ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses each of the elements, assesses the evidence base regarding impact, and focuses on the new status of focused deterrence as a crime prevention framework. Deterrence is a venerable, simple, and powerful idea. “Deterrence” centers on the shaping of behavior through risks and sanctions created by legal structures and actions. Focused-deterrence interventions are routinely based on, and operationally focused on, the empirical observation that for certain extreme public safety problems, very small numbers of exceptional actors are at their core. The original “Ceasefire” intervention and its evolving replications focused on groups and group dynamics. Focused-deterrence interventions have tended to identify and then maintain narrow theoretical and operational attention to particular and limited public safety outcomes. Drug market interventions have created certainty and swiftness by developing prosecutable drug sales cases for all dealers in a given market and then “banking” those cases.
