Abstract
This paper describes the work undertaken over many years by the author and colleagues concerning the role of opportunity in crime. The work began in the early 1970s in the Home Office Research Unit, the British government’s criminological research department. The work supported a preventive approach – situational crime prevention – that was highly contentious in the criminology of the day because it sought to reduce opportunities for crime, rather than to modify offender propensities. Critics claimed that situational crime prevention would displace rather than reduce crime because they assumed that opportunity merely determines the time and place of crime, but does not cause it. This paper describes the difficulties in establishing that opportunity is cause of crime and why this took so long. It reviews the research that was undertaken to this end, and it summarizes the benefits for criminology and crime policy of accepting that opportunity does cause crime.
Highlights
This paper describes the work on opportunity and crime since it was put on the agenda some 35 years ago in the Home Office publication, Crime as Opportunity (Mayhew et al 1976)
As described by Hough and Mayhew
We were not aware of this retraction when we wrote Crime as Opportunity. We found it difficult to muster unambiguous evidence supporting our views about the role of opportunity in crime. d The absconding work mentioned above had gone unnoticed by criminology and, because it dealt with institutional misbehavior, would hardly be convincing as the basis for generalizing about all crime
Summary
This paper describes the work on opportunity and crime since it was put on the agenda some 35 years ago in the Home Office publication, Crime as Opportunity (Mayhew et al 1976). As described by Hough and Mayhew I will focus on a question that pre-occupied us and later: Is opportunity a cause of crime? 1. Why did Crime as Opportunity published in 1976 avoid making the claim that opportunity is cause of crime?. 2. What had changed by the time that Opportunity makes the Thief was published in 1998?
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