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Summary of Criminology & Safety Literature
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This document contains all the summarized literature of the Criminology & Safety course of the master Sociology: Contemporary Social Problems.
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Welsh & Farrington (2012): Science, politics, and crimeprevention: Toward a new crime policy
Crime prevention concerns efforts to prevent crime or criminal offending before the act has
been committed. It often takes place outside of the formal justice system. It is becoming an
accepted alternative to the dominant crime control model. Crime prevention measures can
be put into three different categories:
- Developmental prevention: interventions designed to prevent the development of
criminal potential in individuals
- Situational prevention: interventions designed to prevent the occurrence of crimes
by reducing opportunities and increasing the risk and difficulty of offending
- Community prevention: interventions designed to change the social conditions and
institutions that influence offending in residential communities
Support for crime prevention can be found in public opinion, economic analysis, and the
undesirable consequences of mass incarceration and other punitive policies. There are four
pillars of crime reduction:
- Police
- Courts
- Corrections
- Prevention
Two contemporary developments/frameworks to crime prevention:
- Prevention science: commits to prevention that is grounded in the developmental
epidemiology of specific health or social problems. The influence of this framework
on crime prevention can be found in the adherence to the highest scientific
standards and the focus on basing prevention measures on epidemiology.
- Evidence-based approach: just like prevention science, this framework commits to
using the most scientifically valid studies to evaluate programs. Additionally, this
framework uses accumulated scientific research evidence to increase the influence
of research on (the effectiveness of) policy. At the heart of this model is the notion
that facts are necessary to develop crime policies, not opinions.
There are a number of ways that evaluation research can exert influence on policy decisions.
The one that is most applicable to evidence-based policy is imposed use: state or federal
government agencies mandate that if local programs want to receive funding, they need
that their program is evidence-based. Moreover, evidence-based policy may break down or
temper the current soft-on-crime concern (crime prevention is still seen as soft-on-crime by
some politicians and/or citizens): instead of emotions and opinions, facts and evidence are
used to base policies on. The slogan “get tough on crime” should, over time, change into
“get smart on crime” or “reduce crime in the most cost-effective way”.
One challenge that confronts crime prevention (especially developmental and sometimes
community approaches) is the fact that the benefits from reduced crime may not be
apparent for a number of years, while politicians usually want to focus on the short term.
,Durlauf and Nagin (2011) argue that a reduction in imprisonments can lead to a reduction in
crime rates, if the cost savings from this policy change are allocated to hot spots policing
and other effective policing strategies. Like this study, there have been more studies (see
article for examples) which make a strong case for the need to strike a greater balance
between crime prevention and crime control.
As this article concludes: building a safer, more sustainable society will require using the
best available research evidence, overcoming political barriers, and striking a greater
balance between crime prevention and crime control.
, Farrington (2003): Methodological quality standards for
evaluation research
Methodological quality depends on four (or five, depending on who’s writing) criteria:
- Statistical conclusion validity: this validity is concerned with whether the presumed
cause (intervention) and the presumed effect (outcome) are related. Measures of
effect size and their associated confidence intervals should be calculated.
- Internal validity: refers to the correctness of the key questions about whether the
intervention really did cause a change in the outcome, and has generally been
regarded as the most important type of validity
- Construct validity: refers to the adequacy of the operational definition and
measurement of the theoretical constructs that underlie the intervention and the
outcome
- External validity: refers to the generalisability of the causal relationships across
different persons, places, times, and operational definitions of interventions and
outcomes
- (Descriptive validity/adequacy of reporting) : refers to the adequacy of the
presentation of key features of an evaluation in a research report
Validity: the correctness of inferences about cause and effect.
The main criteria for establishing a causal relationship are:
- The cause precedes the effect
- The cause is related to the effect
- Other plausible alternative explanations of the effect can be excluded
The main aim of the Campbell validity typology is to identify plausible alternative
explanations (threats to valid causal inference).
Methodological quality scales can be used in systematic reviews to determine criteria for
inclusion or exclusion of studies in the review. They can also be used in trying to explain
differences in results between different evaluation studies. The most influential one in
criminology is the SMS (Maryland Scientific Methods Scale). There are five levels on this
scale:
1. Correlation between a prevention program and a measure of crime at one point in
time. This design fails to rule out many threats to internal validity and also fails to
establish causal order
2. Measures of crime before and after the program, with no comparable control
condition. This design establishes causal order but fails to rule out many threats to
internal validity.
3. Measures of crime before and after the program in experimental and comparable
control conditions. It rules out many threats to internal validity, the main problems
revolving around selection effects and regression to the mean.
4. Measures of crime before and after the program in multiple experimental and
control units, controlling for other variables that influence crime. This design has
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