Criminology, Situational Crime Prevention and the Resourceful Offender

Reviews of the field of situational crime prevention (SCP) (Clarke 1995, 1997) typically identify the roots of the approach in a number of coincidences. These include the apparent failure of the traditional criminal justice system to control crime through law enforcement (e.g. Clarke and Hough 1984) the failure to find effective exemplars of rehabilitation of offenders (Martinson 1974); growing disenchantment with the explanatory and predictive competence of 'personality' and 'pathological' models of behaviour in general and offending in particular; and a growing interest in environ mental causes of crime. Changing offenders, or potential offenders, was seen as too difficult to achieve; changing immediate crime situations promised easier, more circum scribed implementation, and better prospects of shorter-term, measurable success. This was a radical break with traditional, offender-oriented approaches, many of which were deeply embedded in a society which saw them as 'the only' responses to crime. It led to a period of self-imposed separation to nurture the new (situational) approach. This phase, which resembled the 'early Church' process of establishing an independent identity, did not completely throw out the concept of the offender, because, fundamentally, one cannot have crimes without offenders. Instead, the