Criminal Justice - Crime Prevention Term Paper

Specifically, the criminal justice system is designed more to address crimes after they have already been committed than to prevent them beforehand.

The criminal justice system is well designed to investigate, prosecute, and punish criminal conduct; it is far less well designed to prevent criminal activity ahead of time, particularly in comparison to other social factors.

By the time criminal violations come under the purview of the criminal justice system, they likely represent only a small fraction of criminal activity in society; for every detected crime, hundreds of others go undetected. More importantly, to the extent societal efforts relate to genuine crime prevention rather than crime control after the fact, those efforts must address social values in the larger sense.

Paternalistic legislation also undermines the societal goal of instilling fundamental respect for the formal rules of law, precisely because criminalizing purely personal conduct is so much harder to justify. On a psychological level, disdain for law enforcement over paternalistic legislation of private personal conduct is counterproductive by virtue of eroding respect for law enforcement in general.

The most important factors for preventing crime consist of social factors such as instilling a general respect for other individuals and for distinguishing between the rights of the individual and those of others. For the most part, these values are best promoted in early childhood in the context of cultural norms than addressed more narrowly in conjunction with constraints on specific conduct. Ultimately, the criminal justice system is most appropriately directed at actual criminal violations, but less effective than social values at crime prevention.