Crime and Everyday Life.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Wickes, Rebecca
• Date: 01 August 2010

Crime and Everyday Life

By Marcus Felson and Rachel Boba

Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 2010

In the last 20 years, criminology has moved away from a welfarist model concerned with improving the social conditions that lead to crime, to one that centres on predicting or preventing illegal acts. At the heart of this shift is a growing recognition that the state has limited political power and financial resources to eliminate the problem of crime. Therefore, the goal is to manage the risks of crime, not win a war against it. It is against this social and political backdrop that a criminology depicting crime, not only as normal, but ordinary, has gained much prominence.

The 'crime is normal' argument is not new to criminology--more than a century ago, Durkheim argued that crime is normal and necessary for re-establishing the moral order of a society. However, the current uptake of this argument examines crime through a 'crime science' lens that is less sociological and more situational. From this perspective, crime is viewed as ordinary, mundane and is understood as the convergence of three or four elements in time and space. Moreover, the criminal, who in Durkheim's day was an important symbol denoting the 'other' or the outsider', is an unremarkable rational actor whose decisions to offend are guided more by opportunities than norms.

Studies that emphasise the importance of criminogenic situations draw heavily on Marcus Felson's routine activity perspective. Since his 1987 publication, Felson and his colleagues have amassed a large and still expanding body of research that situates crime as a routine activity that results from the ebb and flow of social life. Crime and Everyday Life, now coauthored with Rachel Boba and currently in its fourth edition, details this research. This book, which is written primarily for an undergraduate audience, provides an extremely well-executed, yet simple and straightforward approach to understanding crime in...