Crime control, surveillance, prevention and punishment, victims and the role of the criminal justice system and other agencies, including situational and environmental prevention and theories of punishment.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to explain approaches to crime control, prevention and punishment, the role of surveillance, theories of punishment, and the place of victims and the criminal justice system. The examiner rewards candidates who can weigh the strengths and limits of each approach rather than just listing them.

Situational and environmental crime prevention

• Situational crime prevention (Clarke): reduce the opportunity for crime by managing the immediate environment through target hardening (locks, shutters, CCTV) and design, based on a rational-choice view that offenders weigh costs and benefits. Felson's redesign of the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York is a classic example of designing out crime. The main criticism is displacement: crime is not prevented but moved in space, time, target, tactics or type.
• Environmental crime prevention (Wilson and Kelling, "broken windows"): any sign of disorder (a broken window, graffiti, begging) signals that no one cares, so must be tackled immediately. This underpins zero-tolerance policing, credited (controversially) with the 1990s fall in New York crime. Critics question the causation (crime fell nationally, including in cities without zero tolerance) and warn it criminalises the poor and minorities.
• Social and community prevention: tackle the root causes (poverty, poor socialisation, unemployment) rather than the symptoms. The Perry pre-school project in Michigan, which gave disadvantaged children enriched early education, is cited because it produced far fewer arrests in adulthood, suggesting long-term, structural prevention works.

Surveillance

Foucault contrasts older sovereign power (visible, brutal punishment of the body) with modern disciplinary power (surveillance that controls the mind). Feeley and Simon describe a "new penology" of actuarial justice: control increasingly calculates and manages the risk of groups (offender profiling, risk scoring) rather than reforming individuals. Contemporary surveillance adds CCTV, biometric databases, electronic tagging and algorithmic profiling, which some argue produces a "surveillant assemblage" and a "synoptic" society where the many also watch the few (through social media).

Punishment

Two main justifications:

• Reduction: punishment aims to reduce future crime through deterrence (individual and general), rehabilitation (changing the offender) and incapacitation (removing the ability to offend, for example through imprisonment).
• Retribution: punishment is deserved payment for the offence ("just deserts"), expressing society's moral outrage; it is backward-looking and does not need to prevent future crime to be justified.

Sociological views: Durkheim sees punishment as reaffirming shared values and the collective conscience (retributive justice in traditional societies, restitutive justice in modern ones); Marxists see the penal system, and the historical rise of imprisonment, as serving capitalism by controlling the working class and mirroring the discipline of wage labour.

Victims and evaluation

Victimology studies who becomes a victim and why.

• Positivist victimology looks at victim characteristics and "victim proneness" (Hentig), focusing on patterns and on how victims may contribute to their victimisation, which risks victim-blaming.
• Critical victimology stresses how structural factors (poverty, powerlessness) and the state's power to label shape who is recognised as a victim, and notes that the powerful can deny victim status (for example to those harmed by state or corporate crime).

Overall, no single approach controls crime: situational and environmental methods are quick and cheap but risk displacement and over-control, while tackling root causes is slower but more lasting. Punishment serves a mix of reductive, retributive and ideological functions, and the choice between them reflects political values.