Joshua D . Freilich John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) is a versatile approach that seeks to prevent criminal behavior by either implementing strategies to manipulate specific situations to make it impossible for the crime to be committed, or by reducing cues that increase a person’s motivation to commit a crime during specific types of events. SCP’s reach has expanded tremendously in recent years and the number of its techniques has increased from 12 to 25. Importantly, these techniques have been effectively applied to a variety of “new” crimes, such as identity theft, cyber crime, organized crime, and illegal migration, to name but a few. The prevalence of these new crimes has grown out of the new opportunities provided by globalization and the revolution in information technology (see Newman, this volume). This expansion continues to demonstrate the widely recognized practical relevance of SCP to solving crime problems. It also illustrates its unique ability as a theory of crime causation and control to understand the constantly changing environment of crime and the new opportunities for crime that emerge with these changes. It is little wonder, therefore, that SCP should