Situational And Social Approaches To Crime Prevention Essay

SOCS108 Essay Questions 2500 words

Provide a critical comparison of situational and social approaches to crime prevention.

Introduction

Social and situational approaches to crime prevention are different in the way crime is prevented. In this essay, I will briefly talk about the definition of crime prevention and how situational and social approaches came about, provide a critical comparison of situational and social approaches by first explaining what is situational and social approaches to crime prevention, followed by the differences between the two approaches, their strength and weaknesses and lastly, to show understanding that there are other approaches to crime prevention.

What is crime prevention?

The term crime prevention has no

Crime prevention was defined by National Crime Prevention Institute as “anticipation, recognition, and appraisal of crime risk and the initiative of some action to remove it” (National Crime Prevention Institute, 1978 cited by Schneider, 2014) that focus on it being a proactive nature, recognised the scope and nature of the problem and respond to it. Lab (2004) defined crime prevention as “any action designed to reduce the actual level of crime and or perceived fear of crime (lab, 2004, cited by Schneider, 2014). It can be seen that the former definition was too broad and the latter did not mention the proactive nature of crime prevention. It is therefore hard to have a definite definition for crime prevention. One way as identified by Schneider (2014) was to distinguish it from the traditional criminal justice approach. It was noted that crime prevention emerge in the 1960s as an alternative and critique of the criminal justice system where it was recognised that it is limited of what criminal justice can do to reduce crime as seen in the statistics comparing police recorded crime and self-report victimisation survey also known as British Crime