ABSTRACT
This is an account of the personal origins of closely related crime theories that the authors have helped develop: the routine activity approach—Marcus Fel-son (MF) and situational crime prevention—Ronald Clarke (RC). Criminologists generally pay too little attention to the actual commission of crime, and tend to assume that it is over in a flash. This chapter de-emphasizes variations in generalized crime motivations among individuals, or differences between offenders and larger humanity. In the case of capital punishment, severe punishment also carries the risks of serious discrimination and miscarriages of justice. In the case of the routine activity approach and the rational choice perspective, a positive result would serve only to reaffirm the patently obvious, while a negative result would mean that either the dependent or the independent variables were misspecified. Hundreds of other sociological criminologists were produced, hardly any of whom felt it necessary to abandon the paradigm they were taught and who developed anything like the routine activity approach.
