Guilt, Shame and Situational Crime Prevention

This paper builds on Clarke and Homel's (in press) expansion of the situational crime prevention model, which includes new techniques for making the potential offender feel guilty or ashamed about their contemplated crime. In place of Clarke and Homel's single category of "inducing guilt or shame," two separate categories involving the manipulation of internal controls (guilt) and social controls (including shame) are proposed. The addition of these categories expands the repertoire of available crime prevention techniques by giving fuller recognition to the subtleties and complexities of the motivations to commit crime implicit in the rational choice perspective. It is argued that the new strategies also "soften" the narrow, target-hardening image of the situational approach, and may help researchers avoid counterproductive situational crime prevention effects. In a recent revision of Clarke's (1992) classification of situational crime prevention techniques, Clarke and Homel (in press) have proposed the inclusion of additional strategies which "incorporate the threat of feeling guilty when contemplating a morally-wrong act and the fear of shame and embarrassment arising from the disapproval expressed by significant others when offending is revealed." Clarke and Homel have argued that the 12 categories of techniques included in the existing classification relied largely (though not entirely) on manipulations of physical costs and benefits. However, they pointed out, one of the main reasons people obey laws is their moral commitment to the legal code; law violation would generate significant psychological and social discomfiture. While it has been usual in criminology to think of moral commitment in developmental and dispositional terms (i.e., the product of early socialization), whether Address correspondence to: Richard Wortley, School of Justice Administration. Griffith University, Brisbane 4111, Australia.