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.

没有比盗窃更能影响大学校园内学生、教职员工的犯罪了。虽然校园官员和社区成员实施防盗策略是很常见的，但这些努力很少经过实证检验，更不用说实验检验了，因此很难排除对观察到的任何变化的其他解释。本研究采用完全随机的实验设计来测试情景犯罪预防、犯罪设计和破窗文献提出的改造防盗解决方案的效果。五十二间教室被随机分配接受五个干擦标记，使其看起来很旧和使用过，或者五个未改变的干擦标记。