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Richard Wortley and Lorraine Mazerolle (eds.)
Willan Publishing , UK, 2008 , 320 pp ., £22 (paperback) , £55 (hardback) ,
ISBN: 978-1843922803 (paperback)
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978-1843922810 (hardback)
This book provides a comprehensive overview of the most recent developments in environmental criminology in the last decades. The editors Richard Wortley and Lorraine Mazerolle organized 13 chapters, written by some of the most prominent scholars in environmental criminology, into three parts: Part 1, 'understanding the crime event', focuses on basic theories in environmental criminology; part 2, 'analyzing crime patterns', explains different techniques for the spatial analysis of crime; and part 3, 'preventing and controlling crime', provides illustrative practical examples for design-led crime prevention and policing strategies.
Part 1 is a collection of contributions by Derek Cornish and Ron Clarke, Richard Wortley, Marcus Felson and Paul and Patricia Brantingham, who review the development of their original concepts (rational choice theory, precipitators of crime, routine activity theory and crime pattern theory) until today. These different approaches are conceptually related, and together they map the field and provide a sound basis for researching opportunity structures of crime events.
In part 2, analytical techniques are presented in three chapters: Luc Anselin, Elizabeth Griffiths and George Tita introduce the technique of crime mapping and hot spot analysis using GIS for geo-coding and clustering crime data. Graham Farrell and Ken Pease distinguish different forms of 'repeat victimization', such as spatial, temporal, tactical and crime-type repeat. They show what crime practitioners can learn from a concise time-space analysis of previous offences and from 'predictive mapping' in order to reduce the risk of re-victimization for individuals and households. D. Kim Rossmo and Sacha Rombouts point out the advantages of 'geographic profiling' for criminal investigation, which is based on an analysis of criminal cases according to offenders' spatial behaviour...