ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some key principles of criminal opportunity, and defines a vocabulary of concepts for use in analyzing variation in criminal opportunity. For parsimony and conceptual clarity, it focuses on adult crime, and property crime, or crimes of gain, though we believe that our framework might be useful for studying other types of crime. The chapter traces a lineage of useful thinking about opportunity and crime. It extends key elements of this lineage into a vocabulary of criminal opportunity and a set of principles for analyzing it. Francis Cullen outlined a road for a fuller appreciation of Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin's trail-breaking conceptualization of criminal opportunity. The notion of opportunity for crime is as old as criminology itself. It appears as a central concept in traditional Anglo-American jurisprudence and in the earliest social science writings on crime. Finally, the chapter discusses some implications of this conceptual template for theorizing criminal opportunity.
