The Rational Actor (pt2)

Routine Activity theory

  • Routine Activity theory is part of the wider rational actor perspective within crim

    • Focus on offender decision making

    • Focus on the spatial and temporal aspects of criminal opportunity

    • Focus on crime prevention trough ‘situational’ and ‘environmental’ design

  • Perspective that emerged in response to the ‘crisis of aetiology’ (fancy word for knowing)

  • ‘Nothing works’

    • New deal and welfare state programmes had not impacted upon the crime rate (Not the social structure thats the problem)

    • Crisis of rehabilitation

  • 1960s criminology characterised by ‘idealism’ and ‘utopianism (perfect society)’

    • Desire for a ‘practical’ policy based criminology

  • Recognition that manipulating the environment is easier than manipulating human beings. It’s easier to change the environment than people.

Cohen & Felson (1979) — Routine Activities

  1. The risk of victimisation varies dependent on location and circumstances

  2. Changes in consumer goods correlate to changes in offending patterns

  3. Dispersal of human activity away from the home

  4. Changes to patterns of human routine activities

  • Macro focus on changes to routine activities

  • Micro focus on spatial and temporal aspects of routine activities

The ‘chemisty’ of crime

  1. A motivated offender

  2. A suitable target

  3. Lack of a capable Guardian

Burglary Matrix

  1. A motivated offender

  2. Increased consumerism, increased capital diversification, advances in technology

  3. Changes to family structure, changes in activity patterns

Environmental approaches

  • All forms of Environmental approaches assume a rational actor

  • Crime is the outcome of decisions that occur within specific spatial and temporal contexts

    • As crime is a sequence of events disrupting or altering such events impacts the likelihood of criminal outcomes

    • Changing situations is more efficient than changing motivators or individual dispositions

      1. Crime patten Theory

      2. Theory of defensible space

Crime Patten Theory

  • Expands on the spatial elements of Routine Activity Theory

    • Propose that crime results from the interaction of offenders and victims across space and time in the urban landscape

  • Crime types, offenders and targets are not systematically distributed

    • Crime clusters in hot spots

  • Offenders and non-offenders have an awareness of space

    1. Activity nodes

      • Where an individual spends their time

    2. Pathways

      • Routes that connect an individuals activity nodes

    3. Edges

      • The boundary of an individuals activity that can be both physical or perceptual

      • Cognitive maps explain why crime occurs when ad where it does

  • Certain places experience a disproportionate amount of crime — Hot spots

  • Places of crime generation

    • Places to which a large number of people are attracted

    • Creates new opportunities to offend

  • Places of crime attraction

    • Places which attract large numbers of offenders

    • Pre-existing criminal opportunities

Defensible spcace

  • Oscar Newman (1976)

  • Start of the crime prevention through environmental design movement

  • Altering the physical environment in line with the principles of Rational choice, routine activity and control theories

  1. Territorial

  2. Surveillance

  3. Image

  4. Environment

    • Environments that defend themselves and create defenders from their inhabitants

The Politics of Control

  • Nothing works

    • New deal and welfare state programmes had not impacted upon the crime rate

    • Crisis of rehabilitation

  • Emergence of right-wing governments in both the UK and US in the 1970s and 80s

    • Economic and moral political philosophy

  • UK Thatcherism emphasis on victorian values

    • End to supposed ‘permissiveness’

    • Assertion og authority, order and self-discipline

Right realism

  • Collection of interconnected theories and ideologies

  • Wilson ad Murray

  • Heavily influenced by control theory and rational actor criminology

  • Crime occurs when opportunity is high and control is low

The underclass — Murray

  • A state of permissiveness

    • Breakdown of moral values

    • Wakening of institutional controls

  • Permissiveness is central to the rise of crime

  • Focus on inadequate socialisation and moral collapse

Traditional means of socialisation have been eroded:

  • Lack of role models combined with a breakdown in social conscience

  • Willingness to tolerate fecklessness and individuals willing to be feckless

  • Decline of the traditional family

  • Problem because ineffective childbearing connected to low self control

    • Those with low self control have parents who generally fail to monitor their behaviour

    • Are poor at recognising inappropriate behaviour

    • Do not punish such behaviour or do so only inconsistently

  • Individuals with low self control are at high risk of offending

    • More impulsive, risk seeking and selfish

    • Less likely to make correct cost/benefit analyses

Broken windows

Wilson and Kelling (1982)

  • Relationship between crime and disorder

  • Untended behaviour leads to a breakdown in community control

    • Visible signs of decay/disorder breed further decay/disorder

  • Crime is corrosive