Assess The Relationship Between Crime Prevention And Environmental Criminology

People are often interested in the crime itself more than the environment of it when a crime occurs, for they are shocked or they psychologically tend to give much interest to what they feel is sensational. However, criminologists were interested in the environment of crimes; therefore, they analyzed it, which helped crime prevention develop a lot. The theories and studies that are related closely to the environment of crime are routine activity theory, environmental criminology and these contributed largely to situational crime prevention and crime prevention through environmental design. The relationship between them, the reason for this part of criminology being called environmental criminology, and the usefulness of this part of criminology …show more content…
Both of them accounts for what crime consists of, yet have different explanation about crimes’ environment. As written previously, crimes are comprised of “a motivated offender”, “a suitable target”, and “absence of a capable guardian” as it explains in routine activity theory (Felson, 1987). These are all associated with the people who should be and should not be in a criminal situation in order for it to occur. However, Patricia and Paul Brantingham’s environmental criminology focuses more on the characteristics of the criminal environment. Whereas routine activity theory is about the elements of criminal environment, Patricia and Paul Brantingham’s environmental criminology is about the environments themselves. According to their article, “Criminality of Place: Crime generators and attractors”, the environments are classified and defined as “crime generators”, “crime attractors”, “crime neutral areas”, “fear generators”, “nodes”, “paths”, and “edges” (Brantingham & Brantingham, 1995). Even though those places still involve absence and presence of certain individuals just like routine activity theory, the focus is on the environment itself rather than the absence and presence of certain kind of people. Therefore, routine activity theory and Patricia and Paul Brantingham’s environmental criminology are connected to each other, for both of them account for the criminal environment. Also, both of them are associated to situational crime prevention (SCP) as well as crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED). SCP and CPTED help crime rates decrease by making it much more difficult for people to offend a crime, as they make environments not suited for crimes (Cornish & Clarke, 2003). This clearly means that SCP and CPTED are