Breaking Rules: The Social and Situation Dynamics of Young People's Urban Crime by Per-Olof Wikstrom, Dietrich Oberwittler, Kyle Treiber, & Beth Hardie.

• Author: Ejiogu, Kingsley U.
• Position: Book review

Wikstrom, Per-Olof, Dietrich Oberwittler, Kyle Treiber, and Beth Hardie, eds. Breaking Rules: The Social and Situational Dynamics of Young People's Urban Crime. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. xxxii + 479 pages. Cloth, $99.00.

Many criminologists recognize the need for the development and invention of new domain assumptions or paradynamic approaches that will better explain crime. This is important because existing theories do not adequately address the problem of crime causation. In Breaking Rules: The Social and Situational Dynamics of Young People's Urban Crime, the editors, a team of criminologists working under the auspices the Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS) at the University of Cambridge, have provided a dazzling text in criminology that unites different perspectives and explains criminal behaviors in urban environments by situating crime as a process of rule breaking.

Breaking Rules employs a longitudinal framework to explain the act of crime on the platform of Situational Awareness Theory (SAT). The book is divided into four parts, with the first part explaining crime as primarily a moral act. Acts that violate moral rules "are ultimately an outcome of a perception-choice process that is initiated and guided by the interaction between a person's crime propensity and criminogenic exposure" (p. 11). This section calls for a rethinking of crime causation and delineation between the causes (by which the authors mean an understanding of the roots of criminal violations) and the causes of the causes of crime. In Part Two, the authors discuss "The Social Dynamics of Young People's Urban Crime." Additionally, this section articulates the models of distribution of young people within the urban environment and correlates their activity fields and criminogenic exposures. The authors then thoroughly detail the convergence of personal attributes and the social environment in Part Three, entitled "The Situational Dynamics of Young People's Crime." They explore among other issues the ways in which land use may influence social cohesion and thereby alter the moral context in which young people perceive alternatives to crime. Against the grain of common belief, Part Four examines the dynamics of rule breaking. The authors reveal significant juvenile sobriety in Peterborough, where moral laden perceptions influence choices at the situational meeting point of personal crime propensity and environmental exposure...