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| Ancient Greek vase (480 BC) of legendary King Odysseus hearing the Sirens whose songs lure sailors to shipwreck - self-mastery and constraint led his ship to safety. Similarily, in criminology, theories of social and situational control can lead us safely away from crime - photo Wiki Commons |
By Gregory Saville
Note: To theory-averse readers – I apologize. We usually do not write long blogs. We offer real-life examples, stories of people doing great things, and ideas for change. We don’t delve deeply into theory. Now and then, however, I am reminded that theory is the foundation for good practice and that sometimes stories take time. This blog explains why.
Last year I re-read Homer’s Odyssey and thought: perfect blog arc. I drafted an outline—but life intervened. Last week, thumbing through notes from my first crime-theory classes in graduate school many moons ago, it hit me: these weren’t lecture summaries—they were maps of an odyssey —a long voyage across generations, full of rival schools, wrong turns, and breakthroughs.
Like Odysseus, criminologists kept sailing from one island of ideas to the next, each promising an answer to why crime happens and how to prevent it. And, like Odysseus, each landfall changed the quest.
Class #1 Individual Pathology — “Look inside the person”
The theory voyage in criminology was launched inside the human brain in the 1800s. Italian physician-criminologist Cesare Lombroso hunted for the “born criminal”. Early-1900s eugenicists chased ‘feeblemindedness’ and eugenics boards forced sterilizations on the “unfit” — grim policy on flimsy claims.
Some tried to pin crime on IQ. Ultimately criminologist Edwin Sutherland wrote intelligence was not an important cause of delinquency, and more recent studies suggest any existing IQ/crime link reflects school struggles and social frustrations.
Today the spotlight has shifted again. Trauma, psychopathy, sociopathy, and malignant narcissism are the buzzwords. In our field, third-generation CPTED captures this emerging research. New studies by Indian psychologist Meenakshi Shukla and Australian psychologist Natalija Djakovic dig into the Dark Triad —narcissism/Machiavellianism/psychopathy—showing deficits in both cognitive and emotional empathy.
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| Socio-biology theories remain a viable explanation for at least some crimes, especially neurological research on aggression and the amygdala. Trauma-based prevention programs capture this research. |
Other theory captains took new routes. German/British researcher Hans Eysenck’s Crime and Personality (1964) mapped “criminal personalities.” Neurological researchers explored aggression and the amygdala; endocrinologists tested chemical castration for sex offenders. And yet, research indicates that most people with risk factors don’t offend. None of these pathologies are silver bullets.
The emerging field of sociobiology has rebooted with wiser tools—twin studies, behavioral genetics, brain imaging—pointing to a gene–environment duet. Biology matters; context decides. Whether biomarkers become crime depends on the social world where predispositions meet opportunity. Neighborhoods matter.
Class #2 Social Psychology — “We learn our way into crime”
By mid-century, the odyssey turned outward. Instead of asking what’s wrong in the brain, we asked how people learn morals and rules. Lawrence Kohlberg mapped moral development, and Albert Bandura showed we lean toward rewards and away from punishment—kids learn kindness or bravado from caregivers, from TV like Sesame Street, and from crime-glorifying media.
In the 1970s, my old friend C. Ray Jeffery argued these learning “environments” should be woven into one integrated theory—a thread that fed CPTED thinking.
Much of that evolved from Chicago’s Edwin Sutherland who said it plainly: crime is learned from others—differential association. His students Sykes & Matza added techniques of neutralization, the justifications offenders use: “nobody really got hurt” or “the system is corrupt.” Culture-conflict and subcultural theories showed why immigrant and lower-status youth might reject mainstream rules: remove status and respect, and people build their own codes. In prison, a single “diss” can trigger violence.
Which begs the question: if crime is learned, why don’t more people do it? I once attended Professor Travis Hirschi's criminology class years ago where he answered that question: strong social bonds in families and school hold people back. Later, in A General Theory of Crime with Michael Gottfredson, he argued that low self-control—impulsivity and present-mindedness—explains much deviance across life.
A few decades earlier, in the1960s, radical criminology had flipped the script. Howard Becker and labeling theorists asked who gets to define crime. Being from “across the tracks” or “the bad side of town” are labels we still see in SafeGrowth work. Stigma can create careers in deviance; diversion programs try to interrupt that path. Modern restorative justice pushes further: repair harm, include victims, reintegrate people, and rebuild relationships so communities can heal. Vancouver, Canada is the latest city to scale this up as a Restorative City.
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| Restorative Vancouver - photo courtesy of the peacemaking group Peace of the Circle led by Dr. Evelyn Zellerer |
Class #3 Structure & Ecology — “Place shapes possibility”
The third cluster steered theory into bigger waters: neighborhoods, cities, the social fabric. In the 19th century, French sociologist Émile Durkheim called it anomie when shared expectations fray and meaning is lost. Working in Boston and New York, Robert Merton wrote “Social Structure and Anomie” (1938), turning that into strain theory: if we celebrate success but block lawful means, people will innovate—sometimes illegally.
Chicago researchers Clifford Shaw & Henry McKay mapped delinquency across the city. Crime radiated in zones from the core; neighborhood conditions mattered more than individual traits—a theme that still resonates in SafeGrowth work. In the 1930s, they launched the Chicago Area Project to build cohesion and youth capacity; decades later a RAND corporation evaluation confirmed that it worked—delinquency fell and community organizing improved.
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| Neighborhood conditions affect social cohesion, collective efficacy, and crime |
Richard Cloward & Lloyd Ohlin’s book, Delinquency and Opportunity, saw gangs as the street’s answer when legitimate paths are closed. Robert F. Kennedy read their work and helped channel it into Great Society programs to unblock pathways—jobs, training, education.
Conflict theorists added sharper edges: law can reflect the push-and-pull of groups; others, leaning on Marx, tied crime to class domination and surplus labor. These theories led to stormy seas—often more political than operational—but a needed reminder that power, inequality, and law are braided together.
Then came a three-point compass: Routine Activities Theory. Felson and Cohen argued crime happens when a motivated offender, a suitable target, and no capable guardian converge in space and time. Paired with British criminologists Clarke and Mayhew’s situational prevention, that changed practice: reduce temptations, harden targets, add guardianship, design better settings. In 1981, Canadian criminologists, Patricia and Paul Brantingham's environmental criminology, put crime theories into geography.
In the mid-1980s, British criminologists Ronald V. Clarke and Derek B. Cornish crafted their prevention studies into a new twist on a very old idea - many offenders make rational decisions to commit crimes - the Rational Choice Theory. I recently wrote a blog memorial to my friend, the late Ron Clarke (and his co-author Patricia Mayhew) for their tremendous theoretical contribution to the field. SafeGrowth taps into some of these ideas in early phases of prevention; and then extends them in later phases by using community capacity-building.
From the 1960s, Jane Jacobs’s ‘eyes on the street’ in urban planning and architect Oscar Newman’s defensible space in the 1970s, through to Robert Sampson’s collective efficacy in the late 1990s, the through-line is clear: urban design + neighborhood trust + willingness to act = effective prevention. SafeGrowth broadens this ecology of crime into long-term neighborhood capacity and livability.
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| According to legend, King Odysseus left Troy on a voyage home to Ithica following the Trojan War. Crime theory over the decades resembles that journey - photo courtesy of Tungsten, Wiki Commons |
Final Class – Coming Home
Looking back, criminology’s odyssey isn’t about crowning one victor; it’s about integrating what each island on the Odyssey taught us. C. Ray Jeffery's desire for an integrative theory was right all along - albeit in a more expansive form. Pathology showed that bodies and brains matter—in context. Social psychology showed how we learn, belong, and are labeled—and how restoration can replace stigma. Structure and ecology mapped how inequality, environmental opportunity, urban design, and cohesion set the neighborhood stage where all those human stories play out.
That synthesis is where prevention lives. Biology supplies tendencies; peers teach habits; place turns risk up or down. This is the true ecology of crime—not a buzzword, but a practical way to braid the human, the social, and the spatial into strategies that work.
Odysseus doesn’t return the same man who left Ithaca. Neither do we. The destination isn’t a single, final theory. It’s a way of working together—scholars, residents, planners, cops, and city builders—to make safer, more livable neighborhoods that grow and flourish. That is our Ithaca: not a port where the voyage ends, but a place strong enough to launch new journeys and welcome people safely home.
