Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 32.2
Icebergs of
crime: trends in crime in
England and Wales.
Sources:
Mayhew et al. 1993;
Mirrlees-Black
et al.
1996; Hough
and Tilley 1998.
In the review that follows, the emphasis will be on
the major categories of crime and on the meso-
and micro-scales of analysis. This emphasis will do
less justice to minority crimes, which should not
be read as of less geographical interest.
Figure 32.3
Trends in reporting and recording crime:
England and Wales, 1981-95.
Offending
This perspective on crime has the strongest
historical antecedents. An emphasis on area can be
dated right back to the beginnings of modern
criminology in the nineteenth century. Guerry
(1833) remarked on area variations in
Metropolitan France, and later Mayhew (1864)
described in detail the conditions of 'rookeries of
crime' (neighbourhoods with high levels of
criminal activity) in Victorian London. But the
real development of a spatial perspective on crime
came from the Chicago School of Ecology. Shaw
and McKay (1942) painstakingly mapped the
location of juvenile delinquency in Chicago and
proposed the theory of social disorganisation to
explain the pattern of delinquency areas that
emerged. They noted that delinquency declined
with distance from the centre of Chicago and that
Source:
Mirrlees-Black et al. 1996.
