Thermic Law of Crime
Definition
Quetelet's finding that violent, personal crime peaks in warmer months and southern regions while property crime peaks in colder months and northern regions, tied to seasonal opportunity and proximity rather than temperature itself causing violence.
Related terms
- Absolute Poverty
- Deprivation measured against a fixed subsistence threshold, such as inadequate food or shelter, distinct from relative poverty and less central to Bonger's...
- Cartographic School
- An early nineteenth-century movement, led by Guerry and Quetelet, that plotted crime statistics onto geographic maps to study how offending varied by...
- Economic Determinism
- The theoretical position, developed most fully by Bonger, that the economic structure of a society, particularly its mode of production, is the...
- Moral Statistics
- The nineteenth-century term for the systematic study of social phenomena, including crime, suicide, and marriage, using official numerical records rather than individual...
- Relative Poverty
- Deprivation measured against the standard of living and expectations of one's own society, which Bonger treated as a stronger driver of crime...