Essay On Environmental Criminology

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Environmental Criminology focuses more on people given opportunity to commit crimes rather than why individuals commit crimes. This is seemingly a confusing theory to grip but there are many different theories that fall into the metaphorical folder of Environmental Criminology. Some of these theories that stood out to me personally are the Situational Crime Prevention Theory, Offender Search Theory, Broken Windows Theory, and James Q. Wilson’s, “Thinking About Crime.” I believe that these four theories/writings have a significant amount to do with crime and why criminals commit the crimes they do. Situational Crime Theory states that all theories of crime are also theories of crime prevention. This is due to the fact that crime theories …show more content…

Broken Windows can be explained easiest given an example. A home is abandoned in a city/suburb and kids throw a rock through a window of the house, Broken Windows states that that house will now become a hub for crime, it will attract more criminals as the house falls apart more, eventually becoming a hotspot for crime. Now, I find this particularly true, Broken Windows Theory was put to work close to my hometown a few years back. When I was younger my friends went to a place in Catskill, they were highrise like apartments, cheap living for those who needed it. These apartments were called hop-o-nose, they are known locally as the ghetto of my area. They wanted to buy illegal substances, (marijuana and alcohol) and knew somebody there. Now there is a large amount of rundown buildings around the hop-o-nose and this is where they met a person to do so. This isn 't the only case, I had a friend move to the hop-o-nose and due to their peer groups, they got into drugs and started hanging out with bad groups of people. Now, that area is not a place you want to go to at night, it is basically a hub for crime, there are a 2 abandoned warehouses that have been vandalized and are a hub for crime at this point. Personally, I don’t think that the hop-o-nose cause the crime, but the abandoned buildings surrounding them do cause the crime. If the warehouses were restored or bought out and torn down and something else more worthwhile was built, the crime rates would plummet in the

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