ground.”

Early iterations of experimental proactive policing were innovative foot patrols focused on preventing crime and assessing the impact of patrolling squad cars. In the early 1970s, the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment yielded the fresh insight that routine patrolling in police cars was of limited value in preventing crime and making residents feel safer.

In the 1980s, studies of the source of 911 calls in Minneapolis helped lay the cornerstone of place-based policing, including hot spots techniques.

See the related article “From Crime Mapping to Crime Forecasting: The Evolution of Place-Based Policing”

In the 1990s, community policing took root, said Joel Hunt, NIJ senior computer scientist. By the 2000s, computers were supplanting push pins and wall-mounted crime maps. Data-driven policing strategies — typically employing algorithm-controlled electronic maps — began to emerge in the same decade, with extensive NIJ support. Focused deterrence, a strategy designed to discourage crime by confronting high-risk individuals and convincing them that punishment will be certain, swift, and severe, is a product of the current decade.

Collectively, research to date has discerned a stronger overall crime-reduction effect from place-based strategies — such as certain hot spots policing approaches — than from person-based strategies such as focused deterrence, Hunt noted. However, a recent meta-analysis of focused deterrence strategies by Anthony A. Braga, David Weisburd, and Brandon Turchan found that interventions that targeted gangs/groups and high-risk individuals were most effective in reducing crime. [3] The authors concluded that “the largest impacts are found for programs focused on the most violent offenders.” [4]

One example of a person-focused program initially falling short of expectations is the Strategic Subjects List pilot program implemented by the Chicago Police Department in 2013. The list consisted of 426 individuals calculated to be at highest risk of gun violence. The design called for interventions aimed at reducing violence by and toward those on the list, with a resultant reduction in the city homicide rate. An NIJ-sponsored study by RAND Corporation researchers found, however, that the Chicago pilot effort “does not appear to have been successful in reducing gun violence.” [5]

New NIJ funding is aimed at clarifying the factors informing commercial algorithms that drive certain proactive approaches, Hunt said. Work also continues on police legitimacy — establishing trust in the community’s eyes — and procedural justice, which falls under community policing.

Pushing for More Rigorous Research Methodologies

The National Academies and NIJ agree on the need for enhanced experimental program evaluations through rigorous RCTs. However, the conclusion by the National Academies that focused deterrence policy is effective is solely based on a number of quasi-experiments. RCTs randomly divide an experiment’s subjects into groups that receive the experimental treatment and control groups that do not. There is broad agreement that RCTs are generally the best methodology for establishing causality. To improve the scientific rigor of policing research, NIJ’s 2018 policing research solicitation made it clear that projects employing RCTs would be favored going forward.

As NIJ Director Muhlhausen explained during the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology, “RCTs are a powerful tool in understanding what works and is scalable across contexts. When we know what works, we can fund what works.”

RCTs are valued as more reliable scientific methods not only for evaluating whether new policing methods work and can be replicated, but also for testing previous findings of less precise methods. For example, with support from NIJ and the Bureau of Justice Assistance, researchers employed RCTs to assess the effectiveness of a focused deterrence program model previously used to break up a drug market in a small Southern city. The original research, employing a quasi-experimental technique limited to that single site, found the treatment to be effective. But the subsequent RCT, using seven different areas, did not validate that finding: The treatment was found to be ineffective in three of five sites where implemented, while two sites were unable to implement it, researchers reported in 2017. [6]

NIJ scientists caution that RCTs, for all their benefits, are not a magic bullet for all experimental settings. “There are limits on situations in which they can be administered effectively,” said Hunt. For example, he said, “I can’t randomize where incidents occur, only the treatment, and then only in some cases.” Further, police chiefs can be reluctant to give a perceived treatment “benefit” to one group while denying it to control groups, Hunt added. RCTs can also be complex, partly because after the random assignment of subjects, researchers must examine key variables to ensure that treatments and control groups are properly split on those variables (e.g., age, race, and gender). RCTs can also be relatively costly to administer. However, RCTs are still the best research design available for establishing causality. NIJ strives to do RCTs wherever possible.

Representative Research in Process

NIJ’s 2017 grant solicitation statement in the policing strategies and practices area called for research on place- or person-based projects that can reduce crime “with minimal negative collateral consequences,” such as heightened community distrust of law enforcement. The 2017 solicitation thus embodied the NIJ five-year strategic plan’s emphasis on evaluating community engagement strategies and building community trust and confidence in law enforcement.

Two projects funded by NIJ in 2017 focus on evaluating the community impact of hot spots policing and problem-oriented policing initiatives, including development of new measures of law enforcement effectiveness. They are:

• A study of the impact of different strategies within hot spots on citizens’ perceptions of police in a Midwestern university town. The purpose is to demonstrate that police-community relations and police legitimacy can be strengthened, even in a hot spots policing environment.
• A 30-month RCT study of 100 hot spots in two medium-size Southeastern cities. The study is using community surveys designed to move “beyond unreported crime to also measure perceptions of safety, police legitimacy, and collective efficacy” (an overall community-police relations measurement). On the law enforcement side, the study team is also examining officer morale, officers’ perceptions of their roles, police-community relations, and the program’s impact on law enforcement policies and practice.

The 30-month study, with its call for new measures of the impact and effectiveness of policing methods, reflects a concern that simplistic measures of law enforcement success, such as number of arrests or citizen calls for service, are often misleading.

Demystifying Policing Algorithms

Algorithms inform law enforcement strategies by sorting and analyzing sometimes massive amounts of crime data to identify the highest risk places and individuals. NIJ currently supports research measuring the effectiveness and efficiency of commercial algorithms that are marketed to law enforcement agencies for crime mapping and related approaches. At the same time, NIJ scientists are comparing a naive algorithm model to contest entries from the Real-Time Crime Forecasting Challenge. (A naive model is one that assumes what happened before is what will happen next; e.g., the model forecasts that crime will occur this month in the place it occurred last month.)

Hunt, who is leading that in-house study, said commonplace scientific concerns with algorithm-dependent law enforcement strategies include the quality of data going in, how the data are introduced to the algorithm, and “what we do with the numbers at the back end.” Hunt observed that a crime data sample — and thus data-dependent algorithm output — can be biased when, for instance, community members no longer report crime.

Indeed, fewer than half of all violent and property crimes are reported to the police, according to the latest National Crime Victimization Survey. [7] Similarly, homicide clearance rates have reached near-record lows in several major U.S. cities due to increasing gang violence, witness intimidation, and a lack of community cooperation with law enforcement. [8] “Mutual cooperation between the police and the community is essential to solving crimes,” said NIJ Director Muhlhausen. “Unfortunately, some community members refuse to cooperate with criminal investigations, even though law enforcement is legitimately trying to serve and protect their community.”

Hunt said NIJ is pushing for greater transparency on the scientific foundations of support for commercial policing algorithms — that is, less of a “black box” approach by vendors. Academic researchers YongJei Lee, SooHyun O, and John E. Eck, the three members of a team that was among the winners of NIJ’s 2016 Real-Time Crime Forecasting Challenge, wrote that a lack of transparency and a “lack of theoretical support for existing forecasting software” are common problems with proprietary hot spots forecasting products. [9]

Procedural Justice

The National Academies report on proactive policing pointed to procedural justice as one of the methods lacking adequate research evidence to support — or to preclude — its effectiveness. NIJ is working to grow that evidence base through projects such as an ongoing police-university research partnership in a medium-size Mid-Atlantic city, funded in 2016. The research was designed to use surveys and other techniques to gauge police and citizen perceptions of procedural justice issues and to forge a better understanding of the benefits of procedural justice training, body-worn cameras, and the mechanisms of public cooperation, trust, and satisfaction.

One recent NIJ-supported study casts new doubt on the effectiveness of procedural justice training in a specific police application. The Seattle Police Department conducted training to “slow down” the thought processes of police officers during citizen encounters to reduce negative outcomes. The selected officers were deemed to be at risk because (1) they had worked in hot spots or other high-crime city areas, and (2) they had been involved in incidents in which they were injured or used force, or where a complaint had been filed about the officer or the incident.

As reported in NIJ’s CrimeSolutions.ojp.gov, a central web resource to help practitioners and policymakers learn what works in justice-related programs and practices, the Seattle Police procedural justice training initiative was rated as having “no effects,” positive or negative, on procedural justice in the community. [10] The rating was based on a study [11] utilizing an RCT of the program. The RCT found no statistically significant differences between the treatment group and the control group in the percentage of incidents resulting in an arrest, the number of times force was used, the number of incidents resulting in citizen complaints, and other key measures.

One challenge for research on justice-focused policing methods such as procedural justice and police legitimacy — as important as they may be to the ultimate goal of respecting citizens’ rights under law — has been distinguishing their impact from that of routine policing. Brett Chapman, an NIJ social science analyst, said of procedural justice generally that although the work is important, one “challenge is trying to demonstrate how it is dramatically different from what police have been doing for years.”

Research Quality Depends on Execution

Even if an experimental design is flawless, outcome quality can depend on agency cooperation and performance. For example, an NIJ-sponsored 2012 research report on a randomized trial of broken windows policing in three Western cities concluded that the results were negatively affected by problematic execution by the responsible law enforcement agencies. [12]

NIJ operates a national initiative designed to build law enforcement agency research competence. The Law Enforcement Advancing Data and Science (LEADS) Scholars program develops the research capability of midcareer law enforcement professionals from agencies committed to infusing science into their policy and practice. LEADS scholars learn the latest research developments and carry that knowledge to the field.

Proactive Policing and the Fourth Amendment

On the street, the impact of proactive policing methods that involve law enforcement confronting suspects will be measured against the rule of law, including the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure. The boundaries concerning unlawful treatment of suspects by law enforcement are not always distinct. In 2000, the Supreme Court held in Illinois v. Wardlow [13] that police may conduct a street stop of a suspect with a lower threshold of reasonable suspicion if the stop occurs in a high-crime area. Thus, an individual’s particular location may effectively reduce his or her rights in a law enforcement interaction. Implicit in that location-specific adjustment of suspects’ rights is the Court’s recognition that, in those crime-prone areas, innocent citizens are at heightened risk of becoming victims of crime.

Rachel Harmon, a University of Virginia law professor, and a colleague pointed out in “Proactive Policing and the Legacy of Terry,” [14] “So long as police focus on high crime areas, they can effectively lower the behavior-based suspicious activity demanded for each stop.” Yet as scholar Andrew Guthrie Ferguson and a colleague observed in 2008, [15] the Supreme Court has not defined a high-crime area for Fourth Amendment purposes.

Whether or to what extent a law enforcement strategy can exist in harmony with Fourth Amendment protections will depend on program particulars. In Floyd v. City of New York , [16] a federal district court held in 2013 that New York City’s stop and frisk policy at the time represented unconstitutional profiling and barred the practice. But the Floyd proscription was limited to excessive aspects of stop and frisk in New York.

David L. Weisburd, an author of the National Academies study and the executive director of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy, noted but took exception to a narrative he sees being advanced by some scholars and commentators that deterrence-based policing strategies make constitutional violations inevitable. In a 2016 paper in the University of Chicago Legal Forum specifically referencing hot spots policing, Weisburd posited “that hot spots policing properly implemented is likely to lead to less biased policing than traditional strategies. Moreover, there is little evidence that hot spots policing per se leads to abusive policing practices.” [17]

Rachel Harmon and her colleague sounded a similar theme, relative to stop and frisk policies, in her 2017 article referenced above: “Although the proactive use of stops and frisks may make constitutional violations more likely, it seems feasible to design a proactive strategy that uses stops and frisks aggressively and still complies with constitutional law.” [18]

The Harmon article further argued that proactive strategies such as hot spots and preventive policing can avoid constitutional peril “by narrowing proactive policing geographically rather than demographically.” Thus, in Harmon’s view, “the same focused strategies that are most likely to produce stops that satisfy the Fourth Amendment may also be the most likely to be carried out effectively and without discrimination.” [19]

Weisburd, in his 2016 paper, identified a need for new proactive programming that aspires to broad justice impacts. He called for “a new generation of programs and practices that attempts to maximize crime control and legitimacy simultaneously.” [20] The contemporary NIJ-supported, community-focused research noted above seeks new pathways for harmonizing proactive policing strategies with progress on community justice values

About this Article

This article was published as part of NIJ Journal issue number 281 , released October 2019.

[note 1] David B. Muhlhausen, “ Director’s Message: Proactive Policing — What We Know and What We Don’t Know, Yet ,” National Institute of Justice, January 17, 2018.

[note 2] National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2018).

[note 3] Anthony A. Braga, David Weisburd, and Brandon Turchan, “Focused Deterrence Strategies to Reduce Crime: An Updated Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Empirical Evidence,” Criminology & Public Policy 17 no. 1 (2018): 205-250.

[note 4] Braga et al., p. 239.

[note 5] Jessica Saunders, Priscillia Hunt, and John S. Hollywood, “Predictions Put Into Practice: A Quasi-Experimental Evaluation of Chicago’s Predictive Policing Pilot,” Journal of Experimental Criminology 12 no. 3 (2016): 347, 366, doi:10.1007/s11292-016-9272-0.

[note 6] Jessica Saunders, Michael Robbins, and Allison J. Ober, “Moving from Efficacy to Effectiveness: Implementing the Drug Market Intervention Across Multiple Sites,” Criminology & Public Policy 16 no. 3 (2017).

[note 7] Rachel E. Morgan and Jennifer L. Truman, Criminal Victimization, 2017 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, December 2018), NCJ 252472.

[note 8] Aamer Madhani, “Unsolved Murders: Chicago, Other Big Cities Struggle; Murder Rate a 'National Disaster,’” USA Today , August 10, 2018.

[note 9] YongJei Lee, SooHyun O, and John E. Eck, “ A Theory-Driven Algorithm for Real-Time Crime Hot Spot Forecasting ,” NIJ award number 2016-NIJ-Challenge-0017, October 2017, 1.

[note 10] Program Profile: Procedural Justice Training Program (Seattle Police Department) , posted April 29, 2019.

[note 11] Emily Owens, David Weisburd, Karen L. Amendola, and Geoffrey P. Alpert, “Can You Build a Better Cop?” Criminology & Public Policy 17 no. 1 (2018): 41-87.

[note 12] Christine Femega, Joshua C. Hinkle, and David Weisburd, “Why Getting Inside the ‘Black Box’ Is Important: Examining Treatment Implementation and Outputs in Policing Experiments,” Police Quarterly 20 no. 1 (2017).

[note 13] 528 U.S. 119.

[note 14] Rachel Harmon and Andrew Manns, “Proactive Policing and the Legacy of Terry,” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 15 no. 1 (2017): 49-71.

[note 15] Andrew Guthrie Ferguson and Damien Bernache, “The ‘High-Crime Area’ Question: Requiring Verifiable and Quantifiable Evidence for Fourth Amendment Reasonable Suspicion Analysis,” American University Law Review 57 no. 6 (2008): 1587-1644.

[note 16] 959 F. Supp. 2d 540 (S.D. N.Y. 2013).

[note 17] David Weisburd, “Does Hot Spots Policing Inevitably Lead to Unfair and Abusive Police Practices, or Can We Maximize Both Fairness and Effectiveness in the New Proactive Policing?,” The University of Chicago Legal Forum (2016): 661.

[note 18] Harmon and Manns, “Proactive Policing and the Legacy of Terry,” 59.

[note 19] Harmon and Manns, “Proactive Policing and the Legacy of Terry,” 61.

[note 20] Weisburd, “Does Hot Spots Policing … ,” 686.

About the author

Paul A. Haskins is a social science writer and contractor with Leidos.

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• NIJ Journal Issue No. 281

Essay on Crime Prevention

Crime is a global problem affecting each and every country. Every country suffers from increased crime rates which result to insecurities and a negative impact on the economy. This increased crime rate is fueled by poverty, parental negligence, low self-esteem, alcohol, and drug abuse, resulting from the lack of proper moral values (Topalli & Wright, 2014). Moral values are responsible for determining what is right and wrong and also establish what is socially acceptable. They are ideas considered by society as important and contribute to one’s general personality, and thus, without them, an individual is lost. It is significant to prevent crimes to raise the quality of life of all citizens. Preventing crimes also results to long-term benefits as it reduces social cost resulting from crimes and the costs involved with the formal criminal justice system. In order to prevent these crimes, there is the need to develop evidence-based and comprehensive approaches addressing several factors impacting crimes, including moral values on growing children.

Crimes result from negative moral values, and thus there is a need to promote positive youth development and wellbeing. Horace Mann believes that this prevalence of crime in society could be reduced by moral instruction in schools (Spring, 2019). He argues that for the crime rate to reduce, the moral value of the general public needs to be shaped accordingly. According to him, the most accurate method of doing this is by incorporating moral instruction in the education system. He referred to this method as putting a police officer in every child’s heart. This would enable the child to be conscious of the evil in society and be aware of good and bad. This would guide them as they grow up and prevent them from engaging or committing any crime.

The American Education book portrays crime as a global nuisance, and the more accurate and effective method to prevent it is through education. Mann suggests in this book that the number of police required by society would significantly be reduced by schooling. Thus, education is portrayed as a source of knowledge and a significant tool that would help reduce crime rates remarkably. It is supposed to do this by allowing students to acquire more educational attainment that leads to high paying jobs and thus higher earnings, which increases the opportunity cost of crime and consequently reducing crime. Mann also believes that education would reduce the crime rate by affecting individuals’ personality traits associated with crime. This is done by making students become patient, disciplined and moral. Despite this being a more suitable method of preventing crimes in society, it is not as effective as Mann and other researchers rate it.

Mann theory of preventing crime through schooling is a considerate method, but it is not enough to do so. There is no causal relationship between crime rates and school attendance (Lochner, 2020). It is assumed that schooling and crime rates are related, and thus if school attendance is increased, a consequent crime reduction would be noticed. However, this is wrong, and Mann theory has not proved a reality. According to Joel et al. (2021), the percentage of 5-to 17-years-old students increased from 82.2 in 1959-1960 to 91.9 percent in 2004-2005. The average days of attendance also increased from 160.2 in 1959-1960 to 169.2 in 1999-2000. There was also a rapid increase in violent crimes in 1960-2000 from 160.9 to 506.5 per 100,000 residence (Spring, 2019). As the number of students attending school and the attendance days increased from 1960 to 2004, so did the crime rate. This is proof that the crime rate is irrespective of the number of students going to school and the average days of attendance, and thus Mann theory is ineffective.

Moral value instruction is a vital tool to prevent crimes but implementing it only through schooling, such as Mann suggested, is not only a failing strategy but a waste of time and resources. Moral values in children need to be implemented in many different ways to ensure that they stick as they develop into adults (Damon, 2008). Implementing these moral values would ensure that they grow into morally upright adults, thus reducing crime rates. Implementing moral value through schooling is advised, but it would work with a combination of many other methods including through religion and good parenting. Religion helps in the spiritual growth of a person and emphasizes moral codes aimed to develop values such as social competence and self-control, which are major virtues in crime hating people. According to the study done by Brown and Taylor (2007) on how religion impacts child development, it was found that social competence and the psychological adjustment of third-graders were positive influenced with several religious factors. This shows that religion helps in developing children to become adults with a positive and better judgement that would keep them from engaging in any crime and thus would contribute to crime rate reduction.

Parents are responsible for their children, and they are required to guard and guide them as they contribute to their personality. According to Penn (2015), how a child turns out as an adult depends on how their parents brought them up. As a result of this, it is crucial for parents to be careful of how they handle their children. It is the responsibility of every citizen of a county to help fight and prevent crimes, and thus it is the responsibility of parents to reduce the crime rate by training their children to be better people in future. They should be consistent with rules and monitor their children behaviour to ensure that they instil good moral value in them, equipping them with the knowledge of good and evil. If a child is raised in a way that makes them hate crime, then they would not engage in any, and this would contribute to the general reduction of crime in the society.

In conclusion, the main way of preventing crime is by instilling positive moral values on growing children to ensure that they develop into morally upright adults who would not engage in criminal activities. It is assumed that to instil this moral values in children and prevent crimes in future, the best way is through schooling. But this is not the case as there is no causal relationship between crime rates and schooling, and thus schooling will not necessarily result to a reduced crime rate. In order to ensure that moral values are successfully instilled in children, schooling would have to be combined with other methods, some of which include religion and good parenting, resulting in adults who are conscious of good and evil. Increased crime rate is a problem experienced by all countries globally, and the only way to fight it is by shaping the personality of the future generation by instilling positive moral values as their driving force.

Topalli, V., & Wright, R. (2014).  Affect and the dynamic foreground of predatory street crime  (1st ed.).

Spring, J. (2019). American Education.  https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429274138

Lochner, L. (2020). Education and crime.  The Economics Of Education , 109-117.  https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-815391-8.00009-4

Joel, M., Bill, H., Jijun, Z., Xiaolei, W., Ke, W., & Sarah, H. et al. (2021).  National Center for Education Statistics: The Condition of Education 2019. NCES 2019-144 . ERIC. Retrieved 5 July 2021, from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED594978.

Damon, W. (2008).  Moral child: Nurturing children’s natural moral growth  (3rd ed.). FREE Press.

Brown, S., & Taylor, K. (2007). Religion and education: Evidence from the National Child Development Study.  Journal Of Economic Behavior & Organization ,  63 (3), 439-460.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2005.08.003

Penn, H. (2015).  Understanding early childhood  (3rd ed.). Open University Press.

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Approaches to Crime Prevention Essay

Introduction, law enforcement agency, the corrections agency.

The United States of America government employs various approaches in preventing the occurrence of criminal activities . These approaches constitute legal and social institutions that encompass the criminal justice system. Walker (1992) defines criminal justice system as “a set of legal and social institutions for enforcing the criminal law in accordance with a defined set of procedural rules and limitations” (p. 7).

The objective of the criminal justice system is to ensure proper enforcement of the standards of conduct in protecting the rights of the individuals and the community in a free society. The criminal justice system has three components namely, law enforcement agent, courts and correction measures to criminals. This essay explores the dominant approaches employed by the three components of criminal justice system: law enforcement, courts and corrections in preventing the occurrence of crime.

In thecriminal justice system, the police officers have the responsibility to arrest all criminal offenders. The dominant approaches in which the police use in enforcing law and order are police patrol, community policing and the use of intelligent officers. Police patrol involves open vigilance of the police in crime prone areas to prevent real time crimes from occurring.

Community policing entails the use of community to assist the police in giving information and tracking of criminal activities in the society, while intelligent officers are responsible in gathering information about crimes and criminals and present them to the law enforcement agency. The most effective approach of law enforcement is the use of police patrol. The advantage of the police patrol is that there is a rapid response in case a crime is committed.

The patrolling approach is the backbone of policing because “it is the most visible element of policing; readily identifiable police vehicles operated by uniformed officers are often the first line of contact between the police agency and the community lending an atmosphere of safety” (Hess & Orthmann, 2008, p. 145). The patrolling police officers provide a link between the community policing and the law enforcement agency, which enhance effective tracking of criminals in the community.

The patrol approach is a fundamental method of dealing with criminal because without the patrol police officers, there will be hardly any arrest of the criminals. Hess and Orthmann confirms that, “if this division did not exist, there would be little need for the rest of the police agency, because nearly everything a police agency handles begins with the patrol officer” (2008, p. 151). Therefore, police patrol is the most effective approach of preventing crime activities in the community.

Courts form part of the criminal justice system and their function is to administer justice to the suspected criminals and the victims. In the court, the government appoints a judge who is responsible in administering justice by giving a fair and just ruling on a criminal case.

To avoid biases associated with unfair ruling, the United States of America employs inquisitorial system and adversarial system. The inquisitorial system is composed of judges who carryout investigation to determine the fate of the case without any further consultation with the advocates as in the case of the adversarial system.

The inquisitorial system does not provide for plea-bargaining, as Care (2004) asserts, “The fact that the defendant has confessed is merely one more fact that is entered into evidence, and a confession by the defendant does not remove the requirement that the prosecution present a full case” (p. 3). The confessed evidence makes it hard for the accused to appeal the case.

On contrary, the adversarial system ensures fair trial because its ruling depends on the arguments of the advocates representing the disputing parties before a judge who then determines the fate of the case. According to Hale (2004), “the advocates of both parties argue their case before the court and the case is ruled in favor of the party who offers the most sound and compelling argument based on the law as applied to the facts of the case” (p.31).

The adversarial system has advantage over inquisitorial system because it allows for the plea bargain in cases where the suspects confess a crime, gives a fair trial and is free from the state manipulation.

Despite the efforts to ensure fair trial, at some instances, “manipulations of the court system by defense and prosecution attorneys, law enforcement as well as the defendants have occurred and there have been cases where justice was denied” (Perri & Lichtenwald, 2009, p. 24). The adversarial system seeks to ensure effectiveness and efficiency of the court process.

Since a weak judicial system encourages crime, “absence of a justice system that is effective, fair and humane is a threat to the peace and security” (Costa, 2010, p. 1). Furthermore, the effectiveness of the judicial system does not only depend on the court process, but also on the constitution of a country.

After the police arrest suspects and are charged in the court for committing criminal offences, the corrections agency effect the punishment to the criminals. The corrections agency employs different forms of punishments such as fines, imprisonment, probation, exile and execution.

In minor crimes, fine and probation is employed to punish minor criminal offenders. Heinous crimes result into execution in some countries, while in others it leads to life imprisonment. The most effective and dominant approach used by the corrections agency is the imprisonment.

This approach is the most dominant because most criminal offences require rehabilitation of the criminals. Imprisonment of criminals comes with several benefits to the criminals and to the society alike. The main aim of imprisonment is to punish the criminal because the prison term is proportional to the type of crime committed.

Moreover, imprisonment benefits the community because it prevents criminals from perpetrating their criminal activities. The criminals also benefit from the imprisonment because they get a chance to reform their lives, attend vocational training or released as a parole (Hess & Orthmann, 2008, p. 160). This correctional approach has helped in transforming the lives of many prisoners to become reliable members of the society.

An effective Justice criminal system requires proper coordination of the law enforcement agency, courts and corrections agency in order to prevent the occurrence of crimes in the society. The dominant approaches in preventing crimes are the police patrol, adversarial system of justice and imprisonment, as a correctional measure.

Proper coordination of these approaches and support from other minor approaches will help in reducing crime in society. The need to have an effective criminal justice system is not only of a national interest but also of international concern because organized criminal gangs like terrorists need a strong criminal justice system. Hence, a strong criminal justice system needs a collective responsibility from the public, police, courts and the corrections agency.

Care, J. (2004). Civil Procedure and Courts in the South Pacific . New York: Routledge

Costa, A. (2010). Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Issues. United Nations Office On Drugs and Crime. Web.

Hale, S. (2004). The Discourse of Court Interpreting: Discourse Interpreting: Discourse Practices of the Law, the Witness and the Interpreter . Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hess, M., & Orthmann, C. (2008). Introduction to the Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice . Florence: Cengage Learning

Perri, F., & Lichtenwald, T. (2009). When Worlds Collide: Criminal Investigative Analysis, Forensic Psychology and the Timothy Masters Case. Forensic Examiner, 18(2), 23-28. Print.

Walker, S. (1992). Origins of the Contemporary Criminal Justice Paradigm: The American Bar Foundation Survey, Justice Quarterly , 9 (1). 1-13.

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Essay on Crime Prevention

Students are often asked to write an essay on Crime Prevention in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Crime Prevention

Understanding crime prevention.

Crime prevention is the act of stopping crime before it happens. This is done by identifying the causes of crime and finding ways to reduce them. It’s like a doctor who tries to prevent illness by promoting healthy habits.

Types of Crime Prevention

There are two main types of crime prevention. The first is ‘primary prevention’ which aims to stop crime before it starts. It includes things like education and community programs. The second type is ‘secondary prevention’. This focuses on areas or people at high risk of crime.

Importance of Crime Prevention

Crime prevention is important because it helps keep our communities safe. It also reduces the cost of law enforcement and the justice system. By preventing crime, we can create a better society for everyone to live in.

Role of the Community

The community plays a big role in crime prevention. Everyone can help by reporting suspicious activity to the police, participating in neighborhood watch programs, and teaching children about the dangers of crime.

In conclusion, crime prevention is a vital part of maintaining a safe and peaceful society. Everyone has a role to play in preventing crime and creating a safe environment for all.

250 Words Essay on Crime Prevention

Crime prevention is all about stopping crime before it happens. It’s like a game plan to keep people safe. This plan includes things like making laws, teaching people about safety, and having police officers around to help.

The Importance of Crime Prevention

Crime prevention is very important because it helps keep our community safe. Without it, there would be more crime and people would not feel safe. When people feel safe, they can do their work better, kids can play outside, and the community can grow stronger.

Ways to Prevent Crime

There are many ways to prevent crime. One way is through laws. Laws tell us what we can and cannot do. When we break a law, there are consequences like fines or jail time. This can stop people from doing bad things.

Another way is through education. Schools and community groups can teach people about the dangers of crime and how to stay safe. This can help people make good choices and avoid dangerous situations.

Police officers also play a big role. They patrol our streets and respond to emergencies. Their presence can deter criminals and make people feel safer.

Role of Community in Crime Prevention

The community also has a big role in crime prevention. People can look out for each other and report suspicious activities to the police. Community programs can also provide support and resources to those in need, which can reduce crime.

In conclusion, crime prevention is a team effort that includes laws, education, police, and community involvement. By working together, we can create a safer and happier place for everyone.

500 Words Essay on Crime Prevention

Crime prevention is all about stopping crime before it happens. It is a way to keep people safe and maintain peace in our communities.

There are two main types of crime prevention: primary and secondary.

Primary prevention stops crime before it starts. It includes things like better lighting in dark areas, security cameras, and community programs to teach people about safety.

Secondary prevention is about stopping crime that has already started. This could be through police work or community efforts to help people who might be at risk of committing crimes.

The Role of the Community

The community plays a big part in crime prevention. Community members can work together to watch out for each other and report suspicious activity. They can also create programs to help people who might be at risk of committing crimes. This could include things like after-school programs for kids or job training for adults.

Role of Law Enforcement Agencies

Law enforcement agencies are also vital in crime prevention. They can patrol neighborhoods to deter criminals, investigate crimes, and arrest people who break the law. They also work with communities to develop strategies to prevent crime.

Importance of Education

Education is a powerful tool for crime prevention. By teaching people about the law and the consequences of breaking it, we can help them make better choices. Schools can play a big part in this by teaching students about the risks and consequences of crime.

Effectiveness of Crime Prevention

Crime prevention can be very effective. It can reduce crime rates and make communities safer places to live. It can also save money by reducing the costs associated with crime, like police work and court costs.

In conclusion, crime prevention is a crucial part of maintaining peace and safety in our communities. It involves everyone, from law enforcement to community members to educators. By working together, we can prevent crime and create safer, happier places to live.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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Essay On National Crime Prevention Council

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Hospitality , Neighborhood , Conflict , Safety , Parents , Children , Family , Community

Published: 01/31/2020

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What are the three best pieces of advice about handling conflict and preventing crime you picked up at the NCPC site? Any other useful ideas or approaches? The first best piece of advice that one gained from the NCPC site about neighborhood safety is to “set limits on where your children can go in your neighborhood” (National Crime Prevention Council, 2013, par 1). This piece of advice is essential because most parents do not prevent their children from going to dark alleys or places within the neighborhood. They assume that their children are safe since they are just within the neighborhood and nobody can harm them there. This assumption is incorrect because there are a lot of crimes which happen in deserted places in the neighborhood. This advice serves as a reminder and warning to parents, especially of small kids. The next advice that one appreciates is about keeping the kids connected when they are left alone at home by their parents. It was suggested by NCPC that parents should leave important telephone numbers with their children when they leave them alone. These numbers include the parent’s office numbers, doctor’s office or a neighbor or nearby relative’s number, who can assist their children during emergencies. The third advice that one considers very relevant is that parents should teach their children to be assertive especially with strangers. Children should be taught how to say no to suspicious strangers and realize when it’s time to run away from these people. They must be taught how to recognize safe from dangerous strangers. Another useful approach in teaching safety to children is through the help of the schools. Teachers can introduce the topic of safety in the neighborhood or at home through role plays so the children can get a better grasp of the concept. Through guided role plays, the kids will know exactly what to say and do when confronted with a similar situation.

How important is it to "walk in the other person's shoes" when trying to avoid or resolve a conflict? Explain.

It is important to “walk in the other person’s shoes” in avoiding or resolving a conflict because in that way, one will be in a better position to recognize and understand the other person’s point of view. Furthermore, if one puts himself in the shoes of the other, it will expand one’s awareness of where the other person is coming from. It will also divert one’s attention away from his opinions and he will be able to make sense of the arguments of the other party.How do you tend to handle/avoid conflict? Handling a conflict is very challenging but there are steps on how to handle conflict without making the situation stressful for all parties concerned. The first step that one should practice is to be calm. When one is in control of his emotions, he is in a better position to think and listen clearly. When one allows his anger to rule over him, then the tendency of the other party is to respond by being angry too. If the other party sees that one is in an attacking stance, the other party will most likely put on a defensive stance, which makes it harder to resolve a conflict. It is necessary that both parties and the mediator, if any, be rational and in a compromising mood. Another important attitude that one must have in trying to handle a conflict is that each one should be ready to listen. The conflicting parties should respect the arguments presented by the other party. If there is anything that one does not understand, he can ask a question to clarify it, taking care not to interrupt abruptly the other person talking. Both verbal and non-verbal communication play an important role in resolving a conflict, so both parties must be extra careful in their choice of words and in their behavior.

Darlington, R. (2007, April 18). How to resolve conflict. Retrieved from rogerdarlington.co.uk: http://www.rogerdarlington.co.uk/conflict.html National Crime Prevention Council. (2013). Leaving kids home alone. Retrieved from ncpc.org: http://www.ncpc.org/topics/violent-crime-and-personal-safety/copy_of_home-alone National Crime Prevention Council. (2013). Neighborhood safety tips for parents. Retrieved from ncpc.org: http://www.ncpc.org/topics/home-and-neighborhood-safety/neighborhood-safety National Crime Prevention Council. (2013). What to teach kids about strangers. Retrieved from ncpc.org: http://www.ncpc.org/topics/violent-crime-and-personal-safety/strangers UC San Diego. (2009, December 7). How to handle conflict in the workplace. Retrieved from blink.ucsd.edu: http://blink.ucsd.edu/HR/supervising/conflict/handle.html#

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‘I’m gonna O.J. you’: How the Simpson case changed perceptions — and the law — on domestic violence

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It wasn’t long after the televised spectacle of O.J. Simpson fleeing a phalanx of police cars in a slow-moving white Ford Bronco on June 17, 1994, that batterers across Los Angeles adopted a bone-chilling new threat.

I’m gonna O.J. you .

“We all heard it working with our clients,” said Gail Pincus, executive director of the Domestic Abuse Center in Los Angeles. “I heard it directly from the abusers. It was a form of intimidation, of silencing and getting compliance from their victims.”

Abuse survivors, meanwhile, flooded rape and battery hotlines and shelters, telling advocates: I don’t want to be the next Nicole .

The phone “was almost off the hook,” said Patti Giggans, executive director of Peace over Violence, then called the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women. “We were overloaded.”

“People were reaching out for help; they wanted to know, ‘Could that be me? Could that happen to me ?’” she said. “It was a revelation that somebody could die.”

For the American public, the slayings of Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman were practically inescapable in those days. An estimated 95 million people watched the Bronco chase on television. Some 150 million tuned in for the verdict in 1995, when Simpson was acquitted.

The killings took place at a pivotal moment for domestic violence in California and the United States, catapulting what had long been considered a private problem into the public sphere.

“That murder captivated people. You could not escape from it,” said author and abuse survivor Myriam Gurba, whose 2023 essay collection “Creep: Accusations and Confessions” explores gender violence.

The case threw into stark reality a devastating truth — that domestic violence is uniquely deadly for women and girls. Between a third and half of all female homicide victims in the U.S. are killed by a current or former male partner, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

That percentage that has held steady for decades, even as the overall number of killings has plunged, from about 23,000 homicides nationwide in 1994 to an estimated 18,000 in 2023.

Few victims and even fewer lawmakers knew those statistics before Simpson‘s arrest. But the case got people talking.

“That was a huge learning curve even within the movement,” said Erica Villa of Next Door Solutions to Domestic Violence in San José.

In the wake of Simpson’s death from cancer on Wednesday, many domestic violence survivors’ advocates recalled how much changed because of the case — and how much remains the same.

‘We need to push this now’

Giggans was among the millions who watched the Bronco chase on live TV. But unlike most, she was watching with a plan.

“I remember watching it, eating Haagen-Dazs ice cream in my living room in Mar Vista with about six other advocates for domestic violence prevention,” she said. “None of us could get enough of it at the time. But we had an ulterior motive because, for us, it was an educational opportunity. [Suddenly] the media cared what we had to say.”

By then, national news outlets had already uncovered police reports and court records detailing Simpson’s abuse, including a no-contest plea to battery charges stemming from a bloody incident in 1989.

News vans began camping around the block at the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women’s Hollywood Boulevard headquarters, queuing up for interviews. Overnight, advocates became sought-after stars on TV.

“It was an amazingly consequential period,” Giggans said.

It wasn’t merely that Simpson was a wealthy celebrity, or that he had fled police, or that he was arrested by the same law enforcement agency whose officers had been caught on camera beating Rodney King.

“To a lot of people it was a case about race and mistreatment of Black residents by the LAPD, but to us it was the first time that a huge spotlight was focusing on domestic violence,” said Pincus of the Domestic Abuse Center.

By 1994, California was beginning to enforce 1986 changes to its domestic violence laws, which required police to treat family assaults as they would public ones, and to keep records of calls where no arrests were made.

“If you arrived at a scene and there’s a battery or attempted murder, you can’t just not do anything because it’s ‘a domestic,’” as police had done previously, Pincus said. “The other part of the law change said that every police department in the state had to have mandatory domestic violence training, and those protocols had to be established and made public.”

At the same time, Democrats in Congress were working to pass the landmark Violence Against Women Act, which would bring millions of dollars for hotlines and shelters. It included the first federal law against battery, among other protections for survivors of sexual and domestic violence.

After years of laboring in the shadows, advocates found themselves in the limelight. They were determined not to let the moment pass.

“We would get on these national calls and say, ‘We need to push this now,’” Giggans said of VAWA. “We didn’t want it to be just a media moment; we wanted some benefit to come from this tragedy.”

‘People didn’t know anything’

The Violence Against Women Act was signed into law on Sept. 13, 1994, almost three months after Nicole Brown Simpson and Goldman were found.

But when Simpson’s nationally televised trial began in November, it showed just how little the public understood about domestic violence — and how far the law still had to go.

“People didn’t know anything,” Giggans said. “It gave our movement an opportunity to be persistent and consistent in providing the education that we were struggling to provide ... and for people to understand that no one deserves to be battered or abused or raped and that this is a serious social ill.”

Even then, there was a gap between what the public was learning and what the jury was allowed to hear.

Six months after Simpson was acquitted, California added Section 1109 to the Evidence Code, allowing uncharged conduct and other evidence of prior abuse to be shown to jurors in similar cases.

The trial also shined a spotlight on DNA evidence, then a scientifically established but publicly suspect technology.

“It was like mumbo-jumbo to the public at that point,” Pincus said.

Today, DNA evidence is critical to many domestic violence prosecutions because it gets around the reliance upon “he-said, she-said” narratives that long hampered battery cases.

Without DNA, “it came down to who jurors believed: the hysterical victim who jumped all over the place telling her story or refused to testify out of fear, and the abuser who was calm and seen as a nice guy,” Pincus said.

With evidence handling under a microscope, advocates were able to push for reforms in how the LAPD managed rape kits, eventually leading to the creation of a new DNA crime lab.

“The case really did spearhead legislation that started expanding resources,” said Carmen McDonald, executive director of the Los Angeles Center for Law and Justice.

Still, some say the changes are more surface-level than substantive.

“These wonderful changes that were supposedly wrought by the mistakes made during that trial are not anything that I’ve benefited from, and they’re not anything any woman I know has benefited from,” said Gurba, the author and survivor. “If it’s prosecuted, most domestic violence is prosecuted as a misdemeanor. So the state sees our torture as a petty nuisance.”

Now, she and other advocates fear gains made since the trial could soon be erased.

‘All that we built since O.J. can go away’

California is poised to lose tens of millions in funding for domestic violence programs this year, a 43% cut that threatens critical infrastructure including emergency shelter, medical care and legal assistance to survivors, according to the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence.

Programs for at-risk populations already are stretched thin under the existing budget, survivors and advocates say.

“When I tried to enter a shelter when I was escaping domestic violence, I couldn’t get into one because they were all full,” Gurba said.

Now, those already overburdened services could disappear.

“It’s about to fall apart,” Giggans said. “All that we built since O.J. can go away.”

Advocates fear the cuts could create a cascade effect across the state.

“Domestic violence impacts every single community and population; it’s across every field,” McDonald said. “It’s immigration, it’s schools. The loss of funding impacts [other] services that are out there for folks who need help.”

For example, data show domestic violence is a leading cause of homelessness. According to a survey released last summer by the Urban Institute, nearly half of all unhoused women in Los Angeles have experienced domestic violence, and about a quarter fled their last residence because of it.

For Gurba, the looming cuts are yet more evidence of how little has truly changed since the 1994 slayings.

“I don’t think there was a revolution in how domestic violence survivors are treated thanks to that murder — that’s a myth,” she said. “The rhetoric may have changed, but the treatment is still the same behind closed doors.”

More to Read

O.J. Simpson never paid the Goldmans the millions he owed them. Can they finally collect?

April 17, 2024

Abcarian: Never forget — Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder redefined our understanding of domestic violence

April 14, 2024

O.J. Simpson’s executor says he will fight any attempt to collect on a wrongful death judgment

April 13, 2024

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Sonja Sharp is a Metro reporter for the Los Angeles Times. She writes narrative stories with a focus on disability in California culture.

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