ABSTRACT
It is the environment that must provide the essentials for survival – food and clothing. Scarcity of these provides the most obvious of all incentives for the commonest of all crimes – theft. Dorothy Thomas, whose study is still one of the most scientific and thorough investigations of the relationship between crime and economic conditions, therefore used more sophisticated indices. Opportunity is also the most probable explanation of most seasonal variations in crime rates. Burt analysed nearly a million offences committed by adults in the decade 1900-1909, and observed marked peaks in the summer months for violence against the person, suicide, and sexual crimes, while there were much less marked peaks in the winter months for property crimes. Another aspect of the non-human environment whose association with delinquency was at one time the subject of considerable study is topography. In its original form this theory assumed that psychological differences between individuals were irrelevant, and it is the crudity of this assumption which has been most strongly attacked.
