新編大學(xué)英語(yǔ)第四冊(cè)u(píng)nit11 Text D: Crime Prevention

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UNIT 11 AFTER-CLASS READING 3; New College English (IV)

Crime Prevention

1 Criminologists have not successfully explained why some people become criminals while others do not, nor have they explained why some people benefit from rehabilitation programs while in detention or in prison and while some others do not. And they clearly do not explain why crime prevention has had such mixed success in different countries and different cultures.

2 Instead of imprisonment, some criminologists have suggested a radically different approach to crime prevention, asserting that " situational crime prevention is more effective than traditional efforts to prevent crime. These professionals have begun to think of crime as the result of human situations and opportunities. This approach focuses on behaviors of criminals in specific situations, and tries to base crime prevention on changing the situations and opportunities which favor crime, thereby taking away the conditions in which crimes occur.

3 British criminologist Ron Clarke is a leading advocate of this viewpoint. His methods of finding practical ways to prevent crime surprise many conventional criminologists. He says finding practical solutions imposes good discipline on everybody. If a crime prevention system does not work, it is probably not very good in the first place. If it does work, criminology will improve as a science, too.

4 Some examples of situational crime prevention will illustrate the practical aspect of this approach. In Britain, for example, vandalism against traditional red double-deck buses has been a problem. Clarke's research indicated that most of the vandalism was on the upper deck, usually in the back row where supervision was least likely to occur. They also found that the bus conductor had a major role in preventing vandalism, and at the times he went up the stairs to the upper deck to collect fares, vandalism did not often occur. It was only when some companies had removed the conductors and installed coin boxes to save money that vandalism occurred as a major problem. When conductors were hired again, vandalism dropped noticeably.

5 American motorcyclists complained about having to wear helmets, and in some states good helmet-laws were never enforced. Some riders complained that laws forcing them to wear a helmet were an invasion of their rights. The fact is, wherever helmet safety laws have been enacted and enforced, thefts of motorcycles were greatly reduced. Most motorcycle thefts were committed by "joyriders" who took the motorcycle on the spur of the moment. Joyriders do not usually have a big helmet with them when they see an attractive motorcycle, so non-helmeted riders could be positively identified as likely thieves of the motorcycles they were riding.

6 For many years, subway trains and subway stations of New York City were covered inside and out with graffiti. It made New York subways the ugliest anywhere. Because of graffiti and related problems the number of passengers was dropping, employee morale was low, and many efforts had failed to correct the problems related to the defacing of subway property. The president of the New York City Transit Authority started the "Clean Car Program". Included was the demand that all graffiti be cleaned off immediately so that the offending graffiti painters would get no satisfaction from their work. In Sweden the government attacked the graffiti problem in another way. It prepared a pamphlet for tourists, "The World's Longest Art Gallery The Stockholm Metro". They commissioned more than 70 artists to make mosaics, paintings, engravings, and wall reliefs in their subway system. This resulted in strange walls which were difficult to get paint onto or to find the right colors to cover the "art".

7 Finally, if these examples do not strike you as practical enough, or if you doubt that similar methods could work for violent crime prevention, consider the following facts. Several studies show that violent crimes are not usually an expression of stress and strains in life. All violence in some sense is rational and oriented toward a goal. The offender has some reason to attack someone else, even it is only a split-second thought. The offender may commit violence to make someone else do what the offender wants (as with violent rape, etc). He may want to restore justice as he sees it (as with a poor person robbing a wealthy person, a store or a bank, which he sees as people or institutions which oppress him or his segment of society), or, he may merely want to assert and protect his own identity (as with a minority person who is trying to get even for something he sees as destructive of his ethnic group). A robbery may start out with the thief demanding your money and using or threatening force to get it. However, if you challenge the robber in front of his co-offenders, he may harm you to show his bravery and protect his own identity. That is why it is not a good idea to act in a belligerent way when someone is pointing a gun at you. It is well established that fights among young drunk males usually occur as attempts to assert and protect identity. Domestic violence also fits well into these categories.

8 It is not hard to guess that alcohol plays a major role in violence. It gives people "big mouths" which often make aggressive statements that provoke counterattacks and restoration of justice. It also gives people "big ears" by causing people to hear things that were not said. Managing alcohol is part of preventing violence. This lesson has been well learned in soccer and other athletic arenas where beer and wine are sold to the fans. Most managers of these sports arenas prevent drunk people from entering, do not allow alcohol bottles or cans to be brought into the arena seating areas, and control the amount of beer that will be sold to a person or group which appears to be losing control because of alcohol consumption. These managers will sell only soft drinks to the largest part of the crowd, and limit beer and hard liquor to those persons in corporate sponsored boxes and areas where obnoxious behavior is well controlled by the sponsors.

9 To prevent fights and conflicts between fans when leaving an athletic stadium, the strategy is to keep people moving, whether in cars or on foot, so they have little time to linger or to get angry with the opposing fans. A well-managed stadium prevents situations which could lead to violent behavior, and in this sense is an excellent application of situational crime prevention.