Critique on “Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn’t, What’s Promising”
The article “Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn’t, What’s Promising” by Lawrence W. Sherman and other authors has been drawn in 1998. Originally it was prepared as a report to Congress, which has been presented as a research paper. The research focuses on the prevention programs and their effectiveness and states that it has significant positive correlation with the level of focus and specification. The authors believe that crime prevention will be efficient if it is focused on the districts of poverty and violence
The article is long and has a complex structure, including the general overview of the topic, strong and weak points of scientific method utilization in crime prevention, elaboration on research methods and explanation, which programs are working and which are not on the specific levels.I believe that this article has a certain importance for the area of criminal justice since it presents suggestions and robust critique on certain methods being practically applied at different levels. The strong point is the presence of scientific justification of the conducted analysis, which adds academic rigor and credibility. The authors are clear that empirical studies exclusively are not giving significant coverage of the topic. The presence of programs which are promising and which effects are unknown also demonstrates that authors did not have a confirmation bias in their study and remained open to some uncertainty.
However, the article has some weak points too. For me, it was the generalization about why did the authors have particular results in different settings. The clear explanation and summary of the general patterns of crime prevention programs could have made this article more reader-friendly.
To sum it up, the article has relevant suggestions for further research work in the areas of crime prevention, however, it has to be actualized and requires more empirical support in the modern …
