ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses more narrowly on the possibility of general theories of crime. Every crime event has a unique and complex causal history; the foregoing are simplified causal histories. A myriad of additional causes might have been added to each causal history, and each of these would itself have many causes. In principle, a general theory of crime can be very powerful even though it ignores all but one of the myriad causes in the varied causal histories of crime events. Studying the views of criminals on how the law seems so problematic to them is one route to understanding why a particular crime was thinkable to them in a way it is not to others. Criminology as a science has failed to put us in a position to say sensible, empirically informed things about protecting the community from crime.
