Crime prevention strategies and effectiveness

Criminal Justice - Crime Prevention

INCREASING CRIME PREVENTION EFFECTIVENESS

Crime prevention encompasses myriad different facets both within the criminal justice system and also within society at large. Within the criminal justice system, increasing the effectiveness of crime prevention efforts requires directing resources in the most focused way toward that effort. Specifically, increasing the effectiveness of crime prevention efforts requires distinguishing between criminal conduct that affects other individuals adversely from criminal conduct that affects only the criminal himself.

While paternalistic criminal laws may serve some role in the most general sense, the reality of American society is that law enforcement resources are insufficient to address every form of criminality; therefore, one of the primary conceptual themes should be to address crimes perpetrated against persons and other entities first and avoid wasting precious financial resources and manpower against so-called criminal vices, particularly those that do not pose any risk or danger to others.

The war against illegal drugs is one example of a law enforcement effort that wastes a tremendous amount of financial and personnel resources combating a vice that might very well be better allocated to other types of crime. Certainly, some of the criminal conduct associated with the illicit drug market constitutes a necessary area of law enforcement focus, but that class of crimes is completely separable from the issue of private drug use just as driving or violence under the influence of alcohol is completely distinguishable from consuming alcohol privately without concurrent criminal conduct.

Ultimately, effective crime prevention is more a matter of optimal resource allocation to prevent serious crimes against innocent persons than it is a matter of preventing every criminal statute across the board without conceptual distinction. The CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM and CRIME PREVENTION

In the context of crime prevention in society, the criminal justice system is, in many respects, a last resort. Specifically, the criminal justice system is designed more to address crimes after they have already been committed than to prevent them beforehand.

The criminal justice system is well designed to investigate, prosecute, and punish criminal conduct; it is far less well designed to prevent criminal activity ahead of time, particularly in comparison to other social factors.

By the time criminal violations come under the purview of the criminal justice system, they likely represent only a small fraction of criminal activity in society; for every detected crime, hundreds of others go undetected. More importantly, to the extent societal efforts relate to genuine crime prevention rather than crime control after the fact, those efforts must address social values in the larger sense.

Paternalistic legislation also undermines the societal goal of instilling fundamental respect for the formal rules of law, precisely because criminalizing purely personal conduct is so much harder to justify. On a psychological level, disdain for law enforcement over paternalistic legislation of private personal conduct is counterproductive by virtue of eroding respect for law enforcement in general.