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Social Crime Prevention - Interventions to Reduce the Motivation to Offend

Synopsis of Presentation at Tallinn City Council 15 April 2002

Henry Shaftoe, Award Leader, Community Safety and Crime Prevention Open Learning Programme, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

The core problem of crime is similar in every country, but the way we try to deal with crime can vary considerably. Because we experience similar crime problems it is useful to learn from each other about the best ways to prevent crime and create safe communities. Let me clarify that, in this presentation, I will be looking at how to prevent the high volume crimes that affect neighbourhoods where people live, play and work. These are mostly thefts (such as burglary, shop thefts and car crime) and violence (against people or property). I will not be talking directly about organised crime or corporate crime.

Wherever you go in the world, you will find that there are three main ways to prevent crime:

I want to concentrate my presentation on the third of these, but, first of all, a brief discussion and critique of the first two. Using the Criminal Justice System (CJS) to deter crime and Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) assumes that we are all potential criminals who need to have our instincts curbed. Although this may be true for some, I do not think it is true for all of us. Let me explain by once more creating three categories, but this time for types of people rather than types of crime prevention:

What proportions of the population fit into each of the three categories? Well "outlaws" usually make up a small minority of the population, but their negative impact on communities is out of all proportion to their numbers. In most civilised societies one would hope that there are more "self-regulators" than "rational choosers" , but there is not a rigid demarcation between the two – where you sit may be affected by time and circumstance. The important thing to recognise is that the boundaries between the three categories are not fixed – people can move over time (hopefully leftwards rather than rightwards!) and this is where the potential for social crime prevention comes in, as we shall see shortly.

The point I want to make before we move on to looking at the content of social crime prevention, is that application of the CJS and SCP are only really effective for the middle group – the rational choosers. This is a necessary group to restrain, so we must keep the CJS in place and continue to make crime more difficult to commit and get away with, but we should not be concentrating too high a proportion of our precious crime control resources on just these two approaches. There is a danger that we will reach saturation point, where putting more resources into policing, incarceration and fortification not only produces diminishing returns but leads to negative consequences for the quality of life of the population as a whole. I believe this is the case in many countries, including my own and certainly is the case in the superpowers of the USA and Russia.

I believe we should invest much more time and effort into the third category of crime control – social crime prevention (SCP). This has the potential to both rescue the "outlaws" from the margins and to build up the proportion of "self-regulators" in the population. If we can reduce the number of "outlaws" and increase the proportion of "self-regulators" we will, in time, need to spend less time and money on the Criminal Justice System and situational crime prevention.

So what does "social crime prevention" consist of? Good social crime prevention is an interlocking series of interventions that enables people to lead a life where they do not have the inclination, motivation or need to offend against others, whether for expressive or acquisitive reasons. To put it crudely, social crime prevention ensures that babies grow up to be considerate children, pro-social adolescents and responsible adults. A tall order? Yes, but not impossible. A comprehensive social crime prevention programme would contain most of the following elements:

• Support for parents before and after child-birth, by health workers;
• Parenting skills training and family support, by people trained in developmental psychology;
• Good quality nursery and pre-school provision;
• Personal, social and moral education in schools;
• Adequate play and youth activities (of the type that children and young people want);
• Training and employment for useful or meaningful work;
• Supported accommodation for people with particular needs or vulnerabilities;
• Help to overcome or reduce the damage caused by alcohol and other drug dependencies;
• Mediation and other community based conflict resolution services.

Ideally, such a public service programme would be offered universally to the entire population (as happens in varying degrees in the Scandinavian countries), but in reality, due to limited resources, interventions have to be targeted at the most vulnerable or problematic neighbourhoods (as happens in the UK).

The main difficulty of implementing social crime prevention measures should not be their cost (it has been calculated that they accrue huge savings in other types of public expenditure from the obvious reduction in victim losses and crime processing, to more oblique benefits such as reduced medical treatment expenses and less vandalism). The main challenge is to hold steadfast over the long-term pay-off from social crime prevention. Unfortunately SCP requires substantial early input to achieve a benefit that may only become apparent over a long time scale. For example the early intervention programmes such as "Healthy Start" in Hawaii and "Sure Start" in England, and the Schools/police/social services liaison scheme in Denmark may only pay off (in terms of overall public service savings) in ten or fifteen years’ time.

The attraction of criminal justice and situational interventions, such as police crackdowns, building new prisons, installing CCTV in public places or constructing gated communities for upper income residents, is that they produce an immediate visible and drastic result. However, such interventions may merely stem the tide of crime or force it to gush out somewhere else. We will not reduce crime in any sustainable way until we make serious impacts on the reasons why some people are tempted or driven to offend in the first place. The good news is that personal and social interventions that reduce the motivation to commit crime, if offered as help and with sensitivity, can, at no extra cost, lead to people growing up to be happier, healthier and more self-fulfilled altogether, rather than just making them law-abiding.

Finally, it is important to point out that citizens will be more inclined to do the right thing if the social, economic and political system they live in is perceived as fair and just. National and local government policies and practices need to exemplify and model the kind of fair, responsible and equitable behaviour that is expected of the citizenry. In England bad parents say to their children "Do as I say, not as I do" – no wonder their children become delinquents!