CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
This “intellectual journey” has an underlying history. The author came to this task while working in the Criminal Justice System of Nigeria (CJS), namely, the Nigeria Prison Service, between 1999 and 2003. Those five years were full of experiences and problem-solving scenarios from prison inmates who had either been detained or convicted. The police who arrested and sent them to prison labelled the majority of them “armed robbers”, pending the court hearings, which did not come up as and when due. With the daily influx of armed robbery suspects in prison, the author thought it wise to study this subject area to understand the probable factors responsible for the youthful involvement in “armed robbery”, and to suggest crime prevention and/or reduction strategies, which may help the government and criminologists in criminal justice policy-making. The current study was originally intended to be a comparative study of armed robbery in Nigeria and Britain (or more precisely England). Comparative criminology dates back to the time of Emile Durkheim (Newman & Howard, 2001). It involves an evaluative study of any type of crime as it affects more than one culture, or one nation-state, or region. The value of comparative criminology is that it identifies an interesting subject area for study as well as an important method of carrying out the research (Zimring & Johnson, 2005). Armed robbery is an important subject that has been studied widely by criminologists across the world. Research began to develop in the second half of the twentieth century. De Baun (1950); McClintock & Gibson (1961); Normandeau (1968a, 1968b, 1968c, 1969a, 1969b), and Einstadter (1969) for example, pioneered the study of armed robbery in both the US and the UK. Since then many studies have featured samples from national, cultural, cross-cultural or cross-national populations (see for example Rotimi, 1984; Nkpa, 1976; Marenin, 1987; Ekpenyong, 1989; Otu, 2003; Desroches, 1995, 2002; O’Donnell & Morrison, 1994; Matthews, 1996; Matthews et al, 2001; Matthews, 2002; Gill, 2000, 2001; Wright et al, 2006; Wright & Decker, 1987; Macdonald, 1975; Gabor et al, 1987; Wright & Decker, 1997; Cook, 1987; Conklin, 1972; Nugent et al, 1989; Smith & Louis, 2010; Borycki, 2003; Borycki et al, 2005).