British Journal of Criminology Advance Access originally published online on April 8, 2004
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The British Journal of Criminology 44:448-467 (2004)
British Journal of Criminology 44(3) © the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD) 2004; all rights reserved
RESEARCH NOTE |
Measuring the Effects of Improved Street Lighting on Crime
A Reply to Dr Marchant1
* David P. Farrington, Institute of Criminology, Cambridge University; Brandon C. Welsh, Department of Criminal Justice, University of Massachusetts Lowell.
We consider Dr Marchant's criticisms of our systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of improved street lighting on crime. We conclude that the Birmingham, Bristol and Dudley evaluations did provide evidence that improved lighting caused a decrease in crime. We also find that the conclusions of our meta-analysis hold up, even if we greatly increase the variance of our effect size measure. We conclude that existing evaluations of the highest methodological quality, when analysed together, show that improved lighting, on average, caused a significant 20-per-cent decrease in crime in experimental areas compared with comparable control areas.