Mike Sutton (criminologist)

Biography

Sutton was born in Orpington in Kent but, at some point, moved to Lancashire, in the north-east of England, where he attended Ormskirk Secondary Modern School. He enrolled at the University of Central Lancashire for a Batchelor of Arts in Law, graduating with BA (Hons.) Law (1979-1983), continuing on to temporarily cover a lecturing post law, and hold various administrative roles, while undertaking doctoral study, which he completing in 1987,

I originally wanted to be a solicitor, which is why I studied law. By the time I enrolled for my PhD I wanted to work as a Home Office researcher. Within a year of graduating, the Home Office selected me from several thousand applicants. I stayed with them for 14 years before embarking on an academic career in criminology.

Home Office

During his time at the UK Government's Home Office, Sutton's role was as a Senior Research Officer, initially in the Department for Research Statistics and Development, and then later in the Policing and Reducing Crime Unit. He was on the team that evaluated the unit fines experiment in the UK, the findings of which led the British Government to implement means related fines. At a national level the results proved disastrous as the legislation was rapidly repealed following a media outcry. In 1996, he was part of the team that evaluated the £50m Safer Cities Project, finding it cost effective in reducing domestic burglary. Regarding the move away by Safer Cities coordinators, from a successful programme directed largely towards primary prevention, largely towards implementing more offender-oriented schemes, Pease (1997) quotes from Sutton's 1996 evaluation, "This is a strikingly thought-provoking result, given that the situational measures adopted were subsequently found to have been cost-effective in reducing burglary".

Criminology

According to the Oxford Handbook of Criminology (2012), 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,

The capacity to commit crimes of various types will be affected by economic developments. The availability of illegal markets for stolen goods, and the shifting attractiveness of different goods on them, will structure changes in crime patterns (Sutton 1998; Sutton et al. 2001; Fitzgerald et al. 2003; Hallsworth 2005).

personal and social factors in a contemporary adolescent sample, and, for the first time ever in criminology, presents concrete evidence that crime occurs when (and only when) people with specific personal characteristics take part in settings with specific environmental features under specific circumstances.

Market Reduction Approach

Sutton identified a stratagem for crime reduction, by targeting the opportunity to profit from stolen goods and so removing the initial incentive to steal. He called this tactic, the Market Reduction Approach (M.R.A.) and was described as classic research 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 that most significantly contributed to academic knowledge. This article influenced the work of UK Government Foresight Panel on Crime in 2000.

Sutton's early research into vandalism identified Peer Status Motivated Vandalism as the seventh sub-type of vandalism that was missing from the typology created by Stanley Cohen. Sutton's sub-type was identified years later by Mathew Williams (criminologist) in an article in the Internet Journal of Criminology as the most suitable explanation for the motivation behind the "virtual vandalism" he studied in a 3D Internet community.

A 2007 Home Office-funded Government research report co-authored by Sutton, Getting the Message Across on the best use of media for reducing racial prejudice and discrimination, found that the UK Government, and many of its departments and funded bodies, have been wasting resources on publicity that could have made the problem worse.

Mythbusting

Whilst fact checking a well known story about the impact of bad data on policy making, Sutton debunked a long-standing academic myth about a misplaced decimal point in biochemistry research which he went on to mistakingly claim had influenced the erroneous promotion of spinach as a good source of iron.

Patrick Matthew and natural selection

In 2014, Sutton published an e-book, Nullius in Verba: Darwin’s Greatest Secret, alleging that Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace plagiarised the theory of natural selection from Scottish grain merchant and arboriculturist Patrick Matthew. Matthew had published On Naval Timber and Arboriculture in 1831, twenty-eight years before Darwin's On the Origin of Species. When challenged by Matthew writing to a Gardeners' periodical, Darwin claimed that neither he, nor any naturalist he knew, had read Matthew's work. Sutton rejects this claim, identifying seven naturalists who cited the book before 1858, and that three of those (John Claudius Loudon, Prideaux John Selby and Robert Chambers) were well known to Darwin and his associates. He also analysed similarities between Darwin's, Wallace's and Matthew's writings, particularly unpublished essays by Darwin, and Wallace's 1855 Sarawak paper, that was published in a journal edited by Selby. Sutton points out that Loudon was the editor of two influential papers on species and variety written by Blyth, and that Chambers wrote, anonymously, the influential Vestiges of Creation. Sutton has not explained how the relevance of this to telling Darwin and Wallace of Matthew's ideas, especially as each of those editors stated they did not understand Matthew's ideas, or rejected them. Additionally, the paucity of evidence throughout means Sutton has no basis for his claims, each having been deconstructed at Natural Histories. Sutton has yet to respond.

Despite these falsehoods, Sutton's claims garnered media attention, and a paper on the topic was also accepted for the British Criminology Conference that year. Sutton's university, Nottingham Trent University, has backed his claims,. All of which is particularly damning of those people, for not having checked a single one of those assertions.

Until March 2015, only one picture of Matthew existed in the public domain. On March 13, 2015, Sutton clicked a button on his screen that uploaded images that he had been sent

In May 2015, Sutton commissioned Nottinghamshire artist Gabriel Woods for the allegorical analogy in oils on canvas Immaculate Deception