Definition
Routine activity theory holds that a criminal event occurs when three elements converge in time and space: a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a capable guardian. Take any element away and the event is unlikely; arrange all three regularly and crime becomes predictable.
Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson introduced the framework in 1979 to explain why crime rates in the postwar United States rose even as unemployment fell. Their answer: ordinary changes in routine activities — more households empty during the day, more portable consumer goods, more solo travel — multiplied the convergences that produce crime.
Why it matters
How it works
An analyst maps the routine activities of a population — when people are at home, where they shop, what they carry, who watches what — and looks for predictable convergences. Hotspot maps, repeat-victimisation patterns, and time-of-day distributions of offences all fall out of this framework. Reducing crime then becomes a matter of disrupting one of the three elements: reducing target suitability, increasing guardianship, or changing the routines that bring them together.
The theory is sometimes criticised for treating offender motivation as a constant and bracketing why some people are motivated and others not. Defenders reply that it is a theory of events, not of individuals, and that pairing it with developmental or social-structural accounts gives a fuller picture.