Classical School, Rational Choice and Environmental Criminology

Theorists and researchers working in the tradition founded by the eighteenth century classical school, which held that people act on rational calculation of pleasure and pain and that punishment should be proportionate and certain rather than severe, and its twentieth century revivals: rational choice theory, which models offenders as weighing the costs, benefits and risks of a specific criminal act; routine activity theory, which explains crime as the convergence in time and space of a motivated offender, a suitable target and the absence of a capable guardian; and environmental criminology, which studies how the physical design and layout of places, from building sightlines to a neighborhood's street pattern, creates or removes the opportunity for crime. This group gathers the classical school's own eighteenth century founders alongside the researchers who built rational choice, routine activity and situational crime prevention into a working modern framework, and it excludes theorists whose central claim is about an offender's social environment, upbringing or biology rather than the immediate structure of opportunity and choice, who belong instead under Biosocial and Positivist Criminology, Chicago School and Social Disorganization Theory or Developmental and Life-Course Criminology.