- Annals

775031ANN research-article2018 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYREGULATING CRIME Regulating Crime: The Birth of the Idea, Its Nurture, and the Implications for Contemporary Criminology By RONALD V. CLARKE This volume’s contention that regulations have a powerful role in crime control contradicts the prevailing positivism of criminology—that is, the contention that criminality is largely explained by criminals’ past experiences. This article draws upon recent critiques of positivism and explains the implications for contemporary criminology. It begins by describing the ideas of a London magistrate, Patrick Colquhoun, about the determinants of crime and the best means of its control. Colquhoun’s writings were the first developed discussion of regulating crime, but they were soon eclipsed by positivist thinking. I list numerous weakness of positivism and argue that, instead of seeing offenders’ behavior as determined by their past, greater account should be taken of the situational inducements and opportunities to commit crime that they encounter in their everyday lives. Instead of positivism, the dominant model of criminology and crime control should be a neoclassicist, bounded rational choice model, which would introduce situational design and management changes to restrict offenders choices and modify behavior. That change in orientation would open limitless opportunities for criminologists. Keywords: Patrick Colquhoun; positivism; neoclassicism; crime control; regulating crime; crime opportunities T his volume’s central contention that regulations have a powerful role in controlling crime is at odds with most criminology. Despite this, it is supported by some important though often neglected writings about crime. This article Ronald V. Clarke is university professor at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice. He worked for 15 years in the British government’s criminological research department, the Home Office Research and Planning Unit. While there, he jointly developed the rational choice perspective on crime and helped to launch the British Crime Survey. He also led the team that originated situational crime prevention, and he is now considered to be the leading authority on that approach. In 2015 he was awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology. His current research focuses on wildlife crimes. Correspondence: [email protected] DOI: 10.1177/0002716218775031 20 ANNALS, AAPSS, 679, September 2018 21 REGULATING CRIME draws freely upon these writings with the intention of providing a coherent justification for the volume’s contention. It also explains the implications of these writings for contemporary criminology. The article proceeds in three parts. The first part describes the ideas of a London magistrate, Patrick Colquhoun (1795/1796), about the determinants of crime and the best means of its control, which consists of the first developed discussion of what might be called regulating crime. His ideas were ignored for more than 150 years because a consensus had developed among opinion leaders, policy-makers, and scholars, which to a considerable extent still holds today, that the problem of crime could be solved by the creation of an efficient police and criminal justice system, complemented by social measures to end poverty and other conditions of life that produced a predatory underclass. Wide recognition in the 1960s to 1980s of the failure of these policies led to a renewed focus on Colquhoun’s ideas. The second part of the article describes the various contributions arising from this new focus that have given substance to the volume’s central contention—that regulations have a powerful role in controlling crime. The third part lays out the implications for contemporary criminology. Patrick Colquhoun Colquhoun’s (1795/1796) Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis described in meticulous detail the vast variety of crimes in London (one of the most developed cities in the world at that time) that demanded preventive action. The Treatise is very lengthy, and my account of it here draws heavily on a précis provided by David Garland (1996), who had noted the fit between Colquhoun’s ideas and what Garland calls “the new criminologies of everyday life” (more generally known as crime opportunity theories). Garland’s broader purpose was to critique what he sees as the emerging “control” focus of UK government policy in the “late modern” era (i.e., the 1970s and onwards), which included substantial elements of opportunity reduction and which had supplanted what he calls the penal-welfare crime polices of the previous 150 years. In the course of his discussion of Colquhoun’s work, Garland establishes that the Treatise was not, as sometimes thought, an argument for creating a police force in London; rather, Colquhoun was “an advocate of a ‘system of police’ in its archaic, eighteenth-century sense; that is to say, of a well ordered system of regulation, inspection and restraint covering the entire social body and involving numerous governing agencies (both ‘public’ and ‘private’)” (Garland 1996, 464). Further, the Treatise argues that “increased crime is a consequence of increasing trade, increasing opulence and the multiplication of temptation and opportunity which these produce. [Colquhoun’s] analysis has nothing to do with individual abnormality or poor socialization, but instead focuses upon the new plenitude of ships … vessels … waggons … merchandise ... banknotes … money … this vast aggregate of floating wealth, exposed to depredation in ten thousand different ways” (Garland 1996, 464). 22 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY As Garland explains, Colquhoun’s view of the crime problem was accompanied by his view that in any metropolis there are always “various classes of individuals who live idly and support themselves by pursuits that are either criminal, illegal, dissolute, vicious or deprived” (Garland 1996, 485). Their lawbreaking was a rational response to their social and economic position. Consequently, Colquhoun proposed that regulation, inspection, guardianship, and design would substantially reduce the opportunities for crime and increase the risks of an offender being caught. Moreover, this was to be put in place, not by the state, but by “men of influence,” philanthropists; ale-house keepers; merchants; ship owners; the clergy; and magistrates in charge of business, commerce, and the city—in other words, by the institutions of civil society. Garland’s style in reporting on the Treatise is measured and impartial, which together with his undoubted erudition conveys an impression of authority and balance, but he is not in sympathy with the new policies of “control” that he recounts and describes. Even so, Garland’s précis of the Treatise conveniently captures themes that reemerged during the 1960s to 1980s—themes that underlie this volume’s central contention about the role of regulation in controlling crime. They include the ubiquity of crime and its vast variety; that crime is normal and nonpathological; that it is the easily understood response, especially of those who live by their wits, to profitable and easy crime opportunities; that it is best controlled, not by punishing offenders, but by regulating and controlling crime opportunities; that this cannot be done by the state, but must fall to the manifold agencies, public and private, that govern our everyday lives. These themes of the Treatise were complemented by other ideas and empirical relationships incorporated into the mix of thinking in the 1960s to 1980s that gives substance to the role of regulation in crime control. These developments are discussed in the next section. Growing Recognition in the Late Twentieth Century of the Central Role of Regulation in Crime Control This account of developments in thinking about crime and its control during the late twentieth century comprises a critique of the prevailing positivist paradigm of criminology. In brief, positivist criminologists believe that people’s criminality is determined by their past. They take no account of the powerful forces of the here and now that play such a large and pressing role in criminality—the situational inducements and opportunities to commit crime that they inescapably encounter in their everyday lives. This criticism of positivism is not limited to criminology. It holds more generally whenever positivist thinking seeks to explain success in the wide range of human endeavor—in homemaking, in bringing up children, in academia, in politics and public service, in the professions and the arts, and in business and financial matters. Success in all these arenas does partly depend on the individual’s past—genetic endowment, social class, education, and upbringing. But it also REGULATING CRIME 23 crucially depends on happenstance and serendipity—being in the right place at the right time, meeting particular people, coming under their influence, being allocated to a new position, discovering that position’s opportunities, even being dismissed and penalized, and all the other multitude of circumstances that we encounter in our daily lives. Positivists ignore the influence of this vast range of happenings, circumstances, and opportunities of the present that play such an important role in what we are. They believe these facts are of minor importance compared with the formative influences of the past. The critique here of positivist criminology identifies eight major failings of this view, identified by a variety of different scholars. These failings are not discussed in the order they were identified, but in one that best permits a coherent account. Their interpretation might not always reflect the intentions of the authors, many of whom would not have been aware of the other contributions discussed. Clearly, this personal and perhaps idiosyncratic approach carries dangers of subjectivity, but the resulting account is consistent with this volume’s editors’ introduction and is generally supported by other articles in this volume. The dissatisfaction felt by a small group of scholars, writing in the latter half of the twentieth century, with positivist criminology’s assumptions about the causes of crime, is summarized below under eight headings. 1. The “root” causes fallacy Most criminologists are found in the universities and colleges of the United States, and, to a large extent, modern criminology is an American discipline. The disciplinary origin of most of these criminologists is sociology, and it is fair to say that most of them are positivists. As explained above, positivists believe that people commit crimes as a result of forces beyond their control in their inheritance, their upbringing, or their position in society. They describe these forces as the “root” causes of crime. While they might acknowledge that situational opportunities help to determine the time and the place of crime, following Sutherland (1947; see below), they do not believe that such opportunities play an important part in causing crime to occur. Accordingly, they believe society should work to eliminate root causes and that their role as criminologists is to explain how these root causes achieve their effects, and how they might be modified. They do not believe that studying and attempting to modify situational opportunities would be productive for criminology or for society as a whole. As noted below, this consensus of beliefs is being challenged on many fronts, but it is still firmly held by the majority of criminologists. This consensus of positivist thought was questioned by criminologists beyond America’s shores with backgrounds in law and psychology, not sociology. An important step was taken by Barbara Wootton (1950), a London magistrate, and an influential penal theorist, in her brief discussion of the infinitely regressive nature of cause: The search for causal connections between associated phenomena simply resolves itself into a long process of “explaining” one association in terms of another. If a person 24 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY becomes ill with what are known as diabetic symptoms, we measure the sugar-content of his blood. If this is higher than that found in people not exhibiting such symptoms, we say that the high sugar content is the cause of the illness … this in turn is said to be “explained” by a failure of the pancreas to function normally.… And so on with one law of association following another. (Wootton 1950, 18) If causes are infinitely regressive, as Wootton argues, it cannot be determined which are “root” causes and which are not. Paul Ekblom’s (1994) distinction, made some years later between “near” and “far” causes of crime, delivered another fatal blow to the concept of root causes. “Far” causes would be the important “root” causes of criminology, but Ekblom persuasively argued that “near” causes, including opportunity, were more powerful determinants of crime, partly because the causal chain between them and crime was so much shorter and direct. 2. The dispositional bias Not only did the positivist criminology of the twentieth century place unwarranted reliance on root causes, but also, partly as a result, it labored under a “dispositional bias.” The most explicit statement of this bias was made by Edwin Sutherland, a sociologist, often described as the father of criminology. In the introduction to his influential textbook, Principles of Criminology (1947), he stated, “The problem in criminology is to explain the criminality of behavior, not the behavior, as such.… The situation operates in many ways, of which perhaps the least important is the provision of an opportunity for a criminal act” (Sutherland 1947, 4–5). This statement defined the proper object of criminological theorizing as criminality, a disposition, and not crime, which is a behavior, or rather, as Colquhoun documented, a huge, diverse array of behaviors. However, Sutherland’s view prevailed,1 which meant that to this day most of the discipline’s theories seek to explain why criminality develops, not why crimes occur. Sarbin and Miller (1970) forcefully criticized criminology for this dispositional bias, and Hirschi and Gottfredson (1986) sharpened the criticism through their distinction between “theories of criminality” and “theories of crime.” The criminological criticisms of “root causes” and of the discipline’s dispositional bias gained support from some important contributions made by social psychologists, principally by Kurt Lewin (1936). He famously defined the determinants of behavior as a function of both personality and the situation, a relationship he expressed in a deceptively simple formula: B = f(P, S). A shorthand translation into criminology might be that crimes are the result of an interaction between criminal dispositions and criminal opportunities. Because Lewin was not a sociologist, most criminologists would not have been familiar with his law of behavior, or if they were, they chose to ignore it. They seem to have believed that all that was necessary to explain crime was to explain criminal dispositions, which they somehow saw as leading directly to criminal behavior. Their failure to describe exactly how this might occur is almost REGULATING CRIME 25 unforgivable, even if they were guided by so eminent an authority as Sullivan. So why did they do this? The answer, once again, comes from social psychologists, such as Nisbett and Ross (1980), who built on Lewin’s work in a series of careful experiments in the 1970s to describe what they called the “fundamental attribution error” (Clarke 2016). This is the pervasive human habit of overstating the role of the person and underestimating the role of the situation in explaining people’s behavior. Ken Pease and Gloria Laycock (2012) have described a pernicious little wrinkle of the error—we do not apply it to our own behavior. As they explain, “We are happy to acknowledge situational determinants of our own peccadilloes. I am bad tempered because I slept badly. He is bad tempered because he is that sort of person” (2012, 178). 3. The denial of choice Because positivists believe that crime is the result of forces beyond the individual’s control, they deny that people choose to commit crime, though this is a central tenet of many theorists working outside the positivist paradigm, as Clarke and Cornish (1985) made clear when establishing the bona fides of their “rational choice perspective” on crime. Prime among the many “choice” theorists they identified were economists such as Gary Becker and Philip Cook, but they also mentioned work on target choices by “environmental” criminologists such as Brantingham and Brantingham, and Rengert and Wasilchick, and the reports of interviews undertaken by other criminologists, such as Waller and Okihiro, and Bennet and Wright, which showed extensive decision-making by burglars and other offenders. In addition, Clarke and Cornish (1985) cited sociological “naturalists” such as Howard Becker and David Matza, who reported that deviants frequently see their conduct as a rational and obvious response to the pressures and opportunities of their particular circumstances. Somewhat unexpectedly, Clarke and Cornish also cited the work of deviancy sociologists working in Britain during the 1970s, who subsequently proved to be highly critical of Clarke and Cornish’s brand of “administrative criminology” (see Mayhew 2016). In particular, Clarke and Cornish cited approvingly Taylor, Walton, and Young’s (1973) assertion that “a social theory must have reference to men’s teleology—their purposes, their beliefs and the context in which they act out these purposes and beliefs.… Thus, men rob banks because they believe they may enrich themselves, not because something biologically propels them through the door” (p. 61). The “rational choice perspective” is a “bounded” model of criminal decisionmaking (Simon 1983), which allows considerable variation in rationality due to the imperfect information available to offenders about choices and consequences, to their limits of information processing, to their frequent need for haste, to the habitual impairment of their thinking by alcohol and drugs, and so on. It is one of three principal theories of environmental criminology (Felson and Clarke 1998), but both the others (routine activity theory [E. Cohen and Felson 1979] and crime pattern theory [Brantingham and Brantingham 1993]) also subscribe implicitly to a bounded rational choice model. Marcus Felson, architect of 26 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY routine activity theory, neatly summarized the role of choice espoused by these theories: “People make choices, but they cannot choose the choices available to them” (Felson 1986, 119). 4. The indifference to opportunity Most of us recognize that chance has played an important part in our lives. For example, the author met his wife at a student dance in London, which he was reluctantly persuaded to attend by his usual Saturday-night drinking companions. In such a huge city, with thousands upon thousands of students attending dozens of higher education establishments, if he had not met her there, it is most unlikely that he would have met her on some future occasion. All of us could probably cite the effect of similar chance events on our lives. However, most of us are completely unaware of the omnipresent role of opportunity in structuring our everyday lives—understandably, because this fact rarely intrudes on us and it requires considerable effort to appreciate. But if one is engaged professionally in explaining human behavior, including crime, it is incumbent to understand this fact. However, positivist criminologists, intent on understanding the roots of criminality, have somehow defined out of consideration the abundant evidence on the causal role of opportunity in crime, assembled by environmental criminologists in the past few decades.2 For some unexplained reason, but one that is most likely related to their view of root causes, they do not regard opportunity as an important cause of crime. Personal experience suggests how easy it is to do this. In his first criminological study, the author, recently trained as a clinical psychologist, sought to explain why some youths absconded (i.e., ran away) from the training schools where they were sent by the courts. His approach, governed by positivist thinking, sought to uncover differences between the youths who absconded and those who did not. After three years of exhaustive research, he had found very little that differentiated the two groups, but by chance he found numerous strong relationships between absconding and situational variables of school regime and of opportunity. This led him to identify other evidence of situational influences on crime (Clarke 1967), but it was only later, when he came across Oscar Newman’s (1972) work on “defensible space” and C. Ray Jeffrey’s (1971) treatise on “crime prevention through environmental design,” both of which dealt extensively with situational and opportunity determinants of crime, that it dawned on him that positivism had led him to neglect the role of these situational causes. 5. The oversimplification of crime In an historical analysis of criminology for his “Sutherland Award” speech at the American Society of Criminology, Frank Cullen (2011) excoriated the discipline for its narrow focus on “adolescent limited criminology”—in other words, for its preoccupation with street crimes committed by youths from deprived backgrounds. REGULATING CRIME 27 Cullen is a redoubtable positivist with a background in sociology. Significant as his speech was, it was less an argument for a broader definition of crime than a call for examining a wider range of causes of criminality. In the course of his lecture he generously praised the theoretical contributions of environmental criminologists, but he did not mention Colquhoun’s Treatise. Nor did he mention the several editions of Marcus Felson’s Crime in Everyday Life (2002), which can be regarded as a modern statement and amplification of Colquhoun. Had he paid more attention to these works, he might have been even more critical of criminology’s oversimplification of crime and the all-too-common practice when researching root causes to define the dependent variable simply as “crime” or “delinquency” (meaning “criminality” in both cases). Even when finer distinctions between different forms of crime are made (e.g., white-collar crimes, organized crime, violent crime, sexual offences, terrorism, transit crime, auto crime, etc.), the vast differences between the crimes subsumed under each category are usually disregarded, and collectively, these categorizations contribute to the neglect of the multitude of specific types of crime occurring in everyday life. Each of these is the product of its own opportunity structure, committed by its own group of offenders with their particular skills, knowledge, and motives. In the face of this complexity, environmental criminologists have adopted a crime-specific focus for their studies. Thus, instead of studying “auto crimes,” they separately study, for example, breaking into cars to steal items left inside, stealing radios and other fittings from cars, joyriding by juveniles, taking a car for temporary transport, stealing and keeping a car, stealing cars for sale of the parts, stealing cars for resale, stealing cars for export overseas, and carjacking. 6. The embrace of “nothing works” The 1960s and 1970s produced a slew of evidence that “nothing works” in crime control. Best known was Martinson’s (1974) “What Works” article published in The Public Interest, in which he documented the failure of rehabilitative treatment to reduce recidivism. This was soon joined by other studies showing the limited effectiveness of traditional forms of policing, of incapacitation, and of deterrent sentencing. As Garland (2001, 62) notes, despite being a “thriving academic discipline, expanding its hold on the academy and producing more research and publications than ever before,” criminologists felt that … criminology’s basic project—that of discovering the causes of crime and identifying means whereby it might be reduced—was increasingly viewed as having failed to produce anything worthwhile.” Garland explains how this view found ready acceptance among a generation of young scholars whose distrust of the state and authority had been fueled by the Vietnam War and the violent crackdowns on student protesters. In his speech referred to above, Cullen (2011), however, identifies a more selfserving reason: If nothing works, then there is no pressing need for theories to produce knowledge that 28 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY can be used to create interventions that reduce crime. Scholars thus are free to devote large chunks of their careers to publishing … studies that have little relevance to changing offenders in the real world … there is no need ever to truly change anything—either in our academic world or in the world of crime control. (Cullen 2011, 23) In the light of the evidence available at that time, it was reasonable to believe that little or nothing could be done to reduce criminality, but it was not reasonable to think that nothing could be done to reduce crime. These two different objectives have been conflated by positivists, who have generally failed to accept that crime can be reduced by reducing the opportunities for it to occur. Or if they do accept it, they have somehow considered it to be a trivial fact of little interest to them, most probably because they believe that real reductions in crime are only possible by reducing its “root” causes. As James Q. Wilson (1975) forcefully argued in Thinking about Crime, this belief, together with the persistent framing of their theories in terms of “root” causes that cannot be changed (such as poverty, relative deprivation and maternal deprivation) will forever consign criminologists to policy irrelevance. This is a self-inflicted wound in the face of the ample evidence that crime can be reduced by reducing opportunities for it to occur, which is shown clearly by the many dozens of successes accomplished by the application of situational crime prevention and allied preventive approaches such as design against crime and problem-oriented policing. Here we focus on situational crime prevention because the reported case studies, at about 250, have been rigorously evaluated (Guerette 2009; Guerette and Bowers 2009; Johnson, Bowers, and Guerette 2012).3 The following small sample of case studies gives a flavor of the diversity of successes achieved by situational crime prevention:                Responsible drinking practices in pubs and clubs in Australia Street closures to prevent drive-by shootings in Los Angeles Video cameras at the entrances of sheltered housing for retirees Anticloning measures for U.S. cell phones Gated alleys to reduce burglaries of row housing in Liverpool Airline baggage and passenger screening worldwide Cash reduction in U.S. convenience stores Antirobbery screens in London post offices Automated checking of income by applicants for housing subsidies in Sweden Systematic cleaning of graffiti on New York City subway trains Electronic and ink tags on merchandise in U.S. clothing stores Speed cameras and random breath tests in Australia Exact change and drop safes on U.S. buses to prevent robbery of bus drivers Safes with time locks to prevent betting shop robberies in Australia Removal of gas and electric coin meters from council houses in England to prevent burglary REGULATING CRIME 29 If more reason were needed for criminologists to promote opportunity-reducing measures, this is provided by the claim made by van Dijk and others (van Dijk, Tseloni, and Farrell 2012) that an “avalanche” of design and management measures (Clarke 2016), taken by a wide range of society’s agencies and organizations, including businesses and corporations (shades of Colquhoun) to protect themselves from crime, provides the best explanation for the drop in traditional forms of crime in many westernized countries during the past two decades. By contrast, the explanations provided for the crime drop in America by a National Association of Sciences panel (Rosenfeld and Weisburd 2016) were relentlessly positivist in nature: these included, for example, mass incarceration, the decline in drug markets, stronger gun controls, “broken windows” policing, and legitimization of abortion. More to the point, these explanations did not hold for other countries that experienced similar drops in crime (Farrell, Tilley, and Tseloni 2014). Instead of distancing themselves from these crime control successes, criminologists should take credit for them as being consistent with a strong body of criminological theory about the role of opportunity in crime. 7. The empathy for offenders (and indifference to victims) Many positivist criminologists feel deep empathy for the plight of offenders and are angry about society’s treatment of them. Given that these scholars may have spent years of their professional lives documenting the deprivations that result in criminality, their feelings may be understandable. However, they result in a severely restricted view of the crime problem, particularly as they are often accompanied by an indifference to victims. In fact, a great deal has been learned about crime through routine surveys of victims that began in the United States in 1972 (Hindelang, Gottfredson, and Garofalo 1978). These surveys typically ask respondents about crimes they have experienced during the previous 12 months, and soon after their introduction in America they were also undertaken in many other countries. They revealed some consistent but often unexpected results: that young males, not women or the elderly, are the demographic group at greatest risk of personal victimization, that inner-city households are at greater risk of burglary than those in wealthy suburbs, that burglary is most likely to occur in the afternoons during the week than at night, that owning a car more than doubles the risk of becoming a crime victim, and so forth. These early findings soon gave rise to practical efforts to help and support crime victims led by Jan van Dijk and others, but they also stimulated more detailed studies of victimization. An important strand of this work in the UK consisted of analyses of “repeat victimization” undertaken by Farrell and Pease (1993). They showed that 4 percent of all people surveyed in the British Crime Survey suffered more than 40 percent of all victimizations reported in the survey, that many different kinds of crime showed a pattern of repeats, that repeats tended to occur soon after the initial victimization, and that burglaries were sometimes committed against similar homes nearby (so-called near repeats). These and other findings fed directly into police practice, particularly in preventing burglary. Thus, police officers were trained not to dismiss householders’ fears 30 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY about being targeted again with the shibboleth that “lightning never strikes twice in the same place.” Instead, householders were given direct assistance to protect their homes from further burglaries, they and their immediate neighbors were instructed to be alert to further burglary attempts, and the police maintained surveillance of the properties for a number of weeks. Another practical outcome in the UK of the work on victimization consisted of the government’s exhortations to the public to take “routine precautions” to protect themselves from victimization (Felson and Clarke 2010). In 1994, the UK government sent Your Practical Guide to Crime Prevention, to every household in the country, which listed precautions designed to help people protect themselves from crime in a range of everyday locations and situations, such as “on public transport” and “when away from home” along with “keeping children safe from molesters” and “strangers at the door.” Altogether, the booklet (Home Office 1994) provided more than 350 tips.4 This remarkable initiative went unnoticed by criminologists. It clearly signaled that the government had recognized that it could not by itself protect people from being victimized in the manifold situations encountered in the course of their everyday lives. There were simply far too many of these situations to be within police reach, and people must therefore rely on their own efforts to protect themselves from crime. 8. The failure to recognize the extensive regulation of society Most of the work that flouted the conventions of positivist criminology discussed above was undertaken by criminologists on the edges of the discipline. Clifford Shearing may be most unconventional of this group, but his mostly unnoticed work on the regulation of society may be of the greatest importance (see endnote 5). Shearing observed that in the course of our everyday lives we move through a sequence of settings where our behavior is closely controlled by regulations to which we unwittingly submit. An example would be the morning commute from a suburb to work in the big city. Thus, when driving to the station, commuters are governed by the rules of the road and also by insurers’ requirements about operating a vehicle. When parking the car, they are subject to the rules of the commuter lot (e.g., “park between the white lines,” “leave permit displayed”). If they charge their tickets, they are implicitly agreeing to the requirements of their credit card company. If they call ahead to their offices on their mobile phones, they are meeting the phone company’s requirements (e.g., to pay their bills on time; not give out their PINs). When riding on the train, they must follow certain rules (no feet on the seats; show ticket when asked), and this is also true when they catch the subway to their workplace (pay by token or fare card; avoid seats for disabled). In their offices, a host of rules control their private conduct and the actions they take on behalf of their employers. Shearing even provided a concept, bubbles of governance,5 to assist analysis of the degree to which the institutions and agencies of modern society exercise constant regulation of our conduct, and the vocabulary he provided to assist the REGULATING CRIME 31 understanding of this regulation constitutes a perfect modern rendering of Colquhoun’s vision of the civic regulation of crime. The Implications for Contemporary Criminology of the Extensive Regulation of Crime One approach to describing the implications for contemporary criminology of the extensive regulation of crime described in the second part of this article would simply be to discuss the reverse of each of the eight failings of positivist criminology highlighted there. Because this would probably result in considerable repetition, an alternative approach is taken here of listing five principal desiderata of the volume editors’ “new criminology of crime control.” First, instead of seeking to explain criminality, criminologists should seek to explain and reduce crime. This would require them to specify the particular form of crime that they are studying, which would vastly expand the scope of their work because every specific form of crime has its own “opportunity structure,” that is to say, the unique constellation of social and physical conditions that make the crime possible. These conditions are different from those for any other form of crime. Brief consideration of crimes featured recently in the media should make this point apparent: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Acquaintance rapes Cyberbullying Maritime piracy Desecration of monuments Ransom kidnappings Insider trading Acid attacks on women in India Human smuggling Enslavement of young girls by militias Suicide bombings Honor killings Metal theft Workers compensation fraud Killing rhinos for their horns Illegal “pill mill” prescription of opiates Child abductions The list is almost endless and careful studies of these specific forms of crime, explaining them and making suggestions for reducing their incidence and harm, would be fertile ground for hundreds of young criminologists. These criminologists might build careers for themselves in the prevention of larger groupings of crime, such as frauds, or crime in public housing, or on public transport, and so on. 32 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY Second, instead of positivism, the dominant model of the new criminology of crime control should be a neoclassicist, bounded rationality choice model, which, as explained above, has already been adopted by the three main theories of environmental criminology. Assuming that offenders exercise choice allows some measure of responsibility for their crimes to be placed on them, but, more important, it supplies the mechanism through which effective situational design and management changes can be introduced to restrict their choices and modify their behavior. Third, instead of privileging sociology, the new criminology of crime control would be more widely interdisciplinary in scope including contributions from psychology, economics, political science, engineering, geography, and any other disciplines that might improve the understanding and control of crime. The consequences of this for the teaching of criminology would be profound, not merely for the theoretical curriculum, but also for the skills needed to undertake the associated empirical work. A corollary would be that sociology’s search for “root causes” would be abandoned as well as that discipline’s penchant for commentary and critique as the favored modes of criminological discourse. Instead, the dominant discourses would be technological and empirical. Fourth, instead of continuing to ignore victims of crime, there should be a renewed focus on assisting them. This would demand a wide agenda of research and action, but one specific need mentioned already would be to improve knowledge about routine precautions. Ten questions have been identified (Felson and Clarke 2010) for future research on this subject: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. What are the range and the extent of routine precautions taken by the public? How do precautions taken vary with age, sex, place of residence, occupation, etc.? How much cost and effort is entailed in these precautions? What does the public perceive as the benefits and value of these precautions? What are the actual benefits? (For example, do those taking precautions in high-crime neighborhoods have lower levels of victimization, when other risk factors are taken into account?) Are some widely taken precautions lacking in any real benefit and are some rare precautions highly effective? Are some precautions so widespread that further promotional efforts would be redundant? What seem to be the most effective means of ensuring that people take necessary precautions? Which kinds of crime prevention publicity campaigns are most effective in drawing attention to the need for routine precautions? To what extent do these have the negative consequences of provoking fear of crime and resentment about “victim blaming”? 33 REGULATING CRIME Fifth, a program of research would be undertaken on Shearing’s bubbles of governance to illuminate the extent to which our lives are governed by regulations promulgated by the vast variety of agencies, organizations, and businesses of civil society. The program’s principal objective would be to examine the benefits and possible harms of this regulation. The resulting knowledge would, incidentally, provide the clearest link between “the new criminology of crime control” and Colquhoun’s prescient vision. Conclusion It would be exceedingly naïve to expect that the program for the “new criminology” outlined in the third part of this article would be welcomed by today’s criminologists. Most of them would see little reason to change having invested so much of their professional lives in positivist thinking and enquiry. Even the lack of progress in their explanations of criminality, documented by Weisburd and Piquero (2008), seems not to have dented their faith in positivism. Indeed, there may be so many of them invested in these beliefs, who are inculcating them in successive generations of students, that positivist criminology will survive for the foreseeable future. To set against this gloomy prediction, I can only hope that enough young criminologists become dissatisfied with positivism and come to see the new criminology of crime control as affording a better prospect for their future careers. This might be more likely if this new criminology were merged with the well-established “crime science” program being pursued at University College London’s Jill Dando Institute and elsewhere. This might not be too difficult because both the new criminology of this volume and crime science are fundamentally crime-opportunity-reducing approaches. The principal difference between them is that the former takes regulation of crime to be the main vehicle of crime control, whereas the later takes it to be design and management interventions that increase the risks and difficulties for offenders. The principal cost of encouraging this merger would be to reinforce a nascent division in criminology. On one hand, there would be a small group of criminologists working successfully to reduce the harms and costs of the huge variety of crimes and, on the other, a much larger number of criminologists doggedly pursuing a failed paradigm of positivism. Notes 1. In fact, Sutherland subsequently recanted his view in a little-known unpublished paper, “The Swansong of Differential Association,” i.e., his own theory of crime causation (Clarke 2012). The paper was issued in a collection of his writings (A. Cohen, Lindesmith, and Schuessler 1956) and included the following passage: One factor in criminal behavior that is at least partially extraneous to differential association is opportunity. Criminal behavior is partially a function of opportunities to commit specific classes 34 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY of crime, such as embezzlement, bank burglary or illicit heterosexual intercourse. Opportunities to commit crimes of these classes are partially a function of physical factors and of cultures which are neutral as to crime. Consequently, criminal behavior is not caused entirely by association with criminal and anti-criminal patterns, and differential association is not a sufficient cause of criminal behavior. (Sutherland 1956, 31, quoted in Merton 1995, 38) 2. This research has revealed that crime is highly concentrated in particular places, among certain neighborhoods, in certain premises and facilities, and on particular products; that it disproportionately falls on particular victims, many of whom are repeatedly victimized; that it shows marked diurnal, weekly, and seasonal patterns; that the risks of crime are highly predictable and dependent on target attractiveness; and that these risks can be reduced by situational interventions (Wortley and Townsley 2017). 3. See www.popcenter.org. 4. Twenty-five “when driving” tips began with, “Before a long trip make sure your vehicle is in good condition,” and “Plan how to get to your destination before leaving.” 5. While Shearing often lectured on bubbles of governance, he never published a detailed account of the concept. References Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham. 1993. 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