Stephen Farrall

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Chair at University of Derby

Previous studies have suggested mixed results about the effect of road lighting on crime. One potential explanation is that the effect of lighting, if any, varies with the type of crime. This was tested through analysis of the effect of change in ambient light level on crimes recorded in 11 cities in the USA for the 10-year period 2010–2019. The re...

A recent study investigated the influence of lighting on crime by considering the effect of change in ambient light level on crimes recorded in three US cities for the ten-year period 2010 to 2019. The results suggested a significant increase in robbery after dark, but did not suggest significant change in for any other type of crime. The current s...

The influence of lighting on crime was investigated by considering the effect of ambient light level on crimes recorded in three US cities for the ten-year period 2010 to 2019. Crime counts were compared for similar times of day, before and after the biannual clock change, therefore employing an abrupt change of light level but without an obvious i...

Criminal careers research is one of the bedrocks—if not the bedrock—of criminology. It remains a key focal point of criminological research and has embraced ideas and theories from sociology, psychology, psychiatry and urban and community studies. Despite the widening of the landscape of what might be termed ‘the criminological enterprise’ (to incl...

The written diaries of 43 adult male respondents from a prison sample that had participated in a restorative justice intervention reveal a nuanced and dynamic process of desistance via their hopes and pains of anticipated desistance at the micro, meso and macro levels. A utopian reading of the respondents’ hopes and pains of desistance is developed...

A thoroughly engrossing invitation to criminologists to take history seriously. It is a compelling book, which casts a critical eye on complexity, continuity and change. Written with flair and imagination, it provides a bold, dynamic framework to challenge the existing parameters of criminological inquiry. Original, ambitious and thought provoking...

This collection examines the social and cultural legacy of Thatcherism in the 21st century. Drawing upon perspectives from a range of disciplines, it considers how Thatcherism manifests itself today and how we can assess its long-term impact. The book is divided into four sections, which offer different ways of conceptualising and addressing questi...

Les indicateurs de récidive sont souvent utilisés pour évaluer l’efficacité des interventions réalisées par les acteurs formels du système de justice pénale. Ces études permettent de déterminer « ce qui fonctionne » pour prévenir la récidive. Par contre, elles donnent peu d’information sur les processus de désistement du crime, c’est-à-dire sur com...

We would like to start our response by thanking Brendan Dooley and Sean Goodison for producing such a thought-provoking article. We were the (originally anonymous, now self-outed) peer reviewers for this journal. The stimulus and, we should admit, provocation that we received from Dooley and Goodison’s article encouraged us both into producing two...

Fear of crime occupies a substantial area of research and theorising in criminology. Still, to our knowledge it has not been examined within a longitudinal framework of political socialisation. Using insights from generational modelling we explore how political cohorts influence the fear of crime and perceptions of antisocial behaviour. This ‘age,...

The role of political socialisation in explaining disengagement from specific modes of activism beyond voting remains largely unexplored, limited to date by available data and methods. While most previous studies have tended to propose explanations for disengagement linked to specific repertoires of political action, we propose a unified theory bas...

Using insights from the classical sociology of deviance and social structure (notably Durkheim and Merton) we explore the enduring impact of the social and economic changes which started in the UK in the early 1980s. In the two subsequent decades the UK went through a period of radical economic restructuring, leading to lasting social change. We se...

Desistance research emphasizes that offenders identify a future self that aids desistance efforts. However, it is unclear how future selves operate when offending opportunities arise. To explore this we employ qualitative accounts of instances when offende rs and ex - offenders abstained from offending, and the emotions this evoked. Offending was a...

The crime drop is one of the most important puzzles in contemporary criminology: since the early-1990s many countries appear to exhibit a pronounced decline in crime rates. While there have been many studies on the topic, this book argues that the current crime drop literature relies too heavily on a single methodological approach, and in turn, pro...

This paper makes the case that feedback processes in democratic politics - between crime rates, public opinion and public policy - can account for the growth of penal populism in Britain. It argues that the public recognise and respond to rising (and falling) levels of crime, and that in turn public support for being tough on crime is translated in...

To what extent are new generations ‘Thatcherite’? Using British Social Attitudes data for 1985-2012 and applying age-period-cohort (APC) analysis and generalized additive models (GAMs) this paper investigates whether Thatcher’s Children hold more right-authoritarian political values compared to other political generations. We further examine the ex...

However one views it, the changes to housing tenure in the 1980s were pronounced and have had enduring effects in terms of the housing market. In this paper, we throw light on the relationship between housing tenure and the experience of property crime in and around what might be referred to as domestic environments (i.e. people’s homes). In so doi...

As centres of human existence, places and spaces are vital for individuals’ understanding of themselves and who they might become. We explore these aspects of existence through a longitudinal study of 43 current and former drug users. First, we identify the differences between those who have desisted from drug use and those who continued. These dif...

Margaret Thatcher changed British politics – but did her policies change our political attitudes? In a ground-breaking new study Emily Gray, Stephen Farrall, Colin Hay, Danny Dorling and Will Jennings find that the ‘Iron Lady’ left a lasting impact on British social attitudes that is still being felt today.

Attrition represents a significant obstacle to overcome in any longitudinal research project. It is, perhaps, most keenly felt when the data collected are from a qualitative study, since, unlike quantitative longitudinal research, weighting factors cannot be applied to ‘correct’ for any biases in the achieved sample and even a small number of ‘lost...

Bold approaches to data collection and large-scale quantitative advances have long been a preoccupation for social science researchers. In this commentary we further debate over the use of large-scale survey data and official statistics with ‘Big Data’ methodologists, and emphasise the ability of these resources to incorporate the essential social...

In recent years, criminologists have devoted growing attention to the extent to which ‘punitiveness’ is emerging as a central feature of many criminal justice systems. In gauging punitiveness, these studies typically rely either on attitudinal data derived from surveys that measure individual support for punitive sentences or on the size of the pri...

Exploring long-term trends in crime and criminal justice is a multifaceted exercise. This article introduces the construction and methodological benefits of a series of new data sets that amalgamate approximately 30 years of public data on crime, victimization, fear of crime, social and political attitudes with national socio-economic indicators in...

This article examines the 'shadow of sexual assault hypothesis' which posits that women's higher fear of crime, compared to males, can be attributed to their elevated fear of sexual victimization. We argue that the previous, overwhelmingly supportive, research on this issue is incomplete in three ways: (1) the thesis has not yet been extensively te...

This paper concerns road lighting for pedestrians and how this aids reassurance, their confidence when walking alone after dark. Evidence from past studies that lighting enhances reassurance is supported by the findings of an unfocussed approach that aimed deliberately to avoid focus on lighting or fear, thus to counter the unintended potential for...

This book contains a selection of papers, which were presented and discussed at the second GERN Doctoral Conference for PhD students, organised by the White Rose Consortium of the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York and held in September 2013 at the University of Sheffield, UK. The book is the result of intensive reflection and engagement bet...

This article aims to reexamine the development and scope of evidence-based practice (EBP) in community corrections by exploring three sets of issues. Firstly, we examine the relationships between the contested purposes of community supervision and their relationships to questions of evidence. Secondly, we explore the range of forms of evidence that...

In Contemporary European criminology, there is a growing understanding of the fear of crime as the consequence of, and a Code for, broader social anxieties, the origins of which are usually traced to fundamental social and global transformation processes characteristic of late-modernity. Within the large body of papers published on this topic one c...

The fear of crime has been recognized as an important social problem in its own right, with a significant number of citizens in many countries concerned about crime. In this book, the chapters critically review the main findings from over thirty-five years of research into attitudes to crime, highlighting groups who are most fearful of crime and ex...

This book uses historical data to directly address modern criminological debates. There is currently a huge growth of interest in histories of crime, and intellectual conversations and connections between historians and criminologists are becoming much more frequent. However, published work which uses historical data to this extent is rare. This bo...

Book synopsis: Escape Routes: Contemporary Perspectives on Life After Punishment addresses the reasons why people stop offending, and the processes by which they are rehabilitated or resettled back into the community. Engaging with, and building upon, renewed criminological interest in this area, Escape Routes nevertheless broadens and enlivens the...

Understanding how and why offenders stop committing offences is crucial for the development of effective crime prevention and criminal justice practices. Yet desistance has been the subject of little empirical research and relatively neglected by theory. In this article, the authors attempt to move beyond existing approaches to desistance which are...

Research and theorising about the fear of crime has, in the main, been dominated by researchers who have relied upon sociological or socio- demographic variables to account for variations in fear levels. Whilst this body of work has contributed greatly to our understanding of the fear of crime, we are still far from a full understanding of this imp...