Prevention or punishment, which is better alternative in ensuring citizen safety?

In my opinion, prevention is clearly the better alternative in ensuring citizen safety. After all, if crimes could be successfully prevented, no one would ever get hurt, and there would be no need for punishment. Punishment is what takes place when prevention fails, and is therefore rendered useless when prevention succeeds. Thus, to ensure citizen safety, the best place to start is with prevention. Although prevention is much harder to implement than punishment, there are still many ways crime could be prevented. For example, policing hot spots, areas of known criminal activity, will help to decrease the number of criminal events in those areas. Also, community policing efforts can be made to capture known criminals, and secondary prevention techniques can be put into use: focusing on at risk situations such as youth who re dropping out of school or getting involved in gangs. All of these measures can reduce crime, and in the future, could possibly even prevent crime.