LPRC - SPECIAL RE-RELEASE: CrimeScience Episode 39 Part 1 – ft. Dr. Ron Clarke

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

In Part 1 of this episode, Dr. Ron Clarke, renowned criminologist and recipient of the Stockholm Prize of Criminology, discusses the evolution of Situational Crime Prevention, opportunity reduction techniques, the British government’s criminology research department – the Home Office, and more, with host Dr. Read Hayes (LPRC).

Hi everyone, welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we aim to explore the science of crime and the practical application of the science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners as well as other professionals. Co-host Dr. Reed Hayes of the Loss Prevention Research Council and Tom Meehan of ControlTech discuss a wide range of topics with industry experts, thought leaders, solution providers, and many more. In the first of a two-part episode, Dr. Ronald Clark, renowned criminologist, recipient of the Stockholm Prize of Criminology, professor and much more, discusses the evolution of situational crime prevention, his research background, the British government's criminology research

department home office, the genesis and techniques for opportunity theory, and opportunity reduction techniques. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Take advantage of the advanced video capabilities offered by Bosch to help reduce your shrink risk. Integrate video recordings with point of sale data for visual verification of transactions and exception reporting. Use video analytics for immediate notification of important AP related events. Leverage analytics metadata for fast forensic searches for evidence and to improve merchandising

and operations. Learn more about extending your video system beyond simple surveillance in Zones 1 through 4 of LPRC's Zones of Influence by visiting Bosch online at BoschSecurity.com. So welcome everybody to another episode of Crime Science, the podcast, coming to you from Gainesville, Florida, from the University of Florida campus, an LPRC production. Today, it's my great pleasure to introduce a colleague, a mentor, and really one of the guiding lights in the area of criminology, but in particular, the part of criminology we're talking about

is environmental criminology, and the role that opportunity plays in crime. And so we're not gonna talk about criminality, but about crime and what we might do about that. And so I thought if I might, I'll introduce Dr. Ron Clark. And Ron, if you could maybe start off, and I know you've gone through this before,

but maybe a little bit about your background. I think I could recite it by heart, at least I think I can, but better coming from you, Ron. Oh okay, I have a different kind of background from most criminologists. Well, criminologists are a very mixed bunch but I never received any training in criminology. When I was graduating there in England there weren't any real criminology degrees offered but I trained as a clinical psychologist and I quickly found out during that training that I wasn't terribly interested in talking to patients. Even though I was doing a more useful kind of clinical psychology, I was doing behavior therapy

where I was trained with hands-eye-sync at the Maudsley Hospital. But even so, I found dealing with patients comparatively boring than compared with doing a bit of research, which I had to do in my training. So when I graduated, I really wanted to get a research job and I was lucky enough to end up with one that was important in my life actually. So tell us if you would, Ron, a little bit about your role at the Home Office in the UK, what the Home Office is, the equivalent in the United States for example, but what you did and how you all started to look at and think about crime in the real world and

what we might do about it. Okay, actually I'd like to just say a little bit about the work I did before I got to the Home Office. And as I said, during my training as a clinical psychologist I discovered I was much more interested in research and I ended up getting a job in a training school for boys and this was actually an extremely interesting job for me and probably the best job I've ever had because I was left almost entirely to my own devices. The only thing that I was expected to do as a research worker in these schools was to do research that was useful. That was what I was asked to do.

That was what I was asked to do. So I always had to justify what I was doing in terms of how useful it was. And that was very practical. You know, I lived, my office was in the training school and I often shared lunch or afternoon tea, being England, we had an afternoon tea break, with the faculty members who were dealing with the boys on a routine basis. And they always asked me, so how are you going to help me with your research? How is your research going to help me? What use is it going to be? And I found that irritating at the time, as I think they were goading me somewhat, they were sort of implying that I had a pretty cushy existence. But it really made me think very hard about the purpose of research. I strongly believe and still then came to believe and I still do that research is all very well but it's only really good if it's in helping to improve things for people, making life better and whatever the particular way it is. So I acquired a strong belief in doing useful research. And whenever I started off on a research project,

I've always been thinking about how could this be useful? How could it help improve matters for, well, it depends, but could improve matters for those working in the field or for those who are subject to their administrations or whatever. So I've always been very interested in trying to do useful research. I was left to choose what I wanted to work on, but in the end it was decided that I would do work on absconding from the training schools. Now, absconding simply means running away from them, escaping from them, and it was very easy to do this in many schools because the schools by the way they were set up were supposed to be open institutions. So the doors were not locked.

Even at night they were not locked. So boys in the training schools could run away. And many of them did. Many of them absconded. And I was trying to do research that would help to find training regimes that were more conducive to the boys and would be directed to preventing them from absconding. That's what I was trying to do. And what I found, to cut a very long story short, and which is less than stayed with me all my life, or my professional life, I should say, was

that there was very little difference between the boys who ran away and those who didn't. I spent three years trying to find things that differed those two groups, and using all kinds of tests and information about their backgrounds and schooling and so on and so forth. And it was extremely detailed work and I was greatly helped by the fact that I was in a classifying school which meant that boys were given a very rigorous set of tests and interviews when they entered the school and I was able to analyze those and sometimes the psychologists and social workers included stuff that I particularly wanted to hear about so they gave tests that they haven't given before that I thought might predict absconding.

And they asked questions in their interviews that they hadn't thought of before that I thought was relevant to absconding. Anyway, a long story short, very few differences between the boys that ran away and those that didn't. Very few. They were a little... Well, the most significant thing was that whether they'd had a history of running away from other institutions which they'd been in before the training school, such as

children's homes or things like that. But what I did discover while I was doing this, that there was huge differences between the schools in the numbers of boys that ran away, even though it was pretty clear that they had received the same kinds of boys. there wasn't much choice of who they took. And these differences were, I worked out, were due, mostly due to opportunity variables and pressures within the regimes of the institutions. in the regimes of the institutions. So it was the present circumstances and the opportunities they had to run away that governed whether these, whether particular schools had high or low absconding rates.

So what did I learn? I learned that it didn't matter too much about the differences, the individual differences between boys. You could pretty much ignore those. The things that, why they ran away were fairly simple reasons, like they were missing home or they'd been treated badly by the staff or they'd been bullied by other boys or something like that. Fairly commonplace motivations, motives I would call them actually rather than motivations. And what mattered a great deal was the way the schools were run and what went on in them. the way the schools were run and what went on in them. So that led me on to doing work on

trying to understand the present circumstances that influence people's misbehavior or criminality or and thinking about ways to reduce or modify those pressures and circumstances or reduce the opportunities. So my work subsequently was very heavily influenced by what I did in those approved schools and what I learned about absconding. So you then asked me about the Home Office. So I think on the Home Office, yes let's go in because I've asked, I got the question on the record Ron, you know, what were you all focusing on and how did you know, like your early lessons learned about opportunity seeming the most critical factor or a very critical factor and then how you adopted and started to leverage that?

Yes, well, when I finished my work at the training schools, for which I actually was able to submit that work for a PhD, which was very nice because I hadn't had to pay any fees. All I did was had to write it up and submit it for a London University PhD. The only problem was I was examined by people that I'd never met. I didn't know who they would be. So that was a little bit worrying. But never mind, I got my PhD and I decided to get another job. And I had a choice between a university academic job and a job in the Home Office.

The Home Office is sort of the equivalent in this country of the National Institute of Justice, but the Home Office Research and Planning Unit, which is what I joined, does far more original research of its own kind, of its own, rather than simply funding research of others, which is what the NIJ does, mostly anyway. So I joined the Home Office and worked there for a while and eventually climbed up the ranks a little bit. And I was asked at one point to review what worked in reducing crime. I mean, this is a long time ago before the What Works idea got a lot of currency as it has now. And so I set about reviewing the literature on What Worked and most of it didn't work very well. Most of the programs seemed to be, this was in an age where everyone was very focused on rehabilitation.

Much of the rehabilitation work that was going on, which was fairly well evaluated at the time with randomized controlled trials and so on, showed that rehabilitation wasn't doing very much good for anyone. And I also looked at a lot of research on policing and the courts and social work and so on and so forth. And in the end, I came up with the idea, drawing on my work from the training school, that really we had neglected the role of opportunity in crime. In crime prevention, it had been neglected. Most people thought at the time that opportunity was not an important part of crime because

the idea was that if people had the motivation to want to commit crime, opportunity didn't really matter. What mattered was what these people were like and what they wished to do. And their motivation was what mattered. So I then developed a, I then began to develop what came to be called situational crime prevention, which is all about changing the opportunity structure for highly specific forms of crime. That's what, that's basically what situational crime prevention is about.

Excellent. So, because my next question was around the genesis of opportunity theory. Who else started to think about opportunity in a more serious way at that time, Ron? I mean, who were some collaborators as this was evolving? Yes. Okay. as this was evolving. Yes, okay, well there was some... I was quite heavily influenced in the early days by Oscar Newman and the architect who, you know, launched the idea of defensive space. That idea was flawed in many ways, but it basically was an opportunity-reducing approach to crime.

So he was important. There was one or two others, but the most important group that I got to interact with were some American and Canadian researchers, such as the Brantinghams who were beginning to develop what they called environmental criminology, and Marcus Felsen who was developing routine activity at that time, routine activity theory. So I found that they had very similar ideas to mine, of course different in the precise details, but basically they were also interested in the role of opportunity and the role of criminal decision making, which is what I was focusing on. I got to meet the Brantinghams and Shelton really a long time ago, just while they were developing their ideas really, in the 1970s I suppose it was. And we've stayed in touch ever since. We do different sorts of things, you know, we're I think I'm more focused on prevention than either of Telsen or the Brantlinghams, that they're more interested in looking at the role of how opportunity operates.

I'm more interested in finding ways to reduce opportunities, which makes for a different kind of approach. But all these approaches are rather similar and all nowadays come under the broad headings of environmental criminology or even crime science. Those two labels encompass all these sorts of ideas. So maybe if you could give your latest on rational choice perspective.

You all develop, you, Cornish and others, and we had a small role with benefit denial, but the techniques that one might use, as you mentioned, for very specific types of crime and even in specific places, but what were those techniques, particularly the five techniques, and how did that start to unfold and what did that look like? Yes, quite early on I and a few other people began to think about classifying techniques of opportunity reduction and we began with a fairly small number of techniques but now those techniques have grown to about 20, I think it's 24 now. And we have names for each technique and examples of each and many evaluated case studies which try to, you know, which where these techniques have been applied. So that's been quite an important aspect of the work I've been doing with others, of course. But I'm not quite sure how this

will ever end because for every even with these 12 techniques, I keep running up against examples of crime reduction, which are basically opportunity reduction measures, don't really fit the classification. And that's been the reason that the classification, or one of the reasons that the classification has expanded, a lot of what happens is you develop a new set of techniques or expand the ones you've been working on, then you find there's still not enough. And I keep finding that now, and other people do, so people might write

to me and explain a crime reduction approach they followed, which is clearly opportunity reducing, but it doesn't really fit any of the 12 techniques terribly well. And so gradually the techniques have expanded and I think they will further expand but I'm not really quite sure how they will or who will expand them. 24 is quite a lot to take in in any case. But the reason that I and others have pursued this classification is it serves as a useful guide to people who are trying to deal with a specific problem. It gives them 24 techniques that they can think about applying. The trouble is that, as I say, I think that isn't those number, that number isn't quite sufficient.

We have to change it again. But frankly, I haven't got the energy or the taste for doing that. I hope someone else will take it off. Well, that's a great answer. Thank you everyone for tuning in to this episode of Crime Science. Please check back in two weeks for the second part of this episode with Dr. Ronald Clark to learn more about situational crime prevention, wildlife crime, and much more.