Abstract
The overall purpose of this study is to contribute to bridging the gap between people- and place-oriented approaches in the study of crime causation. To achieve this we will explore some core hypotheses derived from Situational Action Theory about what makes young people crime prone and makes places criminogenic, and about the interaction between crime propensity and criminogenic exposure predicting crime events. We will also calculate the expected reduction in aggregate levels of crime that will occur as a result of successful interventions targeting crime propensity and criminogenic exposure. To test the hypotheses we will utilize a unique set of space–time budget, small area community survey, land-use and interviewer-led questionnaire data from the prospective longitudinal Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+) and an artificial neural network approach to modelling. The results show that people’s crime propensity (based on their personal morals and abilities to exercise self-control) has the bulk of predictive power, but also that including criminogenic exposure (being unsupervised with peers and engaged in unstructured activities in residential areas of poor collective efficacy or commercial centres) demonstrates a substantial increase in predictive power (in addition to crime propensity). Moreover, the results show that the probability of crime is strongest when a crime-prone person is in a criminogenic setting and, crucially, that the higher a person’s crime propensity the more vulnerable he or she is to influences of criminogenic exposure. Finally, the findings suggest that a reduction in people’s crime propensity has a much bigger impact on their crime involvement than a reduction in their exposure to criminogenic settings.
Highlights
The value of the area under the ROC curve (AUC) may be interpreted in the following way: If we take a random pair of hours, one of which contains crime and one of which doesn’t, AUC is the probability that we assign a higher probability of a crime to the hour ‘with’ crime than the one ‘without’ crime based on the included predictors
The PADS+ data and methodologies are exceptionally suitable for conducting situational analysis because they enable detailed spatio-temporal matching of people, places and acts of crime, and provide in-depth data about the circumstances and environments in which young people with different crime propensities take part
Situational Action Theory (SAT) proposes that humans are essentially rule-guided actors and that the defining feature of acts of crime is that they breach rules of conduct and, law-relevant personal morals and the ability to exercise self-control are the key individual characteristics upon which a person’s crime propensity is dependent
Summary
Guided by Situational Action Theory, and utilizing a unique set of space–time budget, small area community survey, land-use and interviewer-led questionnaire data from the prospective longitudinal Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+) and an artificial neural network approach to modelling, we will explore some hypotheses about what makes people crime prone and European Journal of Criminology 15(1)
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