Crime prevention through environmental design
Crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) is an agenda for manipulating the built environment to create safer neighborhoods.
Architect Oscar Newman created the concept of "defensible space", developed further by criminologist C. Ray Jeffery, who coined the term CPTED.
The growing interest in environmental criminology led to a detailed study of specific topics such as natural surveillance, access control, and territoriality.
The "broken window" principle, that neglected zones invite crime, reinforced the need for good property maintenance to assert visible ownership of space.
Wide-ranging recommendations to architects include planting trees and shrubs, eliminating escape routes, correcting the use of lighting, and encouraging pedestrian and bicycle traffic in streets.
Newman's CPTED-improved defensible space approach enjoyed broader success and resulted in a reexamination of Jeffery's work.
In 2012, Woodbridge introduced and developed CPTED in prison and showed how design flaws allowed criminals to keep offending.
In the 1960s, Elizabeth Wood developed guidelines for addressing security issues while working with the Chicago Housing Authority, emphasizing design features that would support natural survivability.
She was challenging the basic tenets of urban planning of the time: that neighborhoods should be isolated from each other, that an empty street is safer than a crowded one, and that the car represents progress over the pedestrian.
An editor for Architectural Forum magazine (1952–1964), she had no formal training in urban planning, but her work emerged as a founding text for a new way of seeing cities.
She felt that the way cities were being designed and built meant that the general public could not develop the social framework needed for effective self-policing.
In Death and Life, Jacobs listed the three attributes needed to make a city street safe: a clear distinction between private and public space; diversity of use; and a high level of pedestrian use of the sidewalks.
In it, he states: "The physical environment can exert a direct influence on crime settings by delineating territories, reducing or increasing accessibility by the creation or elimination of boundaries and circulation networks, and by facilitating surveillance by the citizenry and the police."
Angel developed and published CPTED concepts in 1970 in work supported and widely distributed by the United States Department of Justice (Luedtke, 1970).
The phrase crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) was first used by C. Ray Jeffery, a criminologist from Florida State University.
An often overlooked contribution of Jeffery in his 1971 book is outlining four critical factors in crime prevention that have stood the test of time.
Concurrent with Jeffery's essentially theoretical work was Oscar Newman and George Rand's empirical study of the crime-environment connection conducted in the early 1970s.
This laid the foundation for Jeffery to develop a behavioral model to predict the effects of modifying both the external and internal environments of individual offenders.
From 1994 through 2002, Sparta Consulting Corporation, led by Severin Sorensen, CPP, managed the US Government's largest CPTED technical assistance and training program titled Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) in Public Housing Technical Assistance and Training Program, funded by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.
A curriculum was developed and trained for public and assisted housing stakeholders, and follow-up CPTED assessments were conducted at various sites.
By 2004[update], elements of the CPTED approach had gained wide international acceptance due to law enforcement efforts to embrace it.
In 2012, Woodbridge introduced and developed the concept of CPTED within a prison environment, a place where crime continues after conviction.
Woodbridge showed how prison design allowed offending to continue and introduced changes to reduce crime.
Target hardening strategies work within CPTED, delaying entry sufficiently to ensure a certainty of capture in the criminal mind.
Natural surveillance increases the perceived risk of attempting deviant actions by improving the visibility of potential offenders to the general public.
Natural territorial reinforcement uses buildings, fences, pavement, signs, lighting, and landscape to express ownership and define public, semi-public, and private spaces.
