Civilizing Space or Criminalizing Place: Using Routine Activities Theory to Better Understand How Legal Hybridity Spatially Regulates “Deviant Populations”

Abstract

The combining of administrative, civil, and criminal law has broadened modern crime control mechanisms and greatly increased the legal authority and discretion of law enforcement officers. Such legal hybridity has contributed specifically to the pervasiveness of spatial regulatory practices (or spatial remedies), such as the use of banishment policies and civil gang injunctions (CGIs), by police in urban centers. While banishment policies and CGIs exemplify the reliance on legal hybridity to manage “deviant” populations spatially, empirical evidence suggests that spatial remedies guided by the theoretical underpinnings of deterrence and broken windows perspectives are not efficacious at predicting observed behavioral changes. We argue for a critical approach to understanding disobedience to spatial remedies, suggesting that routine activities theory is an appropriate framework to expose why these mechanisms fail to generate robust compliance or remedy problem areas.