He was joint winner of the 1998 British Journal of Criminology Prize for his research on hackers, and publicised the market reduction approach for tackling theft.
[9] According to the Oxford Handbook of Criminology (2012),[10] Sutton made an early contribution to identifying the, "A priori, economic factors [… f]or a crime to occur", namely the means for converting stolen goods into financial gain,
Sutton emphasized the stratagem for crime reduction, by targeting the opportunity to profit from stolen goods and so removing the initial incentive to steal.
and was described as classic research[15] by Marcus Felson, co-innovator along with Lawrence E. Cohen of the routine activity approach to crime rate analysis.
In 1999 Sutton's virtual ethnography of a smart card hacking group was awarded (jointly with David Mann) the British Journal of Criminology annual prize for the article[16] that most significantly contributed to academic knowledge in the field that year.
Mike Suttons inquiry lead T. J. Hamblin to conclude that "even by the turn of the twentieth century errors in earlier measurements were readily apparent without the need to invoke decimal places.
[28] Sutton's claim that Darwin and Wallace plagiarised evolution by natural selection from Matthew has been refuted through detailed comparison of the competing theories: ironically, they are too dissimilar to share the same origin.