Crime Prevention And Criminology Essay

The National Crime Prevention Council, founded in 1982 to inform people of crime prevention. Crime prevention and Criminology go back to back with each other (National Crime Prevention Council, n.d.). We have to study why people commit crime in order to help prevent it from happening. This helps people who try to help prevent crime understand why it is being committed. The basic understanding of crime has been vastly improved over the past few years and is still growing even more day by day. First, we must understand the two different subjects. Crime prevention and Criminology are two separate things, but they do aid each other. First of all is Criminology, according to Wikipedia it is “the scientific study of the nature, extent, management,

The term “Criminology” was introduced in 1885. It is applied specifically to efforts made by governments to reduce crime, enforce the law, and maintain criminal justice. To simplify this definition, it is the effort that people or agencies make to help keep crime rates down (Wikipedia, 2015).

Now, when we take the information that criminologists have researched and studies that have been conducted with criminals, then combine that with people who are trying to prevent crime we can make new methods for deterring crimes. Crime around the world can be prevented or at least in some aspects reduced. The people who try to prevent crimes are police, sheriffs, and many more government agencies.

Another side is not just preventing the crime from happening physically, but also getting into the minds of people. From a psychological standpoint we can push information into people’s minds to prevent them from even thinking about committing the crime in the first place. With methods acting on people’s minds, we can make them weigh the options in their heads. They would rather than not commit a crime instead of going to jail for several years. This is somewhat the goal of the National Crime Prevention Council using commercials on TV, radio and the internet. Another program similar to this is called CPTED which also focuses on preventing

The theory was first brought to the public’s attention when Edwin Sutherland argued if crime was “historical” or “situational” (Preaux, 2015). Sutherland is often called the “father of American criminology” due to his research with criminology. To the offender situational crime prevention makes crimes require more effort, more risk and it reduces the reward the offender gets (Preaux, 2015). The way it works is by either preventing opportunities for the person to commit the crime or by changing the offender’s thoughts about committing the crime.

With these new methods of crime prevention coming into the world crime rates can slowly be reduced. Specific areas are usually addressed, usually the most problem riddled areas. According to the National Crime Prevention Council started at 52.3 incidents per 1000 people in 1981 and in 2004 they went all the way down to 21.1 incidents per 1000 people. (National Crime Prevention Council, n.d.) Those numbers reflect violent crimes such as murders, rapes, robbery, etc. This is a major change and if you calculate that change that means violent crimes reduced about 40% over the period of 23