Ideas, Institutions and Situational Crime Prevention
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Description
Situational crime prevention (SCP) is a set of recipes for steering and channelling behaviour in ways that reduce the occurrence of criminal events. Its project is to use situational stimuli to guide conduct towards lawful outcomes, preferably in ways that are unobtrusive and invisible to those whose conduct is affected. Institutions, as Mary Douglas (1986) has shown, work in similar ways. Their institutional routines and practices, their distinctive ways of organizing the flow of social life, have the usually unnoticed consequence of channelling the thinking and acting of those caught up in them. The effect of embedded institutional arrangements (such as the criminal justice system) is to gently guide our thought and action in predetermined directions, shaping how we think about problems (such as crime) and how we routinely respond to them (e.g. by processing and punishing individual criminals). What interests me most about the recent rise to prominence of situational crime prevention is its apparent success in breaking free of some of the institutionalized patterns of criminological thought and action that have prevailed for most of the 20th century. Without wishing to overstate the matter, or to attribute too much importance to this otherwise rather modest development, I want to suggest that situational crime prevention marks a break with the institutional epistemology that has characterised criminological thought and action for most of the modern period. Understanding the nature of that ‘epistemological break’ (to give an absurdly grandiose but actually quite accurate name to the event in question) and explaining how it came about, will be the purpose of this paper. The striking thing about the premises and propositions of situational crime prevention is how very simple, how very mundane, how very straightforward they appear once they have been explicitly articulated. As an account of how crime events occur, and as a practical means for reducing the occurrence of these events, SCP has all the seeming obviousness and simplicity of common sense. Indeed, the commonsensical character of their diagnoses and prescriptions clearly appeals to the chief proponents of SCP—who take pains to stress that their insights derive not from fancy theorising or a close reading of criminological literature but simply from attending to the practical world and observing how it works. They like to think that the truth claims of SCP should be apparent to anyone, so long as they can shake themselves free of the legacy of criminological theory and see the world for what it is. SCP thus presents itself as a layperson's criminology; as an empirical account of crime and a pragmatic account of what to do about it. And insofar as it entails an account of offenders and the processes that motivate their offending—that is to say, a criminological theory in the conventional sense of the phrase—SCP offers an account that seems equally simple and straightforward. Offenders are, for the most part, deemed to be normal, mundane individuals who give in to temptation as and when criminal opportunities arise. The common sense wisdom of age-old aphorisms tells us all we need to know: ‘Opportunity makes the thief’.
Source Publication
Ethical and Social Perspectives on Situational Crime Prevention
Source Editors/Authors
Andrew Von Hirsch, David Garland, Alison Wakefield
Publication Date
2000
Recommended Citation
Garland, David W., "Ideas, Institutions and Situational Crime Prevention" (2000). Faculty Chapters. 685.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/685
