ABSTRACT
This chapter will consider some issues relating to crime prevention. The reader will recall that Chapter 1 placed a good deal of emphasis on understanding and appreciating the nature of criminology as a ‘modern’ discipline. This emphasis stresses the link between the things that concern criminology and criminologists and the desire to influence the way in which society responds to social problems, in this case the social problem being crime. Put more simply, criminologists do not just want to know about crime, many of them also want to be involved in developing policies that will help prevent crime. However, the link between knowing something about crime and devising policies that will help prevent it is not always simple or straightforward. In this chapter, we shall be exploring some of the difficulties associated with policy formation. In so doing we shall be revisiting the distinction that was made in earlier chapters between crimes of the streets, crime behind closed doors and crimes of the suites.
