Environmental Criminology

Abstract Environmental criminology has quickly become a widely recognized perspective on crime, providing an umbrella under which several theories find a home. One common theme among theories of environmental criminology is that they are a departure from traditional criminology. The tradition has concentrated on exploring crime from the sociological or psychological perspective, focusing on understanding criminality, or the sum of motivations, drives, pushes, and pulls driving an individual toward criminal behavior. Environmental criminologists, on the other hand, seek to understand and explore crime by focusing on the criminal event by concerning themselves more with the places, spaces, and objects that either facilitate or prevent a crime from occurring. Approaching crime from this point of view prompts the researcher to focus on the opportunity constructs for crime and the patterns in which crimes occur rather than social or psychological motivations. Quite literally, environmental criminology is a criminological perspective which, in many respects, considers the causes of crime to be highly related to the nature of the physical environment. That is to say that the very nature of neighborhoods, structures, and objects can have an impact on crime directed in them, at them, and around them.