Criminality

Offender Behavior

With correctional populations at an all time high, the cost of maintaining the prison system has been breaking state budgets for years (Pew Center on the States, 2009). For example, the state of Kentucky was facing a $1.5 billion revenue shortfall in 2009 at the same time that it was being sued by its own counties for costs associated with jailing prison overflows. This growing fiscal crisis has been facing politicians, corrections officials, and criminologists for years with no easy solution in sight.

One possible solution to prison overcrowding is the widespread adoption of community- and problem-oriented policing (Maguire and King, 2004). These policing strategies identify locations that foster criminal activity and design interventions that change the environment in ways that discourage such activity; therefore, they are primarily preventive in nature. Common examples would be 'broken windows' and 'hotspot' policing. However, these policing strategies tend to ignore...
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