Crime Prevention and Control Strategies

Last Updated on September 13, 2026 by Karl Thompson

There are three main types of crime prevention strategy, and the A-level specification expects you to know all three, what they assume about the causes of crime, and how well they work.

1. Situational crime prevention — very local, aimed at specific places and objects. Fitting shutters to a shop so it is harder to break into at night.
2. Environmental crime prevention — regional, aimed at a wider problem area. Increasing zero tolerance policing in a city with a rising street crime rate.
3. Social and community crime prevention — aimed at offenders and potential offenders, and at the conditions that produce them.

Situational and environmental prevention are associated with Right Realism. Social and community prevention is associated with Left Realism.

Crime prevention is part of the crime and deviance topic within A-level sociology, examined on Paper 3 (7192/3), and it comes up both as a topic in its own right and as the applied half of questions on realism.

Before going further, a warning about the three-way distinction itself — see the section at the end. It is more artificial than it looks, and knowing that is worth marks.

Why the Three Strategies Differ: What Each One Assumes

The three strategies are not simply three tools that do the same job at different scales. Each rests on a different theory of what causes crime, which is why they are so hard to combine and why people argue about them.

	Assumes crime is caused by…	So the solution is…	Timescale
Situational	Opportunity and rational calculation	Remove the opportunity, raise the risk	Immediate
Environmental	Visible disorder and weak social control	Restore order, enforce against minor offences	Short to medium
Social/community	Relative deprivation and marginalisation	Change the conditions and support those at risk	Long term

A useful way to see this is to ask what each strategy would say about a burglary. Situational prevention asks why the window was easy to force. Environmental prevention asks why the street looked neglected enough to attract a burglar. Social prevention asks why a seventeen-year-old two streets away has nothing better to do. All three questions are reasonable; they just lead somewhere completely different.

Situational Crime Prevention

Situational crime prevention involves making adaptations to specific localities to make it harder to commit crime, and it is by far the most widely used approach in Britain.

It rests on rational choice theory and on Cohen and Felson’s routine activities theory (1979), which holds that crime requires a motivated offender, a suitable target and the absence of a capable guardian. Reduce the opportunities and increase the risk of being caught, and — on this account — the crime rate falls. Ronald Clarke developed the approach into a practical framework, and it has dominated British crime prevention policy since the mid-1980s.

The two main techniques

Target hardening makes objects and buildings physically harder to attack. Shutters, window locks, anti-climb paint, property marking, alley gates across the passages behind terraced houses, car immobilisers, IMEI blocking on stolen phones. It also includes designing out crime — reshaping a space so that offending becomes awkward. Sloping seats at bus stops so nobody can sleep on them are a designing-out measure, and a contested one.

Increasing surveillance raises the perceived risk of being caught. CCTV is the main British method, supplemented by security staff, neighbourhood watch and now domestic doorbell cameras. Following Foucault, what matters is not whether anyone is actually watching but whether people believe they might be.

A worked example: suicide and coal gas

The clearest evidence that removing a means can reduce an outcome, rather than simply displacing it, comes from outside crime altogether. In the early 1960s around half of all suicides in Britain involved coal gas, which is highly toxic. As coal gas was replaced by less toxic natural gas, suicides by gassing fell almost to nothing — and the overall suicide rate fell with it, rather than people switching to other methods.

This matters because displacement is the main objection to situational prevention, and here is a case where it did not happen.

Evaluating situational crime prevention

It works, and it is measurable. Welsh and Farrington’s systematic review of CCTV schemes found an overall reduction in crime in the areas studied, with a much larger effect in car parks than in town centres or public housing. Newburn (2013) points to the clear link between improved vehicle security and the fall in car crime — a fall difficult to explain unless much car theft was opportunistic and simply stopped when the opportunity closed.

It is cheap, quick and politically attractive. This is a large part of why governments favour it, and it is a point worth making in an essay: the popularity of a crime prevention strategy is not the same as its effectiveness.

Anyone can implement it — councils, businesses, schools, householders. It does not require a national programme or a change in the law.

It avoids labelling, because it changes places rather than people.

HOWEVER, it may displace crime rather than reduce it. If offenders are rational, hardening one target should push them towards a softer one. Displacement can be spatial, temporal, or from one type of offence to another. The evidence suggests displacement is usually partial rather than complete, but partial is not zero — and the CCTV findings above are consistent with displacement as well as with prevention.

It ignores the causes of crime. Garland (2001) argues that situational prevention represents the state giving up on the idea that crime can be reduced by addressing why it happens, and instead managing it as a routine risk to be contained. Inequality and deprivation disappear from the analysis entirely.

It creates divided ‘fortress cities’. Bauman’s objection is that security becomes a commodity: the wealthy retreat behind gates, cameras and private security while everyone else is left in unprotected streets. The overall effect is to redistribute crime towards those least able to protect themselves.

It ignores the thrill of risk. Lyng (1990) argued that for some offenders risk is the reward — in which case raising the risk makes the crime more attractive, not less.

It only works against opportunistic street crime. It is useless against domestic violence, which happens inside the home behind the locks. It is useless against white collar, corporate and state crime, where the offenders are the people with most power to resist surveillance of their own activities.

Situational crime prevention
Supporting	Criticising
✓ CCTV reduces crime, substantially in car parks (Welsh and Farrington)	✗ May displace crime spatially, temporally or by offence type
✓ Car crime fell as vehicle security improved (Newburn 2013)	✗ Ignores inequality and deprivation as causes (Garland 2001)
✓ Cheap, fast, implementable by anyone	✗ Creates divided ‘fortress cities’ (Bauman)
✓ Avoids labelling — targets places, not people	✗ Ignores the thrill of risk as a motive (Lyng 1990)
✓ The coal gas case shows displacement is not inevitable	✗ No use against domestic, corporate or state crime

Environmental Crime Prevention

Environmental crime prevention uses formal and informal social control measures to clamp down on anti-social behaviour and stop an area deteriorating. It relies much more heavily on the police than situational prevention does.

It follows directly from Wilson and Kelling’s broken windows theory (1982): signs of physical disorder give off the message that informal social control has broken down, which attracts offenders and raises the crime rate.

Examples include zero tolerance policing, ASBOs and the orders that replaced them, curfews, street drinking bans, dispersal orders, and the three strikes rule in parts of the United States.

Evaluating environmental crime prevention

It gives police and magistrates the power to act quickly to nip developing problems in the bud, rather than waiting for behaviour to become serious enough to prosecute.

It responds to what the public actually complains about. Anti-social behaviour is what most people report as the problem in their area, and a strategy aimed at it is at least answering the question being asked.

The New York example suggests it works — crime fell sharply in the city after zero tolerance was adopted from 1994.

HOWEVER, the New York evidence does not hold up well. Levitt and Dubner, in Freakonomics (2005), argued that the correlation is coincidental and that other factors explain the fall. Crime also fell in American and British cities which never adopted zero tolerance, which is difficult to reconcile with the claim that zero tolerance caused the decline.

It is expensive. Environmental prevention takes a great many officers to patrol an area and enforce against minor offences, and it costs considerably more than fitting locks.

Reiner has argued that police would be better deployed against serious crime hot spots than clamping down on low-level nuisance.

From an Interactionist perspective, giving the police more power to act against minor offences produces more labelling, more criminal records and more criminal careers — creating in the long run the problem it set out to solve.

It falls unequally. Zero tolerance in New York produced a large increase in arrests for cannabis possession, with consequences for employment and housing far out of proportion to the offence, and the overwhelming majority of those dealt with were Black or Hispanic.

Environmental crime prevention
Supporting	Criticising
✓ Allows swift action to stop areas deteriorating	✗ The New York correlation may be coincidental (Levitt and Dubner 2005)
✓ Responds to anti-social behaviour, which is what the public reports	✗ Crime fell in cities that never used zero tolerance
✓ New York crime fell sharply after 1994	✗ Expensive — requires a lot of police
✓ Broken windows has some experimental support	✗ Police better used on serious crime hot spots (Reiner)
	✗ Interactionism: more labelling, more criminal careers
	✗ Falls disproportionately on ethnic minorities

For the full account of zero tolerance policing, ASBOs, and the Public Space Protection Orders and Criminal Behaviour Orders that replaced them, see Environmental Crime Prevention Strategies.

Social and Community Crime Prevention

Social and community prevention focuses on individual offenders and on the social context that encourages offending. Where the first two strategies try to stop the crime at the moment it would happen, this one tries to stop the person becoming an offender at all.

There are two broad approaches: intervention, identifying groups at risk of offending and acting to limit it, and community approaches, involving local people in reducing crime in their own area.

Intervention and risk factors

Farrington’s (1995) longitudinal work with the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development compared offenders and non-offenders and identified risk factors correlated with later offending: low family income, poor housing, large family size, poor parental supervision, parental conflict, harsh or erratic discipline, low school attainment and impulsivity.

Intervention programmes built on this logic include pre-school enrichment, parenting classes and targeted educational support.

The Perry Pre-School Project is the best-known example. 123 children aged three and four, from low-income African American families in Ypsilanti, Michigan, were randomly assigned in the early 1960s either to a two-year programme of daily pre-school with weekly home visits or to a control group, and have been followed up at ages 19, 27, 40 and 55. The programme group did significantly better on education, employment and arrests. Schweinhart and colleagues (2005) calculated a return of roughly seventeen dollars for every dollar spent.

That figure is contested, and the argument about it is more useful than the figure. Heckman and colleagues (2010) recalculated the return at seven to twelve dollars per dollar. The whole of the difference comes from how you put a price on crimes that did not happen. A headline benefit which depends on valuing hypothetical burglaries should be handled carefully — and this is a good example of a methodological point that earns AO3 marks.

What the evidence says works

The College of Policing maintains a database of interventions and their measured impact on offending, rating the strength of the evidence as well as the size of the effect. Interventions assessed as effective at reducing crime include after-school programmes, alternative education programmes, boot camps, compulsory community treatment for mental health, and wilderness challenge programmes.

Music-making programmes were assessed as ineffective, which will disappoint a certain kind of youth worker. More interestingly, the same database rates some zero tolerance measures as actually increasing crime — which is worth citing in an essay, because it means the argument between left and right realism is not purely ideological. There is evidence, and some of it is inconvenient for the right.

The Troubled Families Programme

The Troubled Families Programme is frequently cited as an example of intervention working. It should not be.

Launched in England in April 2012 with £448 million, the programme aimed to ‘turn around’ the lives of 120,000 families with multiple and complex needs. The national evaluation, by Bewley, George, Rienzo and Portes for the Department for Communities and Local Government (2016), found no significant or systematic impact attributable to the programme on employment, benefit receipt, school attendance, child welfare or offending. Families in the programme changed in much the same ways as comparable families who were not in it — so the changes could not be attributed to the programme.

The evaluators noted real limitations in the administrative data, and a second phase ran to 2020 with further funding and different findings reported. But the Phase 1 evaluation is the best evidence available on the original programme and it is not favourable.

This is genuinely useful for an essay. A student who writes that Troubled Families shows social crime prevention works is repeating a textbook claim that the government’s own evaluation contradicts. A student who knows the evaluation can use the same example to make a much better point: that intervention is theoretically well-founded and extremely difficult to deliver at scale.

Neighbourhood Watch

Neighbourhood Watch schemes are part of both left and right realist prevention strategies, which makes them a good illustration of how artificial the three-way distinction can be. They are community groups that work together to put crime prevention measures in place locally — which is a community approach in its organisation and a situational one in most of what it actually does.

[FIGURE FLAGGED: the original post claimed Neighbourhood Watch prevents 15 crimes in every 100. This is unsourced and the gloss placed on it — that without the scheme crime would be 15% higher — does not follow from it. It has been left out pending verification against the Campbell systematic review by Bennett, Holloway and Farrington. Do not republish the figure until it is checked.]

Evaluating social and community crime prevention

It is the only one of the three that addresses root causes — marginalisation and deprivation — rather than managing symptoms.

The returns can be very large, as the Perry follow-ups suggest, because turning a potential offender into an employed taxpayer pays back over an entire lifetime.

HOWEVER, these are the most expensive measures of the three and the slowest to produce results. A council can fit alley gates this year and report a reduction next year. It cannot demonstrate the effects of a pre-school programme for thirty years, and few politicians plan that far ahead.

Delivery at scale is the problem. Perry worked with 123 children and highly trained staff. Troubled Families attempted 120,000 families and could not demonstrate an effect. The gap between the two is the central practical difficulty with the whole approach.

Marxists argue it does not go far enough. These policies may tackle deprivation, but they leave intact the structural inequalities of capitalism which are the root cause.

It still targets the working class. Like the other two strategies, social crime prevention is aimed at inner-city and working class communities and does nothing about elite crime.

Foucault and Garland read it as surveillance rather than support — extending state monitoring into families and communities under a therapeutic description, while leaving the conditions that produced the problem unchanged.

Social and community crime prevention
Supporting	Criticising
✓ The only strategy tackling root causes — deprivation and marginalisation	✗ The most expensive of the three
✓ Very high long-term returns (Perry, Schweinhart et al. 2005)	✗ Slow — results take decades, which is politically unattractive
✓ College of Policing evidence identifies several effective interventions	✗ Troubled Families: no significant impact found (DCLG 2016)
✓ Risk factors are well established (Farrington 1995)	✗ Perry’s cost-benefit figure is contested (Heckman et al. 2010)
✓ Prevents offending rather than managing it	✗ Marxism: leaves structural inequality untouched
	✗ Still targets working class communities; ignores elite crime
	✗ Foucault and Garland: surveillance dressed as support

Perspectives on Crime Control: The Broader Picture

The three strategies above are both realist. But the specification expects you to be able to apply a wider range of perspectives to crime control, and several of them reject the whole framework rather than preferring one strategy within it.

Consensus theory and the community

The state performs formal social control through the police, courts and prisons. Yet most people get through an entire life without direct contact with any of them. According to consensus theory, this is because informal social control at the level of the family and the community keeps most people in line most of the time, and formal control is only needed for the minority where informal control has failed.

Hirschi’s bonds of attachment theory makes the mechanism explicit: the more attached an individual is to society, the less likely they are to offend. The more connections someone has to a community, the more they have to lose by breaking its rules.

Both consensus theory and Right Realism therefore emphasise informal control — which is why Right Realists worry so much about neighbourhoods where it appears to have broken down.

The Marxist view: crime control as class control

Marxists reject the question. For Marxists the police engage in selective law enforcement, concentrating on working class and underclass areas while the crimes of the powerful go largely uninvestigated.

The evidence Marxists point to is about where enforcement resources go. Police numbers are concentrated in deprived areas, while the agencies responsible for investigating corporate wrongdoing — financial regulators and the Health and Safety Executive — have seen their funding cut. Tombs and Whyte’s work on the regulation of corporate crime develops this argument in detail.

On this account, crime prevention is not really about preventing crime. It is about managing the population whose exclusion capitalism requires, and the choice between situational, environmental and social strategies is a choice between different methods of doing the same thing.

Marxists also offer a structural account of the underclass that Murray’s does not. Whole communities are detached from the labour market because late capitalism, with advancing technology, needs a smaller workforce than it once did. The description matches Murray’s; the explanation is the reverse. For Murray the underclass is a moral failing; for Marxists it is a structural consequence, and its members are victims of it.

The Interactionist view: control creates crime

Labelling theorists argue that crime control does not simply respond to crime, it helps produce it.

Becker suggests the police interpret working class and middle class behaviour differently: a fight in a low-income neighbourhood is read as evidence of delinquency, the same fight in a wealthy area as high spirits. The acts are identical; the meanings assigned to them differ, and those with the power to make a label stick create deviants.

Cicourel developed a class-based account of the same process in The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice (1968), arguing that middle class parents are better placed to negotiate with the authorities and more able to get their children out of a deviant label by persuading the police the behaviour was a one-off.

The implication for crime control is uncomfortable for both realisms. Over-policing alienates marginalised groups and makes offending more likely through a self-fulfilling prophecy — so the tougher the control, the more crime it eventually generates.

The postmodern view: community has dissolved

Postmodernists argue that the capacity of local communities to control crime informally is limited, because communities today have high population turnover and tend to be unstable and short-lived.

More fundamentally, they argue that ‘local community’ is irrelevant to many people’s lives, because society is organised into networks rather than communities. Instead of being embedded in a tight-knit group in one place, people have weaker connections to a larger number of people spread across large distances.

This matters for crime control because those networks generate crimes no local community can do anything about — fraud, phishing, identity theft, cyber-bullying and harassment, all of which happen in virtual space. A neighbourhood watch scheme, however well organised, is powerless against someone defrauding its members from another continent. On the postmodern account, the entire community prevention model is aimed at a form of social organisation that is disappearing, and at a category of crime that is shrinking relative to the crime that is growing.

This is one of the strongest criticisms available of social and community crime prevention, and it is not a criticism from the right. It says the left realist solution was designed for a society that no longer exists.

For how these perspectives differ specifically on policing, see The Role of the Police in Controlling and Reducing Crime.

A Warning About the Three-Way Distinction

The distinction between the three strategies may be somewhat artificial. Possibly the only place you will find it stated so neatly is the Collins (2015) A-level Sociology AQA Year 2 textbook — and it may well have been one of the textbook authors who invented the distinction rather than a real criminologist.

In reality the three overlap constantly. Neighbourhood Watch could legitimately be placed in all three. A local council improving security on a block of flats is doing something both situational and environmental at once. Community policing is environmental in its methods and social in its aims.

So if a crime prevention policy feels like it overlaps, it probably does. It is the three-way distinction that is artificial, invented — in all likelihood — for the purposes of A-level sociology.

You should still use the three categories in the exam, because that is what the mark scheme expects. But a sentence pointing out that the boundaries are blurred, with an example, is exactly the kind of evaluative remark that lifts an answer.

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).

For more on how to tackle the exam paper this topic sits in, see my page on exams, essays and short answer questions.

The two realist theories behind these strategies are covered in full in Right Realist Criminology and Left Realist Criminology, both of which include comparison tables.

For environmental prevention in more depth — zero tolerance policing, ASBOs, and the orders that replaced them — see Environmental Crime Prevention Strategies.

For the theory underlying environmental prevention and the evidence for and against it, see Broken Windows Theory: An Evaluation.

Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com

Sources

Bewley, H., George, A., Rienzo, C. and Portes, J. (2016) National Evaluation of the Troubled Families Programme: National Impact Study Report. Department for Communities and Local Government.

Cohen, L.E. and Felson, M. (1979) ‘Social Change and Crime Rate Trends: A Routine Activity Approach’. American Sociological Review 44(4).

Farrington, D.P. (1995) ‘The Development of Offending and Antisocial Behaviour from Childhood: Key Findings from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development’. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 36(6).

Heckman, J.J. et al. (2010) ‘The Rate of Return to the HighScope Perry Preschool Program’. Journal of Public Economics 94.

Schweinhart, L.J. et al. (2005) Lifetime Effects: The High/Scope Perry Preschool Study Through Age 40. High/Scope Press.

Wilson, J.Q. and Kelling, G.L. (1982) ‘Broken Windows’. The Atlantic, March 1982.