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Concept
Environmental criminology
Summary
Environmental criminology focuses on criminal patterns within particular built environments and analyzes the impacts of these external variables on people's cognitive behavior. It forms a part of criminology's Positivist School in that it applies the scientific method to examine the society that causes crime.
Environmental criminology is the study of crime, criminality, and victimization as they relate, first, to particular places, and secondly, to the way that individuals and organizations shape their activities spatially, and in so doing are in turn influenced by place-based or spatial factors.
In 1971, C. Ray Jeffery published "Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design", in which he examined the role that immediate environments play in crime and suggested a range of strategies for reducing crime by modifying immediate environments. He also coined the term "environmental criminology".
Within fifteen years of the publication of Jeffery’s book, most of the seminal approaches of environmental criminology had appeared, with later developments largely building on these foundations.
One such environmental criminology approach was developed in the 1980s, by Paul and Patricia Brantingham, putting focus of criminological study on environmental or context factors that can influence criminal activity. These include space (geography), time, law, offender, and target or victim. These five components are a necessary and sufficient condition, for without one, the other four, even together, will not constitute a criminal incident. Despite the obvious multi-faceted nature of crime, scholars and practitioners often attempt to study them separately. For instance, lawyers and political scientists focus on the legal dimension; sociologists, psychologists and civil rights groups generally look to the offenders and victims, while geographers concentrate upon the location of the event. Environmental criminologists examine the place and the time when the crime happened.
Official source
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