Measuring crime prevention through environmental design

Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) has considerable support among the built environment professions. Yet the underlying assumptions on which it is based have rarely been, effectiveness or efficacy. This paper reports the development and use of a evaluated to assess their of scale that measured the actual levels of incidental CPTED in two residential areas in Gold Coast, Australia. The scale was administered in parallel with a victimization and social attitude survey. Analysis based on the combination of the two suggests that CPTED measures may have some effect on reducing victimization, particularly the kind of CPTED measures that apply to the group of dwellings on a single street, but the effect on fear of crime is surprisingly limited. It also indicates that there is on a single street, but the of potential in the application of such a scale in a wider assessment of the effectiveness of operationalizing CPTED design measures.

Escalation and deceleration of offending behaviours from adolescence to early adulthood

Relatively little longitudinal research is available in Australia to describe I the age/crime relationship in much detail, particularly patterns of offending occurring during the transition from adolescence to early adulthood. This paper addresses this issue using self-reported criminal involvement from a school-based sample, a group of socially disadvantaged individuals, and a group of officially identified offenders. The findings support the widespread research that rates of offending peak during adolescence, at which time offending is widespread, and that the criminal career is of relatively short duration. However, the results also demonstrate that the age/crime curve is not a unitary phenomenon. The type of offending behaviour being considered, the gender of the population, and the perpetrator's exposure to the criminal justice system contribute to the variability in the curve. In this study, the prevalence and mean level of overall offending for the total sample was higher during early adulthood than adolescence for vehicle offences and drug-use, rates of theft were similar in both periods, and vandalism and serious offending were lower. In addition, socially disadvantaged young people reported involvement in crime that peaked and desisted earlier in the life course compared to the school-based sample, and gender differences within these groups were also found. For the school-based sample, offending for females began and desisted earlier than for males, but within the at-risk group, the opposite was true. Implications for crime-prevention programming are discussed.

Suicide in developing countries (3) Prevention efforts

Until now, suicide prevention efforts have been limited in developing countries, although there are pockets of excellent achievement. Various universal, selective, and indicated interventions have been implemented, many of which target a different pattern of risk factors to those in developed countries. In the absence of sufficient mental health services, developing countries rely heavily on nongovemment organizations (NGOs) to provide crisis interventions for suicidal individuals, as well as proactive interventions aimed at raising community awareness and building resilience. Often these NGOs work within a social and public health framework, collaborating with others to provide nested suicide prevention programs that are responsive to local community needs. There is a clear need to develop appropriate, relevant and effective national suicide prevention plans in developing countries, since, to date, only Sri Lanka has done so. These plans should focus on a range of priority areas, specify the actions necessary to achieve positive change in these priority areas, consider the range of collaborators required to implement these actions, and structure their efforts at national, regional, and local levels. The plans should also promote the collection of accurate data on completed and attempted suicide, and should foster evaluation efforts.