Citizen involvement in community-based crime prevention represents the greatest challenge in terms of encouraging, gaining, and channeling citizen interest and action, as well as the greatest potential for combating crime and deviance in society in a manner most conducive to protecting society and rehabilitating the offender. Moreover, where citizen groups, private industry, and even private citizens have attacked the problem of crime prevention, rehabilitation, and basic social conditions leading to deviant behavior, the results of their efforts have been, almost without exception, startlingly better than those of the formal criminal justice system. For example, a job training–job placement program conducted by the Singer Company in New York for convicted offenders, although of modest proportions, resulted in a job placement rate of 89 percent among probationers, with job retention of 86 percent. The rate of recidivism among these probationers was, as of December 20, 1972, only 2.6 percent. The Indianapolis Anti-Crime Crusade, which is engaged in a multitude of crime prevention activities, has marshaled the efforts of over 60,000 participants. In one area alone—that of school dropouts—the crusade estimates it has returned over 2,000 youths to school.
Few if any communities, however, have been able to construct programs which systematically, yet pragmatically, mesh community resources with those of the formal criminal justice system. Moreover, the problem of mobilizing community resources entails a multiplicity of social, political, and economic retardants which so compound the problem that often a unified approach is avoided in favor of ad hoc and piece-meal reaction to crisis. Another unfortunate fact of life concerns the real interest with which citizens view crime and crime prevention. The individual who works in a high prestige (and thus, highly protected) professional environment, whose children attend schools in cloistered high value neighborhoods, and whose social life is centered in a secluded suburban setting will probably not exhibit the same precise degree of concern about crime as the ghetto family, the lower-working-class family, and inner-city transient area residents.
Interest in specific areas of criminality will also vary drastically. One neighborhood may fear high drug trafficking and related crimes; another, muggings; businessmen may be more concerned with shoplifting and industrial espionage; and housewives, with child molesting and rape. Therefore, broad appeals to crime prevention will mean different things to different people.
