Civil Remedies and Crime Prevention: an Introduction

Civil remedies are procedures and sanctions, specified by civil statutes and regulations, used to prevent or reduce criminal problems and incivilities. Civil remedies generally aim to persuade or coerce nonoffending third parties to take responsibility and action to prevent or end criminal or nuisance behavior. Early examples of civil remedy approaches typically targeted non-offending third parties (e.g., landlords, property owners) and used nuisance and drug abatement statutes to control problems. The penalties of these abatement statutes included repair requirements, fines, padlocks/closing, and property forfeiture, and sought to make owners and landlords maintain drugand nuisance-free properties. In recent years, the scope of civil remedies has expanded beyond non-offending third parties to specifically and directly target offending parties such as batterers, gangs, and delinquent youths. Civil remedies that directly target offenders (e.g., restraining orders, injunctions against loitering and gang member congregations) are oftentimes intermediate steps ultimately enforced by criminal sanctions (arrest, prosecution and incarceration of offenders). Growth in the use of civil remedies as a crime control tactic is attributable to several factors. First, increasing use of civil remedies came at a time when communities and law enforcement officials recognized that criminal remedies were neither effective nor desirable for a wide range