The Structure of Prevention Misalignment

Weak, mixed, or unstable preventive outcomes are often interpreted as evidence of poor intervention design, weak implementation, inadequate resources, or general ineffectiveness. These explanations are important, but they do not exhaust the ways in which an intervention can diverge from the process it is intended to alter. This paper develops prevention misalignment as a claim-relative and structured diagnostic relation between a frozen Crime-Process Profile and a frozen Prevention-Mechanism Profile under declared contextual conditions. It specifies exactly eight primary forms of misalignment: process-level; mechanism; target-bearer; temporal; scale; intensity; feasibility and reproducibility; and evaluative misalignment. The framework distinguishes simple, partial, compensatory, compound, latent, dynamic, and local-with-system-level forms. It also provides the general definitions of translation-induced misalignment and portfolio misalignment while preserving their status as dependent forms rather than additional primary dimensions. The paper separates prevention misalignment from design failure, implementation failure, and non-effectiveness. Its diagnostic record preserves the location, direction, severity, evidence, uncertainty, stability classification, and claim consequences of the divergence. This is Paper 4 of 6 in the Prevention Fit Programme. Its output is the structured diagnosis inherited by portfolio analysis and later evaluation.