ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 details British thinking, through the 1990s to now, about the interrelated themes of crime prevention policy centring on offenders, victims, environment and the community. The same themes can be said to characterise the range of American policy response to crime prevention across a wide variety of public agencies, as discussed in more detail in Chapters 5 and 6. Historically, in both nations crime prevention policy has flowed from choices among increased punishments and/or treatment of the offender, treatment of the offender’s social-economic conditions or hardening targets – more locks, stronger windows, doors and other environmental interventions. These choices and the modern themes they have come to represent, can be brought together into two general approaches, one emphasising offenders and the other emphasising environments. Adopting these approaches is in no way intended to minimise the plight of victims; we suggest rather that there is reasonable empirical justification to suggest that physical environments have a good deal to do with victimisation (Spelman and Eck, 1989; Spelman, 1995), which may properly be considered to fall within the environmental approach, as within sociological, economic or psychological approaches. Indeed, inasmuch as victims can be considered as ‘targets’ of crime, they are central to the theory and practice of place-based crime prevention.
