Last Updated on September 14, 2026 by Karl Thompson
Environmental crime prevention means using formal and informal social control to clamp down on anti-social behaviour and stop a neighbourhood deteriorating. Where situational crime prevention protects a specific target, environmental prevention treats a whole area.
- It aims at the condition of a neighbourhood, not at individual doors and windows
- It relies heavily on formal control by the police, much more than situational prevention does
- It follows directly from Wilson and Kelling’s broken windows theory (1982)
- Its best-known forms are zero tolerance policing and anti-social behaviour orders
- It is fast, visible and politically popular — and the evidence that it works is weaker than its popularity suggests
Environmental crime prevention is one of the three crime prevention strategies on the AQA A-level sociology specification, examined within crime and deviance on Paper 3 (7192/3), and it is associated with Right Realism.
Zero Tolerance Policing
What Environmental Crime Prevention Is
The underlying idea is that crime is encouraged by the appearance of a place.
Wilson and Kelling argued in 1982 that visible signs of disorder — litter, graffiti, broken windows left unrepaired, public drinking, aggressive begging — send out a signal that nobody is in control of a neighbourhood. Offenders read that signal and conclude they are unlikely to be challenged. Residents read it too, and withdraw from the streets, which removes the informal control that was keeping things in check. The area then declines further, and a spiral sets in.
The policy conclusion is direct. If disorder causes crime, then dealing firmly with disorder prevents crime. Deal with the small things and the big things never happen.
Note the date. Broken windows is Wilson and Kelling, 1982, in The Atlantic. Kelling and Coles’ book Fixing Broken Windows is 1996, and the two are routinely confused — including, until recently, on this site.
Environmental prevention therefore differs from situational prevention in three ways worth knowing for an exam:
| Situational | Environmental | |
|---|---|---|
| Scale | A building, a car park, an object | A street, an estate, a city |
| Method | Physical design and target hardening | Enforcement and social control |
| Who does it | Anyone — councils, businesses, householders | Mainly the police and local authorities |
| Cost | Low | High — it takes officers |
Examples of Environmental Crime Prevention
Zero tolerance policing — the police enforce strictly against minor offences and anti-social behaviour: littering, begging, graffiti, fare evasion, public drinking, drug possession. Enforcement might mean on-the-spot fines, arrest, or in some American jurisdictions mandatory sentences under three strikes rules. This is the flagship example and it has its own post: Zero Tolerance Policing: Definition, Examples and Evaluation.
Anti-social behaviour orders, and the Criminal Behaviour Orders, Civil Injunctions, Community Protection Notices and Public Space Protection Orders that replaced them in 2014. These are civil orders restricting what an individual may do, backed by criminal penalties for breach. Covered in full in ASBOs and the Orders That Replaced Them.
Dispersal orders, which allow police to break up groups in a designated area and require people to leave it.
Curfews, restricting when particular people, or people of a particular age, may be in public places.
Street drinking bans, now generally implemented as Public Space Protection Orders.
Closure powers, allowing premises associated with persistent disorder to be shut.
Environmental improvement itself — rapid removal of graffiti, repair of vandalism, improved street lighting, clearing derelict land. This is the least discussed and most literal application of broken windows: if broken windows cause crime, fix the windows. It is worth noticing that this version of the theory requires no policing at all, and that governments have generally preferred the version that does.
Does Environmental Crime Prevention Work?
The case for
It allows swift action. Environmental measures give police, councils and magistrates the power to act against behaviour that is not serious enough to prosecute as a crime, and to act before it escalates. Waiting until a nuisance becomes an offence means waiting until someone has been harmed.
It responds to what the public actually complains about. Anti-social behaviour, not burglary or robbery, is what most people report as the problem in their area. A strategy aimed at it is at least answering the question being asked — and both Right and Left Realists agree that taking public concern seriously is a virtue, even if they disagree about the response.
New York is the case everyone cites. Crime in the city fell sharply from the mid-1990s, after zero tolerance was adopted under Police Commissioner William Bratton from 1994. The scale of the fall was dramatic and it made the approach internationally influential.
There is some experimental support for the underlying theory. Field experiments have found that people behave less honestly in visibly disordered environments than in tidy ones — see the evaluation of broken windows theory for the detail.
The case against
The New York evidence does not hold up well. Crime fell in American and British cities that never adopted zero tolerance, over the same period. Levitt and Dubner argued in Freakonomics (2005) that the correlation is coincidental and other factors explain the decline. If crime falls everywhere, crediting the policy in the one place that adopted it is weak reasoning.
It is expensive. Environmental prevention requires a great many officers to patrol an area and enforce against minor offences. Compared with fitting locks, it is a substantial and continuing cost.
Reiner has argued that police are better deployed against serious crime hot spots than clamping down on low-level nuisance — a point about opportunity cost rather than about whether the approach works at all.
From an Interactionist perspective it creates the problem it claims to solve. Giving police more power to act against minor offences produces more labelling, more criminal records and more criminal careers. A teenager fined for a public order offence at sixteen may find that record shaping their options for years, and if labelling theory is right that makes further offending more likely, not less.
It falls unequally. Environmental prevention gives officers wide discretion over what counts as anti-social, and discretion is where bias operates. In New York the overwhelming majority of people dealt with under zero tolerance were Black or Hispanic. A policy neutral in its wording can be very far from neutral in its effects.
It criminalises being poor in public. Begging, street drinking, rough sleeping and loitering are the behaviours environmental prevention targets most consistently, and they are behaviours associated with poverty and homelessness. Critics argue that the effect is to remove visible poverty from city centres rather than to reduce crime.
Marxists would add that the entire approach directs enforcement resources at the working class and the underclass while corporate wrongdoing is regulated by underfunded agencies. What looks like crime prevention is class control.
Garland (2001) reads it as part of the same retreat as situational prevention: the state manages the appearance of order rather than addressing why some neighbourhoods deteriorate in the first place.
| Environmental crime prevention — evaluation | |
|---|---|
| Supporting | Criticising |
| ✓ Allows swift action before nuisance escalates | ✗ Crime fell in cities that never adopted it (Levitt and Dubner 2005) |
| ✓ Responds to anti-social behaviour, the public’s main concern | ✗ Expensive — requires sustained police numbers |
| ✓ New York crime fell sharply after 1994 | ✗ Police better used on serious crime hot spots (Reiner) |
| ✓ Some experimental support for broken windows | ✗ Interactionism: more labelling, more criminal careers |
| ✓ Visible and reassuring to residents | ✗ Falls disproportionately on ethnic minorities |
| ✗ Criminalises poverty and homelessness in public space | |
| ✗ Marxism: enforcement aimed at the poor, not the powerful | |
| ✗ Manages appearances rather than causes (Garland 2001) |
Signposting and Related Posts
This post is written for students studying the crime and deviance topic as part of the AQA’s A-level sociology course, examined on Paper 3 (7192/3).
Environmental crime prevention is one of three strategies. For all three together, including situational and social/community prevention, and for the wider range of perspectives on crime control, see Crime Prevention and Control Strategies.
For the theory this rests on, and the evidence for and against it, see Broken Windows Theory: An Evaluation.
For the two main examples in depth: Zero Tolerance Policing and ASBOs and the Orders That Replaced Them.
The perspective behind this approach is covered in Right Realist Criminology; the perspective that rejects it is Left Realist Criminology.
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Sources
Wilson, J.Q. and Kelling, G.L. (1982) ‘Broken Windows’. The Atlantic, March 1982.
Levitt, S. and Dubner, S. (2005) Freakonomics. William Morrow.
Garland, D. (2001) The Culture of Control. Oxford University Press.
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