Schools as Precipitants of Crime: The Routine Activities and the Sociology of Place

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SES 0071124PI: James P Lynch, Caterina P Gouvis This project uses extensive Census data to study variations in crimes against school children throughout the day. The area of study will be a large county (about 750,000 residents) in Maryland. Crime victimization rates come from all incidents of person crimes reported to the police from 1992 through June 1999. The overall goal of the research is to assess hypotheses derived from an established perspective in criminology, called "routine activity." According to this view, crime rates are importantly influenced by opportunities, surveillance, and the mix of actors in a setting. To date, studies to assess this perspective have been hampered by inadequate data bases; the number of people who are potential crime victims has not been known, so it is difficult to assess crime rates. Using children enrolled in schools and focusing on crimes that take place at the school should solve that problem, leading to cleaner tests of the hypotheses than have previously been conducted. The main benefit of this research will be to produce a good test of this perspective in the sociology of deviance. This view is considerably more structural than individualistic perspectives, which focus, for instance, on characteristics of perpetrators rather than on properties of social situations.