Crime

Crime represents a significant and complex regeneration challenge – it wrecks lives, blights communities, limits opportunity and imposes costs on us all. Home Office estimates put the cost of crime (conservatively) at around £60 billion a year to the taxpayer and an estimated £19 billion to businesses.

There is a close correlation between areas of high deprivation and those experiencing the worst levels of crime and disorder. The factors contributing to an individual becoming a criminal include social deprivation, school failure, inadequate training, worklessness and inferior housing and urban environments. Drug and alcohol misuse also correlate strongly with criminality.

The ten projects in the crime theme have sought to tackle the social and environmental issues surrounding crime and its consequences. Individual projects have contributed to solving problems of worklessness amongst offenders, helped excluded pupils to develop their social and emotional competencies, deterred young people from crime, improved community safety and supported organisations dealing with alcohol abuse and domestic violence. This work has been done by developing training packages, organising

workshops and carrying out bespoke research and evaluation projects.

Our projects have:

  • Helped voluntary organisations to access funding,
  • Become a source of research and information provision for public sector organisations,
  • Developed training tools to help individuals overcome challenges and
  • Evaluated innovative crime reduction interventions.
     

Through partnering with local organisations the projects have demonstrated that universities have a unique role to play in helping communities to combat crime.

We are now able to use the experience, understanding and research developed through the crime theme projects to inform local, regional and national policy development.