Whether Crime Prevention Should Be A Priority In The Criminal Justice System
centres.
Since the issue of employment contributes to many criminal cases, crime prevention strategies can deal with that issue and eliminate the need to commit crimes due to that reason. This can be achieved through the process of instilling potential offenders with job skills. Consequently, such people will have no need to result to crime as a means of earning a living since they have other alternatives available
Failure in past approaches
Crime prevention should take precedence within the criminal justice system because the punitive approach has failed. Most psychologists argue that when criminals are simply arrested and taken into prisons for a certain period of time, they may not feel the need to reform. They actually claim that this serves to reinforce certain criminal activities. This is because they get to interact with fellow criminal and even learn more tricks to the trade and by the time they leave their prison cells, they are worse of than when they came in. What this means is that the criminal justice system is just going around in circles; criminals commit crimes, stay in prison, then go back to where they started from. When criminals go back to their neighbourhood, the very reason why they committed their crimes in the first place still exists. They will still be faced with family problems, lack of employment and other social evils. These circumstances will propel them into crime and they will end up going back to prison. This is the reason why drug related cases still continue. Psychologists believe that criminals perform criminal behaviour because of these social pressures and they need to be addressed if the criminal justice system hopes to be effective in the future. The ultimate solution would therefore be crime prevention. (Austin, p 34, 2001)
Crime prevention would be quite favourable in drug related cases instead of punitive actions. For example, those caught should be placed in mandatory drug treatment centres. They could also be subjected to community service instead of locking them up in prison cells. There was some sort of disparity in the way the criminal justice system has been handling perpetrators. A person who has committed a burglary and another who has been caught using drugs are given more or less the same treatment through prison sentencing. This is not a fair or effective way of going about the crime problem.
It should also be noted that there may be certain individuals who lack the ability to move on with their lives because the way the criminal justice system has been in the past is that it condemns and segregates offenders. For expel, when one has been convicted to serve a prison term and they complete their term, they not allowed to drive a car even if they have a driving licence. Besides this, they are not allowed to own houses or get certain jobs. What this does is that it frustrates them the more. Such individuals have no room to have fresh start because most of them lack public goodwill. What this does is that it encourages them to continue with a life of crime because they feel that society is already biased towards them. One can therefore conclude that the criminal justice system has not been very effective in the process of dealing with future crime incidences. Crime prevention is the only alternative to this endless cycle of crime. (Oxford Handbook of Criminology, p13, 2003)
Nipping crime at the bud
Many experts have argued that crime prevention will be more successful since most hard core criminals started out as youthful vandals who were shown the right direction. Some people have argued that the countries that have implemented crime prevention strategies have been very effective in crime stoppage. A case in point is the battle against alcohol and drug abuse in Sweden. The campaign was started by psychologist and criminologist Nils Bejerot. He believed that the drug control system used in Sweden before his reforms was quite inadequate. He asserted that if the new carriers of the drug taking habit were dealt with before hand, then there would be chances of preventing them from becoming ambassadors for the drug taking problem. He conducted an experiment in the year 1965 at Stockholm.
This psychiatrist suggested that those who had been caught by police using small amounts of drugs should be placed in treatment program that is mandatory in nature. This would go along way in ensuring that all the future cases of drug dealing were taken care of. In line with the program, local authorities should conduct follow ups to ensure that those particular candidates stay committed to the prevention program. This has gone along way in eliminating drug abuse cases in Sweden. Statistics testify to the effectiveness of this strategy. In Sweden only one in 1,400 may be imprisoned for possession of illegal drugs. This is such an achievement given the fcat that other countries like the