NCJ Number
113779
Editor(s)
D E Georges,
K D Harries
Date Published
1980
Length
301 pages
Annotation
These essays by geographers, criminologists, sociologists, and urban planners examine crime from a spatial and human ecology perspective.
Abstract
Part 1 contains a review of the spatial approach to the study of adult crime and juvenile delinquency that focuses on crime areas and summarizes British criminological research into urban patterns over time. The need for theoretical constructs in geographical analyses is discussed with reference to situational factors influencing the criminal decisional processes. The spatial interrelationships among actors and their surroundings are discussed as they relate to criminal law. In part 2 studies of interurban, intraurban, and psychospatial factors in crime are presented. These include the use of uniform crime versus victim reports, the role of occupation and interurban economic specialization, the social area structure of suburban crime, and factors influencing criminal mobility. Others consider cognitive mapping and the subjective geography of crime and sociospatial variation in perceptions of crime location and severity. Finally Part 3 provides three applications of spatial approaches. These include an examination of cartographic techniques used in the display and analysis of crime data such as choropleth mapping and computer graphics and geographically based techniques used by police in Texas for daily data collection and by police in New York for allocating patrol resources. Author and subject indexes and chapter figures, tables, and notes.