Mapping the Framework onto Prevention Typologies

This article applies the theorem-driven framework developed in Crime as a Mediated, Gated, and Path-Dependent System to major crime-prevention typologies. It argues that prevention categories are not analytically interchangeable because they primarily target different levels of the crime process: criminogenic exposure, social mediation, gated realization, and temporal persistence. Situational, social, primary, secondary, tertiary, general, and individual prevention are mapped onto these processual domains. On that basis, the article develops the concepts of prevention fit and prevention misalignment. Prevention may underperform not only because an intervention is intrinsically weak or poorly implemented, but because its operative mechanism is directed at a different processual level from the one at which the crime problem is generated, sustained, or reproduced. The article distinguishes processual misalignment from design failure and implementation failure, and clarifies how established criminological theories can be read as illuminating different parts of a shared crime-process architecture. Its contribution is therefore not another prevention typology, but a process-sensitive framework for analysing intervention mechanisms, prevention failure, and the relationship between crime theory and preventive action. This article constitutes the first major prevention-theoretical extension of the Theorem-Driven Crime Process Research Programme.