Conceptual Issues in the Geography of Crime: Toward a Geography of Social Control

Abstract

Abstract In this paper I describe and question some of the basic premises, beliefs, and values implicit in the geography of crime. The critique focuses on the analytic separation of crime and the control of crime, a separation that has informed most geographic research on crime. Using an instrumentalist methodology, geographers have studied crime, law, and the judicial system without any systematic consideration of the impact of the control system on crime patterns. A discussion of interactionist and critical perspectives in criminology raises questions about the correctionalist impulse of much of the geography of crime, the prima facie interpretation of official crime statistics guiding it, the hypostatization of criminal behavior informing it, and the general consequences of a perspective that abstracts crime from its sociolegal context. The paper outlines several strategies for developing an integrated analysis of crime and control.