Book Review: Crime and Everyday Life (3rd ed.)

Abstract

Well known for his writing and research on routine activities theory, Marcus Felson challenges criminologists and students of criminal justice in the third edition of his book, Crime and Everyday Life, to streamline their thinking about criminal offending. Taking the focus off the offender, Felson proposes examining the crime incident itself as part of an ecological system of human activity for the purpose of making sense of different types of crime in a variety of settings spanning many historical eras. This type of research, called crime science, greatly expands the explanatory power of routine activities theory, subsuming many other theories and explanations of crime into one general theory.Felson credits a diversity of disciplines to the formation of this single and "tangible theory of crime." The work of urban planners, anthropologists, geographers, political scientists, economists, psychologists, sociologists, and business specialists provides clues to the fundamentals of crime science, or the three principles Felson believes identify criminal offending as an ecological process of innovation and adaptation to either "seeking out or removing crime opportunities." These three principles equate to matter-of-fact observations and the synthesis of macro and micro approaches to explanations of crime: 369