Traditionally in the field of criminology, the topic of “Urban Areas and Crime” has been main interests among criminologists, espcially the Chicago School such as Show and Mackey. They strongly belived that most of cities have their own elements which encouraged crime and delinquency. On the other hand, according to this idea, Bottoms and his collegues also focused on geographical elements related with crime occurring.
In the 1970s, in the US and the UK, a new criminology appeared as “Environmental Criminology” because crime had dramatically increased and citizens demanded of more crime reduction strategies for central and local governments. Most environmental criminologists think that crime does not occur at ramdom but regularly, so they have studied the criminal events happening in a given time and palce. Their ideas for crime prevention are quite simple because people can use the measures which offenders dislike. They belong to “common sense.” Thanks to these strategies for crime prevention, in my view, the US and UK have really enjoyed more stable crime situation since mid-1990s.
Nevertheless, we cannot reduce crime only by the tactics offered by the environmental criminology or situational crime prevention because crime is quite changeable. Then, we need another one, namely “social crime prevention, ” which promotes child socialization in their own communities through education by parents, schools and community people. In the near future, we have to combine situational with social crime prevention in Japan as well.
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