ABSTRACT
Introduction ........................................................................................................ 180 Punishment and Crime Prevention-The Historical Development .............181 Is Punishment (Imprisonment) a Good Way to Prevent Crime? ................ 188 Community and Crime Prevention ................................................................. 190 Is Community Crime Prevention Effective? ................................................... 194 Conclusion and Discussion ............................................................................... 197 Glossary of Key Terms ....................................................................................... 199 Discussion Questions ........................................................................................ 201 Suggested Reading ............................................................................................. 201 Recommended Web Links ................................................................................ 201 References ............................................................................................................ 202
In more or less all countries and throughout all centuries, punishment has been, and still is, symbolized as the “natural” reaction to crime and deviant behavior. In the past, if this punishment did not bring about the desired result, the “treatment” was intensified: more of the same or more severe punishment. In the Middle Ages, for example, humankind was very creative in finding new and cruel punishments to fight crime. Eisner (2001, p. 83) found in his comparative research about severe crimes (killings) in five European regions (England, the Netherlands and Belgium, Scandinavia, Germany and Switzerland, and Italy) that the crime rate-despite the cruel punishment for deviants in the 13th and 14th centuries-was around 25 times higher than today. Thus, one could conclude that severe punishment certainly had no preventive effect at that time. Five hundred years ago, Thomas Morus (1516; 1992, p. 51) disclosed a dinner conversation, at the Cardinal-Archbishop of Canterbury’s residence, in which an English lawyer highly commended the harsh execution of justice upon thieves, who at the time, as he said, were hanged so fast that there were sometimes 20 on a single gallows. He added that he could not in any way fathom how it came to pass that, though few escaped, there were still so many who escaped the long arm of the law and continued to commit crimes. This early example of extremely severe punishment clearly illustrates the dilemma of punishment as being its questionable efficiency in preventing crime. New international research has, in the meantime, clearly shown the short-and longterm effects of punishment to be an ineffective but more expensive response to deviant behavior when compared to other, less harsh, alternatives.
