Crime Prevention and Restorative Justice - Term Paper Example

Restorative Justice The real truth about crime prevention is more complicated-more promising than conservatives will admit and less utopian than some liberals like. Prevention can work and be much cheaper, in every sense, than keeping on relying on incarceration as our first defense against violence and crimes. Instead of simply persisting that prevention is better than incarceration, which is much obvious, then, we need to highlight more precisely what kinds of prevention work better and why some programs are better than the others (Gilling, 2007). The most encouraging effort share vital characteristics: weather the target population is securing against crime; the reasons why people commit crimes and solutions and lastly, how are the current guidelines effective on crime prevention? Crime prevention is not a simple thing. Actually, most police forces have been actively involved in crime prevention for a quite number of years, and their efforts are firmly been supplemented by volunteer and community based initiatives. What is new is the rising tendency of shifting away from exclusive focus on police based approach to in favor of a wider conception of ways to prevent crime. Its impact is a number of new probabilities for delivering on the promise of crime prevention activities. One example of this new adjustment is the direct participation of the local municipal council as one of component of crime prevention and delivery of crime prevention services and activities (Gilling, 2007). The participation of municipal governments in an area of crime prevention has been stimulated by the popularity of municipal crime prevention council in European, especially France, and the success of community based and locally organized initiatives in North America. In both cases, the participation implies a sense that, whatever crime prevention is, the police can hardly do it alone. Furthermore, there is a growing awareness that crime prevention is an essentially a political domain: citizens are vocal about how and where scarce municipal resources are allocated in the war of crime, and politician be held accountable for failure or success of these initiatives. Crime prevention is a duty to every citizen, and given that crime occurs and fought in local communities, it is hardly surprisingly that municipal government involvement now goes well beyond the common role of only funding the police force and leaving the criminology problem for them. Unity in this two different departments has led to a very good mutual benefit to them by making their work easier and smoother and also, improving citizens living standards by offering reliable, efficient way of crime and violence prevention. It has also led to social and economic stability in the society (Gilling, 2007). While reflecting on society defense against crime, sociologist and criminologists normally differentiate between two major systems of control: formal and informal. Formal social control has the reason of explaining: deterring and punishing crime and its put forth mainly through the laws and the criminal justice system. Informal social control endeavors to induce conventionality through people’s custom supervision of one another’s behavior, admonition, censure and reinforced by rule making. It is well understood that these two principal forms of social control are inter-dependent. The law and the criminal justice systems elaborates and regulate the external limits of unacceptable conduct, most of which are kept within limits by daily exercises of informal control. However, without being backed up by the criminal justice systems and the law, these informal controls would soon drop their force. It is also largely recognized that as society evolves into more and more complex forms, informal control has to be much supplemented by formal system control. The reason is because; the informal control heavily depends on people in a community knowing one another, your neighbors, relations and work mates. People may know one another this well in agrarian or rural societies, but rarely in urban and industrial societies. As a result, these latter societies come to rely on largely promulgated laws and developed law enforcement system. Unless we understand, however, is that formal and informal controls are normally intertwined with and dependent upon a third vital control system: routine precaution taken against crime committed by individuals or organizations. Now and then we all do such common things like locking doors, securing our valuables, counseling our children and guarding our wallets to minimize risk of crime. To end all this we also buy houses in a safer neighborhood, avoid dangerous places and people and invest on burglar alarms and fire arms. Similarly, factories, shops, schools and many other agencies and organizations regularly host precautions taken to keep themselves, their employees and clients from crime. The whole sector of industries and employment sole intention is to supply or service this need for organizational and personal security: manufactures of surveillance systems, alarms, safes, and security consultants ticket inspectors, to mention but a few. Without this system routine precaution, the task of informal social control would be vastly more difficult and the criminal justice system would be overloaded by petty and more serious crimes. Routine precautions have grown in magnitude with the decline of formal and informal controls, which is predicted by some commentators. Felson has listed some of the factors in the in decline of informal control in our modern society, including large schools, working mothers, increased economic power by youth separation of home from work place and working mothers. Many of the same factors have deteriorated the power of criminal justice system offenders have become more anonymous and hard to detect. Their opportunity for the theft and vandalism has expanded as growth in possession goes on, but on contrary, the technology and sophistication in crime prevention has amazingly developed to counter crimes or prevent them. The police and organizations become consumers of televisions and books purveying crime prevention and or advice. They learn self defense and purchase mace and car alarms. They screen employees, visitors and clients, provide surveillance cameras. This demand is reflected in the incredible growth of private policing, which in terms of the number employed now surpasses the public police. The increased dependence of the routine precautions is highly assisted by technological development, which, as result gives a low cost security devices and systems designed for specific offences with specific settings (Gilling, 2007). Harbingers of things to come are brought about by the breathalyzer, caller identities, and PIN numbers and by photo radar. Seldom dreamed of thirty years ago, these devises have developed for uses against specific crimes are now being used. Wilson noted that through a third of hiss century the great burden of theorizing and researching criminology has been born by sociologists who targeted finding the root cause of crime, which they most often placed in conditions of economic and social disadvantage. He goes further to argue that the evidence of his expounding approach was mixed at best and the policy inferences of the conclusions that derived from his work were limited. In his conclusion, he argued that a bigger progress could be made if attention moved from basic effort aimed at elaborating crime and to efforts focused in a more applied fashion on ways of minimizing or containing crime, for instance, through a more culling use of imprisonment to curb and incapacitate criminals. Wilson’s timing on criminology was significant. His thinking came during the late years of a post war economic boom that had noticeably enhanced Americans lives in many ways (Gilling, 2007). Yet crime and general violence persisted in the midst of this post war, American prosperity begin to rise in 1960s. America was already uniquely violent among all western nations and the U.S homicide ratings nearly doubled in a span of two years (1965-1975). The children born at that time seemed to be more criminal and violent than any other generation that any living American can remember. This rise of crime and violence seemed to challenge the accepted sociological theories of crime that strained that economic and social disadvantage as the root cause of hostility, violence, and crime. Instead of eliminating the American’s criminal problems, the accompaniments of prosperity seemed to be debilitated. However, the result of increased crime during this period was probably the increased size of post war cohorts who were then in their teenage and young adult crime prone years. Yet this was taken by Wilson to question the relevance of sociological theories on crime and inequality, and eventually concluded that these theories were uncertain utilities in the formation of crime containing or reducing policies (Gilling, 2007). Of course, Wilson could not change American crime policy alone; nor could he have much influenced or foreseen the economic and social trends surrounding crime and its punishment today. Nevertheless, his argument was very significant in policy making circles and they were element of a period in which concerns about social unfairness were withdrawn into the background of American politics. Interests of sociological theories of crime and inequality were reinstated by renewed attention to economic and political formulations that stressed the use of imprisonment or fines to curb criminals who were assumed to be beyond any sensible hope of rehabilitation. The accord was that when it came to understanding the origins of crime and translating into rehabilitative cure, nothing seemed to work. In comparison with the failed rhetoric of rehabilitation of criminals, the fresh economic politics of crime was seductive that even today it dictates the conventional wisdom of American politics and with urges to invest in prisons and policing. Based on the assumption of efficiency and choice, the policy imperative urges that certain severe and swift punishments, including imprisonment and also death penalty, can curl the offenders who are most likely to reoffend from the population, as well as also discouraging potential offenders remaining in the society from committing future anticipated crimes. The logic of incapacitation and deterrence was applied with a sense of exactness that led to Isaac Ehrlich, an economist, guesstimate with time, and a series of data that each time appliance of a death penalty in the States of America could prospectively save lives of eight potential victims of homicide. Similarly, in 1976 the National academy of science in printed a report which claimed that if prisons use was extended, there would be a two to five time potential decrease of crimes. However, opportunity reduction or increased surveillance limits the number of criminal activity, but do hardly anything to lessen the number of potential criminals. All too regularly, the outcome of this neglect may less the reduction of overall crime rates than temporal or spatial disarticulation. Approaches of this type normally adopt some kind of social policy or social development approach to development. The assumption is that a reduction of considerable number of potential offenders requires a recital attack on the types of housing, family, employment and educational status. To clarify, there is detection that a great deal of criminal activities is committed by the youth and that as a result the effect of these problems on young people must become a main concern if we are to break the cycle of crime. There is now substantial body of assessment research available on some of the various crime prevention strategies which have been tested to date. It would be healthy if this information could be provided to the municipal governments in a reachable form (Gilling, 2007). The national crime prevention strategy represents a turning point on the battle against crime. It requires all the support from each and every citizen for it to be fully implemented and succeed. The strategy is based on the perceptive that we need to build a new society free from crime and any other law breaking violence, rather than simply normalizing something that was not normal. The magnitude of crime challenge should never be ignored at any cost. It needs commitment, clarity of vision and leadership from within all the national government institutions, the civil society, government and spiritual reliance. Soon, systems will show police involvement, such as comprehensive media campaigns dealing with police operations and extra mobile patrol units in crime hotspots have been initiated. The effectiveness of these awesome measures can be gauged through current changes in crime statistics and by gathering communities’ reports from key figures in the locality, leaders and law enforcers (Gilling, 2007). References Gilling, Daniel. Crime prevention: theory, policy, and politics. New York: Routledge, 2007. Read More