Beccaria and Situational Crime Prevention

Abstract

This article compares Beccaria’s and Situational Crime Prevention’s (SCP) claims across six dimensions. Both perspectives question harsh penalties, embrace crime reduction as a goal, and view some individuals as possessing agency and rationality. The latter two points distinguish them from most other criminological theories that are not focused on crime reduction and downplay offenders’ rationality. Both approaches have also been criticized for ignoring the root causes of crime in society. Importantly though, the approaches also differ. The Classical School and SCP are usually differentiated from positivistic approaches in their assumption of offender agency. This article found, however, that SCP does not assume offender agency in all contexts. In fact, many SCP interventions could be explained in positivistic terms. The analysis indicates that it is sometimes unclear which causal mechanisms underlie each of SCP’s 25 techniques of crime prevention. Clarifying the precise causal mechanism of each technique could lead to more effective implementation. The article places these and other issues in context and outlines a series of suggestions for future research to address to strengthen the SCP approach.

Examining the state repression‐terrorism nexus: Dynamic relationships among repressive counterterrorism actions, terrorist targets, and deadly terrorist violence in Israel

“…By focusing on environmental factors of offending, rather than on individual dispositions or attributes, situational crime prevention (SCP) scholars argue that SCP's opportunity‐reducing approaches impact all citizens equally and do not necessarily restrict civil liberties and human rights in the praxis of devising the most reasonable security interventions to address crime or terrorism (Clare & Morgan, 2009; Freilich, 2015; Hasisi et al., 2019). This is important in its own right, as well as for mitigating the possibility of unintended backlash effects of terrorism violence discussed earlier.…”

A Criminological Examination Of The Use Of Cyberspace To Traffic Drugs In Durban South Africa

“…Such people are driven by the idea of "easy money" and they are not concerned with the manner in which they have to achieve this (West 2017). According to the Classical School of Thought, the individual weighs the pros and cons of committing a particular crime (Freilich 2015). The person calculates whether the potential pleasure from trafficking drugs is worth the potential punishment.…”

Does Target-hardening Result in Deadlier Terrorist Attacks against Protected Targets? An Examination of Unintended Harmful Consequences

“…This approach illustrates “soft” SCP strategies that seek to minimize environmental conditions that provoke, rationalize, or excuse proscribed behavior during particular events. While SCP security measures, such as hardening targets, are obvious tools for prevention, employing SCP interventions that manipulate the internal state of offenders (e.g., inducing guilt or shame) is an effective strategy to prevent situationally invoked offending (Freilich 2015; Freilich and Chermak 2009; Newman and Freilich 2012; Wortley 1996).…”