Thanks for your contributions; further discussion.

The main point of your post seems to be that we don't currently have a social technology capable of preventing crime, so any space colony would have to rely on the technologies we use now. That's a perfectly valid point. I have discovered a set of technologies that I think would be a big advance, but they are not yet in wide use.

You also mentioned that how the victims of a crime react to it relates to how that criminal gets handled by the justice system. That is also a valid point, and a rough one to overcome (if you want to try to rehabilitate criminals rather than get rid of them). Most "modern" justice systems exist, essentially, to prevent the innocent from being punished. This has been seen as a needful function due to the often-observed fact that a criminal will try to shift the blame for his acts to others. Most systems, though, have no workable means of rehabilitating those found guilty. They weren't even set up to do that. Thus, most justice systems still punish those found guilty of crimes, which is an ancient practice.

My main point is: Can a space colony survive if its social technologies are no better than what we use on earth today? Though it is true that earth has so far "survived," I don't see its condition as improving, and that condition seems a good deal below the level that would be acceptable in a small (by comparison) space colony. Therefore, a needful part of the design process would include a choice of its social technologies, or the development of new ones if existing ones tested out as unworkable.

Janet implied that what might be required is a certain amount of contribution from the religious sector to create a group strong enough to survive in space for the long haul.

And that is, in fact, where the technologies I discovered come from. However, technologies seen as religious in nature have traditionally been neglected by the academic social scientists. Some technologies, including the ones I have discovered, have such strong opponents that they cannot even get a fair airing on the internet or in the media. I would argue that at least some of those enemies are, themselves, criminals, and are opposed to some of the newer social technologies because those technologies would tend to close some of the "holes" in our current system that help keep many criminal operations going.

My use of the term "hard core" needs some explanation. Of course that would include the types of crimes generally categorized as felonies that are very serious and destructive and almost always involve human victims. But it would also include the "drug kingpins" of the world, and other persons of that sort. These sorts of criminals seldom get apprehended because they make it a practice of acting through others. Though their intentions are vicious, they may appear to be upstanding citizens in their communities. Quite ordinarily, the financing for large criminal operations flow through persons of this type. Historic examples include the slave trade and the opium trade. These both started as "legitimate" enterprises, although obviously they were morally unsound. But even after they were made illegal, certain big financial players stayed involved. This is the kind of "hard core" criminal that the new technologies attempt to locate and isolate. You can't trace them to dead bodies. Their underlings do all that work and are in turn murdered if they talk.

I am almost out of steam and time for this post. Let me very briefly list the technologies that would be needful:
1) A moral technology to establish basic agreements in a group about right and wrong. This would include what we now call "human rights."
2) A technology to make a person literate.
3) A technology to make, or keep, a person addiction-free.
4) A technology to rehabilitate persons who have committed crimes.
5) A technology to identify and isolate "hard core" criminals. There should also be a means of rehabilitation, though it is unlikely that most groups would ever trust such people to honestly reform.

The people handled by technology #5 prey on the people handled by technologies 1-4. That's why all five are useful. This list only includes the most critically-needed social technologies to help a group survive. Others that serve other purposes exist or could be developed, but the focus of my post was crime, and these 5 address that subject specifically.