The Prevention of Repeated Crime

Abstract

Though this study is concerned fundamentally with the prevention of crime, it deals only with that part of the field wherein prevention of further crime is sought through treatment of known criminals. The whole field of crime prevention is, of course, much wider than that particular part. With a reasonable degree of logical distinction, it represents five major divisions of particularized interest. The first involves the question of what activities are to be considered as crimes and ought, as such; to be prevented. The second division assumes that a crime has been committed and covers the various activities by which responsibility for its commission is fixed upon a particular individual. The third and fourth divisions assume certain activities as definitively criminal and involve the procedures by which organized society seeks to forestall their perpetration. This prophylactic, preventive activity is of two essentially different types. One type seeks to prevent crime by correcting or alleviating the social and economic conditions which cause crime through their pressure upon the individual. Of this type are efforts toward slum clearance, unemployment insurance, community facilities for lawful expenditure of surplus energies, prohibition of the manufacture or sale of intoxicating liquors. The other type of prophylactic activity, which may be called the fourth division of preventive effort, includes the preventive measures designed to operate upon the individual himself, in the hope of guiding his reactions to social and economic conditions into safe channels, or of so controlling his person in one way and another as to render his reactions harmless. This fourth division may in its turn be divided into two. One comprises all such efforts-trade-training, crime preventive medicine and surgery, teaching of temperance, education, instilling of fear-as are directed toward the group as a whole, without special regard for those who have already offended against the law. The other division comprises such activities as may be directed particularly toward prevention of repeated criminality on the part of persons who have already offended one or more times.It is this latter problem, this fifth division of crime preventive activities, with which this discussion is concerned-the problem of preventing repeated crime through treatment of the known criminal himself.https://repository.law.umich.edu/michigan_legal_studies/1022/thumbnail.jp