Breaking Rules: The Social and Situational Dynamics of Young People’s Urban Crime

Breaking Rules is mostly a book about situational action theory (SAT). Its four authors nicely summarize the theory’s main points and they present several tests of hypotheses suggested by the theory. SAT is primarily concerned with how individual attributes and environmental conditions jointly influence an individual’s decision to break rules, especially legal ones. SAT argues that people develop criminal propensities over time, based mostly on the degree to which they have internalized morality (i.e., accepted normative rules and corresponding negative emotions associated with thoughts about breaking these rules) and their ability to exercise self-control. SAT argues that while morality is necessary and sufficient for deterring crime, self-control is not a necessary condition. In an important twist on prior explanations, SAT argues that self-control is necessary for deterring crime only when a person’s morals are in conflict with a temptation or provocation; self-control is unnecessary when people have strong moral views. Furthermore, SAT sees self-control as a cognitive activity, rather than as a stable or fixed trait. SAT extends the propensity logic to the environment and maintains that settings also differ in their ‘‘criminogenic propensity. ’’ Drawing on theories of social disorganization, routine activities, and collective efficacy, SAT argues that settings vary in their temptations and provocations; that is, in their moral context, the presence of moral norms, the level of rule enforcement, and the actions of others in the setting (e.g., behaving aggressively). Thus, SAT predicts that most crime occurs when individuals with high criminal propensity are exposed to settings that they perceive as high in criminal propensity. This exposure reflects a joint selection process: social selection (i.e., social forces) that result in people with a high criminal propensity finding themselves in criminogenic environments, and self-selection, whereby people with high criminal propensity choose to go to these settings. Per-Olof Wikström, Dietrich Oberwittler, Kyle Treiber, and Beth Hardie use an impressive set of data collected annually for five waves of the Peterborough Adolescent and Young Development Study (PADS). Peterborough is a modest sized U.K. city (2001 population ~156,000) where most youth spend their time in the city, rather than venturing to other urban areas (i.e., 93 percent of respondents’ waking hours were spent in Peterborough). It is also a diverse city: it has some of the country’s most affluent as well as the most economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, and approximately ten percent of its residents are nonwhite. PADS is a cohort study of ~700 young people and had a reasonable response rate (~72 percent) and a remarkable retention rate (~97 percent). The data collected include self-report information from youth first interviewed at age 12 and a primary caregiver, police records, a survey of community residents, census data, and a number of retrospective (i.e., the week-before) time-space diaries measuring how and where youth spent time over a four-day period during the week before each of the five waves of data collection. Comparisons with census and community data indicate that the demographic attributes of youth in the study closely resemble those of the larger population, as do the attributes of their caregivers. The authors use these data for a number of analyses some of which replicate results from earlier studies, while others bring new insights into offending. The former include Reviews 427