Crime and Everyday Life

Crime and Everyday Life, Fourth Edition, provides an illuminating glimpse into roots of criminal behavior, explaining how crime can touch us all in both small and large ways. This innovative text shows how opportunity is a necessary condition for crime to occur, while exploring realistic ways to reduce or eliminate crime and criminal behavior by removing the opportunity to complete the act. Encouraging students to take a closer look at the true nature of crime and its effects on their lives, author Marcus Felson and new co-author Rachel L. Boba (an expert on crime prevention, crime analysis and mapping, and school safety) maintain the book’s engaging, readable, and informative style, while incorporating the most current research on criminal behavior and routine activity theory. The authors emphasize that routine daily activities set the stage for illegal acts, thus challenging conventional wisdom and offering students a fresh perspective, novel solutions for reducing crime . . . and renewed hope.

New and Proven Features

• Includes new coverage of gangs, bar problems, and barhopping; new discussion of the dynamic crime triangle; and expanded coverage of technology, Internet fraud, identity theft, and other Internet pitfalls
• The now-famous “fallacies about crime” are reduced to nine and are organized and explained even more clearly than in past editions
• Offers updated research on crime as well as new examples of practical application of theory, with the most current crime and victimization statistics throughout
• Features POP (Problem-Oriented Policing) Center guidelines and citations, including Closing Streets and Alleys to Reduce Crime, Speeding in Residential Areas, Robbery of Convenience Stores, and use of the Situational Crime Prevention Evaluation Database
• Updated “Projects and Challenges” at the end of each chapter

Marcus Felson is the originator of the routine activity approach and of Crime and Everyday Life. He has also authored Crime and Nature, and serves as a professor at Texas State University. .  He has a B.A. from University of Chicago, an M.A. and  Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, and has received the 2014 Honoris Causa from the Universidad Miguel Hernandez in  Spain.  Professor Felson has been given the Ronald Clarke Award by the Environmental Criminology and Crime Analysis group, and the Paul Tappan Award of the Western Society of Criminology. He has been a guest lecturer in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, El Salvador, England, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Scotland, Spain, South Africa, Sweden and Switzerland. He has applied routine activity thinking to many topics, including theft, violence, child molesting, white collar crime, and corruption.

Rachel Boba Santos is an associate professor at Florida Atlantic University in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. She works with police departments and conducts research on police accountability, the effectiveness of crime reduction efforts by police, and crime analysis.