The Geography of Crime

DURING the past forty years students have become less and less disposed to posit new hypotheses concerning the influences of physical geography upon crime, and have become either skeptical of the old hypotheses or disinterested in them. The observations and brilliant speculations concerning the general effects of the geographical environment made by a continuous succession of social philosophers and social geographers following Montesquieu (1689-1755) 1 and Buckle (1821-62) 2 culminated during the 1890's in the extended empirical investigations of Albert Leffingwell and E. G. Dexter.4 The latter two studied the effects of separate phases of weather upon specific classes of behavior and upon crime in particular. The four succeeding decades in the twentieth century have not witnessed any comparable research efforts to check or amplify the theories of meteorological influence.