Book review: Crime and Everyday Life by Marcus Felson and Mary Eckert, 5th edition

© 2016 The Author(s). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Marcus Felson has recently published the fifth edition of his introduction to the study of crime. In this edition he collaborated with Dr. Mary Eckart. It seems to us, having read and looked at various versions that, in the present version, Felson and Eckart found the right form. Crime and Everyday Life is an excellent book. It is not a dry academic text but a very readable account of crime in our everyday life. The book debunks common fallacies. The authors explain rational decision-making by offenders—from the offender’s perspective (Chapter 3). They include chapters on violence and the role of situations for violent behaviour (Chapter 4). Violence does not require a unique theory, as some psychiatrists and psychologists may believe. The authors describe the role of people, processes and technology in crime (Chapter 5). The emphasis of the book is on the routine activities of people in everyday life. The processes and technologies that govern our lives largely determine these routine activities. Redesigning the processes and deploying appropriate technologies can increase as well as reduce crime. The authors present simple recipes that can be used to prevent common crime. They show that the systematic use of the principles of the situational approach can help to prevent crime (Chapter 10). Each of the 13 short but informative chapters is concluded by a summary of the main points and a list of projects and challenges for the student of crime. The book has many strengths. First, and most important, the crime science approach can be used in practice for crime prevention. The authors make a compelling case that studying the modus operandi and the context of crime helps to develop effective crime prevention. This is backed-up by the many examples developed in the book. It is also supported by several recent studies that showed how the crime drop that has been assessed in many Western countries (Blumstein and Wallman 2005) can be attributed to increases in security. The ‘security’ hypothesis is an application of the principles of the situational approach as explained in the book (see, for instance Farrell 2013). Another interesting aspect of the book is that while explaining the situational approach, the authors explain some basics on human nature. For instance, when they explain that people are quite strict when others break the law and attribute this to poor character, but explain away their own misdeeds by pointing at the situation. They also emphasize that the motives for crime are part of the typical motives that drive all human beings (pp. 58–59): all of us desire goods and money, want to take vengeance and ‘restore justice’ or protect self-image. There is nothing deviant to these motives; it is the use of illegal methods that leads to crime. There are a few things that we believe might be improved in the next edition. We see two points. Sometimes, the authors perhaps oversimplify their explanations. They state, that offenders are usually more afraid of each other than of the police. Also, they mention that Open Access