Offender Mobility

The research on offender mobility has typically examined the journey in terms of distance traveled from the home of the offender to the crime location (Gore & Pattavina, 2004). This line of research has revealed important findings, but it fails to take into consideration that the distance offenders may travel to commit their crimes could be influenced by the local environment where the offender lives or the local environment where the crime occurs (Gore & Pattavina, 2004). Research conducted by Rhodes and Conly, found that land-use patterns in the areas surrounding offender residence and offense locations influence how far the offender traveled to commit their crime (Gore & Pattavina, 2004).

A well-established fact in criminology is that crime rates vary throughout a community center largely on where offenders live (Gore & Pattavina, 2004). Research completed by Shaw and McKay in the mid-1900s found that juvenile offenders were more likely to live in areas characterized by economic disadvantage, residential instability, and ethnic heterogeneity (Gore & Pattavina, 2004).

Offenders may not always start their journey to crime from home. In some cases, the offender may start their journey from their workplace, or a friend’s or relative’s home. The journey may also start from a place where the

offender hangs out (Predicting a criminal’s journey to crime, n.d.). Criminals tend to move around using one address then tomorrow using another. With today’s mobile society it makes it hard to predict where offenders may have started their journey to crime.
There has been allot of research that supports many of the essential claims of social disorganization theory and the distance the offender may travel to commit their crimes.

In the 1980s research began to focus on the capacity of social disorganization to predict neighborhood victimization rates (Gore & Pattavina, 2004). The idea that social disorganization should be used to explain victimization, expanded the idea of informal social control to limit the deviant behavior of people who lived in the neighborhoods but also the behavior of those who might consider committing crimes in the neighborhood even if they did not live in the neighborhood (Gore & Patavina,

2004).
No single police technique will work every time or in every case (Predicting a criminal’s journey to crime, n.d.). If police can better understand crime as a series of trips in distance, time, and space, then they may be able to predict where the offenders come from and where crimes might be more likely to be committed (Predicting a criminal’s journey to crime, n.d.)