Regulating Crime and the International Crime Drop

Michael Quinn’s remarkable article includes the revelation that Patrick Colquhoun’s Treatise of the Metropolis was strongly endorsed and supported by Jeremy Bentham, his great contemporary. It appears that Bentham sought out Colquhoun in order to advise him how to get his ideas into legislation. Ultimately, Bentham’s efforts were unsuccessful, but the fact that the greatest English philosopher of the day took Colquhoun ideas so seriously is of the utmost importance. It is clear from Quinn’s article that Bentham, in an unexpectedly humble role, regarded himself as merely Colquhoun’s assistant. Without Bentham’s endorsement, Colquhoun’s Treatise could be easily be dismissed as the ramblings of an obscure London magistrate.

In fact, there were two planks to Colquhoun’s Treatise. The first was an extraordinarily detailed set of prescriptions for closing the myriad opportunities for crime arising from the varied institutions, agencies, activities, and practices of the modern city that was then London. The second plank was a detailed agenda of control for enabling the poor to resist the temptations to crime laid out before them. Unfortunately, it was this second plank that was in tune with the liberal, welfarist ideas of the day, and which for the next 150 years guided crime policy. Not only did this plank determine future policy, but it also launched criminology on a determinedly positivist course where individuals’ criminality was believed to be inexorably governed by their past.

In a recent article for the Annals (Clarke, 2018), I have argued that in the past four decades the positivist consensus began to unravel with a series of diverse contributions on causation from a variety of scholars, mostly working independently. I go on to argue that this unraveling opens the possibility of returning to Colquhoun’s first and more important plank of regulating crime by reducing the opportunities for it to occur. This transition would be aided by a broad range of theory, which establishes something that should always have been obvious: That the criminality of individuals is the product of an interaction between individual propensities and situational circumstances and inducements.

In this brief commentary, I want to explore the particular implications of the regulatory course so strongly endorsed by Bentham. In doing so, I will make considerable use of environmental criminology, which has engaged in two joint enterprises that give substance to the idea of regulating crime. The first is an extensive project supported by Marcus Felson’s series of five books on Crime in Everyday Life (see Felson & Eckert, 2015, for the latest), which can be viewed as a modern interpretation and restatement of Colquhoun’s original prescriptions for closing opportunities for crime, which arise from the manifold operations, practices, and actions of the entire social body, involving numerous governing agencies whether public or private.

Environmental criminology’s second enterprise, pursued in parallel with the first, has been the extensive effort to develop two preventive approaches: problem-oriented policing (Goldstein, 1979, 1990) and situational crime prevention (Clarke 1980, 1997). Both approaches seek to identify the crime opportunity structures for highly specific crime categories (not just “car crime,” but, e.g., “stealing hub caps in the inner city” or “stealing cars for export overseas”). Both situational crime prevention and problem-oriented policing then proceed to curtail the opportunities for these very different thefts, committed by very different groups of offenders. Dozens, even hundreds of case studies, have been published (those for situational crime prevention are more rigorously evaluated). There should be no doubt that these approaches can be very effective in reducing crime.

To summarize, environmental criminology has provided the means for making regulating crime a practical enterprise through, first, a careful documentation of the myriad opportunities of the modern state that makes crime possible and, second, by developing the technology to close those opportunities. These are contributions of the utmost importance for crime policy. But in the remainder of this commentary, I want to develop some thoughts in my Annals paper about the impact that these ideas from environmental criminology should have on its parent discipline of criminology.

I am not so naive to expect that criminology would readily abandon positivism and embrace, instead, the bounded rational choice perspective that I advocated, even if this would result in many benefits for criminology and its students. Too many criminologists have invested too much of their lives in positivist ideas, and there continues to be a ready market for them in the hundreds of criminal justice degrees offered by colleges and universities. Even so, I would like the opportunity provided by this commentary to return briefly to two linked ideas that I have previously touched on (Clarke, 2016) but which continue to intrigue me.

The first of these ideas is that during the past decades those responsible for protecting their enterprises from victimization have begun to understand that they can expect little help from the authorities who have neither the resources nor the expertise to undertake this task. They have realized that protecting themselves means they must do this themselves. This could be the source of the “avalanche” of security that has occurred in every sphere of modern society—shops, banks, schools, colleges, hospitals, offices, transport systems, the airline industry, fast food restaurants credit card companies, motels, and any other business or organization that is open to some form of criminal exploitation—which is all of them. They have all been tightening up security in ways highly consistent with Colquhoun’s original vision.

Very few criminologists have remarked on this idea. On the other hand, several criminologists, such Jan van Dijk, Graham Farrell, and Nick Tilley among them (Farrell et al., 2014; van Dijk et al., 2012), have seized upon its equally intriguing corollary: Could this avalanche of security provide the explanation for the international drop in crime that has been documented for a wide range of westernized countries? Such an explanation is quite in contrast to those provided in a recent Academies of Sciences review (Rosenfeld & Weisburd, 2016) of the reason for the crime drop in America—all of which rest on positivist thinking. It requires no stretch of the imagination to accept that the crime drop is today’s foremost criminological phenomenon. That its explanation is readily accommodated by Colquhoun’s thinking about regulating crime is a powerful endorsement of his ideas.