Polytechnic Education as a Strategy for Crime Prevention

Abstract

Knowledge is a cherished value that every society is not expected to trivialize. In the Bible, it was stated that people perish for lack of knowledge; in Islam, Prophet Muhammad instructed adherents to go in search of knowledge irrespective of the distance; in academics, if you don’t publish, you perish; in a common parlance, knowledge is power. One of the ways to acquire knowledge is through polytechnic education. There is a common parlance that prevention is better than cure. It is cheaper and safer to prevent crime than controlling, treating, and curing it. The paper interrogated the nexus between polytechnic education and crime prevention. The paper used secondary source of data and Frustration/Aggression theory as the theoretical framework. The study found that there are various strategies and types of crime prevention. These include: crime prevention through social development, crime prevention through environmental design, crime prevention through the role of the victim, punitive crime prevention, corrective crime prevention, and mechanical crime prevention. How does polytechnic as a citadel of learning constitute a strategy for crime prevention? The answer is not farfetched. Of all strategies and types of crime prevention, it is crime prevention through social development and corrective crime prevention that make polytechnic education a strategy for crime prevention. These two strategies or types of crime prevention advocated for the alleviation of causes of crime as the only sure way of preventing crime. They identified poverty, unemployment, and illiteracy as major causes of crime, and that the only way to prevent crime is to put up measures to reduce poverty, unemployment, and illiteracy. These are some of the major opportunities that polytechnic education provides as demonstrated in the study. The paper recommends that polytechnic education should be prioritized in order to prevent or reduce crime.