��Ī - Peterborough

Living on the edge

lw355 — Fri, 29 Mar 2019 09:00:14 +0000

Some of the most deprived areas in England are located in the eastern region. The New Horizons project has been helping those furthest away from the job market to get back into work.

Justice of the East: research on crime and rehabilitation in our region

fpjl2 — Tue, 12 Mar 2019 11:02:00 +0000

Every day, on the streets of cities, towns and even villages across the East of England, young people take decisions that can – in a moment – alter the course of their life and the lives of others.

These events do not occur in a vacuum: the wrong combinations of environment, timing, people and experience can result in decades lost to crime and addiction – damaging communities and draining the resources of criminal justice services under increasing pressure.

This year, the University’s Institute of Criminology celebrates its 60th anniversary. Researchers from the Institute have spent years in the local region engaging with people at different points of these adverse cycles – from police and prison officers to kids on street corners – to build an evidence base for effective ways to reduce harm caused by criminality.

While providing prevention lessons for the UK and indeed the world, research that was kick-started and, in many cases, continues to run in the eastern region means that local policymakers have an opportunity to build on projects and findings uniquely relevant to their patch.

Perhaps none more so than the Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+): a large longitudinal study that has followed more than 700 young residents of Peterborough from the age of 12 to now over 24, as they navigate school, work, family and the law.

Streets of Peterborough

Led by Professor Per-Olof Wikström, Director of the Centre for Analytic Criminology, the study uses waves of surveys conducted across 13 years that take a singular approach to data gathering. For a given day, the participants are asked to give hour-by-hour detail of where, when, how and with whom they have spent their time. This has been combined with psychological and genetic data, plus two huge surveys each of around 7,000 city residents, to create an extraordinary cross-section of young lives and communities in early 21st-century Britain.

“There is nothing else like this study,” says Wikström. “We have the kind of detail other studies simply don’t have. We can demonstrate not just where ‘hot spots’ of crime occur, but why – which can help us predict future crime-prone areas.”

In a major book, Breaking Rules, the research team showed how certain environments trigger crime, the central importance of personal morality and self-control in “crime-averse” youngsters, and how a third of teens never even consider breaking the law while just 16% commit more than 60% of all adolescent crime.

The researchers are currently finishing off their next book, which will take the study findings up to the present day. “We still have a huge retention rate of 91% for our cohort, many of whom are now back in Peterborough after university and some are now becoming parents themselves,” says senior PADS+ researcher Dr Kyle Treiber. “This data has the potential to reach far beyond criminological contexts. There’s so much information on everything from education and lifestyle to social mobility,” she says.

For Wikström, Peterborough is an ideal city to research the role of people and environment in crime causation. “It’s a diverse place of manageable size, with neighbourhoods at both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. Itʼs big enough but not too big, so we could cover the whole urban area – and the surrounding Fenland means people tend to live their lives within the city.”

He suggests that the research, now being replicated (and its findings supported) in countries from Sweden to China, could prove useful for city planners in the eastern region, as well as police and social services. “Peterborough is an expanding city, and our data could help developers understand what creates crime-prone people and criminogenic situations.”

Cops and 'hot spots'

Like all cities, Peterborough has its hot spots: streets or intersections where there is a concentration of theft, violence and criminal damage. These are the areas that some of Wikström’s young people know all too well – and policing them is a challenge for a force that works with tightening budgets. To find the most effective ways of reducing crime in neighbourhoods across Peterborough, University criminologists partnered with ��Īshire Constabulary to conduct major experimental trials of police deployment.

By randomly allocating 21 extra minutes of daily foot patrol by Police Community Support Officers to some of the cities hottest hot spots, researchers showed an average drop in reported crime of 39%. They worked out that every £10 spent on patrols would ultimately save £56 in prison costs.

“In working with us to conduct experiments, ��Īshire Constabulary has set the standard for cost-effectiveness in policing,” says Professor Lawrence Sherman, Director of the Jerry Lee Centre for Experimental Criminology. “The results from Peterborough provide an important benchmark for evaluating police time – challenging those who would rather see patrols in safer neighbourhoods or high traffic areas.”

Fen life

Outside Peterborough, those brought up in the fens can feel their opportunities are limited, and rural life presents its own challenges to those working in the justice system.

A new project led by ��Ī criminologist Dr Caroline Lanskey and King’s College London psychologist Dr Joel Harvey is exploring how the unique Fenland environment stretching east from Peterborough contributes to youth offending. “There are pockets of the fens where isolation, poor transport links and often high levels of deprivation feed into the types of crime young people commit,” she says.

Lanskey and Harvey, with the support of PhD student Hannah Marshall, are working to develop an “explanatory framework” for rural rule-breaking. They are currently conducting interviews, as well as analysing risk assessment data for hundreds of young people from across ��Īshire.

“The fens can feel defined by distance: geographically, but also socially and culturally,” says Lanskey. “Youth justice workers struggle to gain the trust of secluded communities – and struggle to reach them. It can take a whole day to see two or three people.” The project is aiming to report back findings later this year.

Prison and beyond

When the decisions young people make end badly, it can result in imprisonment. Life inside can be harsh – many of the region’s prisons have suffered extensive funding cuts, as in the rest of Britain – and, once a sentence is completed, opportunities on the outside can be scant.

For Drs Ruth Armstrong and Amy Ludlow (who, like Lanskey, are in the Centre for Community, Gender and Social Justice), the secure estate holds a vast amount of talent and potential that risks being wasted. Four years ago, they started an initiative called Learning Together: partnering universities with prisons and probation organisations to build “transformative communities”, in which students from both inside and out are taught at the same time by some of the best lecturers in the UK.

The Learning Together team has worked in several prisons in the eastern region, including Peterborough and Warren Hill near the Suffolk coast. It is with Whitemoor, the high security prison that sits just outside the Fenland town of March, that the team has one of their longest-standing partnerships.

“We started courses in Whitemoor three years ago, and the prison has bought into this work in really exciting ways,” says Ludlow. Bespoke courses on everything from philosophy to creative writing have been taught in Whitemoor; in most cases university students were taken into the prison to learn alongside students currently serving sentences.

“When we move ideas from the learning environment into criminal justice, we show people in prison that they are not defined by their offending, but that there are avenues for them to progress,” says Armstrong.

Learning Together has now instigated over 20 university–prison partnerships nationally. “The relationships of trust built with prisons such as Whitemoor have allowed us to create models of working for partnerships across the country. By engaging locally with research, you can end up pushing national agendas.”

From Fenland delinquency to policing Peterborough’s streets and the power of prison education, researchers from the Institute of Criminology are engaged in the region to help reduce the harm crime can cause.

By engaging locally with research, you can end up pushing national agendas

Ruth Armstrong

UK police officer

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Opinion: Why policymakers should care about location

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 09:00:58 +0000

The EU Referendum of June 2016 shone a light upon some of the deep fault lines contained within British society, throwing up profound and uncomfortable questions about what underpinned the differences in people’s perspectives that were revealed in the vote. Evidence suggests that you were much more likely to have voted to Leave if you had not been to university, were over the age of 45 and lived in a town or the countryside rather than a city.

This seismic event, along with the other political earthquakes currently shaking democratic politics throughout the Western world, reveals societies that are profoundly divergent in terms of political values and cultural outlook. Life chances are often contingent on where you are born, where you grow up and what access you have to educational opportunity. ‘Place’, in other words, has a profound influence on our sense of where we belong and the values we prefer.

For politicians and policymakers who came of age during years of sustained economic growth, and who assumed the financially driven economy would generate opportunities for all, these deeply structural patterns of inequality must come as a shock. Anger and frustration underpinned the revolts by the disenchanted against democracy’s political establishments, sentiments which powered new waves of popular protest and support for populist challenger parties.

These responses highlight the inadequacies of a policy paradigm rooted in assumptions about stable economic growth, the unalloyed merits of urban expansion, and the capacity and political will of states to redistribute public goods across poorer regions.

Government is not alone in bearing responsibility for these issues. Academic experts could also have done more to highlight the major inequalities that are opening up across our democratic lives. These inequalities have helped fuel the very different responses to Brexit that have been apparent in our own ‘place’.

The city of ��Ī was very clearly in favour of Remain in the Referendum – with 73.8% voting in favour. But drive for 30 minutes in almost any direction from the centre and you will find yourself in villages or towns that voted overwhelmingly for Leave. They may be geographically close, but, in relation to Brexit, a chasm of outlook and experience divides ��Ī from the places around it.

A new Combined Authority now links ��Ī, ��Īshire and Peterborough – one of a number of innovations in administrative devolution introduced in England in recent years. This single jurisdiction has a limited set of powers conferred upon its elected Mayor. These new arrangements have had the effect of formally linking ��Ī and its world-class university to districts and towns from which it is, in many ways, a world away. This has created a kind of natural experiment on our doorstep, a smaller-scale replica of some of the geographical divides that are apparent across the country. Some of the social inequalities that exist in the eastern region are ingrained – and are one reason why this area lacks a sense of shared geographical identity. Divides of this sort will require both political will and policy ingenuity to solve.

If we compare ��Ī and Peterborough, for instance, the latter’s inhabitants have a significantly lower standard of living, on average, than their counterparts in ��Ī. On a range of public health measures, from obesity to physical activity levels and avoidable mortalities, there is an entrenched difference between these towns.

More of Peterborough’s children receive free school meals, and a much lower proportion of its residents have access to further and higher education. Most ��Ī full-time residents can expect to earn £120 more per week than their Peterborough equivalent; and the latter’s inhabitants can expect, on average, to live two years fewer than their ��Ī counterparts.

There are significant disparities within each of these places, as well as between them. In 2018, for instance, the think tank Centre for Cities ranked ��Ī the most unequal city in the UK – for the second year in a row – which should give us pause for thought. ��Ī is home to an extraordinary concentration of academic expertise, innovation and knowledge-intensive industries. How can the economic and societal benefits of these assets be more evenly distributed?

The University has a key role to play in addressing these issues. At ��Ī’s newly established Bennett Institute for Public Policy, we are committed to a deeper understanding of them, and to helping policymakers think through different potential responses.

For instance, we are currently examining some of the main differences in economic opportunity and social provision that characterise life in different kinds of town within England, looking at whether the ‘footprint’ of public services is receding more dramatically in, for instance, post-industrial towns than elsewhere. And we are exploring ways in which the newly created tier of Combined Authorities, including that in ��Īshire and Peterborough, can improve in terms of their political accountability to their citizens.

��Ī is, in relative terms, one of the wealthiest parts of the country. The city is one of the strongest sources of economic growth in the UK, and a provider of employment for many residents from ��Īshire – though relatively few from Fenland or Peterborough. The most widely aired solution to the region’s imbalances is to do more to improve its connectivity to the areas that lie beyond its boundaries. To get to the root of the economic disparity in the ��Īshire and Peterborough region, we need to understand the underlying factors that make ‘place’ so important both to the innovation industries that have flourished in ��Ī and to the other kinds of business – notably agriculture – in the landscape that surrounds it.

The University houses a range of individuals and groups with considerable academic expertise on the social and policy issues facing the region, and the importance of place. Several of these have made important contributions to policy debates, for instance as advisors to, and members of, the ��Īshire and Peterborough Independent Economic Review, the Greater ��Ī Partnership and the Combined Authority’s Business Board.

Understanding the importance of place to public policy does not just mean thinking locally, however. There are many different kinds of community – institutional, cultural, or voluntary – which matter to people, and also to policymakers, and some of these extend beyond national borders while others reside within them. In policy circles, the notion of place is a more recent discovery in the wake of events like Brexit. Our conclusion is that bringing intellectual depth and a richer evidence base to this emergent issue is one of the major contributions which the University can make to public policy in our region.

By Ben Goodair, a Research Assistant at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, and Professor Michael Kenny, the Institute's inaugural Director.

What account should policymaking take of the notion of 'place' – the landscapes, cities and towns we inhabit, with all the opportunities and challenges they bring? Ben Goodair and Michael Kenny from ��Ī’s newly established Bennett Institute for Public Policy explore the question in light of the different responses to the EU Referendum in the eastern region.

Some of the social inequalities that exist in the eastern region are ingrained – and are one reason why this area lacks a sense of shared geographical identity. Divides of this sort will require both political will and policy ingenuity to solve

Ben Goodair and Michael Kenny

The District

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How to tend an economic bonfire

lw355 — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 13:05:07 +0000

Business, enterprise and employment are flourishing in Greater ��Ī, but housing and infrastructure are struggling to match the jobs boom, and gaps in social equality keep widening. University academics are connecting their insights, data and algorithms to find solutions to the area’s “growing pains”.

Widening participation in higher education in East Anglia

ta385 — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 10:12:58 +0000

NEACO brings together Anglia Ruskin University, Norwich University of the Arts, University of East Anglia, University of Suffolk, and the ��Ī as Consortium Partners, with ��Ī acting as lead partner.

NEACO is part of the national Network for Collaborative Outreach Programme (NCOP), which aims to:

Double the proportion of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds in Higher Education (HE) by 2020;
Increase by 20 percent the number of students in HE from ethnic minority groups;
Address the under-representation of young men from disadvantaged backgrounds in HE

The project launches in January 2017 and runs until December 2018, with the possibility of a further two years of funding to take the project to the end of 2020. The East Anglia funding allocation is approximately £9 million for the first two years of the project.

The universities will work closely with FE Colleges offering HE provision in the region, as well as dozens of target schools, colleges and other stakeholders. Advisory Groups in Norfolk, Suffolk, ��Īshire and Peterborough are being set up to ensure a wide range of experience can feed into the project.

The programme will work closely with schools and colleges in the region to identify and support students in Years 9-13 from disadvantaged areas (HEFCE GAP wards). The network will deliver a range of targeted outreach activities to raise aspirations, explain the full range of Higher Education options available to students, and provide crucial advice about how to make successful applications.

Tom Levinson, Head of Widening Participation at the ��Ī and interim NEACO Project Manager, said:

“This programme provides an unprecedented opportunity to widen participation to Higher Education and improve social mobility in East Anglia. The funding which the Government has allocated to East Anglia recognises the fact that we have thousands of bright young people in the region with huge potential, and the ability to take their education further.

“��Ī is delighted to be leading a collaborative partnership which aims to show the region’s young people the array of HE options available to them as well as providing practical support to help them achieve their goals. Our region offers world-class courses taught in leading centres of research, and vocational courses with excellent links to business and the professions. The Network brings together a huge amount of expertise and experience and we will be making the very most of this opportunity for the region.”

Tim Greenacre, Registrar and Secretary at the University of Suffolk, said: “The University of Suffolk is delighted to be a member of the NEACO consortium and contributing to widening participation in the region. A central part of the University of Suffolk mission is to raise HE participation and widen participation and this project will complement and enhance our existing widening participation activity.”

Dr Trevor Bolton, Pro Vice Chancellor for Partnerships at Anglia Ruskin University: "We are delighted to be working with regional partners to widen participation in higher education. At Anglia Ruskin we firmly believe we should make higher education opportunities available to as many people as possible - raising the education and skills levels of our region and nation is vital to our prosperity."

Charlotte Wheatland, Assistant Head of Outreach at The University of East Anglia said: “We look forward to strengthening our already strong outreach work with schools and colleges in Norfolk through the NEACO consortium.”

Jerry White, Deputy Principal, City College Norwich said: "On behalf of the New Anglia Colleges Group (NACG), City College Norwich is keen to support this project as we want to see young people from disadvantaged backgrounds given the same chances as anyone else to go on to Higher Education and benefit from the life-changing opportunities this brings.

"The NACG colleges can and do play a key role in supporting the widening participation agenda. As well as having higher proportions of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds studying with colleges, we are also the major providers of Higher Education for students from our local communities in Norfolk and Suffolk. We are looking forward to working with NEACO to develop new ways to overcome barriers and open up opportunities to young people from some of our most disadvantaged communities."

From January 2017, East Anglia’s five Higher Education Institutions, working in close partnership with the region’s Further Education Colleges and other stakeholders, will start to deliver a major Government-funded collaborative outreach programme, the Network for East Anglian Collaborative Outreach (NEACO).

This is an unprecedented opportunity to widen participation to Higher Education and improve social mobility in East Anglia

Tom Levinson, Head of Widening Participation

A ��Ī outreach session in Chatteris, ��Īshire.

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Policing: two officers ‘on the beat’ prevent 86 assaults and save thousands in prison costs

fpjl2 — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 15:05:10 +0000

New research shows that targeting each crime ‘hot spot’ in a city with 21 extra minutes of daily foot patrolling by Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) could save the justice system hundreds of thousands of pounds through prevented crime.

Working with ��Īshire Constabulary to conduct a year-long experiment in Peterborough, researchers from the Institute of Criminology at the ��Ī randomly allocated 34 crime-prone areas to get 21 minutes of extra PCSO patrols a day.

They compared offences before and after the experiment between 38 hot spots with no increased patrol and the 34 with the increase using the ��Ī Crime Harm Index: a new tool that measures “harm caused to victims” by modelling severities in sentencing for different offences, rather than just totting up overall crime figures.

The research team calculated that targeted patrol time equal to two full-time PCSOs would prevent 86 assaults a year, or incidents of the equivalent crime ‘harm value’, saving potential costs to the public of eight years of imprisonment.

The findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Criminology, suggest that every £10 spent on targeted foot patrols prevents a further £56 in prison costs – a five-to-one return on investment.

While modern policing is characterised by a “reactive, fire-brigade” approach, usually vehicle-based, the researchers say their evidence strengthens support for the historic “bobbies on the beat” mode of policing focused on crime-prone areas.

“By working with us to conduct this experiment, ��Īshire Constabulary has set the standard for cost-effectiveness in policing,” said study co-author Professor Lawrence Sherman, Director of the ��Ī Institute of Criminology and its Jerry Lee Centre for Experimental Criminology.

“Any other investment in policing can now be challenged to match the benefits of foot patrols in preventing the equivalent of either 86 assaults, or six burglaries, or six sexual crimes.”

‘Hot spots’ are small urban areas, streets or intersections, where there is a concentration of crime – usually offences such as theft, burglary, violence and criminal damage.

During the experiment, 72 of Peterborough’s ‘hottest’ hot spots randomly received either standard patrols (the control) or an average extra 21 minutes PCSO foot patrol per day (the treatment) over the course of a year.

In the ‘treated’ hot spots, these additional patrols – combined with vehicle patrols by Police Constables (PCs) these areas already received – amounted to an average increase of 56% in daily patrol time.

GPS devices embedded in the radios of both PCs and PCSOs were used to track time spent in each location, a precise measure of the “treatment dosage” of police presence.

The researchers found that, on average per hot spot, 39% fewer crime incidents were reported by victims and 20% fewer 999 emergency calls to the police occurred in the 34 treated hot spots compared with the 38 control hot spots.

The extra 21 minutes of PCSO time per day for each of the hot spots amounts to 3,094 hours across all treatment areas, roughly equivalent to two fulltime PCSOs – no more than £50,000 on current salaries.

The ��Ī Crime Harm Index analysis suggests that, across all 34 treated hot spots, the equivalent of these two extra officers prevented crime amounting to 2,914 days – around eight years – of imprisonment, at a potential cost to the public of £280,000 under English sentencing guidelines.

“The use of the ��Ī Crime Harm Index and the Peterborough cost-effectiveness results provides a like-for-like metric to challenge those who demand more PC or PCSO time in patrolling schools, low-crime neighbourhoods, or traffic accident hot spots,” Sherman said.

“This study should give both Police and Crime Commissioners and Chief Constables a benchmark for evaluating any other uses of police time other than hot spots patrols.”

PCSOs are civilian members of police staff, used to bolster police presence and support PCs. They have no power of arrest, and cannot investigate crimes, but have specific powers to deal with minor public order offices – what’s known as “soft policing”.

Budgetary constraints in British policing mean PCSOs are the only officers who now conduct proactive and visible foot patrols. During the experiment, the PCSOs were told to concentrate on being visible to the exclusion of any other task.

The researchers’ experimental evidence showed that every additional PCSO visit per day to the treatment hot spots decreased calls for service by approximately 34, with the number of crimes declining by around four.

“The experiment suggests that the number of visits to each hot spot may matter more than the total minutes – as if each time the police arrive they renew their deterrent effect on crime,” said Dr Barak Ariel of the Lee Centre of Experimental Criminology, who was lead researcher on the Peterborough experiment.

Sherman says the latest results show that, if deployed tactically and proactively, ‘soft’ policing can achieve comparable crime reductions to the ‘hard’ threat of immediate physical arrest.

“These findings suggest that the probability of encountering an officer is more important than the powers that officer has, and that the frequency and duration of proactive patrolling deserves far more attention,” said Sherman.

“More experiments like this one can produce an even more general estimate of the value of foot patrol activity, to make that value the ‘gold standard to beat’ in selecting cost-effective policing strategies,” he added.

Professor Lorraine Mazerolle of the University of Queensland and Editor of the Journal of Experimental Criminology said the Peterborough experiment showed that “the deterrent role of police and PCSOs patrolling crime-harm hotspots is now indisputable: the police can, and do, prevent crime, they just need to be appropriately deployed to crime-harm hotspots.”

��Īshire Constabulary’s Assistant Chief Constable Mark Hopkins said: “We’re pleased to have worked with the ��Ī Institute of Criminology to conduct this research and we welcome the outcomes.

“We’re keen to look at the findings in further detail and explore how they could help to influence our future policing plan.”

The results of a major criminology experiment in Peterborough suggest that investing in proactive PCSO foot patrols targeting crime ‘hot spots’ could yield a more than five-to-one return: with every £10 spent saving £56 in prison costs.

The use of the ��Ī Crime Harm Index and the Peterborough cost-effectiveness results provides a like-for-like metric to challenge those who demand more PC or PCSO time in patrolling schools, low-crime neighbourhoods, or traffic accident hot spots

Lawrence Sherman

West Midlands Police

PCSOs from West Midlands Police on patrol

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Morality prevents crime

bjb42 — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 19:00:24 +0000

A unique study of teenagers and the community in Peterborough over ten years shows that most adolescent crime is not just youthful opportunism but the combined result of personal characteristics and environmental factors. The findings show that certain urban environments provide triggers for crime to which some teenagers are more vulnerable, while others remain highly resistant to the potential for crime – regardless of the circumstances.

The groundbreaking Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study - or PADS+ - at ��Ī’s Institute of Criminology, tracked in detail the criminal activities of around 700 young people and explored how these relate to both their personal characteristics and social environments - while most studies of crime and its causes only focus on one or the other. The findings from the first 5 years of the study from ages 12-16 have been published in the book ‘Breaking Rules’ (Oxford University Press).

The young people self-reported about 16,000 crimes during the study period - dominant types being violence, vandalism and shoplifting. Crime is often publicly perceived to be a natural part of teenage life in the 21^st century - but the findings show that a third of teenagers committed no crimes at all, and the vast majority of the rest only occasionally - one or two minor crimes a year on average.

The bulk of offences were committed by a small group - with around 4% responsible for almost half the crime and the overwhelming majority of the most serious property crimes - such as burglaries, robberies and car theft. Often beginning before the age of 12, the most persistent offenders in the study were also highly versatile in their criminality – committing a wide range of offences.

The study suggests that a major reason why certain young people refrain from crime is not because they fear the consequences; it’s that their morality simply prevents them from even seeing crime as a possible course of action in the first place.

The researchers found two main characteristics in teenagers resistant to committing crime - who they describe as ‘crime-averse’ - namely, a personal morality that closely matches the law and greater self-control. Those who committed little or no crime fit this model to a large extent.

Young people at the other end of the spectrum don’t care very much about breaking the rules of the law and tend to be impulsive and short-sighted, leaving them more vulnerable to the temptations of crime – they are ‘crime-prone’.

The 16% most ‘crime-prone’ young people committed 60% of the crimes, while the 16% most ‘crime-averse’ were only responsible for 0.5% of the crimes.

“Many young people are ‘crime-averse’ and simply don’t perceive crime as a possible course of action - it doesn’t matter what the situation is,” says Professor Per-Olof H Wikström, FBA, who leads the PADS+ research team. “The idea that opportunity makes the thief - that young people will inevitably commit crime in certain environments - runs counter to our findings. Rather, only the ‘crime-prone’ become vulnerable to said opportunities when taking part in environments with a moral context that encourages, or, at least, does not discourage, crime.”

The research included not just an in-depth longitudinal study of the lives and habits of 700 young people, but also a survey of over 6,000 local residents combined with large amounts of cross-referenced census and land use data to create a detailed impression of the environments in which the young people spend their time.

The findings show that crime is not only concentrated to a small group of young people, but also in certain times and places - known as ‘hot spots’. In many previous studies, crime hot spots have often been explained by the fact that they occur in areas where opportunities for crime are plentiful.

This new study goes much further, showing that crime hot spots are not only a consequence of opportunity but crucially the moral context - the level of enforcement of key common rules of conduct - in which these opportunities occur, and the presence of ‘crime-prone’ young people. Essentially, crime happens when ‘crime-prone’ people take part in moral contexts that encourage crime.

While some urban environments are largely free of youth crime, others include hot spots for young people’s crime. The study findings show that these crime hot spots occur in city and local centres, and residential areas that are characterised by poor informal social control resulting from weak social cohesion – known as poor collective efficacy. The findings also show that poor collective efficacy almost exclusively occurs in areas with a higher level of social disadvantage.

City and local centres and residential areas with poor collective efficacy have moral contexts in which ‘crime-prone’ young people are vulnerable to committing crime, particularly when they are engaged in unstructured and unsupervised activities.

The city and local centres provide many opportunities and frictions due to the presence of retail outlets and entertainment venues and also lack social cohesion among temporary visitors. Residents of areas which lack collective efficacy are less likely to intervene when young people engage in disorders and crime.

“In prevention we need to focus on developing policies that affect children and young people’s moral education and cognitive nurturing – which aids the development of greater self-control - and policies that help minimise the emergence of moral contexts conducive to crime” says Wikström. “In this context, one of the most important but least understood questions is the role of social disadvantage and how it affects the content and efficacy of young people’s moral education and cognitive nurturing.”

A landmark study of criminal activity in teenagers indicates that some never see crime as a course of action while others are vulnerable to environmental inducements to crime. The study reveals factors that explains why some young people are ‘crime-prone’ and others ‘crime-averse’, and explains why crime hot spots occur.

The idea that opportunity makes the thief - that young people will inevitably commit crime in certain environments - runs counter to our findings.

Per-Olof H Wikström

Paul Downey from Flickr

Hoodies

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�������������Ī - Peterborough