Criminal Behaviour in Context by Nick Flynn

Author:Nick Flynn [Flynn, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology, Penology
ISBN: 9781351570602
Google: 5h03DwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 7932462
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2010-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

Leaving home

For most of the participants, as their criminal activities increased so did the desire to leave home. It has been suggested that, while the spatial activities of offenders who cease to offend relatively early in life tend to be routine and local (Wiles and Costello 2000), as they get older, life-course-persistent criminals become more mobile. Since the middle of the last century, when town planners separated residential areas from places of work and commerce, career offenders have travelled to find the greatest rewards, particularly when the local neighbourhoods they come from are blighted by poverty and neglect (Morris 1957). In search of new criminal opportunities and greater returns, ‘criminal entrepreneurs’ think about space and place instrumentally. According to Mack (1964: 43), professional criminals ‘live in a neutral neighbourhood, or keep on the move. A criminal community may be predominately a network of communications over a wide region with some kind of foothold in various neighbourhoods but not tied to these neighbourhoods.’

More recent ‘journey to crime literature’ has cast doubt on this observation. It contends that the routine activities of offenders are restricted to paths and activity nodes near to, or surrounding, their immediate home areas. While there are variations in travel patterns according to offence and offender characteristics (Baldwin and Bottoms 1976), the majority of offender movements are relatively short and overwhelmingly local in nature. For example, quantitative analysis has found that offenders in the city of Sheffield travel only 1.93 miles, on average, to commit crime (Wiles and Costello 2000: 11). This finding is thought to be consistent throughout the UK. It is also thought to hold true in spite of the fact that travel has become easier and more fluid, and social networks more extensive and distanciated within contemporary society. This is thought to be because offenders generally ‘are drawn from those groups in the population who lack the personal and material resources to learn to travel and sustain such travel thereafter’ (ibid.: 44). As we saw in the introductory chapter, this is supported by geographical analysis, which has shown that, compared to wealthier areas, socially deprived urban communities have a fairly restricted activity space (Massey 1999), and that everyday life is characterised by short-range, routine journeys (Golledge and Stimson 1997). As Bauman (2001: 38) has observed generally, immobility remains ‘the main measure of social deprivation and the principal dimension of unfreedom’.

However, as revealed in Chapter 2, unlike other parts of the country, London is not so divided into distinct zones of poverty and affluence that it allows no movement between one place and another, or across urban space generally. Nor are neighbourhoods so isolated that they develop separate ‘territorial’ identities. Most people of different social class and ethnicity live and work together in close proximity. The wealthy may assert a right to defend the places they live in and call their own; furthermore, location for the poor may be buttressed by unemployment and racial or ethnic segregation. But social relations within contemporary cities tend to be

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