NCJ Number
105407
Date Published
1987
Length
15 pages
Annotation
This paper examines three levels of intervention to prevent 'street' crime (robbery, forcible rape, assault, and burglary): primary intervention, which involves police crime prevention; secondary intervention, which consists of selective incapacitation in prison; and tertiary intervention, which focuses on intensive supervision of high-risk parolees and probationers.
Abstract
The police presence in the community reduces the chance of an offender's completing a crime or, having completed it, avoiding arrest. Although low crime rates and high clearance rates in Japan are due to a number of factors, close contact between citizens and police is a significant influence. The Japanese model emphasizes decentralized policing that enhances police familiarity with beat neighborhoods and citizens in those neighborhoods. Such a model applied in American cities should increase the prevention of 'street' crime. Efforts to prevent such crime by incapacitating habitually violent offenders for extended prison terms are based in unreliable prediction methods and result in prison overcrowding. Modest reductions in 'street' crime can be achieved by restrained extended prison terms that do not aggravate the consequences of false-positive predictions of criminality or increase prison overcrowding. Intensive supervision of probationers and parolees, as practiced in Georgia and Alabama, has reduced 'street' crime committed by those under supervision. 31 notes and 12-item bibliography.