Environmental Design, Crime, and Prevention: An Examination of Community Dynamics

Abstract

Property offenders construct cognitive images of the physical environment to decide where to commit crimes. At least three levels of target selection occur-neighborhoods, or regions; street blocks; and specific sites. Information on the physical characteristics of neighborhoods, such as ease of entry and exit, the number of internal boundaries limiting ease of circulation, and signs of guardianship or of incivilities, are weighed by the offender to determine risks, opportunities, and conveniences. This framework for understanding links between offenders and the physical environment provides a typology for evaluating research on environmental design and crime prevention, especially research on defensible-space theory, territorial perspectives, and the incivilities thesis. The incivilities thesis suggests that offenders take into account social and physical incivilities when deciding which neighborhood to choose as crime targets. Three recent studies involving neighborhoods in Atlanta, Georgia, Baltimore, Maryland, and Hartford, Connecticut, show that the effects of environmental design on crime range from small to moderate. Available research suggests that crime prevention efforts should be directed at the street-block rather than at the neighborhood level of analysis.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 174 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.