Community, security and distributive justice

Abstract

The past 10-15years have seen a drop in high-volume crimes in most industrial societies. This chapter treats crime as a distributive bad and crime prevention as a distributive good. Drawing on British Crime Survey data, it considers whether the crime drop has been associated with an improvement or deterioration in distributive justice in England and Wales. The analysis focuses on domestic burglary on the grounds that this is a high-volume crime to which almost all are vulnerable and which has been found to cause substantial material and emotional harm to victims. Domestic burglary has also been the target of substantial preventive attention. There is no consensus on the causes of the overall crime drop, although there is strong evidence that security measures have played a major part in reducing vehicle-related crime. There is also strong evidence that household security levels have increased, that variations are associated with other measures of advantage and disadvantage, and that differences in security help to explain variations in burglary risk. For these reasons, this chapter also considers trends in security level as well as burglary risk in terms of changes in distributive justice. Having discussed the trends in burglary and security in terms of distributive justice, this chapter turns to the remaining sources of distributive injustice in burglary risk and practical possibilities for addressing them.