Essay on Prevention of Crime and Protection against Criminals !
Prevention of Crime and protection against criminals may broadly be defined as anything which reduces the incidence of crime. The focus is on making the environment safe from crime and reducing the potential for crime in high-risk situations. According to Brantingham (1976), the crime prevention strategy involves three areas of action which he calls as primary, secondary and tertiary preventive measures for ensuring crime-free environment reducing high-risk potential and halting the possibility of future crimes respectively.
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Even the U. N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 had emphasised that crime prevention involves multi-facted programmes for protection of witnesses and victim’s assistance, compensation, reparation, reconciliation, restoration and re-integration etc.
Primary Prevention:
Primary prevention refers to location such as residence, school, neighbourhood, community or society and involves altering the environment in such a way that the root causes or at least facilitating factors of crime are eliminated. Primary prevention can be based on social disorganisation theory which stated that residential mobility and heterogeneity leads people to have little or no interest in their neighbourhood and they prefer to move out leaving the area crime prone.
Secondary Prevention:
This refers to reducing opportunities for crime and increasing the risks for committing crimes. It has lot to do with law enforcement practices. This prevention technique has been criticised on the ground that persons who lead deviant life styles, such as drug-addicts, peers etc. hardly respond to legal prohibitions.
Tertiary Prevention:
This term is derived from the field of medicine to describe procedures to be followed after a threat of crime is manifest. This includes personal injury or property insurance as well as self-protective measures by those who have been victimised previously.