Housing Tenure and Residential Community Crime Careers in Britain

The notion of a "criminal career," though generally used in reference to individuals, can be applied also to residential communities. The key to understanding community criminal careers in Britain lies within the operation of the housing market. The urban geography of most large British cities has resulted from historical developments unique to housing tenure in Britain. The tenure picture is unlike that portrayed in the Chicago model of concentric ring development, and the distribution of British offender rates therefore does not correspond to expectations of the Chicago model. Bureaucratic mechanisms for allocating housing in the public rental sector have profound direct and indirect effects on offender distributions and community crime careers. These mechanisms may help to maintain the stability of offender rates in particular communities, exacerbate the rate, or reduce the rate by changing practices in a given public authority housing area. Private rental, although severely diminished in importance du...