Retrofit design for preventing theft on the university campus

No other crime affects more students, faculty, and staff on the university campus than theft. While it is common for campus officials and community members to implement anti-theft strategies, few of these efforts are ever examined empirically, let alone experimentally, making it difficult to rule out alternative explanations for any changes observed. The present study employed a completely randomized experimental design to test the effect of retrofit anti-theft solutions proposed by the situational crime prevention, design against crime, and broken windows literatures. Fifty-two classrooms were randomly assigned to receive either five dry erase markers made to appear old and used or five unaltered dry erase markers. Results show that old and used appearing targets were approximately 36% more likely to remain in the classrooms at the end of the exposure period compared to those not receiving the treatment.