Can a gene be inactivated using CRISPR if it is not in the interspace of short palindromic repeats?
When people talk about genome editing with CRISPR, they are really talking about using CRISPR associated nucleases like Cas9 and Cpf1. These nucleases are useful since their sequence specificity is determined by a guide RNA and they can therefore be used to cut at specific sites in the genome. This actually has nothing to do with the repeats themselves.

See this answer for a brief overview of how genome editing with Cas9 works.