Ethics and Situational Crime Prevention

This book addresses the ethics of Situational Crime Prevention (SCP). It seeks not only to analyse specific SCP measures but to demonstrate how ethical analysis can support and improve the implementation of SCP strategies.

In ethically analysing a particular SCP measure, it is not enough to look at empirical data. Even if a measure is effective at preventing crime, it may turn out to be ethically unattractive because it harms more people than it benefits, or because it violates our right to free movement. The book proceeds from the assumption that decision-making about whether we should use SCPs can only be conducted by carefully identifying, clarifying, and critically evaluating the ethical arguments for and against use of the SCP measure in question. The author analyses several SCP strategies that have not been treated in detail in criminology or applied ethics literatures. These SCP strategies include gated communities, excluding people with a criminal record from housing or employment, the use of hostile design in public spaces, and the implementation of intelligent speed adaption in vehicles.

Ethics and Situational Crime Prevention is an essential resource for criminologists, moral philosophers, legal scholars, and social scientists with an interest in crime prevention.

Thomas Søbirk Petersen is Professor of Bioethics and Philosophy of Law at Roskilde University, Denmark. He is the author of Doping in Sport: A Defence (Routledge, 2021) and Why Criminalize? New Perspectives on Normative Principles of Criminalization (2020). He has also co-edited several anthologies, the most recent being Preventing Crime by Exclusion (Routledge, forthcoming).