Environmental criminology focuses on criminal patterns within particular built environments and analyzes the impacts of these external variables on people's cognitive behavior.
Within fifteen years of the publication of Jeffery’s book, most of the seminal approaches of environmental criminology had appeared, with later developments largely building on these foundations.
For instance, lawyers and political scientists focus on the legal dimension; sociologists, psychologists and civil rights groups generally look to the offenders and victims, while geographers concentrate upon the location of the event.
In the Chicago School, Robert Ezra Park, Ernest Burgess, and other urban sociologists developed the concentric zones model, and considered geographic factors in study of juvenile delinquency.
During and after World War II, when states were expanding crime was raising significantly due to areas society was making.
Social changes in society, much like college, urbanization, suburbanization, lifestyles, and woman working are big contributors to environmental crime.
Smaller problems such as drugs or gangs in a community that are not being actively taken care of by the police cause people to leave these areas out of fear.