Subject Area: Criminology

Crime prevention policy has traditionally been regarded as synonymous with the operations of the criminal justice system. Clearly the operations of the major criminal justice agencies - the police, the courts and prisons - are an important part of the response to crime. However research shows that these agencies have a very limited effect on the incidence of crime. This is hardly surprising when we consider that the causes of criminal offending lie in economic, social and cultural factors which by and large lie outside the criminal justice system. It is therefore imperative to develop approaches to crime prevention which focus on a broad range of areas and social agencies outside the traditionally defined criminal justice system. The emphasis should be on the attempt to link these various areas and to develop crime prevention policy.

There have been considerable developments in the field of crime prevention policy in recent years as the limitations of over-reliance on the criminal justice agencies become apparent. A renewed interest in the concepts of space and locality have led to the development of situational and social crime prevention in the USA, UK and western European countries, and to a lesser but increasing extent, Australia. Previous criminological work in an ecological tradition has been revived. Links are being forged across traditional disciplinary boundaries, for example geography, urban sociology, town planning and criminology. A primary objective of this course is to examine these developments.