Post-apartheid South Africa has been plagued by an increase in crime and a concomitant increase in the number of incarcerated offenders. Researchers have postulated many proximate causes for the insidious increase in crime, including the vast socio-economic inequalities existing in the country, a remnant of apartheid-era policies and post-apartheid migrations. This article focuses on the neglected field of the environmental criminology of offenders. Following a spatial-ecological approach the relationship between various socio-economic variables and offender rates in the City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality in South Africa is modelled. The GIS-based methodological procedure includes a crime offender index, correlational analysis and principal components analysis and produced five factors: social status and income, family characteristics, unskilled earner, residential mobility and ageing population. These five factors, accounted for almost 75% of the variance in the offender index. The findings of our research reject race as a determinant of crime, and rather highlight existing and emerging socio-economic inequalities in the globally connected post-industrial city in regions of political instability and economic uncertainty and its relationship with crime and crime prevention.

Residential desegregation and social reform in urban South Africa are of particular interest when considered against the degree of separation and division that previously existed (Lemon, 1991). Urban South Africa under apartheid is a classic example of the long-standing view that spatial segregation leads to social polarisation and eventually results in the exclusion of categories of people from

No abstract

No abstract

IntroductionCrime is a complex and multifaceted spatial phenomenon. Two major theories suggest the importance of space for understanding crime: the social disorganisation theory (Shaw and McKay, 1942) and the routine activities theory (Cohen and Felson, 1979). According to the social disorganisation theory, crime and delinquency depend on a neighbourhood's level of social and economic deprivation, residential mobility, and ethnic heterogeneity (Cahill and Mulligan, 2003), while the routine activities theory proposes that crime will take place within a criminal's area of social interaction (Weir-Smith, 2004). Other theories attribute the spatial patterning of crime to social disadvantage (