Improve the Community, Deter the Criminal

Crime is a serious and costly social problem that touches every neighborhood in this country. The knowledge base for developing effective neighborhood crime prevention initiatives has expanded significantly in recent years. When targeting these processes, certain interventions have been fairly successful in reducing the prevalence of crime in specific areas. Whether this knowledge can be used to produce sustained reductions in neighborhood crime rates is an important social policy question.

Since the mid-1960s, the United States has been embroiled in a war against crime, and has sought to control crime though the traditional responses of deterrence, incapacitation, and (occasionally) rehabilitation. The results of this law-enforcement approach are apparent. Expanded criminal codes and enforcement have produced huge jail and prison populations, disproportionately persons of color. While many policymakers have sought to justify these actions by citing reductions in crime rates, regardless of the merits of this argument (which are debatable), the financial and human costs of these policies are enormous and underestimated.

Although the criminal justice system is a necessary component of neighborhood crime prevention, it is not sufficient and can easily be overused. Clearly, the criminal justice system, as currently structured, is extremely limited in its capacity to prevent neighborhood crime. Hence, the best bet for promoting safe and healthy neighborhoods is to achieve broad understanding of the causes and impacts of violence and work to develop a broad array of preventive responses.

One important insight to emerge from scientific inquiry into neighborhoods in the past few decades is that problem behaviors tend to cluster in geographic areas and within individuals and families. Consequently, these behaviors tend to reinforce one another. Delinquency, violence, dropping out of school, teen pregnancy, and substance abuse often co-vary. As a result, new models are emerging for improving neighborhood safety and health, beginning with the premise that organizing around broad goals at the neighborhood level will result in improved quality of life for local residents. Inherent in these new models is the belief that traditional approaches to improving social conditions are not effective at the neighborhood level and that communities and regions play a much larger role in producing real change. These new models are diverse, but mutually supportive.

• Individual and family interventions are now giving greater attention to early intervention in the life cycle.
• Community models now recognize the need for achieving justice through harm reduction and offender reintegration rather than through isolation and retribution.
• Restorative and community justice models are enticing because they offer justice by linking community and agency resources through a process that may strengthen collective efficacy at the neighborhood level.
• Technology models are seeking to empower communities with web-based information networks, while pursuing resources to close the “digital divide.”
• Macrolevel interventions are needed to regulate the economic and government forces that have historically resulted in community decline and disinvestment and provide new opportunities that can discourage crime.

Despite gaps in knowledge, progress has been made in designing successful neighborhood crime prevention initiatives. The recent developments in neighborhood-based programming have ignited hope—a hope that crime-ridden neighborhoods can become safe and healthy places for residents to raise children and achieve a reasonable quality of life. Comprehensive community programs have shown some success and are being replicated in many locations. However, there is much more we need to understand and much more we need to do. To take the lead from Penelope Tricket and her colleagues, today’s residents deserve the best we can offer with our current knowledge; tomorrow’s deserve better.

from Community Change: Theories, Practice, and Evidence (pdf). Amie M. Schuck and Dennis P. Rosenbaum. Edited by Karen Fulbright-Anderson and Patricia Auspos. The Aspen Institute.