Crime Prevention & Control: Left Solutions (AQA A Level Sociology): Revision Note

Social and community crime prevention

• Social and community crime prevention is linked to left realist solutions, which focus on structural reforms in capitalist societies

• The aim is to reduce inequality and deprivation, tackling the root causes of crime.

• Places emphasis on the offender’s social context (e.g., family, education, housing) rather than simply removing opportunities

• The long-term strategy is to tackle why crime happens, not just how to stop it in the short term

• Social conditions like poverty, unemployment and poor housing are seen as the key drivers of crime

• Wider social reforms may help prevent crime, even if crime reduction is not their main aim

  • E.g., policies to promote full employment are likely to reduce crime as a side effect

Example: The Perry Pre-School Project

• The Perry Pre-School Project in Michigan was aimed at reducing criminality for disadvantaged black children aged 3–4 years

• It was a two-year intellectual enrichment programme that involved weekly home visits for families

• A longitudinal study compared these children with a control group who didn’t receive the programme

• Findings:

  • By age 40, those in the programme had fewer arrests for violent crime, higher school completion rates, and more stable employment

  • Economically: for every $1 spent, society saved $17 in welfare, prison, and other costs

• The study shows how early intervention and community-based programmes can have a profound, long-term effect on offending

Marxist ideas to control crime

• Emphasise that crime is shaped by inequality, poverty and a criminogenic capitalist culture

• Marxists argue for structural changes in society to reduce crime:

  • Reduce poverty, unemployment and homelessness

  • Decrease income and wealth inequality

  • Improve inner-city conditions through investment in housing, education, and jobs

  • Transform capitalism into a more compassionate, community-focused system, reducing its criminogenic potential

• Similar to left realists, Marxists also stress the importance of community building, leading to stronger social bonds, more facilities, and collective responsibility

Evaluation of left realist solutions to preventing & controlling crime

Strengths

• Takes crime seriously

  • Unlike some theories, this approach does not dismiss street crime as trivial

  • Hughes (1998) highlights how social and community measures address the real problems faced by disadvantaged groups, such as robbery and violence

  • By focusing on inequality, it connects crime prevention with broader social justice goals, giving the approach both moral and practical weight

• Long-term benefits

  • Tackling structural conditions like education, poverty, and housing means interventions can have lasting effects, not just short-term reductions

  • The Perry Pre-School Project demonstrates how early investment pays off through lower crime, higher employment, and lower costs to society

Criticisms

• Expensive and long-term

  • Structural reforms (e.g., tackling inequality, creating jobs, improving housing) require huge financial investment

  • Results may only appear after decades, which makes these strategies less politically attractive compared to quick fixes like policing

  • Governments often prefer short-term, visible measures to please voters, making large-scale reforms difficult to sustain

• Unclear feasibility of 'compassionate capitalism'

  • The idea of reshaping capitalism into a more caring and equal system is appealing in theory, but hard to achieve in practice

  • Critics argue that capitalism is inherently competitive and unequal, so deep reform may be unrealistic without major social or political upheaval

  • This raises the question: can meaningful reductions in crime really be achieved without fundamentally changing the economic system?