Elements of the Critique Because the geography of crime has been cast in the mold of traditional criminology. several elements of interactionist and radical critiques of traditional criminology can also be applied to the geography of crime:
1) Geographic research has focused mainly on the criminal or the crime: little attention has been given to social control or to the operation of the criminal justice system on the develop- ment or configuration of crime patterns.
(2) Geographers have tended to follow the consensus model of law formation underlying traditional criminological perspectives (i.e., one that secs criminal law issuing from a consensus of social values) rather than the pluralist or class conflict models of interactionist and radical the- ory (i.e.. ones that acknowledge that at least some law reflects vested rather than universal social interests).
(3) Geographic research has followed a cor- rectionalist rationale to the extent that much of it isjustified by its utility for helping to do some- thing about the “crime problem."
(4) Because of the analytic separation of crime and control. geographers have tended to hypostatize crime: crime is treated as a distinct behavior that is divorced from its political and legal context.
(5) Geographic research has been limited by postivistic imperatives and an instrumentalist epistemology relying predominantly on quanti- tative techniques.