Crime Prevention Through Social Development (CPSD)

Crime Prevention through Social Development (CPSD) is comprised of interventions that attempt to address the root causes of criminality, particularly among at-risk children and youth, older youth and adults are also targeted as well, which makes this strategy as the most proactive one of all crime prevention strategies (Schneider, 2010 & 2015). The general idea of CPSD is to minimize, eliminate, counter or offset the factors, including deleterious social environment and child’s behavioral, emotional, cognitive or psychological risk factors, which may mislead the children and youth to the risk of future offending or other deviant or antisocial behavior by using targeted, social-problem-solving actions, provisions and interventions. In other
It seems like every individual strategy, as it promises, personifies crime prevention by focusing on eliminating the root causes of criminal behavior, however, the outcomes are more about disorder and social control instead of actual crime incidents. The criticism of (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) CPTED is that it only deals with the immediate crimes but never removes the root causes of the crime. However, the contrary of this criticism can be perfectly applied to CPSD, since it can hardly prove its functionality or effectiveness on immediate crimes. Schneider also admitted this criticisms of CPSD and acknowledged that it is hard to measure the effects of early interventions on later criminality, and some of CPSD strategies do not appear to work at all. Therefore, maybe it is more reasonable to say that CPSD appears to be effective in reducing high-risk children and youth’s misbehavior and disorder, and this positive influence may reduce the possibility for them becoming potential criminals, however, creditable and convincing evaluations are