Interviews

A new turn in crime prevention

by Mark Rowe

A university professor plans to study if better buildings and more sympathetic spaces can prevent people from turning to crime. Rachel Armitage is Professor of Criminology at the University of Huddersfield. One of her research fields has been Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED), which has set out how buildings and the spaces between them can experience varying levels of crime based on their design, build and management.

Her focus now is what she terms Crime Prevention Through Pro-Social Design (CPTPSD). She has outlined her new ideas at an Australian conference.

Rachel Armitage, pictured, said: “CPTED treats offenders as external, as ‘outsiders’, so you protect an area by designing them out. But Crime Prevention Through Pro-Social Design recognises that the offender is very likely to be part of our community and that perhaps enhancing an offender’s emotional or moral attachment to an area may reduce their desire or inclination to commit crimes within the community.”

As part of her designing-out-crime research, she showed a number of convicted burglars a series of photos of houses and streets; to seek the features that made properties and neighbourhoods most vulnerable – such as low fences, or footpaths at the back of a house. But two of the images elicited a very different response.

She said: “The offenders would say ‘I wouldn’t burgle that house because it reminds me of where I grew up’, or ‘it’s like where my grandma lives’. These were a kind of moral responses to the features of the area, as if the design sparked a feeling that it would be wrong to commit a crime against something personal to them.”

Hence her new direction, and she explored the idea when invited to deliver a keynote address at the 2018 Crime Prevention and Communities conference in Melbourne by the Australian Institute of Criminology and the Victorian Department of Justice and Regulation. Her paper was titled ‘A more reliable glimpse’: Re-positioning the offender in Crime Prevention through Environmental Design.

She said: “There is a lot of research on how the design of an environment can impact on someone’s mental health – such as their vulnerability to becoming depressed, anxious or to using drugs. All of those factors can increase a person’s risk of becoming an offender, so if we brought the two areas together and designed places which reduced mental illness and which reduced exclusion, then these people may feel less inclined to commit crimes in those areas.”

She’s been invited to edit a special edition of the Journal of Social Sciences, due to appear in 2019; titled Crime Prevention Through Pro-social Design. An international call for contributions has now been made.

“I am asking people to submit papers that explore how design can impact on offending from a very different perspective. It is a matter of designing in pro-social behaviour. Designing out crime definitely still has a place and we have come a long way towards embedding this into our planning system. I was involved in that. But I think CPTED needs to evolve.”

Her November 2015 inaugural, public lecture as a professor, on ‘when poor design becomes criminal’, featured in the January 2016 print issue of Professional Security magazine. She was the author of Crime Prevention through Housing Design (Palgrave, 2013).

Our review – https://professionalsecurity.co.uk/reviews/crime-prevention-through-housing-design/.

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