A Place To Call Your Own: does housing need make a difference to crime?

Abstract

In public discussions, offending has long been associated with conditions of poverty. While novelists could readily portray characters whose origins in the slum somehow made sense of their moral turpitude, criminology has been preoccupied with analyzing how social conditions make a difference to patterns of offending. But the impact of housing need in particular has been less clearly understood. In his classic review, William Bonger (1916) referred to several disadvantageous consequences of overcrowding, such as early sexual experience, resort to alcohol, and indiscriminate association with others through interaction on the street. From a present day perspective it appears that the ways in which housing needs affect patterns of offending depends on several conditions and circumstances. We can all think of several ways of defining ‘housing need’, for example