Flipping on the porch light before bed feels like one of the simplest home-security habits imaginable. A brightly lit entrance should make a burglar think twice, right? Research does support lighting as one component of crime prevention, but it doesn’t prove that leaving a single porch light on all night automatically protects an individual house from burglary. In fact, decades of research into outdoor lighting suggest that visibility, surveillance, neighborhood conditions, and the way lighting is used matter more than simply keeping a bulb burning from dusk until dawn. Before paying to illuminate your front steps every night, it helps to understand what the evidence actually tells us.
