Crime Statistics: The Dark Figure video

A request from an American University to use this video in an online course prompted me to remember its existence on my YouTube Channel. It’s a short video that looks at the “dark figure” of crime – crimes that are committed in our society but which never appear in the official recorded crime statistics. As such […]

Neutralising Deviance

Matza’s (1964) notion of “Delinquency and Drift” is particularly useful for the way it looks at “techniques of neutralisation” and while these ideas are still relevant the focus has tended to be on the behaviour of individual, mainly lower class, deviants. It would, however, be a mistake to think Matza’s ideas can’t be applied to […]

Crime, Media and Postmodern Modalities

Harari’s “The theatre of terror” article is worth reading because it explicitly sees terrorism as a form of “spectacle” in contemporary Western societies – an idea referenced by Kidd-Hewitt and Osborne (1995) when they argue crime in general can be seen in terms of postmodern spectacle, a general “crime discourse” driven by two main narratives: […]

Situational Crime Prevention

Examples of different types of Situational Crime Prevention aren’t too hard to find (Alley Gates / Defensible Space, various forms of target-hardening etc.) but a couple of new ones – to me at least – might be useful to add to the list: 1, Community Shelters: Used as “safe places” for “young people” (12 -18) […]