Crime prevention in Germany: Relevance of community crime prevention and victim-offender mediation : bachelor thesis

Crime is an ancient problem, which has always been and will be a trouble for every society. Punishment has been seen as a natural reaction for crime or delinquent behaviour; if it didn’t help to reach the desired outcome, even harsher punishment was inflicted upon the offenders. Even though punishment became harsher throughout the time, it didn’t deter offenders from committing a crime. Over the centuries, crime prevention strategies were based on deterrence theory; this theory relied on perceiving the threat of punishment which is so severe, that it would outweigh any potential profit from committing a crime. In the 21st century, deterrence theory is still the dominant approach to prevent crime. Nevertheless, it was shown that imprisonment is poor strategy for crime prevention. Not only it does not deter offenders from committing a crime, but in some cases, after release from prison, they tend to reoffend because they have a problem with reintegration into society. In addition to not being effective as a strategy for drop in crime rates, incarceration is also very costly sanction. In the past decades, these reasons have led criminologists to put in the foreground alternative ways to imprisonment, which would result in effective crime prevention. Two of such are victim-offender mediation as a method of restorative justice and community crime prevention, where the community is the object of interest which relies on participation of the citizens and tries to recognize potential of crime in the community early on.