Preventing Repeat Residential Burglary Victimization
This chapter reviews evaluations of the prevention of repeat residential burglary. These evaluations are a subset of the evaluations relating to the prevention of repeat victimization. The review methodology aims to follow that of the systematic review process proposed by the Campbell Collaboration, which has produced a series of recent reviews including, Farrington and Welsh (2002) and the set of reviews edited by Farrington and Welsh (2001). In keeping with that format, the authors acknowledge a possible interest: We have both previously worked on repeat victimization prevention efforts and elsewhere contended that preventing repeat victimization is a potentially attractive crime prevention strategy.
Putting process into routine activity theory: Variations in the control of crime opportunities
This article extends the basic tenets of routine activity theory by explicating three unique mechanisms that influence crime prevention actions: relationality, relativity and responsibility. We assess how macro variations in crime opportunities influence the social processes associated with readiness for three crime control actions: offender handling, target guarding and place managing. We explore the utility of these theoretical advancements using multilevel survey data from the Australian Community Capacity Study that includes 4390 residents across 148 suburbs in the Greater City of Brisbane. Incorporating individual measures of perceptions of routine activity dynamics and community-level measures of social structure, we use multilevel mixed-effects ordinal logistic regression to explain variations in the three different crime control actions. We find moderate support that some social processes are more strongly paired with some types of crime control actions than others: relationality most strongly predicts offender handling, relativity is most significantly associated with target guarding, and responsibility is most influential for place managing. We argue that the routine activities of crime can be better understood by delineating the social processes of crime prevention, and that these should be modeled on a continuum and considered in context of community variations in social structures.
Size-selective neuronal changes in the anterior optic pathways suggest a differential susceptibility to injury in multiple sclerosis.
Axonal damage is found in both acute and chronic lesions of multiple sclerosis. Direct axon counting in post-mortem tissue has suggested that smaller axons might have a greater susceptibility to damage, but methodological limitations have precluded unequivocal interpretation. However, as neuronal and axonal sizes are linked and neuronal changes would be expected with retrograde or transsynaptic degeneration following axon injury, we hypothesized that an alternative strategy for studying this phenomenon would be to define multiple sclerosis-associated changes in neurones. To test this hypothesis, we measured both axonal loss and neuronal size changes in the anterior optic pathway [including the optic nerve (ON), optic tract (OT) and lateral geniculate nucleus] of the brains of eight patients who died with multiple sclerosis and in eight control brains. The ONs and OTs in brains from the multiple sclerosis patients showed a trend to smaller mean cross-sectional areas (ON, multiple sclerosis = 6.84 mm(2), controls = 9.25 mm(2); and OT, multiple sclerosis = 6.45 mm(2), controls = 7.94 mm(2), P = 0.08) and had reduced axonal densities (ON, multiple sclerosis = 1.1 x 10(5)/mm(2), controls = 1.7 x 10(5)/mm(2); and OT, multiple sclerosis = 1.4 x 10(5)/mm(2), controls = 1.8 x 10(5)/mm(2), P = 0.006). Estimated total axonal counts were reduced by 32 (OT)-45% (ON) in the patients relative to controls (ON, multiple sclerosis = 8.1 x 10(5) axons, controls = 14.8 x10(5), P = 0.05; and OT, multiple sclerosis = 9.1 x 10(5), controls = 13.3 x 10(5), P = 0.02). The size distributions of the magnocellular cells in the lateral geniculate nucleus were similar for the two groups, but in multiple sclerosis brains the parvocellular cells were significantly smaller (mean sizes: multiple sclerosis = 226 microm(2), controls = 230 microm(2), P < 0.001) and had a larger variation in size, suggesting a greater proportion of atrophic neurones. Axon loss in the optic nerves of multiple sclerosis patients correlated strongly with measures of increased dispersion of cell sizes in the parvocellular layer (r = 0.8, P < 0.04). These data demonstrate that both atrophy and decreased density contribute to the substantial axonal loss in the anterior visual pathway of these patients. This appears related to a relatively selective atrophy of the smaller neurones of the parvocellular layer in the lateral geniculate nucleus, supporting the hypothesis that smaller axons may be preferentially susceptible to injury in multiple sclerosis.