Farrell, G. orcid.org/0000-0002-3987-8457 and Tilley, N. (2026) Crime opportunity theory: the state of the art. Crime Science, 15 (1). 12. ISSN: 2193-7680
Abstract
The 1976 monograph Crime as Opportunity initiated a paradigm for how crime and criminality should be understood and controlled. Here we define a crime opportunity as any situation in which the benefits of committing crime outweigh the costs, and group crime opportunity-related theories and concepts under the banner of crime opportunity theory. The study details how reducing crime opportunities has proven successful locally for many different crime types, and how reducing crime opportunities has emerged as the leading explanation for the international crime drop. It concludes that crime opportunity theory should be the principal reference point for explaining and preventing crime and criminality.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Authors/Creators: |
|
| Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2026. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Dates: |
|
| Institution: | The University of Leeds |
| Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Law (Leeds) |
| Funding Information: | Funder Grant number ESRC - Economic and Social Research Council ES/L014971/1 |
| Date Deposited: | 28 May 2026 14:08 |
| Last Modified: | 28 May 2026 14:08 |
| Status: | Published |
| Publisher: | BioMed Central |
| Identification Number: | 10.1186/s40163-026-00275-z |
| Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:241376 |
Download
Filename: s40163-026-00275-z.pdf
Licence: CC-BY 4.0

CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)