Changing concept of security:a design perspective

The decline of “penal welfarism” is significant along with the shift from the change occurring in rehabilitative to punitive ideals in criminal justice politics. The end of a system of rehabilitation and social reintegration as the ultimate reason for punishment also has given rise to different trends in crimes. The traditional welfarist picture of the delinquent as a disadvantaged, needy person who acts from necessity stands disappeared in the public view. Instead, the new crime control has been supported by stereotypes of professional criminals as members of organised crime networks and terrorist cells.

This shift from a welfarist to a punitive form of criminal justice has been supported by a collective popular demand for general protection in the name of potential victims. Criminal justice politics stands shifted toward issues of risk management and crime prevention, thus entailing a shift in criminological thinking from topics like anomie, relative deprivation, sub-cultural theory, and labelling to a more pragmatic approach of crime control. Crime was formerly thought to be committed by individuals who lacked education, employment and intelligence. The picture stands changed and now we see criminals as rational actors who lack social, situational and self-control – a picture that reminds us of Thomas Hobbes’ dark concept of natural characters as evil wolves that tend to exhibit anti-social, selfish and criminal behaviour as soon as they are left alone. In this situation, security can be guaranteed only through a complex system of institutional and formal control.

Strategies of crime control now focus on “criminogenic situations” that offer crime opportunities for crime to anyone who can be tempted. For almost a century, criminal dispositions of individuals were at the heart of preventive action, whereas in recent years, the study of criminality as a personal trait lost the race against research studying crime events. Furthermore, crime prevention has been extended from an exclusive task for criminal justice institutions (police, courts, prisons and probation services) to a multitude of civil institutions, including private security guards and a range of law enforcement agencies who manage public order.

At the same time, modern industrial societies are creating many new risks that were unknown earlier. New threats like nuclear war and industrial pollution have emerged as secondary and unintended consequences of modernity. Other than natural risks such as floods, earthquakes and floods in earlier times, modern risks are manufactured by humans themselves. These changes have broadened the security agenda and it led to large volumes of research and development in the field of security management.

The security agenda has now reached beyond national military threats, and a recognition has arisen that economic, societal, environmental and health problems pose significant security burdens. The traditional focus of security was upon the nation state and the protection of territory and human security made the protection of individuals as its primary purpose. This type of security is generally overseen by political, social, environmental, economic and cultural agendas which are designed collectively to furnish the building blocks of survival, livelihood and dignity.

Making social or economic policy in the name of security may be a way of enhancing its priority and attracting more resources but potentially it has a distorting effect, captured by the term ‘securitization.’ Societies that experience considerable levels of crime and fear of crime, have already adapted to this development, whereas societies subjected to low crime rates and moderate fears have managed to keep crime prevention issues separate from policy programmes covering youth welfare, migration, housing and urban and environmental redevelopment.

Risks and fears that emerge with massive migrations, financial crises and religious fundamentalism nurture these developments of securitization in all societies. As a consequence, security has become a holistic concept now tackled by governments and also by the industrial and service sectors in a variety of economic fields. Security has become a major commodity and subject for research and development within its own industry. This trend caused a paradigm shift in the field of crime prevention from social prevention and social support for law abiding behaviour to situational prevention and the reduction of opportunities for offending.

The possibility of accumulating the first food surplus in the course of the agricultural revolution of the Neolithic era (around 9000 BC) brought extraordinary implications for human development. The transformation from nomadic life to settlements required people to develop ways to protect surplus production and property from weather, insects, and predatory humans. Since then, defensive designs can be found in many forms and shapes, beginning with the fortification of Jericho around 7000 BC.

Defensive structures such as the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall, the walls surrounding Constantinople, and finally modern defensive measures such as the Maginot Line, the Iron Curtain, and the Berlin Wall reveal the close link between architecture and some form of physical protection against predatory attacks. In addition, the construction of city walls, citadels, and castles in the middle ages protected residences and also were linked strongly to community organisation and land economics. The gradual formation of nation-states caused a transition from fairly isolated centres of power to territories that shared borders.

The political transformation from empires to democratic nation-states in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries caused defensive design to lose popularity as security became an administrative concept involving diplomacy and state politics. As a result of economic globalisation and world-wide migration, the standard model of the nation-state deteriorated.

The decline of international threats exerted more pressure on governments to develop security concepts within the states and understand security in terms of individual needs and public safety. Conventional defensive design became obsolete, and the need for defensive measures such as armed borders and city fortifications disappeared.

The crime-design nexus has taken a new shape under contemporary conditions of security threats. Defensive design lost its international scope and it stood relegated to reducing opportunities for property crimes, vandalism, and social disorder. Efforts to control crime should thus focus on reducing the occasions and opportunities for crime events rather than trying to change criminal dispositions.

Under the influence of the natural human sciences, mainly biology, medicine, and psychology, crime stands conceptualised as “criminality” – a characteristic of individuals rather than an event. Hence, we can speak of a re-emergence of defensive design in a new shape: a set of recipes for steering and channelling behaviour in ways to manipulate opportunity structures for motivated offenders.

The special field of environmental criminology has developed in two directions. The first focus is on crime science and methods for studying the geography of crime using geographic information systems (GIS). Crime mapping has been established as a highly specialised field of research employing spatial statistics to study artificial neural networks, space syntax, and other applications for analysis. The focus is now on industrial production and the design of urban environment, architecture, and products against crime.

Instead of conceiving crime in terms of socio-pathologies of offenders, the rational choice perspective takes the view that crimes are purposive and deliberate acts committed with the intention of benefiting an offender, who balances costs and benefits in a rational decision process before an offense.

Target hardening is considered a creative and clever job for landscape designers, urban planners, architects, interior designers, and product designers. Bank robbery, for example, can be prevented when this kind of psychology of space is taken into account: An offender wants to explore a situation in anonymity before committing an offense. He is less obvious when standing at a bus stop in front of a bank. He wants to see who is inside the bank (usually robbers avoid contact with children). He wants to escape quickly (different if the cash counters are at the far end of the room) and leave the side street which may help him or hamper his flight.

The prevention of property crimes in public or private spaces have become more complex along with other factors such as infrastructures as social magnets, demographic composition, social conflicts, more or less reliable social control mechanisms through neighbourhood or presence of strangers at a scene, anonymity and non-involvement which are added factors.

More distant explanations for crime in a society (sub-cultural, social dis-organisation, demographic and socio-economic change, and social strains) are ignored because the solutions to the causes of crime seem unachievable to security mangers. Therefore, practitioners who follow this stream of policies also walk on thin ice between “designing out” crime and “crowding out” troublesome people.

Alternatively, concepts in design-led crime prevention may develop in a different way by considering social dynamics and socio spatial structures in urban development that respond to crime and insecurity in compliance with a sociological analysis of spatial situations.

Social trends have consequence for urban structures that again affect opportunities for crime. These side effects often remain unnoticed in both the theory and practice of environment criminology. Three of the many social areas where developments are significant for opportunity structures of crimes are:

Consumerism education women in the labour market: There may be other social developments in the employment sector that point to a revision of this trend. For example, changes in work regulations that allow work to be completed from home may give employees more flexibility, and this may disturb the regularity and rearrange the social construction of routine activities. In other words, the concept of defensive design has been modified to capture the psychology of situations and the sociology of space.

Explanation for crime and deviance are found in migration, segregation, and social disruption. Delinquency is not a pathological factor of the individual, but a consequence of spatially patterned social circumstances that construct the environment. Urban space is a social construction and subject to influence from a number of institutions, cultural traditions, structures, habits, and social interactions.

Physical space shapes social interaction and social interaction shape the physical structure in a city. Space is not considered a pre-social entity; it is a social phenomenon that become manifest in spatial realities that reflect onto society. Space should be analysed as a construct of social activities and the effects of spatial configurations on social activities. For example, a church is both a religious structure and a place that guides social behaviour. A church is a symbol and a cultural product on the one hand and a place of silence on the other. The same dialectic principle applies to schools, transportation facilities, sports centers, and public places in cities.

The construction of walls, citadels, and defensive edges was meant to protect the territories of empires, kingdoms, city-states, and aristocratic private properties. Border checkpoints in the nineteenth and twentieth century were meant to protect territories of states.

The shift to protect individuals within countries is a consequence of a transfer of security from national level to individual level that caused a dispersion of accountability for public safety and the phenomena has turned into a multi-disciplinary effort that triggers an influx of industrial production for target hardening for private properties.

(The writer is an advocate and is currently working as an associate with Azim-ud-Din Law Associates. To see author’s other areas of interest visit Zafars Blog on International Studies

http://blogoninternationalstudy.blogspot.com/)