' S Introduction

Crime Prevention Studies will publish theoretical and empirical research on the subject of reducing opportunities for crime. Until recently, this topic was of relatively minor importance in criminology because opportunity was thought to determine, not whether crime occurred, but only the time and place of its occurrence. It followed that manipulating opportunities would result not in reduced crime, but in the temporal or geographical displacement of offending, or perhaps in the commission of different and possibly worse forms of crime. If crime was to be reduced, what needed to be changed was the underlying motivation for crime, deriving from strong biological, psychological or social forces. Consequently, the principal objective of crime control policy has been to modify criminal dispositions through the imposition of treatment or punishment and, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, extensive experimentation took place with different forms of rehabilitative treatment and deterrent sentencing. This research found that criminal dispositions are remarkably resistant to change and that no one treatment or sentence is clearly more effective than any other. Differing sentence lengths seem to have few detectable effects on subsequent offending; therapeutic regimes of various kinds in prisons and training schools seem to be no more effective than conventional or indeed punitive ones; and non-custodial disposals— fines, probation, community service—seem to vary little in their ability to bring about reform. Faced with these results, the policy focus shifted in the 1980s to simple incapacitation of the "career criminar through lengthy terms of imprisonment. Now, at the beginning of the 1990s, it is becoming apparent that, despite the tremendous criminal justice costs incurred, incapacitation will be no more successful than treatment or deterrence in achieving reductions in crime, and crime policy seems on the verge of another shift. While the future direction is not clear, it seems safe to predict that this will involve increased attention to the prevention of crime if only because this has attracted so little interest in the past.