Crime prevention 10 marker - can someone mark please :)

Hi, I've just done this practice 10 marker on crime prevention and was wondering if someone could mark it for me Thanks


There are several strategies for preventing or reducing crime and these reflect different views of the nature and causes of crimes. Crime depends on there being the opportunity to commit it. Some crimes may result from the degeneration of a particular locality which suggests that crime is tolerated there by the community or police. Of course, it may be that poor living conditions are themselves the cause of crime.

Applying material from Item B, analyse the effectiveness of two crime prevention strategies. [10]

Item B suggests that crime occurs because of the opportunities there are for it to be committed. It could be argued that situational crime prevention is one strategy that has been effective in preventing crime from occurring. Situational crime prevention is a pre-emptive approach to crime prevention, meaning that the opportunities to commit crime are reduced before criminals can offend. For example, the presence of CCTV cameras is one way in which opportunities are reduced for criminals to offend because the criminal knows they are being watched on CCTV, which causes them to self-regulate their behaviour, as explained by Foucault’s Panopticon theory. Therefore, situational crime prevention is effective because it reduces the opportunities for criminals to offend, such as through CCTV footage. However, it could also be argued that situational crime prevention is not effective because it displaces crime to other areas rather than treating the cause of it. This may suggest that social and community crime prevention is a more effective crime prevention strategy as it does treat the root cause of crime. This is seen in the Perry Pre-School Project longitudinal study, where disadvantaged 3–4-year-olds were followed into adulthood, and it was found that there were far fewer arrests for violent crime, property crime and drug crimes than their peers who were not part of the project. Therefore, it could be argued that social and community crime prevention is a more effective crime prevention strategy than situational crime prevention.

Another crime prevention strategy is environmental crime prevention. Item B suggests that crimes may result from degeneration in an area, which may suggest that the police do not care if there is social disorder. Wilson and Kelling’s “Broken Windows” theory suggests that degeneration or decline of an area communicates the message to aspiring criminals that authorities do not care if they commit acts of vandalism through crimes such as graffitiing because nothing is being done to solve it. As a result, a zero-tolerance policing strategy is one way in which crime can be prevented. For example, the “Clean Car Program” in New York City introduced environmental crime prevention strategies to the New York Subway system by taking trains that were messy or had been graffitied on off the tracks to clear up and paint over, which caused a decline in crime in New York in the 1990s. Therefore, environmental crime prevention is effective because a crack-down in policing and the adoption of a zero-tolerance policing strategy communicates the message to criminals that vandalism will be punished, which causes criminals to not offend. However, it could be argued that the decline in crime in New York City in the 1990s was caused due to the increased numbers of officers in the police force and falling unemployment instead of adaptations made to the environment in order to mitigate the amount of crime committed in an area. Therefore, it could be argued that environmental crime prevention is not as effective because it does not solve the root cause of crime – it only acts as a “band-aid” to cover up the prevalence of crime in an area suffering from degeneration.

I would give this either 9 or 10 out of 10.

I have only one criticism

Item B suggests that crime occurs because of the opportunities there are for it to be committed.

Be careful with this line as this is not literally what the source is saying, rather I think this is an inference you have made. An examiner might accuse you of being deterministic and mark you down. Of course, you are correct in the analysis you give after this point. Just the lead into it is not perfect.

The specific wording they have chosen is crime depends and you have written crime occurs. This subtle difference might be picked up by an examiner.

Still a really good answer though. A very good effort