The rational choice perspective (RCP) is currently the core theoretical approach underpinning situational crime prevention (SCP). To date, many crimes have been studied through the lens of RCP, which increased our understanding of these phenomena, how they are committed and how they could potentially be prevented through SCP. This book, designed with the hope of moving RCP forward for SCP purposes, takes a challenging but novel step in providing leading experts from different disciplines with the opportunity to express themselves on how we could best achieve this task. This book explores various perspectives, which include the development of frameworks based on the role of situations in crime or forensic sciences for improving crime prevention practices. The need to consider affective states and other offender-related factors to improve our understanding of offender decision-making models is highlighted as a means to better predict which SCP mechanisms may be most useful in discouraging particular types of offenders. Finally, it is also argued that the use of RCP should be more pragmatic and that this perspective should be preserved and adapted based on what we find in our experiments. Taken together, these theoretically distinctive and challenging contributions ultimately guide how crime prevention practices could be best approached in the future.

A collection of original papers examining the theoretical and philosophical bases of the perspective of situational crime prevention. Among issues examined are: the status of situational crime prevention as a theory; the theoretical traditions and context of SCP; the relationship of rational choice to SCP; utilitarianism and SCP; and the ethical./policy implications of SCP.

Better Crime Prevention provides a critical guide to theory, research, ethics, and politics in relation to crime prevention policy and practice. It concludes with an agenda for continuous improvement. The book also demonstrates what is involved in doing theoretically informed and realistically applied social science orientated to reducing harms. The focus throughout this book is on ethical and effective ways to reduce crime-related harms. There are chapters on how to target crime prevention efforts, crime prevention theories and frameworks, ethical issues in crime prevention, the practical conduct of crime prevention, evidence-based crime prevention, the politics of crime prevention, and the need for continuous adaptation in crime prevention. Student readers will obtain an overview of, and capacity critically to engage with, crime prevention theory and practice. Policymakers and practitioner readers will be able to make better-informed decisions about what to do and how to allocate crime prevention resources. Social scientists interested in contributing realistically to harm reduction will better understand how they can go about doing so.

Victimology and crime prevention are growing, interrelated areas cutting across several disciplines. Victimology examines victims of all sorts of criminal activity, from domestic abuse, to street violence, to victims in the workplace who lose jobs and pensions due to malfeasance by corporate executives. Crime prevention is an important companion to victimology because it offers insight and techniques to prevent situations that lead to crime and attempts to offer ideas and means for mitigating or minimizing the potential for victimization. .In many ways, the two fields have developed along parallel yet separate paths, and the literature on both has been scattered across disciplines as varied as sociology, law and criminology, public health and medicine, political science and public policy, economics, psychology and human services, and more. The Encyclopedia of Victimology and Crime Prevention provides a comprehensive reference work bringing together such dispersed knowledge as it outlines and discusses the status of victims within the criminal justice system and topics of deterring and preventing victimization in the first place and responding to victims' needs. Two volumes containing approximately 375 signed entries provide users with the most authoritative and comprehensive reference resource available on victimology and crime prevention, both in terms of breadth and depth of coverage. In addition to standard entries, leading scholars in the field have contributed Anchor Essays that, in broad strokes, provide starting points for investigating the more salient victimology and crime prevention topics. A representative sampling of general topic areas covered includes: interpersonal and domestic violence, child maltreatment, and elder abuse; street violence; hate crimes and terrorism; treatment of victims by the media, courts, police, and politicians; community response to crime victims; physical design for crime prevention; victims of nonviolent crimes; deterrence and prevention; helping and counseling crime victims; international and comparative perspectives, and more.

Much of the debate about how to prevent crime feeds off misinformation and moral panics. This lively and thought-provoking book aims to get to the core of the debates surrounding the prevention of crime. Taking an inter-disciplinary approach to this complex topic, it illustrates the key role to be played in the prevention of crime by a number of professions such as housing managers, planners, teachers, youth workers, social workers, health visitors and, equally importantly, by lay citizens. Accessibly written and introducing a wide range of theories and issues from both academic literature and field-based research, Crime Prevention provides a balanced and wide-ranging account for all concerned with crime and its prevention.

This book provides a comprehensive, authoritative and wide-ranging account of the background, theory and practice of crime prevention and community safety. It will be essential reading for anybody with interests in these fields, and will be the major work of reference on this subject for those engaged in the practice, study or teaching of crime prevention. The book provides a detailed overview of the main theories and perspectives informing crime prevention policy and practice, and includes chapters covering efforts to address a number of the main types of crime problem. It also includes chapters relating to research methodologies used in conducting and evaluating crime prevention initiatives.

This book provides an essential introduction to the complex issues and debates in the field of crime control and the new politics of safety and security across the globe. The contributions to this volume present a critique of current policy and open up the field of study to new directions.

Strategic Security Management supports data driven security that is measurable, quantifiable and practical. Written for security professionals and other professionals responsible for making security decisions as well as for security management and criminal justice students, this text provides a fresh perspective on the risk assessment process. It also provides food for thought on protecting an organization’s assets, giving decision makers the foundation needed to climb the next step up the corporate ladder. Strategic Security Management fills a definitive need for guidelines on security best practices. The book also explores the process of in-depth security analysis for decision making, and provides the reader with the framework needed to apply security concepts to specific scenarios. Advanced threat, vulnerability, and risk assessment techniques are presented as the basis for security strategies. These concepts are related back to establishing effective security programs, including program implementation, management, and evaluation. The book also covers metric-based security resource allocation of countermeasures, including security procedures, personnel, and electronic measures. Strategic Security Management contains contributions by many renowned security experts, such as Nick Vellani, Karl Langhorst, Brian Gouin, James Clark, Norman Bates, and Charles Sennewald. Provides clear direction on how to meet new business demands on the security professional Guides the security professional in using hard data to drive a security strategy, and follows through with the means to measure success of the program Covers threat assessment, vulnerability assessment, and risk assessment - and highlights the differences, advantages, and disadvantages of each

This work analyses the degree to which criminal behaviour represents a rational choice, answering how the criminal framework was developed, and how to apply this framework to the study of criminal behaviour

Opportunity theories of crime seek to explain the occurrence of crime rather than simply the existence of criminal dispositions. They emphasize the fundamental element in the criminal act of opportunity: how this arises, how it is perceived, evaluated and acted on by those with criminal dispositions. This volume brings together influential research articles on opportunity theories of crime by leading theorists such as Cohen and Felson on routine activity theory and Clarke and Cornish on the bounded rational choice perspective. The articles also include more recent theoretical developments and studies of situational crime prevention of specific twenty-first century crimes. These articles attest to the sheer volume as well to as the richness and the variety of work designed to reduce crime that has forever changed the face of criminology and criminal justice.