The United Kingdom has more than 4.2 million public closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras-one for every fourteen citizens. Across the United States, hundreds of video surveillance systems are being installed in town centers, public transportation facilities, and schools at a cost exceeding $100 million annually. And now other Western countries have begun to experiment with CCTV to prevent crime in public places. In light of this expansion and the associated public expenditure, as well as pressing concerns about privacy rights, there is an acute need for an evidence-based approach to inform policy and practice.
Drawing on the highest-quality research, criminologists Brandon C. Welsh and David P. Farrington assess the effectiveness and social costs of not only CCTV, but also of other important surveillance methods to prevent crime in public space, such as improved street lighting, security guards, place managers, and defensible space. Importantly, the book goes beyond the question of "Does it work?" and examines the specific conditions and contexts under which these surveillance methods may have an effect on crime as well as the mechanisms that bring about a reduction in crime.
At a time when cities need cost-effective methods to fight crime and the public gradually awakens to the burdens of sacrificing their privacy and civil rights for security, Welsh and Farrington provide this timely and reliable guide to the most effective and non-invasive uses of surveillance to make public places safer from crime.
How can a society prevent-not deter, not punish-but prevent crime? Criminal justice prevention, commonly called crime control, aims to prevent crime after an initial offence has been commited through anything from an arrest to a death penalty sentence. These traditional means have been frequently examined and their efficacy just as frequently questioned. Promising new forms of crime prevention have emerged and expanded as important components of an overall strategy to reduce crime.
Crime prevention today has developed along three lines: interventions to improve the life chances of children and prevent them from embarking on a life of crime; programs and policies designed to ameliorate the social conditions and institutions that influence offending; and the modification or manipulation of the physical environment, products, or systems to reduce everyday opportunities for crime. Each strategy aims at preventing crime or criminal offending in the first instance - before the act has been committed. Each, importantly, takes place outside of the formal criminal justice system, representing an alternative, perhaps even socially progressive way to reduce crime. The Oxford Handbook of Crime Prevention is a comprehensive, up-to-date, and authoritative review of research on crime prevention. Bringing together top scholars in criminology, public policy, psychology, and sociology, this Handbook includes critical reviews of the main theories that form the basis of crime prevention, evidence-based assessments of the effectiveness of the most important interventions, and cross-cutting essays that examine implementation, evaluation methodology, and public policy.
Covering the three major crime prevention strategies active today-developmental, community, and situational-this definitive volume addresses seriously and critically the ways in which the United States and the Western world have attempted, and should continue to strive for the prevention of crime.
The United Kingdom has more than 4.2 million public closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras-one for every fourteen citizens. Across the United States, hundreds of video surveillance systems are being installed in town centers, public transportation facilities, and schools at a cost exceeding $100 million annually. And now other Western countries have begun to experiment with CCTV to prevent crime in public places. In light of this expansion and the associated public expenditure, as well as pressing concerns about privacy rights, there is an acute need for an evidence-based approach to inform policy and practice.
Drawing on the highest-quality research, criminologists Brandon C. Welsh and David P. Farrington assess the effectiveness and social costs of not only CCTV, but also of other important surveillance methods to prevent crime in public space, such as improved street lighting, security guards, place managers, and defensible space. Importantly, the book goes beyond the question of "Does it work?" and examines the specific conditions and contexts under which these surveillance methods may have an effect on crime as well as the mechanisms that bring about a reduction in crime.
At a time when cities need cost-effective methods to fight crime and the public gradually awakens to the burdens of sacrificing their privacy and civil rights for security, Welsh and Farrington provide this timely and reliable guide to the most effective and non-invasive uses of surveillance to make public places safer from crime.
Crime prevention should be rational and should be based on the best possible evidence. Decision-makers should weigh heavily any available evidence on what works best. How can a program that has produced no discernable evidence of effectiveness, as shown through numerous evaluations, be considered for implementation? Unfortunately, this happens all the time. Evidence-based crime prevention attempts to overcome this and other obstacles by ensuring that the best available evidence is considered in any decision to implement a program designed to prevent crime. This book is about evidence-based crime prevention.
A project of the Campbell Collaboration Crime and Justice Group, Preventing Crime brings together the leading scientific evidence on what works best for a wide range of interventions organized around four important domains in criminology: at-risk children, offenders, victims, and places. It is the first book to assess the effectiveness of criminological interventions using the most rigorous review methodology of the systematic review. It is an indispensable guide to the leading scientific evidence on what works best to prevent crime.
This compact resource synthesizes current research on bullying in the schools while presenting strengths-based approaches to curbing this growing epidemic. Its international review of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies unravels the complex dynamics of bullying and provides depth on the range of negative outcomes for bullies, victims, enablers, and victims who bully. Chapters on protective factors against bullying identify personal competencies, such as empathy development, and keys to a positive school environment, featuring findings on successful school-based prevention programs in different countries. Throughout, the authors clearly define bullying as a public health/mental health issue, and prevention as a deterrent for future antisocial and criminal behavior.
Included in the coverage:
· School bullying in different countries: prevalence, risk factors, and short-term outcomes.
· Personal protective factors against bullying: emotional, social, and moral competencies.
· Contextual protective factors against bullying: school-wide climate.
· Protecting children through anti-bullying interventions.
· Protecting bullies and victims from long-term undesirable outcomes.
· Future directions for research, practice, and policy.
With its wealth of answers to a global concern, Protecting Children against Bullying and Its Consequences is a definitive reference and idea book for the international community of scholars in criminology and developmental psychology interested in bullying and youth violence, as well as practitioners and policymakers.
Based on extensive research initiated by the UK Home Office, Reducing Crime offers an objective look at the effectiveness of criminal justice interventions in the reduction of crime. Bringing together information about where, for whom and at what cost these interventions are effective, the book examines alcohol prevention and drug treatment studies; courts, sentencing and police interventions; probation and prison interventions; and situational burglary and housing interventions. In addition to a cost/benefits analysis of each intervention, the book also discusses future research and policy directions.
?? ?This brief examines the influence and prestige of scholars and works in the field of Criminology and Criminal Justice, as well as changes in influence and prestige over a period of 25 years, based on citation analysis. Methods of measuring scholarly influence can be highly controversial, but the authors of this work clearly outline their methodology, developed over years of experience working with this area of study. Through their expertise in Criminology and Criminal Justice, they are able to solve problems that affect or confound many traditional forms of citation analysis, such as irregularly cited references or self-citations. It includes 25 years of data (1986 through 2010) on the most-cited scholars and works in major American and international Criminology and Criminal Justice journals, and provides an objective measure of influence and prestige. Through an analysis of the data, the authors also document the intellectual development of criminology and criminal justice as a field of study since 1986. They highlight the development of research trends and indicate areas for future research. This book is designed for use by scholars and academics in the fields of Criminology and Criminal Justice, and the methodology will be of interest to researchers in related disciplines, including Sociology and Social Psychology. --Cohn, Farrington, and Iratzoqui provide an invaluable service in unpacking the criminological enterprise. Using systematic citational analysis, they illuminate the core patterns of scholarly influence that have shaped the field's development. This volume is an essential resource for all those wishing to understand which scholars and writings have done most-within and across time periods-to affect thinking about crime and justice. Francis T. Cullen
Distinguished Research Professor
University of Cincinnati
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Citation analyses have become one of the most significant measures of scholarly influence. They are especially useful for revealing major trends over time regarding authors and the topics of interest to the wider field. Cohn, Farrington, and Iratzoqui's Most Cited Scholars in Criminology and Criminal Justice, 1986-2010 provides the most up-to-date, comprehensive, and longitudinal investigation of scholarly influence in criminology/criminal justice. This resource is a most interesting read, one that supplies not a mere counting of citations but clear ideas about where the field has been centered and where it is trending into the future.Alex R. Piquero
Ashbel Smith Professor of Criminology
University of Texas at Dallas
The first decade of the new century proved to be a deadly one for many children and young people in the United States. Despite increased policing on the streets, higher rates of incarceration, harsher sentencing, stricter control of illegal drugs, and attempts to reduce access to firearms, FBI reports show that more than 7,300 young people between the ages of 15 and 29 were murdered in 2008 alone. It's clear that traditional crime reduction strategies have not stemmed the rising tide of homicides perpetrated by and upon one of society's most vulnerable populations. Innovative, practicable solutions are needed to staunch this lethal trend.Based on the findings of a unique longitudinal study, Young Homicide Offenders and Victims: Risk Factors, Prediction, and Prevention from Childhood now provides experts with unprecedented analysis of prospectively collected data on 1,517 boys and young men who grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Following these males from childhood into early adulthood, examining their lives and the conditions under which they grew up in a representative mid-sized American city, the study forms the basis of this unique volume designed to stimulate debate on key questions of prevention and intervention as well as dispel popular myths about the childhood and adolescent features of homicide offenders and homicide victims. Key areas of coverage include:Early childhood risk factors of young homicide offenders and victims. Insights into homicide offenders' lives as told in their own words.The effectiveness of screening for at-risk youth. Risk factor-based prevention and intervention strategies.The impact of interventions on homicide rates.Policy implications at the local, state, and national levels.Young Homicide Offenders and Victims: Risk Factors, Prediction, and Prevention from Childhood is essential reading for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers across the fields of juvenile justice and criminology, developmental psychology, sociology, psychiatry, public health, and policy making.-------"This book changes the game in violence research ... The analysis is masterful, the prose is readable, and the achievement is nothing short of stunning."
Richard Rosenfeld, Ph.D. / Curators Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Missouri-St. Louis"This book will stand the test of time as a landmark homicide study."
James C. Howell, Ph.D. / Senior Research Associate, National Gang Center"This is a fascinating, pioneering book ... The authors' sophisticated analyses demonstrate convincingly the considerable value of prospective longitudinal data for enhancing our understanding of the etiology and control of lethal violence."
Steven F. Messner, Ph.D. / Distinguished Teacher Professor, Department of Sociology, University at Albany, SUNY / President, American Society of Criminology
This book brings together an international group of experts to present the latest psychosocial and developmental criminological research on cyberbullying, cybervictimization and intervention. With contributions from a wide range of European countries, including Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Italy, France, Hungary, Spain, and the United Kingdom, as well as from Canada and the USA, this authoritative volume explores the nature, risk factors, and prevalence of cyberbullying among children and adolescents. A particularly original focus is directed towards the Tabby project (Threat Assessment of online Bullying Behaviour among Youngsters), an intervention programme based on the threat and risk assessment approach which seeks to prevent the occurrence of violence and its recidivism.
Presenting cutting-edge research on developmental criminology and legal psychology, International Perspectives on Cyberbullying is a comprehensive resource for practitioners, teachers, parents, and researchers, as well as scholars of criminology, psychology, and education.
Offending from Childhood to Late Middle Age is a timely volume by leading researchers in Life Course Criminology, which reports new findings from The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, a prospective longitudinal survey of 411 South London males first studied at age 8 in 1961. The main aim of the study is to advance knowledge about criminal careers up to age 56. At the time of these most recent findings, forty-two percent of the males were convicted, with an average ten-year conviction career. Only seven percent of the males accounted for half of all convictions. Almost all of the males (93 percent) reported committing an offense in four age ranges, compared with 29 percent who were convicted at these ages. There were on average of 39 self-reported offenses per conviction. Group-based trajectory analyses indicated that, while there were distinct groups of offenders who followed different age-crime trajectories between ages 10 and 56, five groups best characterized the criminal careers of the men, with two groups, high adolescence peak and high rate chronic, exhibiting the most offending. Also, the offending trajectories were predicted by individual and environmental childhood risk factors, with the most chronic offenders (to age 56) having the most extreme scores on childhood risk. Based on these results, risk assessment instruments could be developed and risk-focused prevention could be implemented in early childhood, including parent training, pre-school intellectual enrichment programs and home visiting programs, in order to prevent chronic styles of offending from being initiated. This work will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, especially those with an interest in life course criminology and crime prevention, while also being of use as a research framework for other studies.? It will also be of interest to researchers in sociology, psychology, and other social sciences, as well as policy makers and practitioners. "This is a `must read' for anyone seeking to understand the development and course of crime from childhood through adulthood. Comparative analyses of officially recorded and self-reported offending and analyses of the predictive power of childhood risks to distinguish offending trajectories are important contributions of this new milestone in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development."J. David Hawkins, Ph.D., Endowed Professor of Prevention, Social Development Research Group, School of Social Work, University of Washington "For more than four decades the Cambridge Study of Delinquent Development has been a guiding light for research on what has come to be called developmental criminology. This latest installment is still another demonstration of the importance of this seminal study."
Daniel S. Nagin, Teresa and H. John Heinz III University Professor of Public Policy and Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University
This ambitious volume brings together and assesses all major systematic reviews of the effectiveness of criminological interventions, to draw broad conclusions about what works in policing, corrections, developmental prevention, situational prevention, drug abuse treatments, sentencing and deterrence, and communities.Systematic reviews aim to minimize any possible bias in drawing conclusions by stating explicit criteria for inclusion and exclusion of studies, by conducting extensive and wide-ranging searches for possibly eligible studies, and by making all stages of the review explicit and transparent so that the methods can be checked and replicated. Over a decade ago, a concerted effort was made by members of the criminology community, including the Editors and contributors of this volume, to bring the practice of systematic reviews to the study of Criminology, providing replicable, evidence-based data to answer key questions about the study of crime causation, detection, and prevention. Now, the pioneers in this effort present a comprehensive stock-taking of what has been learned in the past decade of systematic reviews in criminology. Much has been discovered about the effectiveness of (for example) boot camps, "hot spots" policing, closed-circuit television surveillance, neighborhood watch, anti-bullying programs in schools, early parenting programs, drug treatment programs, and other key topics.This volume will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, as well as in related fields such as public health and forensic science, with important implications for policy-makers and practitioners.Decisively showing that the "nothing works" era is over, this volume takes stock of what we know, and still need to know, to prevent crime. I plan to keep this book close at hand and to use it often!
Francis T. Cullen, Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus, University of Cincinnati At a time when there is a broad commitment to bringing science to the front lines of practice, this book should be on the reading list of both policymakers and scholars.Laurie O. Robinson, Clarence J. Robinson Professor of Criminology, Law Society, George Mason University and former Assistant Attorney General of the U.S. Department of Justice
This book examines the use of "Communities That Care" (CTC) interventions in European countries. It reports results obtained by using the CTC Youth Survey in five European countries covering different parts of Europe - Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Croatia, and Cyprus. The main aim of the book is to compare (a) the prevalence of delinquency and substance use, (b) the prevalence of key risk and protective factors, and (c) the strength of relationships between risk and protective factors and delinquency and substance use, in these five European countries.
The chapters in this book compare similarities and differences between the countries, possible explanations of these, and the implications of the results for theories and for intervention policy and practice. Additionally, it provides evidence about the replicability over time and place of the strength of relationships between (i) risk and protective factors and (ii) delinquency and substance use. In turn, this increases confidence in the generalizability of criminological theories over time and place.
It will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in criminology and criminal justice, particularly those with an interest in developmental and life-course criminology, juvenile delinquency, and substance use, as well as crime prevention and intervention.
This book reviews research on psychology and crime in Japan, and compares the findings with similar research conducted in Western industrialised countries. It examines explanations for crime and antisocial behaviour in Japan using research and theories from a psychological perspective. Topics covered include cultural explanations, developmental and life-course criminology, family violence and family risk factors, youth crime and early prevention, school factors and bullying, mental disorders, biosocial factors, psychopathy and sexual offending. In some parts, it challenges and refines the prevailing belief that Japan is a society characterised by low crime and little antisocial behaviour. This original project is the most up-to-date work on crime in Japan, and advances the important field of psychological criminology.