Crime, Geography of

Criminal Law and the Causes of Crime

Often, during the first lecture of an introductory criminology course, the professor will pose the question “What causes crime?” After a few students respond, the professor will provide the answer: “Criminal laws cause crime! “To avoid the appearance of being facetious, the professor may bring up the 19th-century European maxim of Nullum crimen sine lege, nulla poena sine lege, that is, there is no crime or penalty without law. Specific behaviors, processes, or arrangements that are viewed as detrimental to the common good are codified into criminal laws with sanctions, forming part of a system of formal social control known as the criminal justice system. Many criminal laws are the outcomes of political debates in which different social interests struggle to get their views enacted into policy.

Jurisprudence has vast bodies of literatures focusing on the evolution of criminal laws and their political, social, and cultural biases. There are two major schools of thought regarding the function of criminal law. The conflict school believes that criminal law and the criminal justice system are established to protect the few from the masses and that the cause of crime is external to the individual, while the consensus school believes that criminal law and the criminal justice system serve the common good and that the cause of crime is within the individual.

Approaches and Issues in Studying Crime

Crime encompasses so many behaviors emanating from different motivations and circumstances that ascertaining the geography of crime has been more suggestive than definitive. Therefore, it has been imperative to break down crime into different distinct categories and ascertain the geographic and spatial properties of the different categories. A common distinction has been to compare violent crimes (crimes against a person, e.g., homicide or rape) with crimes against property (e.g., residential burglary or automobile theft). Other approaches focus on the specific settings and places in which crimes occur, such as gang territories or drug markets.

The majority of the crime data used in contemporary research come from reports to the police, known as official reports. The geographic scale of these data range from the large scale (e.g., a burglarized home) to smaller scales representing larger areal units (e.g., census blocks, counties, or states). Another source of crime data is the U.S. National Crime Victimization Surveys (NCVS), which is intended to measure crimes not reported to the police. Currently, the geographic scales of these data are too general to yield meaningful geographic analyses. Self-reports are another source of crime information, whereby individuals are asked to give the researcher an accounting of their unreported or undetected crimes. Ethnographic studies acquire this type of data, but only a few have used any type of spatial analyses.

The metric of crime as the dependent variable is a frequency count expressed as crimes per population base. Other studies have developed different rates focused on the appropriate targets of the crime. For example, rates have been developed for sexual assaults per 1,000 females, residential burglaries per 1,000 dwelling units, and hotel/motel crimes per 100 rooms. Recently, location quotients are appearing more in the literature, providing a clearer picture of the spatial variation of crime.

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