ABSTRACT
Criminology has been defi ned as the scientifi c study of crime and criminals. However, most traditional criminological theories involve the study of criminals. They seek to explain how biological factors, developmental experiences and/or social forces create criminality. The occurrence of crime is understood largely as an expression of the offender’s deviance, which may be a function of distant events that occurred many years beforehand. Once criminality has been explained, many theorists take the view that the theoretical task has been accomplished. Criminals will inevitably commit crime; we just need to wait for them to do so. In contrast, it has been emphasised in this book that criminal behaviour must be understood in terms of the person-situation interaction. Crime may be committed by individuals who do not have entrenched criminal dispositions. And even where offenders might be regarded as ‘real’ criminals, they do not offend randomly; they commit particular crimes in particular contexts. We require not just theories of criminality but also theories that explain why offenders commit crimes when and where they do. This requires a shift from an examination of the distal causes of criminality to an examination of the proximal causes of crime.
