The Dictionary of Human Geography

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crime The geographical study of crime seeks

to: explain the spatial clustering of criminal

behaviour; consider how the construction

and monitoring of spaces might reduce the

incidence of criminality; and explain how

wider social and political dynamics shape the

fear of crime and societal responses to it.

Like many other social phenomena, crim-

inal behaviour is unevenly distributed. Much

work ingeographyattempts to account for

this variation, typically by elaborating the

demographic characteristics and common

social patterns in places where crime is con-

centrated. Often taking inspiration from the

‘social disorganization’ theory developed by

chicago schoolsociologists, these accounts

take aim at several factors arguably common

to places characterized by concentrated disad-

vantage: the comparative lack of economic

opportunity, the likelihood of high residential

mobility, the high percentage of single-parent

households, and the general cultural accept-

ance of crime (Smith, S.J., 1986a; Sampson,

Raudenbush and Earl, 1997). Some geo-

graphical work focuses more on the common

practices of criminal offenders, and how their

time–space patterns make opportunities for

crime more or less available to them

(Rengert, 1997). A related, and highly popu-

lar, criminology of place concentrates on the

alleged effects of so-called ‘broken windows’

as incubators of crime. Places where broken

windows are not fixed signify a lack of infor-

mal social control that invites the criminally

minded into their midst (Wilson and Kelling,

1982; for a critique, see Harcourt, 2001). In

recent years, the geographical clustering of

crime has been mapped by police departments

usinggeographic information systems(gis)

technologies: these help isolate ‘hot spots’ of

criminality for targeted enforcement.

For some, this clustering of ‘hot spots’ is

connected to the built environment. Various

related approaches – ‘situational crime pre-

vention’, ‘defensible space’, ‘environmental

criminology’ – suggest that crime’s geograph-

ies are significantly a consequence of whether

spaces deter crime through effective defen-

sibility andsurveillance. Places can thus be

constructed to repel crime if they make entry

difficult or monitoring easy. Such monitoring

takes conspicuous form in the UK, and

increasingly in other places, through closed-

circuit television (CCTV) units that monitor

much of public space (Fyfe and Bannister,

1998). These surveillance practices ostensibly

reduce criminality by increasing the threat

of capture.

Other work in the geography of crime

focuses on how crime is commonly con-

structed, socially and politically. There is

now, for instance, an extensive literature on

the fear of crime, and its variation across social

groups and across space (see Koskela and

Pain, 2000). Such fear is more prevalent

amongst the elderly and amongst females,

especially when they are in unfamiliar public

places. Fear of crime is also a political

construct, used as a means to legitimate ‘get

tough’ policies for reducing crime. These

political processes are sometimes tied to the

wider practices ofneo-liberalism, through

which welfarist approaches to social problems

are delegitimized, in favour of policies that

emphasize social control. skh

Suggested reading

Smith, S.J. (1986a).

crisis A potentially complete failure in the

reproduction of systemic relations. The term

appears in multiplediscourses, being used to

describe threatened failures in the reproduc-

tion of socio-economic structures, political

institutions, representational conventions, eco-

logical systems and more. Its connotations are

largely negative: describing the failure to repro-

duce relations as a crisis carries some implica-

tion that continuity in those relations is

desirable or necessary. Crises of social relations

are often viewed as having positive aspects

as well, though, inasmuch as they present win-

dows of opportunity for progressive change.

Relevant work inhuman geographyhas

focused mainly on crises of capitalism.

Human geographers influenced byhistorical

materialism have viewed capitalism as a

socio-economic system whose internal contra-

dictions make it inherently unstable and prone

to periodic crises that lead to the reconfigur-

ation and greater socialization of relations of

production and reproduction. Such a trajec-

tory ultimately calls into question the repro-

duction of capitalism itself, making this

perspective fundamentally different from more

mainstream accounts of the ‘business cycle’.

Briefly, capitalism is prone to crisis because

its endogenous dynamics frequently and char-

acteristically produce situations in which:

(i) workers, collectively, cannot afford to buy

the commoditiesthey produce (a crisis of

underconsumption); (ii) more commodities

are produced than can be absorbed by all

available purchasing power (a crisis of over-

production); (iii) capitalists accumulate

more capital than they can invest in profitable

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CRIME