4 What Have Criminologists Done for Us Lately? Ken Pease and Graham Farrell The United Kingdom’s official graduate careers website 1 sets out jobs ‘directly related’ to graduation in criminology as follows: • Community development worker • Police officer • Prison officer • Probation officer • Social worker • Solicitor ‘Directly related to’ is a weaselly phrase which disguises the fact that nearly all the listed jobs require further professional training and that a criminology degree does not confer an advantage over other degree courses in recruit- ment into such careers. Only just over half of criminology graduates are in employment six months after graduation, and a third of those employed are in retail, catering and bar work. So your next Whopper and chips from Burger King may be served by a criminology graduate regretting their degree choice. So to paraphrase the old song, ‘Don’t let your daughter study criminology. Mrs Worthington’. Corporate and private security management are conspicuous by their absence from the list. One may speculate about this. For what it’s worth, our guess is that security work lacks the professional status of the jobs on the list as well as the presumed person-handling skills conferred by a degree in one of the social sciences. All the named jobs entail dealing individually with clients (willing or coerced). However, progress in the study of crime in recent years has come primarily from an understanding not of the criminal mind but of how to shape environments in pursuit of crime reduction. This perspective sits well alongside the focus of the security industry. People have a tendency to be irrational in many ways. One such tendency is known as the fundamental attribution error. This leads people to overestimate 65