ABSTRACT
This chapter examines more fully how criminal opportunity is conceptualized and operationalized at the individual and ambient levels. Within a criminal opportunity framework, the measures of involvement in crime or number of criminal peers are perhaps best conceived as representing ineffective guardianship, since people involved in deviance are unlikely to rely upon police, principals, teachers, or other agents of social control. Ethnographic evidence suggests that many people in particularly disadvantaged and isolated communities may perceive middle-class expectations as unviable given the structural constraints. The chapter discusses individual-level constitutional factors and environmental-level constitutional factors. It presents environmental design and also discusses how routine activities serve as mechanisms that propel the convergence of motivated offenders, suitable targets, and capable guardians at the individual and ambient levels. At the environmental level, aggregated social control is the collective degree to which formal control agents, and inanimate control devices in a bounded locale can observe and impede criminal acts.
