ABSTRACT

Many people have noted that criminals tend to offend in a limited area and that area tends to be close to where they live. Indeed the basis of penal reform in the 19th century was precisely to remove people from their areas of criminal activity that was regarded as supporting their crime-oriented life-styles. The first fully documented account of the geographical localisation of criminals is usually regarded as the work of what is known as the Chicago School of sociologists (Shaw 1942). Subsequently, with the development of empirical criminology especially in the 1970s and 1980s, a variety of studies drew attention to the limits on criminal mobility (e.g. Capone and Nichols 1976, Pettiway 1982).