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Better Crime Prevention provides a critical guide to theory, research, ethics and politics in relation to crime prevention policy and practice, demonstrating what is involved in doing theoretically informed and realistic applied social science orientated to reducing harms.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of tables -- Notes on contributors -- Preface -- About the cover -- Abbreviations -- PART I: Theoretical perspectives on crime prevention and community safety -- 1 Theory for crime prevention -- Introduction -- Six requirements for crime prevention and community safety theories -- Specifying plausible causal mechanisms -- Speaking to the essential conditions for crime genesis -- Articulating the conditions for the activation or deactivation of relevant causal mechanisms -- Explicating plausible mechanisms that may produce unintended outcomes -- Crime prevention theories need to be stated in ways that make them open to empirical test -- Morally defensible and acceptable normative assumptions -- Good theory with benefits -- Doing relatively atheoretical crime prevention -- The complexity of crime prevention -- Frameworks to help navigate the complexities of crime prevention -- Problem-oriented policing/partnership -- Leverage -- Evolution -- Signal crimes -- Conclusion -- Note -- References -- 2 Criminology's first paradigm -- Introduction to the scientific paradigm -- Small steps -- Summary so far -- Pre-paradigmatic criminology -- Subfields linked to outside sciences -- Criminology's first paradigm -- Learning about crime events -- A common theory of crime events emerges -- Discussion of naming -- Specificity -- Generality -- Notes -- References -- 3 Community safety and crime prevention: a critical reassessment -- The career of a policy concept -- Community safety: tensions and limitations -- The ASBO cuckoo in the community safety nest -- Democracy, accountability or local corporatism -- Discipline, surveillance and selectivity -- Us and them -- After community safety? -- Conclusions -- Notes -- References -- PART II: Approaches to prevention

This book provides a concise and up-to-date account of crime prevention theory, practice and research in a form designed to be accessible and interesting to both students and practitioners. Readers will be equipped to think in an informed and critical way about what has been and might be done in practice to prevent crime at local and national levels. What is distinctive in the approach is the emphasis on crime reduction mechanisms, how they may be activated and the intended and unintended patterns of outcome produced. Each of chapters two to five takes this as its organizing principle. The key

Crime problems largely result from opportunities, temptations, and provocations that have been provided to offenders unintentionally by those pursuing other private interests. There is a widespread notion that the state and its agencies can and ought to take full responsibility for crime control and that there is, therefore, nothing that nonstate actors can or need to do. In practice, there is little that the state can do directly to address the opportunities, temptations, and provocations for crime; but where crime control responsibilities have been accepted in the private sector, successful measures to reduce opportunities and temptations have been devised and adopted, preventing many crimes and reducing costs that would otherwise fall on the state as well as on victims. This article sets out the reasons why a shift in responsibility for crime prevention from the public to private sector can produce patterns of crime control that are both effective and socially desirable, albeit important roles remain for the public sector in stimulating and supporting such measures.

While written by a proponent of realism, this article argues in favour of a pragmatic approach to evaluation. It argues that multiple sources of evidence collected using diverse research methods can be useful in conducting informative evaluations of programmes, practices and policies. It argues in particular that methods, even if their assumptions appear incommensurable with one another, should be chosen to meet the evidence needs of decision-makers. These evidence needs are captured in the acronym, EMMIE, which refers to Effect size, Mechanism, Moderator (or context), Implementation and Economic impact. Finally the article questions evidence hierarchies that are inspired by clinical trials, and suggests instead that, notwithstanding the clear differences in the physical and social worlds, engineering may provide a superior model for evaluators to try to emulate. And engineering is, above all, a pragmatic field.

The nature and meaning of replication is crucial not only for those undertaking studies of efforts at replication, but also for those conducting, using and evaluating demonstration projects, since their rationale lies in lessons learned for use elsewhere. The issue of replication is discussed using as a case study the highly influential British Burglary Prevention Project in Kirkholt, Rochdale and efforts to emulate it. Three ways of construing replication are presented: 'strict', 'relativist' and 'scientific realist'. Serious weaknesses are identified in the first two, and the third is advocated. Major lessons for practitioners and evaluators are drawn, in order that most benefit can be obtained for practice and policy from demonstration projects and their successors.